The populist manifesto

Strategist Waleed Shahid lays out the future for a Democratic Party that can win

Waleed Shahid is one of the most forward-thinking Democratic strategists, and after thinking through the results of the 2024 election, he’s come up with a way forward for the Democratic Party. It’s a practical plan for organizing that neatly dismisses the repackaged received wisdom that pundits have been dispensing since the polls closed.

Read the full memo below, and let us know what you think in the comments. Then, we encourage you to visit The Bloc to find out more about Shahid’s strategic work, and to check out the link below to subscribe to his newsletter and follow along with his thinking on the future of progressive politics.

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By Waleed Shahid

As Democrats sift through the aftermath of our electoral defeat, the finger-pointing has been relentless. For many party elites, the culprit is “wokeness.” The story they tell is simple: the party lost because we cared too much about the wrong people. As Anat Shenker-Osorio points out, this is the lie sold by far-right authoritarian movements. They claim the powerless have somehow taken power. They say the country is under attack and the “real” Americans have to save it. It’s a tale as old as time—a cheap distraction, trading hard truths for easy scapegoats. The real tragedy? Democrats are taking the bait, spinning their wheels in the meaning-making of WTF just happened.

Trump’s expanded support in 2024 wasn’t solely a longing for a bygone era where women, immigrants, Black people, and LGBTQ individuals had fewer protections. That sentiment, while undeniably present in parts of his base, was likely baked into his 2020 coalition. The new voters he attracted weren’t necessarily motivated by culture wars as their top priority. Instead, their choices seemed rooted in broader discontent—economic unease, disillusionment with current leadership, and a craving for disruption. This wasn’t a simple referendum on identity politics but a reflection of the complex, often contradictory forces shaping American politics today.

No, Trump won over the median voter because Democrats allowed the deep frustration with our broken political and economic system to fester leaving voters to turn to a figure who promised change, even if it meant embracing the dangerous allure of authoritarianism.

Some Democratic elites now champion economic populism, but their rhetoric remains untethered from meaningful self-reflection. They gesture toward change without confronting what it demands—or how it could reshape the party’s foundation. The Democratic Party has become trapped in a politics dominated by the upper middle class, where fighting for democracy and combating bigotry are framed more as moral performances of negative partisanship than as paths to real change. Identity politics, once rooted in insurgent movements demanding equality and justice, has been diluted into a safe, corporate-friendly jargon. Black Lives Matter became hashtags and kneeling politicians in kente clothes, while structural demands—on housing, healthcare, or policing—were sidelined. This transformation isn’t about representing marginalized voices; it’s about appeasing the sensibilities of donors and professionals who shape the party’s agenda. What passes for boldness is little more than symbolic gestures that flatter elites and alienate everyone else.

This dynamic isn’t accidental. For decades, Democrats have shifted from labor unions and working-class organizing—evidenced by 172 House Democrats voting to cut ACORN funding during Obama’s first term—and instead prioritized affluent professionals and donors.

"Our problem as a party is that the biggest source of our venture capital now comes from labor, which is a group that's becoming less and less important, and representing less and less of a percentage of American voters,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg in 1999. “We have to replace labor's investment in the party with investment from another source, and hopefully from a source that's growing."

It’s the same strategists and strategy that led Chuck Schumer to declare in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western PA, we’ll pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs.” That gamble didn’t pay off in 2016 or 2024.

That shift handed the Democratic Party to a managerial class that treats politics as a balancing act of interest groups rather than a tool for structural change. Over time, the pivot from labor unions and working-class organizing to affluent professionals and donors has gutted the party’s ability to meaningfully challenge the conservative order. What remains is a politics of performative gestures and timid incrementalism—actions designed to placate elite donors and upper-middle-class voters while sidelining the working class and marginalized communities in the name of respectability. It’s a strategy that flatters elite sensibilities but fails to deliver real results.

If Democrats want to reclaim their position as the party of working people, they need to stop hedging and start confronting the power structures that define inequality. That means actually naming the villains: billionaire elites, corporate monopolies, and archaic institutions that choke off democracy and lock ordinary Americans out of governing their own futures.

