Democrats are not understanding what happened in 2024. If they understood it, they would see its enormous potential for 2028—at least if they responded correctly.
What they are missing is what drives the populism that rallied to Trump. That populism is not partisan. It is relational. It is not about Left versus Right. It is about inside versus outside. Populism is the rejection of a status quo. It is the rejection of insiders. Populism is the people’s scream at a system they don’t think hears them.
Nothing in the Democrat’s campaign this year responded to that scream. Yet there will be an obvious way to respond in four years, much more effectively than Trump could today.
Put most strongly: If seen correctly, 2028 has the potential to be the most transformative election we’ve had in almost a hundred years, not just because of what it could be for the Democratic Party, but because of what it could mean for democracy.
“Government is not the solution …, government is the problem”
When Ronald Reagan spoke these words in his first Inaugural Address, he fueled a movement on the Right that has been enormously effective in persuading Americans of its truth. That movement has convinced America that government is a waste of time. That it is corrupt or inept or inherently unable to do anything — except benefit insiders, or the bureaucrats or the cronies and parasites that gather around it. Government is a failure; those who press for government to take up and address our problems are either dupes or corrupt themselves.
Many have written powerfully about this campaign and its extraordinary success. What is astonishing to me is how studiously Democrats just ignore it. Democrats make promises and advance programs as if the public believes such promises could happen, or if they do happen, that they will have a positive effect on ordinary people. They simply declare their ideas — which, in my view, are often great ideas—but then are puzzled when the public doesn’t embrace them. Government, on this view, is Frank Gallagher (Shameless), earnest and loving, but completely incapable of overcoming the addiction that renders his every promise meaningless. Fiona is the America that elected Trump, screaming its frustration in response.
Because America’s reaction to the Democrats’ promises makes sense—if you assume that government doesn’t work or is inherently corrupt. Why pay taxes if government spending is useless — or worse? Why regulate, when all regulation is just the product of crony capitalism? Just leave us alone, this view insists, and we’ll do with our own as much as we can. It won’t be great, but at least we won’t be the dupes of the Democratic Left.
No one need lecture me about how wrong or incomplete or baseless these views about government are. They are certainly not my views. I think government is essential to modern life. I think it critical to solving critical challenges that we as a people face. I think bureaucracies are filled with people trying to do the best they can with shamefully undersupported infrastructure. Sure, the government is inefficient, as would any enterprise be with the criminally insufficient investment we’ve made in it. Of course, without investment, it fails. That’s the point that those who have written about this Reagan campaign have made again and again: Underinvestment is the strategy. It is the technique for a self-fulfilling prophecy. But whatever its cause, its effect is real. The public perceives government as the least efficient or effective part of modern life; they, therefore, see little reason to support it through more taxes or with their votes. “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
We can wish this reality were not so. We can’t change it by pretending it is not so. Yet what was so striking about the Harris campaign was its total obliviousness to this reality. All of her proposals, when viewed through the eyes of this kind of citizen, were either “handouts” to favored factions or promises that depended upon believing that government could actually work. Tax credits for families, or home buyers, or students, or first time business owners? More government handouts. Policies to end climate change? Yea, as if government could ever do that. Encouraging small business? Who thinks government knows anything about making business work better? If you believed that government could work, these ideas were wonderful. The challenge for Democrats is that a shrinking minority of Americans actually believe that government can work.
This is the fundamental constraint on democratic — and especially Democratic—politics. Democracy depends on us having a reason to work together. If we’ve lost the sense that there’s anything to do, we won’t work together. It is the pathology of a failed marriage: At some point, you just give up. And as Democratic politics, in particular, depends upon the public believing there’s something for democracy to do, or something that government can do, this constraint defeats Democratic politics.
Every. Single. Time.
Destroy the idea that government has worth, and you destroy the reason for Democrats to win.
So then what is a strategy in the face of this reality?
I have thoughts, sketched here. I offer them with skeptical humility. This is part of a solution. It is the most important part. But it is not everything. It is just the part I believe most are missing, and the part I know most about.
(1) Start where the people are.
