When we start the next Congress in the new year, Republicans will control the White House, Senate, and the House. As Democrats, we must ask ourselves: How did we get here?
The truth is that Democrats have been losing the trust of poor and working people of every race going back at least a decade. If we do not acknowledge the depth of the problem, we may win a battle in two years if the House switches control, but we will lose the battle of winning the trifecta and any chance of real sustained progress for our country.
Voters are rightly angry that for the past 50 years, wages have stagnated even as productivity increased. Wealth and income inequality have continued to skyrocket. A 56 percent majority of Americans don't have enough saved up to pay for a medical emergency expense of $1,000 or more, leading to one in 12 Americans owing medical debt that totals at least $220 billion nationally. Housing costs have been rising faster than median household income since 2000, leading people to spend over 30 percent of their monthly income on housing costs. Meanwhile, the prices of groceries—from diapers to eggs—have skyrocketed. Through all of this, corporations have made record profits and America's 806 billionaires are richer than half the population combined.
Giant Democratic Party identification dips started back in 2010 and have continued to crater, as voters watched the traditional party of poor and working class Americans fail to deliver on basic policies like raising the minimum wage, while embracing free trade rather than protecting jobs at home. Voters began abandoning both parties in droves, with party identification with Independents reaching its height of 43 percent last year. In 2024, millions of voters chose to stay home, and millions of infrequent voters chose the candidate who conveyed the anger they felt most and promised to blow up the system.
To win back working class and poor voters of every race, it's past time for a rebuild of the Democratic Party. We must urgently and authentically communicate to people that we will stand up for them, and we must clearly paint a vision of how we will unrig the system so we can actually deliver results that make people's lives better every day.
Let's be clear: Un-rigging this system requires that we call out the very actors who are rigging the system and benefiting from people's pain. Too many of those actors are the very people who fund our party and elections. That confuses voters in knowing if we will stand up and fight for them—and it also influences too many in our own party to moderate their positions and not stand up and fight for working people.
That's why I've led many of my colleagues in calling for our party to reject Big Money and dark money in primaries. We have to be crystal clear and consistent about who we are standing up for and how hard we intend to fight for them.
Unrigging an economy that has been rigged over decades also takes time. President Biden and Democrats began the process of rejecting failed, trickle-down economic policies and embracing middle-out, bottom-up economics with real results: We created over 16 million jobs, saved our economy from a pandemic disaster, and passed programs to support struggling families from relief checks, housing assistance, and the child tax credit. But when Republicans took over the House and allowed all those provisions to expire, voters were left facing continued price-gouging by corporations and feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them—leading to them rightly feeling they were worse off than before.
That's exactly why progressives pushed hard to ensure we passed Build Back Better, legislation that would have addressed two of the biggest inflationary costs: universal childcare and housing. That bill was blocked by two conservative Democrats in the Senate and torpedoed the effort to address the rising costs that families continued to face. Had we delivered on these two critical pieces in a timely way, voters would have felt the effects—and the election result may have been very different.
The good news is that Democrats do have a clear path forward: to be united and passionate about fighting for bold, direct economic policies that unrig the system and deliver change so families across America can stop just trying to survive and start to thrive.
That means being united in fighting the GOP on anything that rigs the system against working people and poor people. One of the first opportunities to do that will be over Trump's efforts to expand tax cuts for the wealthiest: the Trump Tax Scam 2.0. The last time around, every Democrat voted against the Trump Tax Scam 1.0 and it was the moment—apart from Jan. 6—where Trump's public approval rating was at its very lowest. We fought hard and voters noticed. That should be our game plan again.
We will also have lots of opportunity to call out the huge conflicts of interest presented by a Trump Cabinet of billionaires who have a combined wealth of $350 billion dollars and very little experience in making government work for the people instead of them. They will push policies that hurt working people and poor people and we should call out the corporations and wealthiest individuals who will benefit. Democrats should be strong and unapologetic in contrasting their vision with ours, without regard to who their political donors may be.
We will also have to be on offense, not just defense, showcasing over and over again the broadly popular and populist policies that lift up families. From minimum wage to expanding and protecting Medicare and Social Security, to pushing loudly for increasing competition and limiting corporate concentration of power and monopolies, we can draw people into our vision of a more equitable future.
We should take on the corporate price-gouging that is driving up prices in the grocery store while driving down wages for workers. We should take on the private health insurance companies that deny critical health care as a practice to drive their profits higher. We should call out the ways in which small farmers have been driven out of business by just a couple of corporate conglomerates. There is a reason Trump just said that it will be "very hard" to lower grocery prices: It's because he has no intention of challenging the big corporations who are rigging the system against the little guys and jacking up prices.
We've got a vision that everyone should do well when our economy does well and that Democrats are ready to fight—with everything we've got—to make that happen. The time to turn the page is now. Let's get to work.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal is a Congresswoman from Washington and the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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