Back in the 1970s, America felt unstoppable. We had just put a man on the moon, built the interstate highway system, had decades of rising living standards and wages, and were including more and more people in society through the civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and other movements.

We were doing so much that we actually had immigration offices all over the world that were recruiting millions of people to come help build this country. That’s how my parents got here. One of my dad’s friends took him to one of these offices in Calcutta where a nice staffer pitched him on the American Dream and got him to apply for a visa right there on the spot.

My parents came here with less than $20. They grew up poor in India, especially my father. After being displaced during Partition, his family of ten squatted in an abandoned house before “upgrading” to a one-bedroom apartment. He often went days without food. But he was lucky to have a solid education because my grandfather was a teacher who ended up starting the local public school for all the neighborhood kids.

In the United States, my dad was able to get a job within a week of arriving despite having no connections, and, on a single income, was able to afford a solid, middle-class life for me and my family. Growing up, I had everything I needed: a roof over my head, food on the table, and a great public school education in Fort Worth, Texas.

My parents’ story has always stuck with me precisely because of how common it actually was. Millions of immigrants who came here during that time had a similar story. So did hundreds of millions of Americans who, starting with the New Deal and all the way to the 1970s, accomplished one of the biggest leaps in incomes and living standards that humanity has ever seen. I’ve always been awed by that accomplishment, and the core driver of my politics and work over the last decade has been the belief that we can do it again.

I was pretty apolitical, though, growing up and through college. After college, I came out to San Francisco the first chance I got to work in tech because I naively believed tech would be a way to fix the biggest problems in the world. After working in tech for a few years though, I knew the answers didn’t lie there. So I quit.

It feels cheesy to say this today, but I actually made a list of the problems I wanted to help do something about. It said: inequality, poverty, and climate change. Then Bernie Sanders announced his run for president in 2016 talking about exactly those things, and he started filling stadiums with people excited for something new. So I joined!

On Bernie’s campaign, I worked as a programmer and an organizer. I built the tools for the distributed organizing team. It was amazing to see the kind of organizing that’s possible when you have millions of people who are dying for change and a structure to mobilize them.

At the end of the campaign, Zack Exley, the guy who built the team, pitched all of us on a crazy idea to recruit a big slate of congressional candidates and run them as a block — a 400-headed presidential race, as Rachel Maddow called it. We had just experienced the momentum Bernie was able to create by pitching the nation on real change, and we realized that even if Bernie won, he wouldn’t be able to do anything without a Congress to back him. We thought we saw a way to channel the momentum of the Bernie movement into real change in the midterms.

Only three of us said yes to this crazy idea: Alexandra Rojas, Corbin Trent, and me. And that was the start of Brand New Congress, which later became Justice Democrats. We fell short of recruiting four hundred people that first cycle and didn’t spark the national movement we hoped for, but we did recruit and run Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush. When it became clear that all our candidates were probably going to lose, I decided to go run AOC’s campaign to see if we could pull off at least one victory. After she upset Joe Crowley and won, I went to DC as her first chief of staff, where my first job was launching the Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal was our vision of what Democrats should stand for: a plan to invest in upgrading and developing our economy by tackling climate change, creating millions of high-wage jobs in the process. While Alexandra, Corbin, I, and others were working at Justice Democrats and then on AOC’s race, Zack Exley was busy running New Consensus, the think tank he and I had started a few months after Justice Democrats. We had looked around for a think tank that was working on the details of how to radically reverse the decline of the working class while building a clean economy. We didn’t find any (though many economists were talking about the need to do this), so we started one. The Green New Deal came out of the work Zack and others did at New Consensus.

Once AOC won, we had a three-pronged approach to launching the Green New Deal. I worked on the inside to build political support, while the Sunrise Movement, whose political team we had met through our campaign work, worked on the outside to mount a pressure campaign on representatives and presidential candidates. At the same time, New Consensus worked to flesh out the ideas in the Green New Deal and socialize them with academics and journalists (which was a big reason people like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman came out in favor of it when it launched).

