We need a political movement to fight billionaires | Will Bunch Newsletter

Everything feels different this time. In November 2016, there were protests; today, mostly silence. In November 2016, there was a lot of talk about resistance; today, people are talking about stepping away from politics. In November 2016, people clamored for news; today, folks are logging off. In November 2016, there was shock. It has been replaced by numbness. But best to take the words of Joni Mitchell to heart, that “something’s lost but something’s gained, by living every day.”

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The warning signs were hiding in plain sight, even at the Democrats’ ecstatic four-day August convention in Chicago that felt more like a warehouse rave than a political confab — a vibe-shift that sent delegates back home convinced that their nominee Kamala Harris was about to vanquish Donald Trump from American political life for good.

But in an election year in which there was fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today’s America, some observers — especially in the party’s left flank — were appalled at the barely hidden embrace of big money. Across the Windy City, in rented venues like the House of Blues, lobbyists for industries like crypto or PACs funded by firms like Cigna or AT&T threw posh late-night private parties for Democratic insiders after the TV lights were turned off.

But one pivotal moment inside the United Center even horrified the seen-it-all investigative journalist and former Sen. Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, who noted that a line from Illinois governor and Hilton hotel heir J.B. Pritzker — “Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing, stupidity” — caused “raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.”

Sirota and others who heard it knew instinctively that this was not a winning message for the party that once dominated American politics in the mid-20th century by turning out the working class, and Tuesday’s results proved them right. In the flaming wreckage of an election in which Trump won a return ticket to the White House by winning the popular vote for the first time in three tries, while his fellow Republicans were capturing control of Congress, both pundits and Democratic insiders have spent the last week fighting over who to blame.

For these wounded elites, prime suspects include everything from President Joe Biden’s insistence on running and staying in the race until July, to Harris’ failure to reach young men by not going on testosterone-laden shows like Joe Rogan’s podcast, to the party’s collective inability to feel consumers’ pain over the post-COVID spike in prices. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a political scientist to argue that the biggest blunder was not attacking the billionaire class because Harris was too busy begging for their campaign checks.

If there is one thing that gets working-class Americans across the familiar fault lines of political ideology or race or ethnicity to agree, it’s that the super rich have too much wealth and power and don’t pay their fair share. In March, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of voters in the seven key swing states found some 69% of voters — including 58% of Republicans and 66% of independents — supported higher taxes on billionaires. That populist fervor is hardly surprising in a nation where the top 10% controls 60% of all wealth, while the bottom half struggles with just 6%,

But while the Harris campaign did pay lip service to raising taxes on the super wealthy, it didn’t give voters the red meat of a soak-the-rich campaign that might have landed emotionally in a nation that most voters believe is on the wrong track. That’s probably because Team Harris, with its ambitious yet eventually reached goal of raising $1 billion in order to outspend Trump on TV ads and getting out the vote, felt it needed to woo Big Business, not offend it with a truly populist campaign.

A New York Times post-mortem on what went wrong with the vice president’s messaging and proposals noted in its headline that she had a “Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch” that “Fell Flat” with voters, writing that Harris “adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.”

It was arguably worse than that. One of the Democrat’s few firm economic proposals was a 28% capital-gains tax plan that was actually lower and thus more friendly to the wealthy than what Biden had been proposing. Much of her economic agenda, according to the Times, was bounced off a key adviser: her brother-in-law Tony West, a corporate lobbyist for Uber — and it showed. Although the Biden administration had been cracking down on abuses in cryptocurrency, Harris signaled support for the scam-plagued, polluting industry, and won over some new donors.

Harris even campaigned with a billionaire — the colorful Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban — who went before a Wisconsin rally to say the Democrat “has an amazing plan for small business,” even after he’d initially lobbied for Harris to dump controversial tough-on-business Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan. Watching Harris’ carefully calibrated campaign, it’s also hard not to wonder whether her tepid talk about reining in fossil fuels and even her weak-tea echo of Biden’s Gaza policies — unpopular with many young voters — were meant more for donors than for voters.

It can’t be a coincidence that Democrats’ decades-long embrace of the donor class in an era of big-money politics has disabled its potential populist message to working folks who elected FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton. The Democrats need radical change in a hurry if the party wants to retake the House in the 2026 midterms and start the search for a new leader who can replace Trump in the 2028 election — assuming that we’re still having those by then.

That won’t happen under the current Democratic leadership or its consultants, who owe their status to the party’s wealthiest supporters. Any serious political movement to reinvent the anti-MAGA left will have to start from the bottom-up — with meetings and phone calls and rallies by community activists and environmentalists and ministers and everyday folks. The goal must be finding a new breed of candidates who will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions. That can help remake Congress and eventually boost a presidential candidate truly committed to taxing the rich, waging a new war on poverty, cutting the wasteful Pentagon budget and expanding the Supreme Court to protect these gains.