New York’s Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, a moderate Democrat, compared the Democratic Party’s current moment to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 loss, urging the party to seize defeat as an opportunity to end the neoliberal order that has dominated American politics since Reagan. He critiques Democrats for failing to replace this brittle regime, which prioritizes markets over public good and entrenches economic inequality, with a bold new vision. Highlighting the vital balance between labor and capital, Delgado insists that public servants must reject market-driven greed and instead focus on empowering working families through policies that shift power and resources back to the people. This, he argues, is the path to reconstructing a political order rooted in economic justice and public trust.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this. He fought fascism abroad and, just as critically, at home—waging war on the economic oligarchs who made government serve profits over people. Today, too few Democrats are willing to take up that fight, leaving billionaires and corporate interests free to extract, exploit, and silence the working class. That cowardice has consequences. To govern in the people’s interest, you first have to be willing to take on those who profit from their suffering.

“For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality,” Roosevelt declared at the 1936 Democratic National Convention. “A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government.”

Roosevelt framed the fight against fascism as a fight against the stranglehold of economic elites, naming their greed as the true enemy of democracy. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, leaned on billionaire Mark Cuban to sell her message and had Uber’s senior staff in her inner circle of advisors.

What Democrats Missed

1. Policy Must Be Stupidly Simple: Build Back Better was a real shot at change—child tax credits, lowering child care costs, paid leave—policies people could understand. Instead, Democrats became bogged down in the complexities of the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS, and infrastructure—important initiatives, but convoluted and mediated through corporate subsidies, as most of the U.S. energy economy is privately controlled. By failing to deliver clear, populist solutions, they confirmed voters’ suspicions: Democrats talk, debate, but never deliver.
   
   Democrats achieved major victories, like negotiating Medicare drug prices, significantly expanding the ACA, and delivering historic pandemic relief. Yet these wins barely registered with the public, lost in the chaos of the modern attention economy. Pandemic relief, once celebrated, faded from memory or turned into a point of cynicism. In the end, the accomplishments were overshadowed by the narrative of an out-of-touch administration, fueling the public’s appetite for change.
   
   Outside of weapons aid to Ukraine and Israel, most voters can’t name a single Biden-Harris achievement related to their number one concern: the cost of living. Pundits compared Biden to LBJ and FDR, but his record fell short of offering anything as simple and tangible as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
   

2. Inoculate Voters For The GOP’s Divide-and-Rule: Democrats should have been ready for the GOP’s culture wars on immigrants and transgender people years ago. The GOP culture war strategy is simple: stir up fear and division by telling people: if you're struggling, it's because of them—immigrants, queer people, undeserving welfare recipients, the "other." This narrative keeps voters angry and distracted, while the real culprits—billionaires and politicians—push their agenda, protect their wealth and power, and shift the blame. It’s a relentless cycle of pointing fingers at the outsider to conceal the real enemies at the top. Harris and Biden barely addressed the GOP’s core strategy for what it is. But if culture is clearly shifting on issues of race, immigration, gender, and sexuality, and only one side is talking about it, you’ve got a captive audience, ripe with conspiracy theories, misinformation, persuasion, and more.
   

3. The Multiracial Working Class Is the Key: Democrats win when we’re the party of working people. The GOP is weak on economics, but we ignore that to chase after suburbanites distracted by the latest words from Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney about civility and democracy. Meanwhile, voters have been angry for years about wage stagnation, rising healthcare, housing, child care, and education costs. We’ve forgotten how to unite around those grievances and point the finger at who’s holding us back—while we defend institutions that people know aren’t working. It’s time to stop running from our strengths and start speaking to the people who’ve been left behind.
   
   Democrats have lost much of the working class, except for union members, who supported Harris 57-41 over Trump. The party should start by learning from the unions that have already delivered for them. Unions, unlike many Democratic leaders, know how to engage their members on real economic concerns like cost of living and job security. The Harris campaign was crowded with Uber executives, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, and celebrities, instead of being anchored by the voices of major labor union leaders—those who engage working-class voters every day and understand their fight for dignity and power. To win back the working class, Democrats must focus on passing laws to increase workers' power in our democracy and workplaces, while building their structural leverage in the economy.
   