That experience made me realize how powerful it can be to have people on the inside working with a movement on the outside who are all aligned on a vision for the country. And I learned that it is easier than we think to get new ideas to go somewhere in DC, especially right now when people are hungry for some vision of a future. If we could do the Green New Deal with just one member of Congress, what could be possible with dozens or hundreds of congresspeople acting with real purpose and urgency?

I left AOC’s office at the end of 2019 after ruffling a few too many feathers in DC and moved back to San Francisco. Since then, Zack, I, and others have been working on the Mission for America at New Consensus, which is a successor to the Green New Deal with the details filled in.

My plan when I left Congress and moved back to San Francisco was to continue working at New Consensus and continue supporting political candidates who rejected the corporate status quo in favor of championing working-class people. I wasn’t looking to be a congressional candidate myself. But this last election changed my mind.

I thought the fact that Trump made more inroads into the traditional working-class, multiracial Democratic base than any GOP presidential candidate would be a wake-up call for Democrats — especially since they couldn’t dismiss his victory as a fluke like they did the first time around. I thought Democrats might take the threat of Trump and the authoritarian right seriously, since they repeatedly told us during the election that a Trump win would slide the US into authoritarianism and fascism. But then I saw how Democratic leaders actually acted in the face of a Trump win and Trump’s brazen attempts to consolidate power. I heard Nancy Pelosi interviewed after this election saying Democrats did nothing wrong and didn’t need to change.

Democrats need a new economic vision, and they need new leadership. Here in San Francisco, even those who have supported Pelosi for decades and deeply respect her past work believe it’s time for change. But because of the deeply hierarchical nature and deference to seniority in the Democratic Party, no one else is willing to risk their political career by running against her.  So it was one of those, “If not me, then who?” moments, and I felt a duty to run.

I’m running because I want to help spark a national movement of candidates who are willing to fight for a new economy and society that will dramatically improve working people’s lives. No single candidate can do this alone, and I am recruiting others around the country to join me — a handful for 2026 and a wave for 2028. That huge leap in incomes and living standards that started with the New Deal and went into the 1970s — we can do that again and do it while building a clean and fair economy. And if we don’t — if we can’t prove that democracy can deliver what people need — then people will vote for the authoritarian who promises to do it himself.

For most people, the American Dream is dead. Their kids are not going to do better than them. People are having to work longer hours to be able to afford less and less. This trend has been getting worse for about fifty years now.

This is, ultimately, why people keep voting for anyone campaigning on bold, sweeping economic and political change. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a populist who would fight for Main Street, not Wall Street. In 2016, Trump campaigned against both parties to drain the swamp. In 2020, Joe Biden even pitched an ambitious economic vision with Build Back Better. People are open to radically different versions of what the vision of change looks like, but most agree that the status quo is simply not cutting it.

In 2024, there were countless reasons behind Democratic losses: a powerful right-wing media ecosystem, Democrats failing to use new media channels as well as Republicans, Democrats being seen as not taking inflation and immigration concerns seriously, conservative billionaires who apparently are far more creative and strategic than their progressive counterparts, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia, Christian Democrats being forced to choose between their party and their churches, social conservatives feeling like the whole world is changing in a chaotic way, and a whole professional-managerial class who loves their tax cuts just as much as the billionaires.

But the biggest reason Trump won was he was, once again, the change candidate who would blow up a system voters believe is broken, and [Kamala] Harris represented continuing the status quo.

Ultimately, Democrats did not actually do that badly against Trump. Both Republicans and Democrats have been routed way worse many times over in the past several decades. But it’s still insane that anyone could lose to someone as reckless, undisciplined, and unpopular as Trump. Yet, Democrats somehow managed to lose not once but twice to Trump, even when they had four years to see the threat coming the second time around.

Democrats still being unpopular now, even amid Trump’s chaos, stems from three major problems in the party.

