Peter Cunningham

As Democrats continue to reflect on how a highly experienced 60-year-old vice president, ex-Senator, and former State Attorney General and local prosecutor lost the 2024 election to a 78-year-old, twice-impeached ex-president and convicted felon who cannot complete a single paragraph without lying, two different pieces come across the threshold.

Former Chicago Mayor, Congressman, White House Chief of Staff, and now Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel lays out his prescription for success. Highlight team Trump’s close relationship with big business and a policy agenda that will further squeeze the middle class. Tap into anger on issues like crime, immigration and inflation. And, finally, run more “authentic” candidates like veterans, law enforcement leaders, small business owners and even football players.

“Authentic” Democratic candidates have won in purple and even red states and districts. Dem. Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, runs a car repair shop in Washington state and was reelected this year in a district Trump won 50-47. Its notable, however, that a former NFL player could not unseat Harvard-educated Ted Cruz in Texas, and a Marine veteran lost to Yale-educated Josh Hawley in Missouri. Maybe those races were unwinnable. Maybe the candidates were flawed. Maybe the presidential race was also unwinnable, given Harris’ close ties to an unpopular president and other headwinds she faced, like her late start.

For a different tack, consider a piece from Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias emphasizing basic competence in government as a political strategy. He ticked off a number of reforms he has made to save time for customers at the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles–in line with the kind of nuts-and-bolts politics that helped elect Governors Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. He expands by saying, “If we really want safer cities, it would help to invest in technologies that reduce paperwork for police. If we really want better schools, we should make it easier to certify new teachers.”

Reading these and other analyses, I’m still wondering if Democrats can build a credible economic narrative that isn’t designed to merely mollify the angry middle class but is genuinely grounded in fundamental principles of shared prosperity? Rather than small-ball initiatives to make life a little more affordable for slivers of people, like down payment assistance or child tax care credits, we need to argue for an economic overhaul that systematically and dramatically shifts money from the top 20 percent to the bottom 80 percent–essentially reversing the last 50 years of wealth consolidation at the top. The policies to get us there essentially boil down to fair and effective taxation, more support for workers and small businesses, and investments in programs that extend the five basic elements of the middle class promise to everyone: job, home, health care, education and retirement. Some call it the safety net. I call it the American Dream.

The politics of getting there are more complicated because the top 20 percent has a lot of power and are investing heavily to keep it that way. What they don’t have – or shouldn’t have — are the votes. Why would a big share of the bottom 80 percent vote to keep the top 20 percent flush?

The answer almost surely lies further upstream with culture. Perhaps the 80 percent think they can all make it into the top. Perhaps they want to keep the top rich in case there is a warm seat for them somewhere in the future. Perhaps they distrust government enough to vote against the very things that make them economically secure. It’s baffling, given how many millions of people have been lifted out of poverty through government programs and the millions protected from hunger, and the millions more who get government-funded health care. The loss of trust is profound and is a direct result of the Republican strategy.

Republicans won this election with a false story about how immigrants are a threat to the American Dream, instead of the embodiment of the American Dream. For decades, they have spread a false story that the government that builds schools and roads, housing and cities, protects us from foreign enemies and makes the food we eat safer and the water we drink cleaner, still can’t do anything right. They have spread the myth that wealth trickles down from the top rather being sucked up from the bottom. The biggest myth of all is that everything great about America is a result of rugged individuals triumphing against the odds rather than people of good will collectively pursuing common interests. The truth is that unfettered greed has made the land of opportunity increasingly unaffordable for more and more Americans and an activist government is our best and only line of defense.

Republicans are now fully in charge of the White House and Congress and even dominate the judiciary. They are already retreating from their empty promises because they will face a reckoning in two short years. They should heed wise words attributed to Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican President: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”