How Democrats Are Reclaiming the Politics of Populism
In the waning days of the midterm election, the Democratic Party of Bexar County, Texas, released an intriguing ad that interspersed contemporaneous news clips with archival footage of a 1990 speech given by Ann Richards, the last Democrat to serve as the governor of the Lone Star State, and its liberal grande dame. 1990 is long ago, but everything about Richards’s presence in the ad casts the mood even further back in time. She was already nearly sixty years old, with a white bouffant that must have required an E.P.A.-defying amount of hairspray to hold in place, and she spoke in populist terms that, two years before the triumph of Bill Clinton’s Third Way, might already have seemed dated. “I wanted to begin this program today with children,” Richards says, with a kind of revival-tent projection in her voice, “to say that that’s what the future of Texas is all about, and that we Democrats believe in the greatness of this country, and of this state, and we are not about to allow Texas to be sold to the highest-bidding Republican.” Her speech is interspersed with images of the current governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who had declared that he wanted to make his state the “epicenter of A.I.,” and of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who has spent nearly two hundred million dollars bankrolling the allegedly corrupt Republican candidate for Senate, Ken Paxton. Back in 1990, Richards made the Democratic case in a tone that is both plaintive and thunderous: “There are things in our lives and in this state that are more important than money.”
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.”
Democrats look competitive in places where they have been shut out for a generation: slightly ahead in Texas, where there has been no Democratic senator since 1994; about even in Kansas, where the Party’s drought stretches back to 1932; and getting close even in South Carolina. They have done so by running against the war and against the President’s indifference to the affordability crisis, but also, in an unusually straightforward way, against corruption. One recent estimate suggested Trump’s net worth grew by 2.2 billion dollars during the first year of his second term, and a recent Fox News poll found that eighty-eight per cent of voters were either “extremely” or “very” concerned about corruption. Though Trump had campaigned against a rigged system, as Ossoff put it at a recent campaign event, “he’s not unrigging it. He’s re-rigging it for himself.”
There are ironies in the campaign against Washington corruption, which sometimes echo Trump’s own themes. An ad for Annie Andrews, the Democratic pediatrician running for Senate in South Carolina, features her standing in a boggy marsh in waterproof overalls, saying, “Trump was right. The biggest swamp is Washington, D.C.,” and arguing that “Washington insiders, data-center developers, and the same drug and insurance companies that have been ripping us off for years” had “handpicked” her Republican opponent, Darline Graham. According to a CNN tally this week, two hundred and seventy-five million dollars has been spent on anti-corruption ads—most of it by Democrats, and much of it arguing that there is too much money in politics. Mary Peltola, a former Democratic congresswoman running for Senate in Alaska, and herself under public scrutiny for ballot shenanigans, has attacked the growth of her opponent’s net worth during his time in the Senate: “This is exactly the kind of corruption that Alaskans are sick of.”
Every out-of-power party criticizes the status quo, and the more out-of-power they are (and the national Democrats right now are quite out of power) the more latitude they have to do so. But the campaigns run by Democrats in 2026 have generally steered clear of sweeping policy proposals or eye-catching promises like impeaching the President; the House Democrats’ “First 100 Days” program largely focusses on repealing unpopular Trump initiatives and investigating corruption. This is, in its own way, a development. Part of the power of the Bernie Sanders movement, the great disruptive force inside the Democratic Party during the past decade, was how it coupled a more expansive, left-wing policy approach with populist appeals. Under Biden, mainstream Democrats experimented with more transformative policy goals without the political populism—leftist economics by wonks. Now mainstream Democrats like Ossoff and Sand, themselves hardly outsiders, are trying something like the inverse—anti-corruption and anti-insider messaging without the leftish approach to policy.
These midterms are likely the final elections of the long Trump era, which puts some of its patterns into relief. As has been the case in democracies around the world, American voters have generally disliked the governments in power, whether right-wing or left-wing, and no matter who is running the show the public dissatisfaction with most institutions and authorities has only deepened. In the United States, Trump found a way to exploit these patterns with a right-wing populism that edged into cultural nativism. Democratic voters, in choosing Joe Biden in 2020, leaned into a defense of American institutions.
This time, they are pointing in another direction, toward a more traditionally progressive populism opposed to corruption and concentrated money. An interesting question for the Party going forward will be how that posture evolves after this election cycle, and how it makes its way into policy. For this election, though, there is a throwback feel in both the tone of the Democrats and in the electoral map they are pursuing. They have a seminarian running for Senate in Texas and a minister on the ticket in Kansas, and both stand a decent shot. And they have a story of what is happening to the country, an account influenced by an older version of the Democratic Party, one that predates the changes that came with Clintonism—that the Republicans are selling out to the highest bidder, and that there is more to life than money. ♦