First, Democrats don’t know who they stand for. People like AOC and Bernie are tapping into real energy by speaking out against oligarchy and presenting a vision of a party that fights tooth and nail for the working class. But much of the rest of the party is ignoring that, and the party leadership is busy wasting their time trying to woo the billionaire class. 

Second, Democrats have neither an explanation for why working- and middle-class Americans are sinking nor a vision for how to reverse that. Trump has a story for why life is getting harder for people — he tells us that America has spent too much time focused on immigrants and other countries and not enough time on “real Americans.” Democrats don’t have an alternative to that. That’s partly because they’re totally out of touch with how out of reach the American Dream is for most people, and partly because they don’t believe it’s possible to turn things around anymore. That’s why they keep pushing for modest reforms and keeping the status quo intact.

Third, Democrats are seen as weak, incompetent, and sluggish. I experienced this firsthand when I worked in DC during Trump’s first term. The party felt like a slow, bloated corporation, completely blind to the rapidly changing world around it. While Trump flooded the news cycle with outrageous statements on a daily basis, Democrats would respond a week later with a “strongly worded statement” at a press conference no one watched. By then, the conversation had already moved on.

Party leaders dismissed social media and new platforms as just a fad and sidelined members like AOC who actually understood how to communicate in the modern era. Much of the party believed its main job was dialing for dollars and did not take the job of legislating seriously. As a result, there was a strong bias toward inaction as members were always thinking about which big donors they might be upsetting by supporting certain bills — even when that legislation polled well in their districts.

At a time when voters want effective leaders who will change the status quo, Democrats are seen as defenders of a rigged political and economic system who are unable to get anything done. We won’t be able to solve this unless we elect a whole new generation of Democrats.

To answer this, we should look at how the Democratic Party became the party that most workers aligned with in the first place. Before Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR], the Democratic Party was not the home of the working class. Reconstruction, the labor movement, and the radical working-class and multiracial Populist movement all took place outside of the Democratic Party.

No one would have said that the Democrats were a working-class party when Roosevelt took power. And no one would have said that Roosevelt was a working-class leader or a leader of the working class. But then he did something surprising: he did amazing politics.

He did that by bailing out every American’s life savings right after taking office and averting a total banking system collapse — and explaining exactly what he was doing directly to Americans on the radio with the same kind of thrilling suspense and drama that Trump uses (though Roosevelt’s version was strategic and caring as opposed to chaotic and cruel). He delivered life-saving assistance to most of the United States through Social Security, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Surplus Commodities Program, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and other social programs — all of which were completely new.

He built hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, tens of thousands of bridges, hundreds of airports, and extended electric power to almost all of America through the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Act. He put all of America to work defeating fascism by building the most powerful industrial economy in the world, creating a vast amount of new wealth as a byproduct. He unequivocally stood by unions so that the wealth from this new economy would be shared, creating the middle class. He trash-talked oligarchs and Wall Street, supported women’s rights, and even cautiously began hinting toward racial equality toward the end of his presidency. 

Roosevelt built a new economy and society that improved workers’ (and really everyone’s) living standards and conditions so dramatically that he made the Democratic Party the obvious home for the working class. And he relentlessly made it clear through his speeches and fireside chats that he was on the side of workers. This meant that even when the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression after his first term, workers kept giving him a chance because they trusted that he was fighting for them.

For the Democratic Party, the crime his successors committed was to think their job was to shut down Roosevelt’s project. There’s a whole story, with many twists, of why that happened. One was that Southern white Democratic congressional leaders believed it was their duty to dismantle planning institutions that had been interfering with the supply of practically indentured black workers in the South. That’s not an exaggeration: US representatives were explaining on the House floor on the record that economic planning had to stop in order to “preserve white supremacy” — their words.

Another twist was that Northern tycoons and the free-market ideologues they funded were running think tanks and employer associations devoted to brainwashing Americans against any kind of economic planning or coordination. They were literally slipping comic-strip versions of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom into millions of workers’ pay envelopes.

