Democrats are failing against Trump. We need a new generation in 2026

The Guardian

15-05-2025

After more than 100 days of the Trump administration, it's clear how unprepared Democratic leadership has been for this moment.
Words can hardly describe just how far Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the administration have gone to serve the interests of their fellow billionaires, undermine our economy and kill hundreds of thousands of jobs while dragging our basic civil liberties and constitution through the buzzsaw to illegally disappear countless immigrants and send them to privately funded domestic prisons and torture camps abroad.
It's why the absence of true oppositional leadership has been deafening. After spending an entire campaign cycle naming Trump as an existential threat to our democracy and rule of law – which he is – the party's leadership has folded at the first chance to wield the power they have, revealing hypocrisy and cowardice.
Chuck Schumer surrendered the entire federal budget and Marco Rubio, who is now championing the administration's campaign of disappearing immigrants, was confirmed unanimously to Trump's cabinet by the US Senate.
Every choice Democratic leadership has made to sacrifice its base and become more like the bad guys we were supposed to be fighting has led us here. And now, people are losing faith in Democrats' ability to solve our country's biggest problems – the party is polling at a historic low.
Americans have long been ready for the political revolution Bernie Sanders has talked about, but the party and the DC elite haven't been. Aside from the many polls that highlight the national popularity of Sanders and the policies he supports over the last eight years, voters have made it abundantly clear that it's time to usher in a new generation of leaders who won't act like doormats for Trump and Elon Musk. They see this party – just like our government and our economy – as captured by the wealthy few.
Waiting for 2028 is not the answer – no president alone can provide the change we need. Massive transformation in this country has never happened without a Congress willing to act – from FDR's New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement. As the 2026 midterm elections approach, we have an opportunity to take action.
When I first started at Justice Democrats in 2017 under Trump's first presidency, we had a vision as big as a presidential-sized campaign. What if we ran a 50-state campaign to run people in Democratic primaries and take back Congress? Though we haven't been successful in every race, over the last four cycles, Justice Democrats has been a part of unseating five 15+ year incumbents who collectively served 108 years in office, we have beaten the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and corporate Democrats in open seats, and we have gone up against hundreds of millions of dollars of opposition spending.
Our mission since the beginning has been simple and focused: to build a mission-driven team of working-class leaders in Congress who champion solutions as big as the problems we face. We have recruited and elected leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Summer Lee and more over the years.
Our work towards this mission has not been perfect, and there has been so much we have learned along the way from the thousands of volunteers, organizers, staff, leaders, donors and allies we have met along the way. But together we have built a powerful bench of progressives in Congress who are the most politically courageous and working-class people to ever walk the halls of one of the most powerful bodies in the world.
We know it's not 2017 any more and the forces we are up against – in the White House and the billions spent to influence our media, our elections, our politicians – are even greater than they once were. It still probably sounds far-fetched to clean up the House and Senate – replace every bought-and-paid-for Democrat and Republican we have in Congress. But we believe it is our collective duty to try.
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Last month, we announced our first new Democratic congressional primary candidate since the 2022 cycle: Donavan McKinney, a working-class Detroiter and state representative, against the incumbent US representative Shri Thanedar, AKA Detroit's Elon Musk. Thanedar is a self-funded multimillionaire businessman who since 2021 alone spent over $17m of his own wealth to bankroll his congressional campaigns while spending more taxpayer money than any other member of Congress on ads to promote himself last year.
This race embodies the fight for the future of the Democratic party. Are we going to elect more multimillionaires backed by corporate lobbies to play possum in the face of fascism, or are we going to elect people who will fight to fix America's crises with the urgency of someone who has lived through them?
A new world needs new leaders. The 2026 cycle presents a historic opportunity for generational and working-class transformation in the Democratic party and in our politics.
Alexandra Rojas is executive director of Justice Democrats