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HOW STATUS QUO DEMOCRATS COULD CREATE ANOTHER TRUMP  
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David Sirota
September 10, 2026
The Lever
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_ A new study suggests Democrats’ broken promises won’t just cost
them elections — they could fuel an even more dangerous MAGA
backlash. _

, (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough/Alex Brandon/Andres Kudacki)

 

When I look back on all of my work over the last 30 years, one of the
projects I’m most proud of is _Meltdown_
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an audio series I did in 2021 with acclaimed director Alex Gibney that
reveals the untold story of how Obama-era Democrats turning promises
of economic hope and change into more of the same created the backlash
conditions for the rise of Donald Trump. 

It is a miracle _Meltdown_ ever got made, because calling its tale
“untold” is an understatement. The story of Obama’s 2008 victory
concluding with Trump’s 2016 win involves a sequence of economic
facts and events that have been suppressed, shadowbanned,
memory-holed, and censored from America’s political conversation.
This is particularly true in media outlets that serve liberals, who
seek comfort in the idea that Trump is an anomaly rather than a
symptom of something their own political party participated in
creating.

Every now and again, there are attempts to warn about this perpetual
doom loop. Gibney and I did so ourselves after _Meltdown_ debuted in
the pages of _Rolling Stone_
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where we cautioned against Democrats coming into office promising big
New Deal-style economic changes, then mostly delivering only for their
big donors. We warned that such a bait-and-switch would result in the
inevitable backlash from disillusioned voters who would ignore syrupy
odes to restoring democratic “norms” and decide once again to vote
for a Joker-style candidate like Trump promising to blow up the entire
system. 

The piece went viral, but the message went largely unheard amid
Democratic politicians and pundits insinuating that voters were
insufficiently grateful for Joe Biden’s allegedly wonderful economy.

Fast forward five years and we are on the verge of the 2028 Democratic
presidential primaries. For the most part, Democrats and their media
outlets are still soothing themselves with the fraudulent story of
Trump as an anomaly rather than a symptom and still promoting the
politics of restoration rather than transformation. Indeed, the
over-the-top celebration of Barack Obama’s new $800 million monument
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to himself was an example of this desperate pining for a return to a
pre-Trump normal — even though that “normal” was what created
Trump in the first place, and even though restoring such a
“normal” could create the conditions for an even worse Trump in
the future. 

So it is time for another alarm to sound — and thankfully, a new
paper has provided one. And this particular warning is backed by reams
of economic data.

THE DOOM-LOOP DATA

The paper
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from researchers at the Institute for New Economic Thinking is
entitled “A Revolution of Falling Expectations: The Macroeconomic
Roots of Popular Discontent.” It’s a wonky title that undersells
what it is trying to warn us about.

The first part of the paper debunks the idea — loudly promoted by
Democratic pundits — that Bidenomics was fundamentally changing
America’s economic structure in positive ways. Yes, Biden’s
administration did more for the working class than Obama’s, and with
way less political capital. But at the end of Biden’s time in
office, the overwhelming beneficiaries of Biden’s economic policy
were people who were already wealthy.

According to the paper, by the end of Biden’s term, median household
income was only 0.6 percent above 2019 (considerably below the
pre-COVID trend), median family income only 1.5 percent higher, real
compensation remained about 5 percent below its pre-pandemic trend,
union coverage had declined, and the income needed to afford a median
home had risen to $120,000 – 44 percent above median income.
Meanwhile, the top 10 percent captured more than $21 trillion in new
wealth.

These data points are a long-overdue corrective to an insidious
narrative against so-called “deliverism” — the FDR-themed idea
that politicians delivering for voters prompts them to support said
politicians. After the 2024 election, elite pundits began insisting
that Democrats should never again assume delivering material gains for
voters wins elections because Biden supposedly did that, and Democrats
still lost. 

“Why ‘Deliverism’ Didn’t Deliver for the Democrats” read
_The xxxxxx_
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headline, with a subhead: “The Biden team bet on big legislation.
Voters didn’t care.”

Similarly, “the attempt to make electoral hay out of well-designed
policy alone must be counted as a failure,” wrote a pair of
professors in an essay
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headlined “The Democrats’ Big — and Failed — Bet.” 

_The New York Times_
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capped off the oeuvre by concluding that “the Biden
administration’s deliverism strategy failed to deliver
politically.”

In all this commentary, pundits pretentiously cast voters as stupid
rubes so entranced by attention-economy vibes rather than the tangible
economy that they will no longer reward politicians who improve
things. But as the INET paper proves, this whole line of argument
against “deliverism” is specious, because Biden didn’t actually
deliver. 

“The ‘bad vibes’ narrative pins responsibility for Kamala
Harris’s 2024 loss on ungrateful voters who do not appreciate
Bidenomics’ successes… [but] Bidenomics was not in any way
transformative,” note the paper’s researchers, Thomas Ferguson,
Servaas Storm and Jie Chen. “In the end it was but a steady
continuation of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama status quo that has
hardwired deep structural inequalities into America’s economic
development.”

This is the Democratic Doom Loop — a party that overpromises when it
is out of power, then underdelivers (for everyone other than its
donors) when it is in power — prompting voters to then angrily vote
for a GOP that promises to destroy the whole system. And yet,
discussion of this doom loop remains stifled by establishment
Democrats and their media apparatchiks self-servingly promoting the
notion of Trump as an outlier rather than a manifestation.