So we lost our capacity to keep deliberately upgrading our economy. We stopped making sure investment in industry and upkeep of infrastructure kept happening. And when you stop upgrading your economy, the existing economy slowly falls into disrepair just like an old house that no one looks after. So as companies started shipping factories overseas, and as good-paying jobs were replaced with minimum-wage jobs at Walmart, our politicians did not believe it was their duty to figure out what to do about it.

Since Democrats were no longer demonstrably delivering real gains to workers, they no longer had an edge over the Republicans. That didn’t mean workers left the party immediately. But when neither party is clearly improving workers’ lives, other issues start determining elections and which party workers will vote for — just as they did before Roosevelt.

Through the 1950s and ’60s, Democrats continued to win workers and dominate elections by maintaining and expanding social programs (which didn’t upgrade the economy to make workers a lot wealthier but at least gave workers a safety net), coasting on strong brand identity with Roosevelt’s achievements, and benefiting from race-affiliated voting by whites in the South. After civil rights, Democrats became the home of black voters, while Southern whites flipped to the Republican Party, which started an era of split control between Democrats and Republicans.

Then starting with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both parties started cutting the social safety net as well, so it was really no longer clear why workers should vote for Democrats. Of course, Republicans often went after the social safety net more aggressively. But Republicans were clear that their offer to the American people was tax cuts that would put more money in their pockets, which often gave them an edge in elections.

In the 2000s, a failed war in Iraq followed by the Great Recession severely damaged trust in our government, and people started voting for outsiders pitching dramatic economic and political change. It became clear that neither party’s elites had an answer for turning the country around, and the current system was failing. But by that point, Democrats were unable to return to Roosevelt’s builder/problem-solver mode because they had lost all the institutions and know-how for doing it over the last sixty years.

In A Crisis Wasted, Reed Hundt describes how Obama had an instinct that we should respond to the Great Recession with something bigger and more transformative, some kind of moonshot. But he was shot down by advisors like Larry Summers. There was no one in the room who knew how to do something like that, much less believed that it was possible or necessary.

The post–New Deal/WWII Democratic Party only had two jobs: keep all the institutions that built the most prosperous and equal economy in history working to grow the pie; and ensure that those institutions changed to include everyone. We later became aware of a third job: build a new clean economy so that life can continue to thrive on this planet. They couldn’t do those jobs. It was beyond their desire, imagination, and capacity. That’s why they lost workers and have had to share power with Republicans for all these decades — a party that explicitly wants to make life more difficult for the vast majority of the people — for example, by cutting Medicaid, food stamps, and so many other programs.

In this mode, Democrats are mere decline managers. And when workers have to choose between someone defending a declining system, and someone who says they’re going to blow up that system, eventually they’re going to hit that red button. And that’s what many of them did in 2024.

Here’s the good news: Democrats can reverse this trend by doing what Roosevelt did. If we present a plan for delivering dramatic improvements to workers’ lives, and then follow through on that with urgency, purpose, and clear communication, we will become the home of the working-class again.

Throughout the twentieth century, every developed nation today went through periods where they rapidly transformed their economies and delivered unbelievable new levels of prosperity to their people — often after periods of being really stuck, like we are today. America last did this through its mobilization for World War II, after years of being stuck in the Great Depression, but many other countries did it during peacetime. All of them did it by flipping into a whole new mode of operating, which we’ve been calling “mission mode” at New Consensus. Mission mode is different from how we’re operating today in three key ways:

1. Mission mode begins when a new leadership comes to power that calls the country to a mission that will transform the entire economy — not just some piece of it. They then actually follow through on it with urgency, actively organizing society to take on projects in the mission, making a show of the progress to build public support and calling out heroes of the mission, while using the political capital built from the public support to clear away obstacles and enact structural reforms.
2. They make comprehensive plans for executing the mission. They don’t just pass some policies and take their hands off the steering wheel, as we do today. Counterintuitively, making a plan to basically solve all of a country’s problems at once can be easier than solving only a few of a country’s problems because each solution increases the capacity of the country to solve other problems. It also paints a clear picture to the country’s people of what the vision is.
3. They create institutions to finance and execute these plans. In the past, the United States had many such institutions all across society with the largest, by far, being the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The RFC was the engine behind both the New Deal and the industrial mobilization for World War II. It functioned like a venture capital fund, a private equity firm, an investment bank, and a project manager all in one. It built new industries, upgraded old ones, merged firms when necessary, fixed supply chain bottlenecks, solved problems, invested in existing companies to tackle challenges the mission needed, or launched new companies when they wouldn’t. At New Consensus, we’ve been calling these “investment and coordination institutions.