On Election Day 2024, voters across the nation were asked to support a wide range of democracy initiatives. In Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon, they were asked to support the reform of party primaries and embrace ranked-choice voting. Ohio voted on an anti-gerrymandering initiative. Missouri voters were asked to repeal a ban on using ranked-choice voting to count votes. And in Maine, they were asked to support a ban on SuperPACs.
I supported every one of these initiatives. Each, I believe, would make our democracy work better.
But America was more uncertain about all of them—except one. The only statewide democracy reform initiative to pass overwhelmingly was an initiative challenging the most corrupting money in American politics — SuperPACs. By more than 70%, voters in Maine endorsed a limit on contributions to independent political action committees.
That initiative will be challenged in the courts. It already has. I get most believe it will be struck down. I think most are wrong (you can read why here).
But that’s not the point here. The point is to recognize what this landslide says about the views of Americans, regardless of party. In a beautifully purple state, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents overwhelmingly supported ending the role of big money in American politics. Or put differently, among all the reforms that we democracy nerds wanted Americans to embrace in 2024, this change alone unites us.
I had seen this first hand in Maine. On Election Day 2023, I had volunteered to gather signatures to get the anti-SuperPAC initiative on the ballot. I was assigned to Hollis, a small, conservative-leaning community with a relatively high median age and household income. The polling place was essentially a single room building, in a large parking lot next to a post office. I arrived at 6:30am to begin a 13-hour shift at 7am. I realized I had never done anything for 13 hours straight (and had a new appreciation for the 55 hours my wife spent in labor with our first child). The election officials directed me to a table standing at the opposite end of the ramp leading out of the voting area. The day looked bleak: Somehow, I was supposed to persuade people to walk back, away from their cars, at least 20 feet, to come sign a petition against big money in Maine politics. Even I found the idea implausible.
I had a single sign taped to the table — “End Big Money in Maine Politics.” And soon after the polls opened, I was joined by someone else who was gathering signatures for a very different purpose: to get Donald Trump on the primary ballot in Maine. Stavros Mendros was the local chair for the Trump campaign. Though Trump had been President, he still needed signatures to get on the Republican Party primary ballot.
Stavros greeted me warmly. As he was wearing a MAGA hat, I’m not sure that I conveyed the same warmth in return. But he asked to read my initiative, and after about a minute, he looked up at me and said, “Hell, yes!” “I am,” he promised, “going to tell everyone who signs my petition to sign yours as well.” And indeed, throughout the time he was there, that’s precisely what he did. Trump supporters signed his petition, and then they signed mine.
Not just Trump supporters, of course. Indeed, there were many who expressed outrage at the idea of Trump being on the 2024 primary ballot at all, but who were eager to sign the initiative. Yet throughout the day, the people who were most passionate to sign this anti-big-money petition were people who struck me as the most conservative. The very question triggered what seemed like fury for many of them. They just had to see the words “big money” and they were driven to come over to the table to sign.
I tell this story to emphasize a point that should be fundamental, but that has bizarrely been forgotten in American politics today: We, practically all of us, believe money has corrupted politics. Yet they—practically everyone actually practicing American politics—have decided to ignore this critical common core.
Why is a complicated question.
Some ignore it because they don’t think anything can be done about it. I get that. It’s wrong, but it makes their behavior make sense.
Some ignore it because they don’t want anything done about it. A decade ago, we tried to rally a political campaign against SuperPACs. At that time, a gaggle of billionaires joined the campaign. When I polled those same billionaires about Maine’s 2024 ballot question, almost all of them declined to support it, with almost a majority suggesting to me, directly or indirectly, that they now actually supported SuperPACs. It gave them, they suggested, the power to “do good,” as one put it. In consequence, practically every foundation that had been pressing to reform the role of money in politics a decade ago has now withdrawn from that fight. And the vast majority of the non-profits founded to fight money in politics have now just moved on.
