Democrats' road to victory in '26 and '28

It's the economy - and the billionaires - and the corruption.

We know that Donald Trump is failing, but will anyone succeed at pointing that out and defeating him at the ballot box?

The second Trump administration is already, like so many of Trump’s ventures before this, defunct. But it still falls to the anti-Trump coalition of Democrats, independents, and Never Trump Republicans to make the sale, to argue the case, to demonstrate a superior replacement.

One piece of good news for the Resistance, though, is that midterm elections have a built-in tailwind for the opposition party — there is almost always a public feeling of wanting to rein in or check the president, but yet the president is not on the ballot; and if people are unhappy, there is a general desire to “throw the bums out” and to clean house. A midterm is often a yes-or-no referendum on the president, and historically the answer ends up being somewhere on a spectrum of no, hell no, and fuck no.

Yet the opposition needs to make a case — and it is also a good beta test for 2028, when presidential candidates will absolutely need to make a case for themselves.

Okay, then. Here is the key. Don’t overthink this.

Seriously. This is not a complicated exercise. We simply need to look at how Trump is failing, how it’s hurting people and pissing them off, and run on that.

Begin with the economy. In fact, begin with it, turn to it in the middle, and then end with it. And if we want to latch onto a few other issues too, there’s a way to do that without deviating from the simple message centered on the economy.

First, we have higher prices, falling stocks, and a shrinking economy sinking into recession. Trump ran on lowering prices, and instead he’s driving them higher — his tariff taxes make things more expensive, other countries retaliate and make them even more expensive, the extra costs are passed onto consumers, consumer confidence is collapsing, GDP is shrinking, small businesses are being forced to close, and the bull market on Wall Street has come crashing into a decline.

This alone is enough to win elections for years to come. I repeat: if we did literally nothing but this one thing, we would win. Over and over.

But since Democrats often feel the need to have 14-point plans when a single simple message will do — and because having three points is the gold standard of classic rhetoric — let’s go a bit further, shall we?

Second, we have the billionaires, starting with Trump himself but also including Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and more. This is an administration of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. They want to jack up taxes on the middle class and working class (tariffs) and gut the ACA and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, all so they can pay zero in taxes. A cabal of the richest men in America have declared war on the middle class.

Third, we have the corruption — with Musk engaging in massive conflicts of interest, shutting down or slashing all the government agencies that regulate his businesses, then making sure his fat government contracts are still in place or increased. Plus Trump and Musk selling Teslas at the White House. Plus Trump insiders allegedly timing their stock market trades with Trump’s tariff announcements. Plus the Trumps’ new private members-only club in DC, Executive Branch, for only the ultra-wealthy billionaires (with a $500,000 initiation fee), giving them direct access to senior administration officials and inner circle cronies. And for good measure, don’t forget Clarence Thomas and his $4 million of secret unreported gifts — including free private jet and yacht trips.

Get in losers, we’re crashing the economy — and corruptly helping this loser sell more of his loser cars to prop his plummeting stock price. All while middle class Americans pay more in taxes and groceries and healthcare and everything.

Together, these three pillars of the argument focus not only on the urgent what of economic pain but also on who is responsible for that pain and how and why it is being inflicted. It crafts a strong and simple narrative of what has gone wrong and who is responsible for it.

Then, the finale: what are we going to do about it? For a midterm, this is fairly simple. We need to stop them. Put Democrats into the majority in the House and Senate, and we can stop them.

If we want to get specific, we can get specific. Revoke all the tariff taxes. Take back Congress’s constitutional power over tariffs, so Trump cannot set them himself. Ban insider trading by both congressional and executive officials. Revoke the “special governmental employee” loophole that allowed Musk to be in the administration without any ethics check or conflict of interest rules or requirements that he step down from CEO roles or divest himself of his financial stakes in all his companies. Require mandatory conflict of interest checks, barring anyone from holding any office if they will profit from their positions of authority. End all the tax cuts for billionaires. Fight price gouging and greedflation with investigations and prosecutions. Restore the insulin and inhaler and other prescription drug price caps Biden negotiated — and expand them — lowering costs for everyone.¹

But don’t get too specific too often. Always come back to the core, high-level message — Trump and his billionaire buddies are breaking the economy, screwing you over, and lining their own pockets.

Of course, there are so many issues one can and ideally would raise — but anything more will create additional complexity and muddle the message. And some of the more pressing grievances can fit within the key points above, partly because “corruption” is such a capacious term. It encompasses far more than self-dealing. It can expand to include all of Trump’s abuses of power — from his attacks on universities, the press, and lawyers, to his lawless executive orders, to his refusal to follow court orders, to his un-American seizure and detention of people without ever getting their day in court. He is a thug, abusing the power of the presidency for personal vendettas and unconstitutional criminality.

So, by all means, attach those sub-arguments to the corruption section of the legal brief against Trump, as it were, especially in front of audiences who will appreciate the level of detail.

But do not forget or lose sight of the simplicity of the core, the big picture.

As James Carville famously said inside the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And the “stupid” was not the people, or the media. It was actually Clinton, along with the other campaign staffers: Carville was trying to get everyone to focus on a single simple message rather than getting lost in the policy weeds.

And it worked. Against a very wealthy, out-of-touch Republican who had infamously raised taxes and presided over a recession — at a point when pundits had written off the Democratic brand and its ability to win national elections.

Trump’s own failures light the path for defeating him. We just need to stay on the path and keep moving forward.

1. Mind you, literally none of this is likely to happen in reality, because Senate Republicans could filibuster them — or because Trump will veto them, and there will probably not be enough votes on most or all of those measures to get the 2/3 majorities in both houses necessary to override a veto. But that should not stop Democrats from running on these issues in 2026 — it will simply feed into a narrative of “cleaning up America” for 2028, getting rid of Trumpism for good.