4. Norms Can’t Save Us: The Democratic Party has an enduring problem: its leadership and much of its electorate cling to institutional norms even as those norms undermine the values they were built to serve. Biden’s 2020 campaign embodied this dynamic—a promise to stabilize rather than transform—and the collapse of Build Back Better revealed the consequences. Faced with unified control of government, Democrats splintered their agenda, chasing the symbolic victory of bipartisan infrastructure while sidelining once-in-a-generation investments in climate, immigration, and child care. Leaders like Pelosi and Schumer deferred to outdated processes, mistaking caution for pragmatism and institutional inertia for strategy.
   
   Republicans, meanwhile, understand the stakes. Mitch McConnell shattered the filibuster for judicial nominations without hesitation, reshaping the courts for decades. Democrats, by contrast, remain wedded to norms long since weaponized against them, trapped in a Beltway echo chamber where accountability runs horizontally, not vertically to voters. The emerging challenge from The Squad and younger Democrats is more than a critique of the GOP—it’s a critique of Washington’s nostalgic reverence for a status quo that no longer exists. They see clearly what the party’s gerontocracy resists: real change requires letting go of broken norms and returning to the values those institutions were meant to serve. It’s not just a matter of strategy—it’s a matter of survival.

A Blueprint for Populist Realignment

Here’s how Democrats can rebuild—and realign:

1. Populist Think Tanks: Democrats need to invest in infrastructure that popularizes, passes and implements simple policies with immediate, tangible impacts — solutions working-class voters can see, feel, and understand. This means funding think tanks and policy campaigns that prioritize direct, social democratic benefits—programs that cut through the noise, deliver results quickly, and match the scale of the problems that working-class voters face. With federal gridlock stalling broader progress, Democratic governors in trifecta states must take the lead, implementing state-level policies that resonate with voters and rebuild trust.
   
   If the left aims to realign the Democratic Party into a vehicle for economic populism, it must create a party within the party—an organized, powerful faction capable of reshaping the party's direction. In other words, the left needs its own version of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a $45 million juggernaut that has become the operational backbone of the MAGA movement, and effectively operates as a “party within a party.”

   
   CPI is the connective tissue between far-right elected officials, media, think tanks, and movement organizations. They organize strategy retreats, training sessions, and programming for members of Congress and their staffers, focusing on areas such as conducting oversight of Democratic opponents, running opposition research bootcamps, hosting legislative director retreats, developing rapid-response communication strategies, cultivating talent for spokespeople, collaborating with issue-specific experts on policy and ideology, and placing staffers in strategic roles to advance their agenda.

   
   This isn’t just about operational mechanics; it’s about changing how the left approaches power. Right now, too many elected officials and progressive organizations operate like small businesses, focused on preserving their own brand rather than collaborating to advance a collective mission. What’s needed is a permanent support system—one that anchors progressive governance, counters conservative dominance, and redefines what the Democratic Party can achieve.
   

2. Working Class Fighters As Candidates: In focus groups, people often compare Democrats to turtles, sloths, and slogs—symbols of sluggishness and inaction. This perception stems from a broader complaint that Democrats don’t fight, they just talk. In contrast, Republicans are likened to predators—lions, sharks, tigers—admired even by some in our base for their relentless pursuit of power. To rebuild trust and shed the image of passivity, Democrats should prioritize recruiting working-class candidates who reflect voters’ frustrations and lived experiences, rather than defaulting to former White House officials or CIA employees who reinforce perceptions of elitism and detachment. To win, Democrats need to shift this image, showing resolve and urgency in their actions, rather than being seen as the party that debates but doesn’t deliver. The fact that voters in Queens and the Bronx backed both Trump and AOC reflects a shared hunger from working class voters for candidates who position themselves as unafraid to challenge broken systems, even from opposite ideological poles. Justice Democrats’ success in recruiting working-class bartenders, nurses, and principals to run for Congress isn’t just a progressive triumph—it’s a glaring indictment of the Democratic Party establishment. These efforts fill a vacuum the party itself should have addressed long ago. If the Democratic Party were effectively cultivating and empowering leaders who reflect the diversity of working-class America, organizations like Justice Democrats wouldn’t need to step in to do the job for them.
   

