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The Urgency of Marrying Affordability to Anti-Corporate Populism

For all the good news, Democrats are at a dangerous moment politically.

The inspiring victory won in the streets of Minneapolis gives Democrats an opening for a realignment of American politics, but only if we build a bridge to working-class voters conflicted on immigration, based on the populist economic issue driving their anger right now: the abuse of corporate power. We must show people that the same government that is terrorizing people in cities like Minneapolis is also allowing big business to abuse its power to make life tougher for all working families.

The combination of wages’ not rising fast enough plus the inflation of recent years has hit working families very hard. These voters have not liked the excesses of ICE, so we have an opening with them on immigration, but it will never be their main issue. Economic struggles will always be the first order of business for most working-class voters.

Right now, the political dynamic favors the Democrats. Republicans are no longer winning the immigration debate, and the economy is hurting them because they are the party in power.

The problem is that Trump is moving fast to develop and promote his own populist-sounding affordability agenda, including proposals to cap credit-card interest rates at 10 percent; prohibit large corporate investors from buying up single-family homes; and slash the cost of prescription drugs. 

For all the good news, Democrats are at a dangerous moment politically. On a high from winning the 2025 elections so decisively and seeing Trump’s numbers tanking, much of the party leadership believes they can glide into a 2026 election victory by simply attacking Trump and repeating the word affordability. But Trump’s team is politically flexible enough to craft a populist-sounding affordability package that—rhetorically, if not substantively—borrows key elements of the Elizabeth Warren and Zohran Mamdani agenda.

It is no accident that Trump has surprised observers by recently saying favorable things about both Warren and Mamdani. Even his rejection of popular healthcare subsidies long supported by Democrats has been framed with a populist twist, attacking “subsidies” as handouts to greedy insurance companies.

At this moment in time, Donald Trump is sounding more like a progressive economic populist than........

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