Yet while the billionaires, the foundations, and the non-profits (that the billionaires and the foundations fund) have moved on, America has not. The cynicism and fury inspired by the never-ending line of stories about policy bending to money, about justice bending to money, about the most important institutions in our democracy — the press—bending to money, have only grown. And rather than us ignoring this one thing we all agree upon, we should find a way to leverage it into a movement that would capture a critical slice of populism’s rage and finally do something positive with it.
So this is first: If change begins where the people are, then the people believe fundamentally that our government has been corrupted by money.
(2) Build upon common beliefs.
“You got to give them hope.”
Harvey Milk’s insight is fundamental truth. We can all recognize a problem, but most of us won’t fight it unless there’s a reason to fight it. Unless there’s something we can do, or something that has a chance of succeeding.
At the start of my work against the corrupting influence of money in politics, we conducted a poll. 96% of Americans said it was “important” to reduce the influence of money in politics, yet 91% said it was not possible.
This is the politics of resignation: We accept what cannot change (death, taxes, and a corrupted democracy) because we recognize we cannot change it.
The remedy to resignation is to show people that change is possible. To show them a strategy that has at least a shot of winning. The remedy is to give them hope.
Maine’s initiative against SuperPACs is a beginning. As I said, the initiative has already been challenged by Maine citizens and PACs supported by the Institute for Free Speech, a non-profit backed by donors including Donors Trust, the billion dollar dark money funding organization backed by Leonard Leo. (Central casting couldn’t have done better!) The Institute is confident it will get the Supreme Court to rule that the initiative violates the First Amendment. I am certain that under existing Supreme Court precedent, it does not.
But whether they’re right or not, the litigation gives us a chance to build a campaign focused on the corrupting influence of SuperPACs in American democracy. That campaign could then rally the America that recognizes this corruption, and wants it to end.
That rally comes not by talking about “campaign finance.” (Banish those words.) It comes from talking about everything that corruption does:
- Why is America furious about health insurance? Because the industry has leveraged its wealth to protect itself from health care reform.
- Why can’t we afford the basic infrastructure that every comparable nation has, from clean and affordable transit, to next generation mass transit? Because the dinosaurs that would be challenged by a different and more efficient infrastructure lobby effectively to block even the thought of meaningful change.
- Why do prices rise while corporate profits rise as well? Because we’ve given up on competition policy, the consequence of a 40-year-long campaign fueled by corporate money.
- Why is the IRS constantly underfunded, leaving literally billions of dollars of taxes that are already owed uncollected? Because we have a Congress eager to bend to the demands of tax-cheat billionaires, who find it cheaper to fund the campaigns of their friends in Congress than to actually pay the taxes they already owe.
- Why is the real federal minimum wage today less than it was in 1950? Because every time Congress gets close to changing it, money flows into the campaigns of those who would stop that change and — surprise, surprise!—the change is stopped.
With these and every other issue of any importance, corruption blocks real change. And a constant drumbeat focused on this connection would fuel the demand — the central demand of populism anywhere—that this corruption end. Everything this campaign could do could link the problems ordinary people live to this corruption. It could scream what Barack Obama said again and again in his 2008 primary:
“If we don’t take up that fight, then real change, change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.”
Yet how this message spreads is as important as the message itself. This cannot be a campaign with slick television ads, and fancy websites. It only works if it is a story told person to person, town hall to town hall, critically, podcast to podcast, not by politicians, or not just by politicians, but by people who accept Harvey Milk’s challenge. By people who give others hope, by showing them what they already see. By showing them that they already understand why we don’t get nice things, and that we can change it.
The best way to do this, if we could, is through citizen assemblies. All across the world, and slowly now across the United States, communities are organizing assemblies to listen and deliberate upon issues that are important to them. The best of these assemblies are large (though most of the work is done in small groups), randomly chosen and, critically, representative. But at the start, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The key at the beginning is simply to engage: For people to meet face to face, and to hear and find common ground. It must be a different politics, and we must build that difference out. Our democracy drowns with a media that profits from turning us into ignorant people who hate each other. We will get nothing unless we find a way to engage outside that ecosystem, crafting a different way to engage which does not profit by destroying our capacity to hear.
So second, we must build upon our common belief, by engaging in a way that reminds us that we can do this.