3. Encourage Movements Do Their Jobs: Instead of sidelining or calling for movement groups to be defunded, party leaders and donors should embrace their critical role in shifting public opinion and grounding politics in the voices of ordinary people. Movements have the power to reframe and humanize complex issues like immigration, transgender rights, and racial justice, minimizing the effectiveness of Republican attacks on persistent Democratic vulnerabilities and creating space for politicians to act on shifts in public sentiment.

   
   In 2020, Democrats surged to victory on the strength of historic turnout, driven by young voters and the largest wave of left-wing and Black freedom protests since the 1960s. Biden’s win coexisted with polarizing slogans like “Defund the Police,” which dominated headlines as the streets reverberated with calls for systemic change. This energy wasn’t separate from the election—it fueled it, with millions inspired by Biden’s promise to pursue “racial justice.”

   
   The left, a force of unrelenting momentum in 2020, reshaped the political landscape with its marches, chants, and demands. But by 2024, that momentum had quieted, the roar of activism fading to a distant echo. Kamala Harris inherited a landscape less charged with the restless fervor that defined Biden’s rise. This fusion of electoral campaigns and protest movements in 2020 reflected a collective hunger for justice, a belief that transformative change was within reach.

   
   Yet by 2024, much of that energy had dissipated. Left-wing groups grew quieter, philanthropic efforts narrowed their scope to electing Democrats, and the broad anti-MAGA coalition struggled to rekindle the bold, grassroots activism that had once thrived, leaving a palpable void in its wake.

   
   Movements don’t just mobilize voters—they bring a sense of "the public" into politics through organizing, mobilization, and earned media, pushing beyond the imagery of calculations driven by people in suits.

   
   To win durable majorities, leaders must invest in these movements, empowering them to tell the stories, build coalitions, and create the moral urgency that drives a sense of public participation in our politics and expands what is politically possible. We need to restore a dynamic balance of conflict and collaboration between movements and parties—the kind of tension that once drove FDR and LBJ to achieve some of the most transformative presidencies in modern history. Without their energy, politics risks becoming stagnant and detached, losing the very constituencies that make change possible.
   

4. Reform Movement Organizations: Movement groups have always navigated the tension between energizing their base, persuading the middle, and disrupting the status quo. Since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, many groups have shifted from pure protest to deeper political engagement—embracing elections, legislative advocacy, and canvassing as tools to test their ideas and sharpen strategies for building majoritarian power. While federal progress on racial justice and immigration has faltered, wins on climate and economic policy highlight what persistence can achieve.

   
   For years, center-left and progressive groups have grappled with a critical question: are organizations rooted in real constituencies, or are they drifting into donor-driven list-building machines with little connection to working-class bases? The risk of becoming hollow vessels—focused on fundraising metrics rather than people’s material needs—is always real. Leaders should push for clarity: is the goal mass membership, shifting elite or public opinion, legislative wins, or building an online echo chamber to rival the far right’s Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, and $56 million PragerU? Without a clear theory of change, lofty ideals can collapse under their own weight. But with intentional strategy, movements can avoid this drift and build real, durable power.

   
   As Jesse Jackson famously observed, the Democratic Party is like a plane—it needs both a left wing and a right wing to fly. The dynamic between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln captures this balance: Douglass’s uncompromising moral clarity forced the nation to confront the urgency of abolition, while Lincoln’s pragmatic navigation of political realities turned that vision into actionable policy. Without Douglass, Lincoln risked moral stagnation; without Lincoln, Douglass’s ideals might have drowned in political impossibility. Their collaboration wasn’t smooth—it was tense, necessary, and deeply productive. That same interplay of bold vision and strategic execution is what the Democratic Party needs today

   
   The tension between transactional politics and transformational movements is as old as American democracy itself, and today’s Democratic Party is no exception. In moments of upheaval, ideologically driven movements have often dragged their parties out of complacency and into purpose. Abolitionists gave Republicans emancipation. Labor unions handed Roosevelt the New Deal. Civil rights leaders pushed Johnson to deliver the Great Society. Right-wing economists armed Reagan with trickle-down economics. For progressives today, the challenge is to offer not just another interest group to triangulate, but a clear and compelling answer to the most urgent question of our time: “How should Democrats govern?”
   

