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THE DEMOCRATS’ PATH BACK TO POWER  
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Pramila Jayapal
December 19, 2024
Newsweek
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_ Democrats do have a clear path forward: to be united and passionate
about fighting for bold, direct economic policies that unrig the
system and deliver change so families across America can stop just
trying to survive and start to thrive. _

Parmila Jayapal: 'This is going to be a very challenging time',
screen grab

 

When we start the next Congress
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year, Republicans [[link removed]] will
control the White House, Senate
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did we get here?

The truth is that Democrats have been losing the trust of poor and
working people of every race going back at least a decade. If we do
not acknowledge the depth of the problem, we may win a battle in two
years if the House switches control, but we will lose the battle of
winning the trifecta and any chance of real sustained progress for our
country.

Voters are rightly angry that for the past 50 years, wages have
stagnated even as productivity increased. Wealth and income inequality
have continued to skyrocket. A 56 percent majority of Americans don't
have enough saved up to pay for a medical emergency expense
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$1,000 or more, leading to one in 12 Americans owing medical debt that
totals at least $220 billion nationally. Housing costs have been
rising faster than median household income since 2000, leading people
to spend over 30 percent of their monthly income on housing costs
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Meanwhile, the prices of groceries—from diapers to eggs—have
skyrocketed. Through all of this, corporations have made record
profits and America's 806 billionaires are richer than half the
population combined.
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Giant Democratic Party
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started back in 2010 and have continued to crater, as voters watched
the traditional party of poor and working class Americans fail to
deliver on basic policies like raising the minimum wage, while
embracing free trade rather than protecting jobs at home. Voters
began abandoning both parties in droves
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with party identification with Independents reaching its height of 43
percent last year. In 2024, millions of voters chose to stay home, and
millions of infrequent voters chose the candidate who conveyed the
anger they felt most and promised to blow up the system.

To win back working class and poor voters of every race, it's past
time for a rebuild of the Democratic Party. We must urgently and
authentically communicate to people that we will stand up for them,
and we must clearly paint a vision of how we will unrig the system so
we can actually deliver results that make people's lives better every
day.

Let's be clear: Un-rigging this system requires that we call out the
very actors who are rigging the system and benefiting from people's
pain. Too many of those actors are the very people who fund our party
and elections. That confuses voters in knowing if we will stand up and
fight for them—and it also influences too many in our own party to
moderate their positions and not stand up and fight for working
people.

That's why I've led many of my colleagues in calling for our party to
reject Big Money and dark money in primaries. We have to be crystal
clear and consistent about who we are standing up for and how hard we
intend to fight for them.

Unrigging an economy that has been rigged over decades also takes
time. President Biden and Democrats began the process of rejecting
failed, trickle-down economic policies and embracing middle-out,
bottom-up economics with real results: We created over 16 million
jobs, saved our economy from a pandemic disaster, and passed programs
to support struggling families from relief checks, housing assistance,
and the child tax credit. But when Republicans took over the House and
allowed all those provisions to expire, voters were left facing
continued price-gouging by corporations and feeling like the rug was
pulled out from under them—leading to them rightly feeling they were
worse off than before.

That's exactly why progressives pushed hard to ensure we passed Build
Back Better, legislation that would have addressed two of the biggest
inflationary costs: universal childcare and housing. That bill was
blocked by two conservative Democrats in the Senate and torpedoed the
effort to address the rising costs that families continued to face.
Had we delivered on these two critical pieces in a timely way, voters
would have felt the effects—and the election result may have been
very different.

The good news is that Democrats do have a clear path forward: to be
united and passionate about fighting for bold, direct economic
policies that unrig the system and deliver change so families across
America can stop just trying to survive and start to thrive.

That means being united in fighting the GOP on anything that rigs the
system against working people and poor people. One of the first
opportunities to do that will be over Trump's efforts to expand tax
cuts for the wealthiest: the Trump Tax Scam 2.0. The last time around,
every Democrat voted against the Trump Tax Scam 1.0 and it was the
moment—apart from Jan. 6—where Trump's public approval rating
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at its very lowest. We fought hard and voters noticed. That should be
our game plan again.

We will also have lots of opportunity to call out the huge conflicts
of interest presented by a Trump Cabinet of billionaires who have a
combined wealth of $350 _billion_ dollars and very little experience
in making government work for the people instead of them. They will
push policies that hurt working people and poor people and we should
call out the corporations and wealthiest individuals who will benefit.
Democrats should be strong and unapologetic in contrasting their
vision with ours, without regard to who their political donors may be.

We will also have to be on offense, not just defense, showcasing over
and over again the broadly popular and populist policies that lift up
families. From minimum wage to expanding and protecting Medicare and
Social Security, to pushing loudly for increasing competition and
limiting corporate concentration of power and monopolies, we can draw
people into our vision of a more equitable future.

We should take on the corporate price-gouging that is driving up
prices in the grocery store while driving down wages for workers. We
should take on the private health insurance companies that deny
critical health care as a practice to drive their profits higher. We
should call out the ways in which small farmers have been driven out
of business by just a couple of corporate conglomerates. There is a
reason Trump
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said that it will be "very hard" to lower grocery prices
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It's because he has no intention of challenging the big corporations
who are rigging the system against the little guys and jacking up
prices.

We've got a vision that everyone should do well when our economy does
well and that Democrats are ready to fight—with everything we've
got—to make that happen. The time to turn the page is now. Let's get
to work.

_Rep. Pramila Jayapal is a Congresswoman from Washington and the head
of the Congressional Progressive Caucus._

_Newsweek is the global media organization that has earned audience
time and trust for more than 90 years. Newsweek is committed to fair,
independent, and transparent journalism._

_Newsweek reaches 100 million people each month with thought-provoking
news, opinion, images, graphics, and video delivered across a dozen
print and digital platforms. Headquartered in New York City, Newsweek
also publishes international editions in EMEA and Asia._

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Policies and standards
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* Pramila
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* Congressional Progressive Caucus
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* Democratic Party
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