“Most of the Democratic establishment has reassured itself that
Trump is an anomaly, a freak outlier, and that Trump’s voters are
either irredeemable bigots (‘deplorables’) or gullible manipulated
by social media,” the paper’s authors write. “These Democrats
believe that Trump can be removed from office by exposing corruption,
by fact-checking misinformation, by electing the ‘right’
charismatic Democrat and by better ‘communicating’ their otherwise
little-changed economic policies, including free trade — and this
will then return America to ‘normalcy.’ The problem with this
narrative is that it ignores the material and structural factors that
led to Trump’s rise in the first place and the long-term erosion of
the social underpinnings of America’s economy. Trump is the symptom,
not the disease.” 

RESTORATION VS. TRANSFORMATION

Breaking this doom loop is crucial — both for the future of the
Democratic Party and the country. But the INET paper warns that the
Democratic donor class — anchored in the finance
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and tech
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sectors — remains largely “opposed to unions and any other popular
movement that they see as obstacles to their goal of remaking society
from the ground up through artificial intelligence.” 

The continued influence of that donor class threatens to perpetuate
the doom loop by preventing the Democratic Party from distinguishing
itself as a genuine populist alternative to the oligarch-owned
Republican Party. As the authors explain:

Because both Democratic and Republican administrations have so clearly
prioritized corporate shareholders’ interests over working people,
privatization over public welfare, and wealth accumulation by the 1%
over economic progress and security for the working and middle
classes, it is easy to understand the widespread perception that the
political system is really controlled by one giant money party…

The question going forward is how the Democrats respond. Right now,
money is pouring in to think tanks like the Third Way from insurers
and health care companies to block Medicare for All (denouncing it as
“socialism”). Major AI firms, crypto, and other finance and tech
firms are also directing firehoses of cash to party vehicles to secure
their ends, which include choking off efforts to raise taxes on
billionaires. Leaders of the Democratic establishment in both the
House and the Senate, if not the Democratic National Committee
directly, also control vast war chests of money from these same
interests.

Whether it is Third Way declaring “war”
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on the left, Neera Tanden 24-7 tweet-sabotaging
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populist Democratic nominees, or House Democratic Leader Hakeem
Jeffries preemptively abandoning
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Medicare For All ahead of the midterm elections, corporate Democrats
are making clear they will not willingly surrender their power over
the party, they will not accommodate a populist economic agenda, and
they will not tolerate a structural analysis of their complicity in
creating the backlash conditions for Trump’s rise. 

This is why Democrats’ corporate faction especially fears Michigan
Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed
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just because he defeated their faction’s handpicked candidate in the
Democratic primary with a campaign for Medicare For All, nor only
because he’s now ahead in many polls
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as he demands
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public control over AI development. No, they particularly loathe him
because in addition to those ideological affronts, El-Sayed is also
one of the few Democratic nominees acknowledging that his own
party’s fealty to oligarchs helped birth the Trump era. 

“Too often [Democrats] are taking money from the very same people
who created the problem,” El-Sayed told _The Real News_
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later telling CBS News
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that his swing state became “so sick and tired of the establishment
bought off by corporations on both sides of the political aisle that
it was willing to hold its nose and vote for Donald Trump twice."

And then last week on the campaign trail, he put it even more bluntly
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“Donald Trump is not himself the disease; he is just the worst
symptom of the disease of our politics. The disease is the system that
allows big corporations and billionaires and special interests to buy
and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system
against us.”

El-Sayed is effectively arguing that transformation — not
restoration — is necessary to break the Democratic doom loop of
overpromising, underdelivering, and ultimately demoralizing voters
into believing both parties are the same, which ends up pushing them
toward reactionary right-wing politics. 

That kind of truth-telling offends corporate Democrats who are
perfectly happy to let the Democratic doom loop repeat in perpetuity,
creating ever-more reactionary MAGA movements for the rest of our
lives. And why wouldn’t corporate Democrats be happy with that?
After all, they’ve gotten very rich, famous, and powerful as this
doom loop has wrecked the country.

For the rest of the country, though, the doom loop isn’t working out
so great. There’s an affordability crisis, endless wars, rampant
corruption, an intensifying climate crisis, and a potential AI
apocalypse
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— all enriching both parties’ donors. 

The good news is that there are plenty of policy tools available to
make things better. Read the INET paper or Isabel Weber’s new book
_Antifascist Economics_
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to learn about them. Better yet, go subscribe to _Master Plan_
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upcoming episode featuring potential 2028 Democratic presidential
candidates discussing their plans for a whole different kind of
politics. 

The other good news is that polls show most voters — including many
Democrats
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— now know _both_ parties’ leadership have betrayed them. 

So the political conditions to break the doom loop are finally here.
But that won’t happen without an epic battle. As the saying goes,
power concedes nothing without a demand. Now is the time to start
making the demand — and to start ignoring those who are
self-servingly insisting that the factional fight inside the
Democratic Party is a divisive distraction. 

It may be divisive because the stakes are so high, but it is the
opposite of a distraction. It is one of the main events that will
decide the future of America.

_The Lever_ is a nonpartisan, reader-supported investigative news
outlet that holds accountable the people and corporations manipulating
the levers of power. The organization was founded in 2020 by David
Sirota, an award-winning journalist and Oscar-nominated writer who
served as the presidential campaign speechwriter for Bernie Sanders.

* corporate Democrats
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* elections
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* Democratic Party
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