5. Win The Battle For Trans Rights: After George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, many Democratic elites blamed the same-sex marriage movement for being too bold and moving too quickly. Yet just a few years later, same-sex marriage became the law of the land, a reminder that organizing often drives the political shifts once deemed inconvenient and impossible. Not long ago, Democrats beat back Republican-led trans bathroom bans in states like North Carolina, proving this fight is far from unwinnable. Caution may feel safe in the moment, but transformative change requires courage to lead. At our best, Democrats are the party that protects the marginalized, not feeds them to the wolves—a purpose we can’t afford to abandon.
   
   To ensure trans Americans are safe and respected, we need to reframe the issue as part of a universal fight for dignity and freedom, not as a niche debate about policing language. Sports inclusion is far from the top concern for trans Americans, but the public often doesn’t understand this, falling for the GOP’s framing of it as central to the debate. Messages like Sarah McBride’s, which expose this obsession as a GOP distraction from solving real issues, alongside messages emphasizing autonomy, freedom, privacy, and safety, are both crucial to reshaping the conversation.
   
   Everyone has faced pressures to conform to gender norms, and everyone deserves the freedom to live authentically, without fear or control. Walking away from the fight for trans rights means ceding the narrative to Republicans, who weaponize fear and suspicion to create a captive audience for their far-right message machine. To counter this, progressives must highlight shared values like privacy, safety, and autonomy while exposing the absurdity of policies like bathroom bans, which rely on invasive enforcement and government overreach. This isn’t just about protecting trans people—it’s about connecting their fight to a universal struggle for dignity and freedom, with year-round earned and paid media campaigns (ads, spokespeople in national media, and appearances on key podcasts and YouTube shows) that persuade the public, reframe trans rights, and build a majoritarian coalition.
   
   It’s strikingly self-defeating to argue that listening to the groups most targeted by Trump’s administration somehow betrays the people “Democrats fight for.” Trans people are facing a Supreme Court case this month that could ban gender-affirming care nationwide, yet Democrats spent the weeks leading up to it attacking trans communities instead of showing solidarity. Governor Andy Beshear’s recent victory in Kentucky offers a smarter path: he didn’t avoid controversial issues—he vetoed anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice bills—but he paired those actions with a relentless focus on delivering material benefits like jobs, health clinics, and better infrastructure. Voters don’t need to agree with every decision if they trust your priorities and see their daily lives improving. Beshear’s success shows that effective leadership isn’t about abandoning our core values; it’s about standing firm on principles while persuading voters that you care about people’s core concerns.
   
   Voter frustration over immigration and the border wasn’t solely concocted—it stemmed from real, tangible disruptions in communities. Many working-class voters felt they were playing by the rules while the government seemed to prioritize newcomers. Long-established Latino immigrants are increasingly resentful as new asylum-seekers gain access to work permits and driver’s licenses, benefits that many undocumented workers have spent decades without. ProPublica’s reporting shows how this frustration, rooted in real policy disparities and unmet Democratic promises, helped drive a notable shift toward Trump, underscoring the complex interplay between immigration policy and political realignment.

   
   These tensions are predictable in every society in human history navigating the line between compassion and control. Nations are defined by borders, and the very idea of "the people" relies on who is included and who is not. Yet Democrats fumbled the opportunity to shape this debate. When far-right Republican governors exploited the asylum crisis, sending migrants to blue states in a cynical stunt, Democrats mostly stood by as the narrative spiraled. Even worse, some Democrats echoed GOP criticisms of the Biden-Harris administration rather than reframing the issue or backing movement organizations in developing earned and paid media campaigns. These efforts could have humanized the migrant experience, mitigated Democratic vulnerabilities, and highlighted how Republicans are exploiting a broken immigration system for political gain. Into this silence stepped Republicans, eager to score political points and dominate the conversation.

