The “blue tsunami" of Democratic wins in Tuesday’s midterm elections was a stunning rebuke of division, war, and corruption, and of the corporate crime wave that Republican rule has enabled. However, the credit for these wins belongs not to the Democratic Party — whose leadership has offered at best tepid resistance to the Republican agenda over the past two years — but to the working people across the country who have spent the last two years organizing and fighting back in their communities and workplaces.
From bringing food to neighbors too terrified of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to leave their homes, to confronting ICE in the streets, to turning out in the largest demonstrations in our country’s history, everyday working people created the momentum that led to this point. Trump’s approval ratings began to fall after the working people of Minnesota demonstrated in January that it was possible not only to stand up to, but to defeat his authoritarian agenda. Tuesday was not just an electoral victory, but an organizing win.
Crucially, the margins of victory in this election were so large that Trump’s pre-election threats not to recognize the results, based on unfounded allegations of voter fraud, were rendered irrelevant. They were “too big to rig,” as a source within the Trump administration admitted to CNN.
While the Democratic Party was the beneficiary of Tuesday’s elections, we must be clear that the Democrats’ failure to address the needs of the working class was also the cause of Trump’s rise in the first place. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, scores of Democratic governors, and countless Democratic legislators spent the last half-century kowtowing to, rather than confronting, corporate power. Clinton continued Ronald Reagan’s policies of slashing social spending; Obama continued George W. Bush’s policies of endless war and mass deportations. Both kept Wall Street in charge of our country’s economic policies and both fully embraced a free trade agenda which destroyed millions of good manufacturing jobs, hollowing out the economies of entire regions, and devastating the labor movement.
Given this record, it is hardly surprising that large numbers of working people embraced Trump’s promises of restoring manufacturing jobs through tariffs, enough to give him the margin of victory in 2016. While President Joe Biden’s administration was the most worker-friendly in a generation, with a National Labor Relations Board that aggressively enforced workers’ rights, his failure to confront corporate power or to meaningfully address the affordability crisis led to working people, again, providing Trump with his margin of victory in 2024.
Two years of irrational tariffs, brutal crackdowns on immigrants, and unnecessary wars and military adventures have only made the affordability crisis worse. Democrats have now been given an opportunity to demonstrate that they will stand up to corporate power and pursue bold policies to improve working people’s standard of living — but they cannot take popular support for granted. In a poll one month before the election, only 27 percent of voters believed that Democrats had real solutions. Working people are not looking for politicians who think the goal is simply to go back to business as usual, they want political leaders who will pursue an aggressive agenda of improving their lives.
While President Trump has promised to veto any legislation passed by the new Democratic Congress, Democrats must not use that as an excuse not to craft and pass legislation to constrain corporate power and put more money in working people’s pockets. Let Trump clearly demonstrate which side he is on by vetoing legislation that would improve workers’ lives.
At a minimum, the new Democratic Congress should:
Raise wages with an immediate boost to the federal minimum wage, which still stands at a paltry $7.25 per hour, unchanged since 2009. A number of the candidates elected on Tuesday campaigned on fighting for a $25 minimum wage.
Lower costs by both investigating corporate price-gouging, especially by oil and food companies, and addressing the biggest costs for working families: healthcare, housing, education, and childcare. Over the past four decades, costs for these four items have risen from one and a half to six times faster than inflation, driven largely by bad policy choices. Good federal policies can ensure that every American has healthcare, stable housing, quality public education, access to higher education, and the ability to raise a family comfortably.
Pass Medicare for All. With double-digit increases in healthcare costs on the horizon, now is the time to finally join the rest of the industrialized world by implementing a universal healthcare system which takes healthcare off the bargaining table and guarantees it to every American.
End attacks on higher education and ensure that our nation’s universities have the funding they need to do research that benefits society, without political strings attached.
Expand and fully fund Social Security so that all Americans are guaranteed a decent retirement.
Tax the rich and corporations. In 2017 and again in 2025, President Trump and the Republicans gave massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Those tax cuts should be immediately reversed, and the resources devoted to programs which benefit working people.
Dismantle the rogue ICE and Department of Homeland Security agencies and rebuild our immigration system. The Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement has been especially cruel, indiscriminately killing people, grabbing children off the streets, and detaining people in inhumane conditions. However, it is built on a fundamentally broken system, which through both Democratic and Republican administrations has separated families, punished hard-working people who have contributed to our society for generations, and been a drag on our economy. It is long past time to pass immigration reform legislation that includes a legalization program, prioritizes family reunification, and protects worker rights for both current and future immigrants.
Slash funding for war and end U.S. financial support for the Israeli military, and redirect those resources to meeting working people’s needs.
Rein in AI and ensure public oversight of the development of this technology, rather than leaving the decisions to for-profit corporations.
Restore clean energy projects and rebuild infrastructure. With rising demand from data centers and electric vehicles, our country needs new ways to generate electricity without burning fossil fuels. It is time to revive the Green New Deal to meet the challenge of climate change while creating good union jobs, including making our nation’s railroads invest in cleaner, safer, and more efficient locomotives.
Protect and expand workers’ rights by passing the PRO Act, enacting card-check recognition, repealing the 1947 anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and outlawing “right to work,” and protecting the right to strike by banning permanent replacements, allowing striking workers to collect unemployment, and outlawing state bans on strikes by public-sector workers.
Investigate and prosecute corruption. For far too long, politicians of both parties have used their positions to enrich themselves and to steer federal contracts and money to their cronies, but corruption has ballooned astronomically over the last two years. Trump’s own wealth has grown by $2.7 billion since he was re-elected to the Presidency in 2024. Government corruption is both a rip-off of our tax dollars and a driver of inflation, and Democrats must prove that they will restore accountability, and restore and shore up our democracy, by unmasking and rooting out corruption and reversing “Project 2025,” the right-wing playbook that Trump began enacting through executive orders as soon as he got into office.
The Democratic Congress must also be held accountable to the people who elected them. Voters elected Democrats not out of any love for the party, but because they are looking for elected officials who will reverse decades of stagnating wages, increasing costs, and growing corporate power over every aspect of our lives. Democrats must demonstrate that they are serious about improving working people’s lives by passing meaningful legislation and setting the stage for electing people up and down the ticket in 2028 who will fully enact that legislation. Otherwise they, like the Republicans before them, will deservedly face voters’ wrath.
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration the membership of UE, and of many other unions, has stood up against the right-wing, authoritarian agenda that the American people rejected on Tuesday. The alternative is the policies that rank-and-file UE members have debated and adopted at convention after convention — policies like “Medicare for All,” “The Fight for Higher Education,” “Stop the Dismantling of Public Education,” “A Green New Deal for People and the Planet,” “Labor Law Reform,” and “A Just Economy for All.” This is what we are fighting for, and what we look forward to achieving in 2029 and beyond.
Scott Slawson
General President
Andrew Dinkelaker
Secretary-Treasurer
Kimberly Lawson
Director of Organization