How Democrats Can Reclaim Red America

A winning campaign in five slogans

Main Street, Left and Right (Image by ChatGPT)

I’ve been following politics now for the better part of three decades, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that you don’t win elections because you have a better command of the facts. You win because you can tell a better story, a story that makes sense of people’s frustrations and explains how you’d address them.

For most of that time, the Republican Party has done a much better job telling Americans a compelling story. It’s a story about how over-educated, out-of-touch coastal elites sold out American workers to Mexico and China, while welcoming waves of immigrants who took their jobs and drove down their wages. It’s a story about how choices made in Washington, and ratified on Wall Street, destroyed or devalued the kind of work traditionally done in small towns, by people with a high school education.

Like all compelling narratives, this one has a kernel of truth. But it also gets a lot wrong, and in doing so it opens the door for Democrats to tell a different, more convincing story.

It’s a story about how, for the last half century, big corporations have gobbled up small and medium-sized businesses, to the point that practically every sector of our economy is now dominated by a handful of firms. It’s a story about how these cartels have…