The Democrat's 2026 midterm electoral strategy remains essentially the same as it was during the melted-down 2024 presidential election: Focus on President Donald Trump's obvious character flaws and failings rather than highlight the critical issues and offer progressive alternatives. Waiting for Trump to shoot himself in the foot is not a winning campaign strategy. Neither are abstract ideas about defending democracy and saving the nation from autocracy or fascism. Voters want practical approaches to everyday challenges of rising food costs, prohibitively expensive and inadequate health insurance, skyrocketing medical costs, exorbitant childcare and pre-K expenses, and spiraling energy pricing.

Since the last quarter of the 20th century, establishment Democrats and their leaders have slid so far to the political right that progressive, populist initiatives are undermined by fear of taxes and debt. The Democratic Party has allowed conservatives to label it as a party of spendthrift liberals and radical leftists rather than actually embracing a progressive agenda offering optimistic, creative, and constructive alternatives to the conservatives' agenda favoring the wealthy and corporations. Due to its conservative turn, moreover, Democratic leadership is decidedly reluctant to back progressive and politically aggressive Democratic candidates, as seen in the candidacies of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Graham Platner in Maine.

The political table has been so tilted toward conservative goals that the survival of the Democratic Party and popular elections itself are clearly threatened. Gerrymandering, opposing mail-in ballots, requiring stricter voter identification, confiscating state voting records and increasing the presence of security forces at polls are among the voter suppression tactics that conservatives are employing to rig the midterm and other future elections. The use of the military to confiscate ballots in the upcoming midterm elections is far from out of the question. Financing independent candidates to siphon off votes from Democratic ones is another ploy to be expected. To counter these anti-democratic tactics, Democrats must frame these challenges in practical personal terms—as corrupt means to prevent citizens from influencing policy, as ways to deny such popular initiatives as universal healthcare and control over other cost-of-living expenses. Complaining about the threat to democracy simply isn't concrete and personal enough.

Absent vociferous opposition to the conservative direction in international affairs, the Democrats also cede this critical ground to Republicans. This effectively facilitates the displacement of diplomacy by militarism as the principal approach to resolving global issues and conflicts. Without alerting and educating the American public to its profound and eminently dangerous military, political, and economic implications, the Democrats' influence here is essentially neutered. The present conflicts in the Middle East illustrate this point. Despite expressed public concern for supplying Israel with the munitions used against Palestinians in Gaza, the Democrats demurred from leveraging the removal of military support to promote a ceasefire and negotiated settlement. Neither did the party bring to the public's attention the US abandoning diplomatic negotiations with Iran in February, negotiations that were reportedly making progress on nuclear energy concerns. The combination of unrestricted military aid and disingenuous diplomacy fueled a regional war. This is a reality that must be made emphatically clear to American citizens.

Running against a personality cult and election rigging without offering hope for a better future through specific, concrete policy commitments effectively puts Democrats on the defensive and abandons the progressive populist movement in its own party.

Despite positioning itself to the conservative center of the political spectrum in recent decades, the Democratic Party can yet build on its members' near universal call for a more muscular confrontation with Republicans and Trump. One starting point is massive military spending. The disastrous domestic and global effects of US military campaigns and overall defense spending present Democrats with a historic political opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity the party must immediately take the offensive by highlighting the deleterious impact of unparalleled military expenditures. This campaign strategy can unfold in specific ways, drawing into high relief the connection between allocating vast resources away from social programs into military coffers.

First, levels of defense spending are inversely, and critically, correlated with spending for services that profoundly impact the quality of life of the vast majority of Americans. The proposed $1.5 trillion military expenditure for 2027—a 44% increase over 2026 and more than half of the total government budget—sequesters funding that could be used for domestic purposes, programs ranging from education, public health, housing, transportation, and social services to agriculture, science, and environmental protection. This comparison highlights the distorted priorities of the nation and directly relates to the jaundiced attitude toward the federal government and the disaffection of large swaths of American voters. It further counters the impact of disinformation and misinformation that........

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