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laborpolitics.com

big chance Dems fail to deliver if AOC doesn't run for president

Yes @mattyglesias is right, Chuck Schumer, Neera Tanden, and Rahm Emmanuel would definitely have recruited a billionaire-bashing candidate to run in South Carolina

Abolish the Senate filibuster now.

It’s the single most important thing Democrats can do right now. And this is the ideal moment to do it. 🧵

It's amazing how much work @mattyglesias puts into ignoring the obvious difference between Bernie (and Talarico's!) working-class against billionaires message and tepid Clintonism

DSA candidates and Blue Dogs both beat the Democratic Party average last night. Edge is small esp. once you add controls for demographics and other candidate characteristics (e.g., anybody would have crushed Paxton; Collins would have done well against any Maine Dem).

in hindsight, the US democratic process held up in the midterms much better than many of us (myself included) feared

in our decentralized system, seems like even authoritarian presidents have few mechanisms to viably steal elections, at least beyond very tight elections where smaller impositions to tilt the scales can be determinative

during Trump 1.0 i was on team "Trump is horrible, but not a fascist," but then the frenzy of the first year of Trump 2.0 suggested he might have actually have a bigger ability to kneecap the basic electoral process

now i'm back to feeling like the biggest democratic obstacles are the old ones: the filibuster, Senate, SCOTUS, electoral college, typical Republican state-level efforts to make it harder to vote, etc

MSNOW: What is your message now to Jewish voters nationally and what you will do to protect them?

Abdul El-Sayed: I’m committed to Jewish safety, and we are united against discrimination. The U.S. spends billions to carry out genocide and apartheid against Palestinians. The ur complicity is continuing right now. Nobody wants to talk about that.

In the last 20 hours you have posted three times pitting this as a binary ideological battle between the moderate/establishment “faction” and the progressive/leftist “faction.”

So either you were being disingenuous then, or you are being disingenuous now. There is no third ince progressive candidates perform led slightly worse than moderate ones — which on balance is accurate but there are many exceptions (including Randy Villegas) and race/candidate/cycle-specific factors at play in individual races that you intentionally and irresponsibly choose to ignore — the party shouldn’t listen to their advice on how to win. Even though the objectively successful “fusion” message employed by the Ossoffs and Talaricos of the world adopted a lot of the economic populist messaging honed by the progressive-left over the last decade or so.

And you basically said that anyone that disagrees with you is just stupid (a lot of what ails the left “stems from poor epistemic practices”).

I want a party that takes good ideas for all corners of the party (including moderates!).

All of this is incredibly nuanced, but you are — and have been, even in the weeks leading up to the election — trying to lay the groundwork for a blunt and deeply unsophisticated “us vs. them” dynamic that serves nobody but people like you who want clicks on your Substack (and any corporate clients you have that would benefit from said debate/outright moderation on policy).

You took like a campaign tactic in popularism — which at a base level makes sense — and have contorted it into an entire ideology. It’s just poll- and focus-group tested centrism with no room for outside the box thinking, which — as anyone who has worked in politics or campaigns can attest — is not always the optimal strategy! And I say this as a longtime pollster and focus group moderator!

Democrats did not sound like this before Bernie Sanders ran for president and anyone pretending otherwise is obviously full of shit

In 2008, Barack Obama won a landslide victory and enormous mandate, only to quickly squander it.

Today the Democratic establishment is far more delegitimized, and the Left is far stronger. History doesn’t have to repeat itself. jacobin.com/2026/11/midter…

History doesn’t have to repeat: Barack Obama won a landslide victory and enormous mandate, only to quickly squander it. Thankfully, the Democratic establishment is weaker than in 2008, and the Left is stronger

jacobin.com/2026/11/midter…

the "limits of the change that this Dem majority will bring about" depends to a significant extent on whether we effectively organize to push them to deliver

you can't actually do working-class self-organization at this moment at scale without a major focus on pressuring the Dems to deliver big!

the alternative articulated by Sid is propagandizing at best, and de facto lowering expectations at worst, not the actual self-organization of millions

A striking and novel feature of this election nationwide was the growing Democratic emphasis on corporate greed, billionaire power, and a rigged economic system. Not just affordability, but the fight against those making our lives unaffordable

laborpolitics.com/p/dont-squande…

This was the message that flipped Texas, not milquetoast centrism

"Republicans and Democrats alike sold the false Gospel of trickle-down economics"

You can't seriously judge how economic populists performed without accounting for the massive Republican spending advantage they faced in Maine, Ohio, Michigan, and Texas

It's funny that @mattyglesias thinks is a dunk, but Talarico ran on a economic agenda message anathema to Third Way "centrism"

Economic populism won big

Talarico, with his Bernie-lite politics, was the night's biggest Senate over-performer. His victory speech made clear who the enemy is:

"We just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor, every corrupt defender of this broken political system: in this state, in this country, power belongs to the people."