(3) From the outside
But we must build from a critically different perspective.
If populism is not about Left versus Right—if it is about inside versus outside—then the populist challenge is to wage a campaign that is, and that therefore can be perceived to be, a campaign from the outside.
Trump taught us this. Trump is perceived (bizarrely and mistakenly) as the quintessential outsider. His attraction is precisely that he is “not like them.” Most in his base don’t know of the endless money-driven policy flip-flops that define the few policies he’s explicit about. Most have little recognition of his policies at all and certainly no recognition of their certain economic and human costs, at least if implemented as he has promised. Regardless, Trump’s brand is simple: battle-scarred and tough, he’s going to “burn it all down”; they’ve been trying to take him out from the beginning, but he’s not going to be defeated. He is, to add the (horrific) icing to his cake, not for “they/them”; he is “for you.”
The good news for Democrats is that this brand is particular to Trump. Trump defeated every Trump-wanna-be in 2024 (DeSantis, Haley, Scott), and kept others off the field because none of them were seen by voters as outsiders. All of them were politicians first — and thus, regardless of their policies, none could push aside the outsider Republican, Donald Trump. None could rally the populist rage that Trump has so effectively captured.
Trump will not be the candidate in 2028. And thus none (save the too-weird-by-half Vivek) of his most likely replacements will be outsiders either. JD Vance may have come from Appalachia, but his rise is tied directly to the money that insiders beg for and bend to. There will therefore be no natural inheritor of the populist passion in the Republican Party in 2028. Whatever special power Trump had relative to any Democrat, it won’t transfer automatically to future MAGA Republicans.
However, the bad news for Democrats is that there is no obvious outsider among Democrats either. Bernie Sanders could have been: Sanders is unique in the party, maybe the only career politician not perceived as a career politician. That’s not because people miss that he’s been in government all his career. Rather, it is because they understand him to be someone who has (almost uniformly) done what he believed was right, regardless of what it may have cost him politically. Sanders has a unique credibility as an inherently principled politician (a concept that, for most Americans, is oxymoronic). And while others may be just as principled or consistent in their views, the views that Sanders has pressed most strongly are the progressive issues that united, not triggered, most Americans.
Yet I trust that Sanders will believe that an 87-year-old should not run for President. And so, if not Sanders, the challenge for the Democrats is that none of its leaders are perceived as outsiders by the American public. At least not now. AOC comes closest, though her rise within the party has been earned by becoming a regular player within the party. Like every other obvious Democrat, she has no identity independent of politics. Like all of them, she has risen and become known because of her talent in politics and little more.
Mark Cuban may be an exception. He’s not now a leader in the Democratic Party, though he did yeoman’s service in the campaign for Harris. Like Trump (actually, better than Trump), he had early and significant business success; like Trump, most Americans know him from reality TV. He’s no doubt brilliant and driven and well-resourced—and most importantly to me, not a fantasist. So maybe.
But like every other plausible Democrat, Cuban, too, has failed to talk about politics in a way that would connect to the populists. He, too, has spoken about issues, and wonky ideas to make things better, but never by talking about how we could make government better. Or more simply, make government work. If Cuban, in particular, or the Democrats more generally, are ever to crack the right-wing hold on populist passion, they must learn to speak in a way that connects. If they’re ever to earn the outsider mantle, they must be willing to talk about politics in America the way most Americans see it. (Insiders will quibble with that claim — “it’s not most,” they’ll insist. Sure. But it is certainly the slice of America that determines who wins. So sure, you’ve got the America that rallied to Harris’ glamour rallies. Great. But you need more of America to actually win.)
Because this is the critical opportunity that 2028 presents: The second Trump administration will give an outsider focused on the corruption of American democracy an endless supply of examples to draw upon.
