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We All Need Dems To Win

Why DNC leadership matters for the well-being of all people

WILLIAM J. BARBER, II AND JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE

AUG 27READ IN APP

In rural Iowa and Georgia – places regularly labeled “red” – Democrats won yesterday. 

Catelin Drey won a special election in Iowa’s Senate District 1 by 11 points. In last year’s general election, Trump won the same district by 11.5 points, making Drey’s victory a 22 point swing for Democrats.

Georgia’s special election for Senate District 21 was a seven-way race where no one got more than 50% of the vote. But Democrat Debra Shigley advances to the run-off there as the frontrunner, with more than twice the votes of her Republican opponent.

Special elections are low turn-out races that often favor Democrats, but even still, they are a real-time measure of who is showing up in American politics. And this is good news for Democrats. More importantly, it’s good news for all of us.

Today the Democratic National Committee concludes its summer meetings in Minneapolis and begins to execute its plan for next year’s midterms. It’s vitally important for Dems to succeed. This isn’t because Democrats are always right or even because they deserve to win based on the record of what they have done with power in recent decades. Democrats need a plan to win because they are the only political party in the United States that can check the power of Republicans, who have capitulated to an authoritarian regime. 

Whatever you make of Donald Trump, the simple political fact is that the structure that has allowed him to move from rage tweeting to illegal executive orders, disastrous legislation, militarization of American cities, and shake-downs of foreign governments is the Republican Party. Without the GOP, he is but one among what the Scripture calls the “indolent rich.”

Many Republicans have challenged the GOP to check Trump’s extremism, but it has not. Currently, Trump owns the party. The only way to check his power is for Democrats to win – not just the White House in 2028, but up and down the ballot in 2026.

This is why we sent a memo to the DNC in Minneapolis this week to let them know that we stand ready to work with the party and any candidates who will embrace a strategy to mobilize an historic turnout of low propensity, low-income voters in 2026.

Winning isn’t everything, but it is a necessary pre-requisite to any serious effort to reconstruct democracy in America. We’re sharing the analysis and proposal we sent the DNC with you because we believe the local leaders we have been waiting for across this nation are among you. Please let us know in the comments how you’re working to implement this strategy in local races where you are.

Analysis

Over the past four decades, as inequality has grown exponentially for all Americans, the number of poor and low-income white people—66 million in 2018—has swelled higher than any other demographic. This is one reason low-income, majority white communities became susceptible to the “populist” appeal of the MAGA movement. If white people are hurting, MAGA tells them, it must be because Black people or immigrants are taking from them. By leaning into an aggressive investment in extreme ICE raids, Trump’s regime has bet the farm on this myth.

Democrats, on the other hand, saw their worst performance in decades with low-income voters in 2024. After consistently outperforming the Republican candidate for more than half a century, the Democratic Presidential candidate tied with Trump among low-income voters in 2024. But the partisan margin wasn’t closed by low-income voters who swung to Trump; it was 2020 voters who skipped the 2024 election who closed the gap.

New data from Lake Research Associates makes clear that more than 19 million “Biden Skippers”- people who helped elect President Joe Biden in 2020 – didn’t show up in 2024. When asked why, nearly a third said their number one reason for not voting was that they didn’t feel like the Democrats’ message spoke to their economic situation. These “Biden skippers” are not disinterested in politics. Nearly half say they check the news more than once a day and the majority favor Democrats in a generic match-up. What they want is a candidate who speaks to them, commits to fight for them, and presents an economic agenda that they know would make a difference in their lives.

Opportunity

The GOP’s major policy achievement in 2025 has been to cut government programs that serve everyday people so they can give tax breaks to corporations and wealthy Americans. Almost every Republican in Congress voted for this unpopular legislation that will hurt poor and low-income families first and worst. These Americans are, in fact, the largest swing vote in the country. We need a movement to engage poor people who have rarely voted because they don’t believe that the system can work for them. As they begin to feel the impact of the cuts from Trump’s big ugly budget bill, poor and low-income people who hear Democrats running for House and Senate seats speak to them and embrace policies that could make life better for them, they have the power to flip the House and the Senate.

Poor and low-income people make up a third of the U.S. electorate—more than 40% of the electorate in the swing states that will decide the 2026 midterms. It’s time for the Democratic Party to acknowledge the crisis that poverty is for almost half of Americans and speak directly to poor people of every race about their plan to reconstruct an economy that works for all of us.

This was the heart of Bishop Barber’s message to the DNC 6 years ago. It is even more urgent now.

Proposal

To tap the largest swing vote in the country for an historic surge in the 2026 midterms, we propose that the DNC:

• Embrace a $15 federal minimum wage, indexed for inflation, universal access to healthcare for all Americans, and a progressive tax structure to pay for these public goods as centerpieces of the Democratic platform.
• Support primary challenges against incumbent Democrats who have not affirmed this agenda when they had an opportunity to vote on it.
• Use the infrastructure of the DNC to encourage all candidates to speak to poor and low-income voters (in addition to middle class voters), to campaign in low-income zip codes with histories of lower turnout, and to embrace poor people and workers movements that have been advocating for wages and healthcare.
• Invest in ad campaigns that contrast the affordability crisis that Trump’s reconciliation package and tariffs have exacerbated with the policies Democrats would pass to bring down costs and improve wages for working people.
• Center this moral agenda as common ground for all Americans who believe in liberty and justice for all.