This is a well-worn path that all industrialized countries have followed to build and upgrade their economies. There are no examples of countries that created broad prosperity and made huge structural changes just through slow, piecemeal reforms. There’s something about the scale and speed of a sweeping transformation that gives countries the momentum they need to achieve a kind of escape velocity where they can finally tackle their biggest problems.

This also isn’t the standard social democratic path of redistribution and social programs (though that is part of the story for making sure the newly created wealth gets distributed fairly), and it isn’t the neoliberal path of deregulation and withdrawal of the public will from markets and enterprise. It is something different.

We’re arguing that we need to follow that path again. This time, we need to replace the old, dirty economy that’s failing to provide prosperity to most Americans and driving the climate crisis. In its place, we must build a new, clean economy that delivers prosperity to everyone by producing the high-value goods and services the whole world is demanding for the global green transition. The Mission for America is a detailed plan to get America into mission mode to do exactly that.

The MFA is more than all the policy details for how to do it (though it does have hundreds of pages of that!). It is a comprehensive plan where each piece of the MFA depends on the others. It has over twenty chapters that go through every sector of our economy and lays out exactly what we need to do to build the high-tech, clean industries for each. Equally as important, the MFA describes the political strategy that a president and Congress would have to take to lead the country in this mobilization and succeed. Finally, it details how to create the investment and coordination institutions we’ll need to get back into mission mode, including resurrecting the RFC for the modern era.

The Green New Deal [GND] is best understood as a political strategy to introduce some big ideas and change what was viewed as politically possible. At the time we launched the GND, the Left was focused largely on shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure — the movement to “keep it in the ground.” Meanwhile, moderates were just trying to figure out what the right price of carbon should be. In that context, we had two main ideas that we wanted to introduce with the GND:

1. Solving climate change shouldn’t pit prosperity against the planet. Instead, the project of solving climate change is the same as growing, upgrading, and developing our economy. We need to actually build a new clean economy that will create millions of high-wage jobs and dramatically improve living standards. To do that, we should mobilize our economy the way we did during World War II. This time, of course, instead of building machines and material for war, we need to build clean industries and infrastructure to replace the dirty old stuff.
2. The scale of ambition of climate proposals being put out by Democrats needed to dramatically increase. For context, Bernie’s climate plan in 2016, considered very ambitious at the time, called for an 80 percent cut in US emissions by 2050 to be achieved largely through carbon taxes. But this goal was, of course, far short of what’s needed. And building an entirely new clean economy with carbon taxes alone is not a serious proposal. When has any country managed to upgrade their entire economy and build completely new industries through taxes alone? And that was the radical Bernie plan — Hillary Clinton’s proposals were much worse.

Our strategy was to insert these ideas onto the national stage by using the huge spotlight AOC had after her surprise victory over Joe Crowley. After she won, the media all wanted to write the AOC vs. Nancy Pelosi story. So we decided to give them what they wanted — but on our terms.

Incidentally, the other big story on cable news at the time was the unprecedented California wildfires, and everyone was asking, “Is this the natural disaster that will finally make the Democrats take real action on climate change?” AOC joined the Sunrise Movement in a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office on her first day in DC, at huge risk to her own political career. Every press outlet covered it. But it wasn’t a sit-in just to do some political theater. She did it to call for the Green New Deal, a sweeping demand aimed at the Democratic leadership.