Because this administration is destined to become a master class in all that’s wrong with American democracy — the greatest kleptocracy since the last Trump administration. (And before you whine about that characterization, read The Big Cheat by David Kay Johnston. Seriously. There will be a quiz.) As a government of billionaires (literally, more than in any other administration ever), by billionaires, and for billionaires breaks the only remaining parts of government that Americans like or depend upon, it will become increasingly clear just how completely money has corrupted our government. As Trump threatens tariffs, and then grants exceptions to those who show him the right fealty (as happened repeatedly in his first administration), as his party bankrupts Social Security and cripples Medicare, as they let loose crypto markets, after hobbling the FTC and CFPB, as they make permanent a tax cut that taxes corporations and the super-wealthy at banana republic levels, while giving ordinary taxpayers little relief at all, they will give a properly focused anti-corruption outsider’s campaign everything it needs to make the case it needs to make: That the problem with government is not government; the problem with government is corruption. The problem with government is that we’ve let our government become corrupted by enormous wealth. And the solution to that problem is not destroying government. The solution is to actually build the government Madison promised us— one “dependent on the people alone,” where “the people” means, “not the rich more than the poor.”
No image better captures what many on the Left think about the 2024 election than this.
I get this self-satisfied scorn. I’ve felt it myself, long before it was fed to me by Reddit.
Yet what this smugness misses is that “anti-establishment” is relative: Harris let herself become the establishment; anything relative to her was anti-establishment.
In 2028, there will be a different establishment. Trump will have had four years to demonstrate whether a billionaire’s government is a government that benefits ordinary Americans. There will be endless examples to show America exactly why it does not. By 2028, if even a fraction of the policies pushed by Trump become law, an increasingly furious America will begin to pay attention.
2028 is thus the chance to make fundamental reform happen. If the slogan that won the last election was “She’s for they/them; he’s for you,” the slogan that will win the next is: “They are for themselves; we must fight for us.”
What can be done now
If this strikes you as close to right, there is tons that you can do now.
I said we need a campaign: The non-profit I launched almost a decade ago, EqualCitizens.US, will help kick that off — not to claim an exclusive role, but simply to get this going. (Support us here.) But we need a campaign manager to build this campaign. If you’re that manager, or know who that manager should be, here’s a job description.
I said we need to support the Maine campaign: The work to support the litigation will be expensive. They need your help. You can support them here.
I said we need the commitment of democracy reformers everywhere: There are so many who have, over the last decade, been fighting for every cool democracy tweak. (I’ve been told that $160M was spent this cycle alone trying to get primary reform and ranked choice voting.) Those reforms are right. Their timing and technique are not. So if you’re a supporter of these democracy reform organizations, ask them to come home. Ask them to return to the corruption fight. No one need deny the brilliance in these clever hacks. But we must affirm this fundamental truth: We can only move as far as the people will go, yet the people start us in a productive place.
I said we need to engage differently: The citizen assembly movement is the most exciting innovation in democratic reform anywhere. Join one, locally, or support the many organizations pushing to spread citizen assemblies nationally. Or if you could, help us fund kicking off the biggest citizen assembly campaign in the history of that movement, with a goal of 250 assemblies by July 4, 2026. If this interests you, let me know.
I said we need to learn to talk about this issue in a way that could connect: Talk, or even better, create. We’re helping to launch Citizens Create. The aim will be to inspire creative efforts to explain and engage on these existential democracy issues. The project will encourage a wide range of creativity, but in a way that would help support creators. The very best will be bundled with a bumper that invites you to donate to the creative work you’ve just seen. Half of that donation will go to the creator, and half will go to spreading the creativity even more.
And finally, and most critically, I’ve said we need to give up the idea that small change is good enough: Even when we win our fight over SuperPACs, we will still need an amendment to the Constitution that frees democracy from the bizarre jurisprudence of this Supreme Court. The work done by American Promise to rally states to demand a constitutional amendment is critical. (It would have a real chance, IMHO, if it broadened its appeal, to join forces with those demanding a “convention to propose amendments.”) We won’t get an amendment next year, or the year after. But if we “take up that fight” to “change the way our government works” (your words, Barack), every victory will bring that amendment closer. Not all of us will get to this promised land. Every one of us must fight now to get us closer.
I’m going to be writing about this as regularly as I can. Those essays will live on this site. If you want to support them in a Substack, you can do that here.
Thanks for reading. Even more, thanks for acting.
