How Democrats Are Reclaiming the Politics of Populism
The New Yorker · Benjamin Wallace-Wells ·
In the midterms’ most competitive races, Democratic candidates are reviving an old Party message: that the Republicans are selling out to the highest bidder, Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes.
Even in her own time, Richards was inimitable. But the Bexar County Democrats were onto something. In the present election, the Democrats are trying to do two things at once: introduce some fresh faces who might wash away the nursing-home veneer that has clung to the Party, especially in the wake of Joe Biden’s forced exit from the 2024 Presidential election, and change the terms on which American politics are argued. For more than a decade, the central subject of American politics has been the culture war, red states versus blue states, feminism versus the manosphere. But the underlying changes in the country have followed a different dimension—they have had to do with technology, money, and the escalating challenges of ultra-wealth and inequality. (The script for a closing ad for Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, says, “Amy Acton is campaigning in this,” over a shot of the candidate next to a Jeep Wrangler. “Vivek Ramaswamy, in this”—news footage of the Republican next to a private jet. “That pretty much tells you what you need to know about these two.”) James Talarico, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Texas, often says while campaigning, “The biggest divide in this country isn’t left versus right; it’s top versus bottom.” In many ways, the basic Democratic challenge this year is to try to make it so.
It is a propitious time for a little bit of populism. The intrusion of Musk into politics and of the A.I. hyperscalers, via data centers, into otherwise out-of-the-way American towns has made the issues of concentrated wealth and power especially poignant this year. Even more significantly, Donald Trump’s pursuit of policies that have exacerbated the central political problem of rising prices—the tariffs, the Iran war—combined with his financial entanglements and shadowy deals, has made him newly vulnerable to charges of using his public office for personal gain or, more simply, of being out of touch with Americans’ daily struggles. It’s been pretty easy, in other words, for the Georgia senator Jon Ossoff, who has called for a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, to forcefully denounce a “coin-operated” political system in a way that ostensibly blames both parties but really points the finger at Republicans. Ossoff has a gift for emphatic concision. Trump’s, he said recently on the trail, is “the most corrupt Administration of all time, and everybody knows it.”
In Iowa, Rob Sand, the state auditor and the Democratic candidate for governor, has taken a different, and more down-home, approach to populism. Sand begins his rallies by asking attendees to applaud, first, for the Republicans present, then for the independents, and then (“to be fair”) for the Democrats, and then prompts the crowd to sing the first verse of “America the Beautiful.” “I don’t really like political parties,” Sand said a few weeks ago, at a town hall in Dallas County, just west of Des Moines, noting that he first registered to vote as an independent “because I think for myself.” Sand often uses the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” in reference to one-party rule (Republicans have held Des Moines for a decade) and to draw attention to his work as an auditor, to find savings, but the basic case he makes on the trail is against the two-party system. “Can we pause for a moment to talk about how un-American that is?” Sand said. “Here we have a constitutional right to vote, and your tax dollars are paying for the election, but you’re not allowed to participate unless you sign a piece of paper saying you’re joining a private club beforehand.”
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