Part of what made the GND practical was that it originally was a resolution calling for a House committee to develop a ten-year transition plan for the economy. This was something that Nancy Pelosi, as House speaker at the time, could have actually done. But of course, she didn’t. Still, it pressured her into reestablishing an older climate committee.

This committee didn’t create a detailed, comprehensive ten-year plan, but it did at least come up with some policy proposals, much of which ended up in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA]. Imagine how much worse the IRA would have been without that little bit of planning that the GND forced — and how much better it could have been if House Democrats actually spent four years calling in experts and really tried to figure out the comprehensive plan to fully transition the economy!

We purposefully launched the GND resolution at the dawn of the 2020 Democratic primaries to force presidential candidates to respond with endorsements or their own plans, and this worked to get our two big ideas across. The Sunrise Movement was crucial here by making sure that every presidential candidate was asked at town halls whether they would endorse the GND. We managed to get every presidential candidate to talk about solving climate change as a way to upgrade our economy and create millions of high-wage jobs. Many of them, including Biden, even talked about doing a mobilization on the scale of World War II to do it. And Democratic presidential candidates all rushed to release increasingly larger climate plans in response to the GND.

Even Joe Biden responded with Build Back Better — a moderate plan compared to that of everyone else running but bigger by an order of magnitude than anything anyone had proposed before. And then Build Back Better turned into the IRA, which passed and created the largest investment in climate change in history. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a bigger step in the right direction than would have been possible otherwise.

The GND resolution was only an outline of a comprehensive plan — the entire resolution is just fourteen pages. The Mission for America is a successor to the GND — a much more detailed plan for actually getting every piece of the GND done.

The Mission for America doesn’t actually hearken back to the New Deal so much as it does to the World War II period and the period in preparation for the war when Roosevelt began the great upgrade of the economy. Looking back, the big lesson is that the country could have started rebuilding right after the Great Crash. They didn’t need to wait for war. But they were bound by ideological dogmas that made it impossible — just as Democrats and Republicans were after the 2008 crash and as they still are today.

For example, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation [RFC] was way more constrained in the New Deal era, initially only allowed to lend to banks to keep them afloat. Its scope was slowly expanded over the course of the New Deal. But it wasn’t fully empowered to act until Roosevelt started mobilizing the economy in anticipation of entering World War II, because he initially believed the government should not intervene directly into private markets. In 1937, he even scaled back RFC lending [over the protests of progressives like Adolf Berle], triggering a recession, before reversing course.

When a real existential crisis emerges, the political class often finally sees through its own blinders to the obvious solutions. That’s what happened when US leaders saw that we were going to have to enter World War II, and it’s what enabled us to finally do what we needed to build the kind of industrial base to get us out of the Great Depression. Today both the crisis of global warming and the crisis of sinking or stagnating wages for workers can only be solved by a sweeping rebuilding program like the Mission for America. And the potential crisis of mass unemployment spurred by AI — something that is seeming more and more likely — will also need a sweeping program like the Mission for America to tackle it. But that would be a topic for a whole other interview.

The labor movement was incredibly important for mobilizing for World War II. Unions played an active role in planning the mobilization together with the War Production Board, and in turn, the rapid expansion of America’s industrial base dramatically strengthened the labor movement of the time. Union membership surged during this period, growing from about eight million members in 1940 to over fourteen million by 1945, representing about 35 percent of the workforce. Of course, it helped that Roosevelt signed a legal framework for organizing unions into law and often came down on the side of striking workers when labor disputes did arise.

I see a similar role for labor today. Labor needs to be an active participant in planning the mobilization in the Mission for America — just as they were in the mobilization for World War II, and just as they are today in many European countries. And incidentally, those countries build projects faster and cheaper than in America.

I understand why labor today is skeptical of schemes like the Green New Deal or the Mission for America. When they hear talk about replacing coal jobs with solar jobs or old auto jobs with EV jobs, they are right that under the status quo, workers will be completely screwed by that transition. But if we organize a transformation truly on the scale of World War II, in which we invested basically half of GDP for several years building new industries and upgrading old ones, labor will have a historic opportunity to be stronger than it has ever been. I believe that when a political movement comes along that’s on the brink of winning something like that again, labor will pull out all the stops in support of it.