Sound crazy? Such a movement happened in this century, when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10 to challenge established Republicans with new grassroots organizations that met regularly, staged boisterous protests and primaried GOP incumbents, pushing their party further to the right. That short-lived counter-revolution set the stage for Trump, and for last week’s big victory.

The current Democratic brand is toxic — especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo. Build a new Democratic Party that bans big money, because elections are won with votes, not dollars. The next Democrat who brags about how obscenely rich he is should be booed out of the arena.

Question: Will, Is anyone surrounding Harris seriously looking at the voting data & irregularities? If exit polls are this far off in EU they would assume election fraud. We need hand counted audits. — tkn_audit2024Election (@tkn_nola) via X/Twitter

Answer: I received a record number of questions from you in an historic week, and several were about this. I think we need to always consider the potential for computer hacking and other forms of election tampering — especially from adversaries like Russia who’ve tried to break into our election computers before (remember Reality Winner?) —as real. Thus, I think audits of some paper ballots should be routine. But so far even circumstantial evidence that Trump’s win was fraudulent simply isn’t there. Voters moved toward Trump in pretty much every state — look at his surprising strength in non-swing states like New Jersey and Illinois — which is suggestive of a real trend and not a hacking campaign against a complex array of different vote-counting computers. Likewise, evidence that some people cast ballots for Trump and not in down-ballot races is how you’d expect some of his low-propensity voters to behave. I’m a journalist who’s always open to evidence, even if it seems outlandish to some, but I haven’t seen any proof yet of anything other than more Americans wanting a President Trump than a President Harris.

The question I posed here two weeks ago — about whether newspaper endorsements of candidates are still a good idea, in the wake of surprising decisions by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and others to cancel them in 2024 — drew a great deal of reader response. A strong majority of you supported the practice of endorsements, arguing the editorial boards that weigh in on other issues should voice an opinion on democracy’s most important decision. Harry S. Nydick wrote that “when a newspaper does not endorse candidates, it hides from politically responsible readers, who want to make the best decisions, what the people who present the news and opinions really think...” But a few of you, like Armando A. Pandola Jr., think newspapers should only focus on objective reporting. He wrote “it is time for news outlets to concentrate on their mission — to provide the truth to the people.”

📮 This week’s question: Donald Trump won Tuesday, even in the popular vote. So what now for the 70 million-plus who supported Harris? Resistance? A retreat from politics? For a chance to be featured in the newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Trump response” in the subject line.

Donald Trump’s reelection wasn’t the only radical change in American life last week. After two years of frequent chatter and occasional head fakes to other startup sites, a wave of people from the left half of the U.S. political debate, including many of the public intellectuals of liberalism, are moving away from the social media website formerly known as Twitter — now called X by its owner, the world’s richest person Elon Musk — in droves. The primary destination has become Bluesky, a two-year-old alternative that, over time, has become remarkably similar to the pre-Musk Twitter both in its functionality and form — even in its light-blue color scheme and butterfly logo that looks suspiciously like the Twitter bird unceremoniously murdered by the Bond-villain-like Musk.

“Hey folks: I, too, am pulling out of here slowly as I head for bluer skies. Hope to see you there,” the Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose nightly newsletter has become a touchstone for liberals since Trump’s first term, posted on X/Twitter Sunday night, one of scores of similar posts. Bluesky officials said the site gained 700,000 new users after Trump’s victory, bringing its total to 14.5 million.

But that number is likely to grow substantially from former X/Twitter users fed up after two years of changes from the Trump-supporting Musk to bring back right-wing extremists, make it harder to prevent harassment, and to turn the site into a cesspool of disinformation — much of it shared personally from Musk’s account. Social media researcher Axel Bruns told the Guardian that Bluesky has “become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else.”

On Sunday night, I reactivated a Bluesky account — @willbunch.bsky.social — that I’d all but forgotten about and has been sitting dormant, and began posting there as well. (Although I haven’t yet cured my brain of wanting to pronounce the name like a Polish bar in Port Richmond.) I haven’t left X/Twitter — at least not yet, anyway — despite its morally unconscionable management by Musk, because I believe that in this moment of national crisis those of us who want a better America need to stay connected any way we can, and a lot of friends are currently still there. But building a new, engaged social network on Bluesky is going to be a major focus going into 2025 as we look to rebuild American democracy from the ashes of what just happened. I hope that many of you reading this can join me on Bluesky in launching a new conversation around hope and positive change.

What a difference four years makes! On this date in 2020, I was on the prowl for feel-good stories that might explain how Joe Biden had ousted a scandal-scarred and COVID-tainted Donald Trump from the presidency (the Jan. 6 insurrection was still a gleam in POTUS 45’s eye then). I found one in the Democrats’ surprising win in Georgia, a former bastion of the Confederacy where Black voters, and especially women, had flexed their turnout muscles. The story of how activists like Nsé Ufot of the New Georgia Project had worked for years behind the scenes and in a negative climate to register thousands of new voters is a tale of positive social change that might be worth re-reading on this dark day 48 months later. You can check it out here: “How Georgia’s women of color beat voter suppression and saved democracy.”

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