6. Build Populist Media: Democrats need year-round media campaigns to elevate working-class leaders, particularly from labor unions, and name the villains behind today’s economic struggles. Billionaires and corporations in Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, grocery store chains, and real estate are bleeding working people dry, with both parties often complicit. Campaigns should build on the work of United Auto Workers and groups like More Perfect Union by spotlighting labor leaders, warehouse workers, and tenants fighting back, turning their stories into a rallying cry against corporate greed and driving a populist narrative that resonates across the political spectrum.
   
   To cut through the noise, these campaigns must be bold and conflict-driven—grabbing attention on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram while dominating earned media on CNN, CBS, and MSNBC. For all the talk of Democrats losing the working class, labor, and tenant leaders remain pretty much invisible in most national print and TV outlets. We need a spokesperson network to bring working-class voices into national conversations and digital media infrastructure—podcasts and YouTube shows—that make their stories impossible to ignore. To reclaim the narrative, Democrats must center the people who best embody the fight for fairness and economic justice.
   
   To build a 21st-century American multiracial populism, we need a sharper understanding of the forces shaping voter behavior—starting with John Steinbeck’s insight that many working-class Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” For instance, many working-class voters are often described as prioritizing values like hard work, small businesses, providing for your family, upward mobility, and the American Dream, suggesting that a successful populist coalition will require a nuanced approach that respects diverse aspirations. Many voters don’t simply resent the rich (they voted for Donald Trump after all), but they do want a fair shot. They’re not asking for the rich to disappear, but for a world where three men don’t hold as much wealth as the bottom 50%. It’s about creating a vision of prosperity that includes everyone, not just the few at the top.
   
   Lastly, the multiracial working class is extremely diverse—racially, ideologically, religiously, geographically. This won’t happen with a cookie-cutter playbook; it demands well-funded research and strategic investment to craft a populism that resonates across lines of identity while addressing the anxieties uniting these groups.
   

7. It’s Not Joe Rogan. In the George W. Bush years, media and political elites fixated on conservative talk radio, desperately seeking a liberal counterpart to Rush Limbaugh. Today, the fixation has shifted to Joe Rogan, podcasts, and right-wing echo chambers on YouTube as the supposed key to voter engagement. But the problem isn’t just the lack of platforms or personalities—it’s the lack of ideas that resonate on a visceral level. Conservatives didn’t merely elevate compelling figures; they sold emotionally charged narratives that tapped into people’s frustrations, fears, and aspirations. Democrats, meanwhile, often obsess over the medium but fail to deliver a product that connects with lived realities.
   
   Kamala Harris’s challenges with authenticity and accessibility reflect a broader strategic issue rather than a need to engage specific platforms like Joe Rogan. Her hesitance to lean into unscripted, long-form interactions and her discomfort with intimate, conversational formats have left voters unconvinced of her relatability. Compounding this is her inconsistent public narrative—policy shifts, a lack of clear beliefs, and an introduction to the national stage that felt unsteady and overly managed. In a media landscape favoring unfiltered authenticity, Harris’s resistance to being fully known has widened the gap between her and voters, who increasingly prioritize trust over polish.
   
   The solution isn’t about finding the next Joe Rogan of the left—it’s about creating a sense of accessibility, authenticity, and belonging. Voices like Raphael Warnock, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mehdi Hasan, Tara Brach, and Hasan Piker can succeed as major voices on the left not just because of who they are, but because they pair cultural relevance in their unique ways with a sense of agency, hope, and solidarity. In an age of rapid secularization, people aren’t just looking for policy fixes; they’re searching for meaning and belonging in ways that feel affirming, not condescending. By crafting narratives that address economic and cultural alienation with self-help, humor, imagination, and practicality, Democrats can bridge the gap between policy and personal impact. Without content that resonates on a deeply human level, even the most powerful platforms and personalities will struggle to persuade those who feel left behind.