I am running to greatly expand and improve the social safety net as well, so I don’t want anyone to think this is all just about reindustrializing America. That means universal health care, universal childcare, paid family and medical leave, and raising the minimum wage. I also believe our gross levels of income and wealth inequality need to be reversed, and that will only happen if we increase taxes on the richest and end all the tax loopholes.

We must also end the corrupting influence of money in our politics. This is the number-one polling issue in the country. People rank it even above the economy, which means we should really be shooting for the moon here. We should be moving toward a publicly financed campaign system. And for the record, I am not taking any corporate or lobbyist money in my campaign.

On foreign policy, I believe we need to stop bombing and sanctioning countries every chance we get. We’ve destroyed our standing with the world. Our unhinged foreign policy is leading us to ruin. We need to have a complete change in our foreign policy to become one where we follow international law and do business with other countries instead of coercing them. We should be doing the modern-day version of the Marshall Plan, except this time to help developing nations create their own clean, sustainable, and prosperous economies. I’ve also been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as the race to war with Iran. If elected, I’d be a vote to end all military aid to Israel.

Finally, we need to end corruption in our government. This is a no-brainer. This includes banning members of Congress from owning or trading stocks and banning the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry. This stuff polls incredibly well — especially among Republicans. And it doesn’t even matter if congress members are actually being corrupt — the appearance of corruption and the lack of action to do the bare minimum against it has destroyed trust in our institutions, letting someone like Trump come to power on promises of draining the swamp.

If Democrats had any strategic sense, they could be running a powerful anti-corruption campaign against Trump right now, who has the most corrupt administration that’s ever come to power. Of course, that’s going to be hard to do without electing new Democrats, since most people believe that current Democrats, with their levels of insider stock trading and courting of billionaire donors, are only a little less corrupt than their Republican counterparts.

Zohran’s win is definitely showing progressives have some momentum right now. But yes, progressives suffered some real defeats in 2024. Part of it was a backlash to police reform due to a rise in crime during the pandemic, and part of it was attacks specific to Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. But there will always be attacks. Ultimately, the biggest factor in these races was the tens of millions of dollars AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and their allies spent against them. That firehose of money also meant Justice Democrats couldn’t recruit anyone new in 2024 since they had to spend all their time and money defending their incumbents — and they did succeed in defending nine out of eleven of them!

But ultimately, progressive momentum will always ebb and flow when there are just a few candidates running in every election. People rightfully don’t believe a few members of Congress can deliver sweeping change to improve their lives. So in the absence of that, progressives win or lose elections based on all kinds of contemporary issues and the personalities of the people running, and money plays a much bigger role. And if we are just competing dollar for dollar against the establishment, we are at a disadvantage.

Our advantage is that we have people on our side. We can get attention by having a vision of change that people will get excited for — and that makes every dollar we spend worth ten spent by the other side. But it works best if voters can believe that the vision being pitched will actually happen if they vote for it. That’s one reason Zohran did so well: he was clear that making him mayor means he’ll actually have the power to do what he’s pitching.

I believe the way to restart the momentum is to give the American people a real option for transformational change. That won’t happen with just a few members of Congress who say they will fight for it. But imagine if we had a movement of a few hundred members of Congress together with a presidential candidate — all running on the Mission for America to make the working class dramatically richer, to enact universal health care, universal childcare, end corruption in government, end money in politics, and end the wars.

It would be so shockingly different from what anyone has ever done in our politics that it could capture national attention. That national attention would raise money and create momentum, garnering more national attention — just like we saw with Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and Obama’s in 2008. Then people would have a real chance to vote for change — to know that if they elected this block of candidates, everything they are saying they’d do, they could actually do. That’s the movement I want to help create. And if it sounds like a movement you want to be a part of, please nominate someone amazing on my website to run with me. We can build that movement and we can win.