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We Are About to Miss the Opportunity of a Lifetime

2026 and 2028 can be our time.

Twenty twenty-six and 2028 can and should be the beginnings of something transformational.

We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35 percent, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44 percent increase. The largest in American history. The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base. But daycare? Too expensive, folks.

Recently, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.

But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s real energy out here and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is good at channeling anger into “Trump bad,” but that won’t do it. These millions of us could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.

Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular than Trump’s. Even among ourselves. Fifty-five percent of Democrats say the party has the wrong priorities. Seventy-one percent of Democratic-aligned voters say it’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally understanding how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power.

We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power, they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a........

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