The following article stub by Jennifer Rubin is cross-posted from “How Democrats Win in 2026 and Beyond” at The Contrarian:
Democrats should not wait until Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the midterm campaign, to pivot and begin sprinting toward November. No one who genuinely cares about the fate of democracy should be kvetching about primary polling (which partisans trolling for donor dollars, but not real voters, obsessively focus upon) or relitigating the relative electability of primary opponents after primaries are decided. (Kudos to Rep. Haley Stevens for fully embracing Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in recognition of the stakes.) Fortunately, a batch of insightful Democrats have stepped forward to offer a pathway to win decisively on a populist economic message with broad-based appeal.
Leading the way, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico delivered a speech last week that adeptly framed the argument for Democrats:
For fifty years, billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians have been stealing from the American people. Stealing the wealth we created. With their bribes, their bailouts, and their billionaire tax breaks.
This “affordability crisis” isn’t something that happened in the last five years. This affordability crisis has been fifty years in the making.
Since the late 1970s, mega donors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties, and then those politicians turned around and rigged this economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense.
We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.
Pushing back on the notion that Democrats despise capitalism, Talarico makes the case that the far right has destroyed free markets. Corruption, tariffs, and dark money have influenced regulatory favors and tax giveaways, and massive corporate consolidation are the antithesis of a competitive free market that would create wealth for a wide cross-section of Americans.
“[T]he idea behind capitalism was simple and revolutionary: people should get fairly compensated for their labor. We should get paid for our work. But that’s not what we have right now,” he argued. “You can’t tell me the market is working as it should when billionaires are becoming trillionaires — while the people who do all the work can’t afford the basics.” He added, “Adam Smith is rolling over in his grave. This is not capitalism; this is crony capitalism.”
Talarico’s proposed agenda, dubbed the New American Dream, includes raising the minimum wage, expanding overtime, repealing tax cuts for the super-rich, protecting labor organizing, and investing in college and vocational education. He also includes items that genuine fiscal conservatives used to favor — such as reducing the national debt (“closing tax loopholes, cracking down on tax cheats, and ending forever wars that send billions of our tax dollars overseas”) and removing red tape that impedes housing construction.
Talarico’s pro-worker proposals include universal childcare and paid family leave, an expanded child tax credit, and “cracking down on the data centers jacking up our utility bills and using up our water — and preventing new ones from being built unless they meet our demands.” Positions such as these, which legacy media would characterize as “progressive,” and MAGA operatives would denounce as “socialism,” are embraced by super-majorities of Americans. Here is where Talarico adeptly turns MAGA hacks’ rhetoric against them:
They’re going to claim this new dream is radical. They’re going to claim it’s extreme. They’re going to claim we’re socialists, or communists, or whatever sounds scariest in a headline. And we’ll say: Is that the best you can do?
These are the same old scare tactics. The same old politics of the past. The names they’ll call us only reveal how small their dreams are.