   
   To build a durable digital media infrastructure, Democrats must invest in influencers who reach audiences through non-political content—fitness, sports, entertainment, beauty, meditation, gaming, lifestyle, and self-help—where trust and cultural connection are already strong. This means funding creators who weave messages of solidarity and agency under the next Trump administration into relatable, everyday content rather than overtly political appeals. By supporting these voices and fostering partnerships across diverse platforms, Democrats can create a media ecosystem that taps into cultural relevance while subtly shaping the narrative on belonging, justice, and collective action.
   

8. Embrace Democracy Reform: Democrats must embrace democracy reform to break free from the two-party doom loop that fuels polarization, gridlock, and disillusionment. The current winner-take-all system incentivizes negative partisanship and makes it increasingly difficult for the governing party to deliver results. Thermostatic public opinion punishes Democrats for governing, no matter their achievements, making it impossible to build lasting trust with voters—another reason they need bold democracy reforms to break the cycle of backlash and gridlock.
   
   Structural changes like proportional representation through multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting offer a way out by making elections more competitive and representative, empowering diverse voices, and reducing the zero-sum nature of our politics. These reforms wouldn’t just broaden voter choice—they would create space for new coalitions, reward collaboration over obstruction, and weaken the hold of the far right.
   
   If Democrats want to restore faith in governance and build a sustainable path to power, they must prioritize a bold and imaginative democracy reform agenda on the local, state, and federal levels. Blue State trifectas have no excuse not to lead the charge on proportional representation, setting a national example for fairer, more inclusive democracy. This goes beyond election mechanics; it’s about transforming a system that rewards division and stagnation into one that fosters representation, accountability, and actually passing laws.
   

9. Mainstream Media Reform: In 2024, Democrats once again misunderstood the true mechanics of cultural power. As Heather McGhee writes, the right’s influencers aren’t just celebrities; they’re in your headphones, on your screens, talking for hours every day, embedding their worldview into the fabric of daily life. It’s not about a viral moment or a campaign concert. It’s about permanence and persistence—being there, day after day, to shape how people think about the world, subtly and consistently.

   
   Meanwhile, you might think watching CNN or MSNBC offers you a break from Fox News, but it doesn’t. Fox doesn’t just broadcast to its right-wing viewers; it sets the agenda for everyone else. Once Fox locks onto a narrative—whether it’s wokeness, migrant caravans, transgender athletes, or Hillary’s emails—it becomes the story other networks feel compelled to react to. Suddenly, MSNBC and CNN are no longer offering independent analysis; they’re playing Fox’s game. It doesn’t look like Hannity or Fox & Friends. It looks like a measured panel discussion on “will X or Y divide the Democrats?” but the framing is already skewed. Fox isn’t just shaping its audience—it’s shaping the entire media ecosystem.

   
   McGhee observes that while MSNBC is hailed as the liberal answer to Fox News, it tracks the outrage of the day without a clear map of the world it wants to build. Meanwhile, Fox doesn’t just report the news; it digs trenches around its central narrative of grievance. At MSNBC, working-class solidarity and economic populism—the fire that should drive the Democratic Party—flickers but never truly ignites.

   
   The problem isn’t just what gets covered; it’s how it gets covered. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a moderate Democrat, spoke on Jake Tapper's show, and for a moment, it felt as if she were speaking in a foreign tongue. She talked about timber revenues drying up, wildfires choking the land, and the quiet desperation of families trying to pass down small businesses—stories that don’t fit the neat partisan battles or tactical sparring the media thrives on. It was plain, unvarnished, and strangely unfamiliar: the language of people, not politics.

   
   Political journalism today is too often consumed by tactical framing: who’s up, who’s down, how something “plays” politically. Policies are often framed through the lens of electability, sidelining their potential to solve real issues faced by people. Will it alienate swing voters? Will it hand Republicans a talking point? These frames shrink monumental issues into partisan chess moves, stripping away their stakes and substance. Over time, this fixation breeds cynicism. It teaches voters to see politics as a game, where nothing is real, no problem is solvable, and everything is just another strategy session. The real tragedy? If every story is about tactics, then nothing is truly about solutions—and that’s how we lose.
   
   If mainstream media wants to lead rather than echo, it must embrace a sharper program—one that grabs viewers’ attention and names both the protagonists and the culprits. This means investing in real journalism on the forces that shape our lives—corporate power, labor exploitation, housing crises, health care failures—and telling these stories through the lens of their human cost, not just their partisan implications. It requires turning the camera outward, away from the Beltway echo chamber of partisan punditry to directly impacted people, and subject-matter experts who can unmask failures and hold the right people accountable. Without this, the media remains tethered to Fox News’s dominance, stuck reacting to the outrage of the day while politics becomes a sterile chessboard, devoid of stakes, villains, or heroes.
   

10. Win The War On Attention: To compete in the war on attention, Democrats must move beyond sporadic appearances and build a robust infrastructure for relentless, narrative-driven engagement.
    
    Joe Biden’s most profound vulnerability in 2020 wasn’t just his age or even his physical fitness; it was the perception that he might not be the true author of his presidency. This wasn’t about whether he could jog up Air Force One’s steps—it was about whether voters saw him as autonomous, decisive, and in command. In an era of hyper-mediated politics, where every narrative metastasizes at the speed of a tweet, this kind of unease is potent. The Biden campaign’s insight was counterintuitive: the antidote to this wasn’t performative vigor but quiet authenticity. By letting Biden speak plainly and directly to voters about policy—unedited, focused, and deliberate—they addressed a deeper anxiety about their candidate’s agency and vision. What emerged wasn’t just an effective strategy for Biden but a reminder of a political truth often lost in the cacophony: clarity and simplicity, when rooted in substance, can cut through even the most insidious narratives.

    
    But after his election, President Biden held fewer interviews and press conferences than any president in modern history, leaving a vacuum that allowed his image to be defined by perceptions of frailty, passivity, and conspiracy theories depicting him as an empty suit, controlled by nefarious forces within the establishment. In a fragmented attention economy where meaning is constantly under siege, leaders like Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Andrew Cuomo have shown how to anchor public focus. AMLO’s daily press briefings, La Mañanera, operated as a structured attentional regime—blending updates, policy narratives, heroes and antagonists, and spectacle to seize and hold public interest. Similarly, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic briefings became hugely popular spectacles demonstrating leadership while dominating the narrative.

    

    Popular Democratic Party leaders must build mechanisms for persistent visibility: daily livestreams, podcasts, or even interactive town halls in partnership with influencers or outlets with major working-class audiences. These aren’t just communication tools but platforms to set the terms of public debate, addressing voter anxieties and aspirations in real time. In a world of collapsed attentional regimes—where algorithms amplify outrage and shallow narratives—the key is to construct spaces where focus, persuasion, and values intersect. By shaping the attention economy with substance, Democrats can counter right-wing spectacle and re-establish politics as both engaging and essential.

    
    The next DNC Chair must rebuild the party around a simple idea: Democrats win when they are the party of working-class people of all backgrounds. That means recruiting populist candidates who look like the voters they need—teachers, nurses, labor leaders—people who live the struggles they’re running to fix. It means ditching technocratic jargon for policies that are bold, easy to understand, and deliver real results, like lowering childcare costs, raising wages, and ensuring rent is affordable. The Chair also needs to play offense on messaging: invest in earned and paid media campaigns that spotlight corporate greed and Republican hate-for-profit, naming the villains behind economic struggles instead of getting bogged down in partisan back-and-forth.

    
    To move beyond the zero-sum gridlock of the two-party system, the DNC should also embrace reforms like ranked-choice voting and proportional representation. These changes would give voters real choices, reduce polarization, and reward collaboration over obstruction. Finally, by pushing for mainstream media reform, supporting independent progressive and digital media, and collaborating with movement organizations on campaigns that persuade broad majorities, the party can reclaim its role as the champion of all working people and rebuild trust in a future that is both pragmatic and transformative.
    
    

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