The Comeback Plan

10 Steps to End Our Political Nightmare in 3 Years

To: Friends and allies
From: Billy Wimsatt, Executive Director of Movement Voter PAC
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
RE: A plan for the Democratic coalition’s political comeback
Executive Summary: Read here

Introduction

Friends and allies –

As we approach the one-year anniversary of last November’s fateful election, I wanted to offer this memo as a roadmap: A provocative ten-step plan to transform our movement, our politics, and our country – in the next three years.

In short: It’s not too late. We still have a chance to save our country.

How do we do it? With a Big Hairy Audacious Plan to meet the scale of the crisis. With an attractive “populism meets abundance” economic vision, and an energetic and empathetic organizing campaign, we can win back millions of hearts and minds – enough to win the next election, and the one after that. Three years from now, we can finally bring this national political nightmare to an end. 

It won’t be easy. It will require determination, courage, creativity – and massive investment. It will also require culture change. We’re going to have to think big and differently. We’re going to have to believe in ourselves. We’re going to have to remember three small words we said the last time things looked bleak under a bad president: 

Yes we can.

Who Is This Memo For?

This memo is for organizers, movement leaders, strategic donors, and most of all, it is for all of us as responsible adults — young adults, I’m talking to you too! — because we all need to step up and be responsible adults at this moment in history.

We are in a hard place. Responsible adults do hard things. We have hard conversations. We make tough decisions. We invest in the future. We do the right thing. We take the heat. As responsible adults, we make sacrifices for kids and grandkids – and other people’s children too. When leadership is required, we step up. If you haven’t noticed, we have a huge leadership vacuum right now. When we become aware of a need, we raise our hand and say: “Ok, I’ll do it.” 

This is a memo for responsible adults who are called upon by dire circumstances to show up in a different way than we ever have before. It’s for political donors who usually fund candidates. It’s for nonpartisan donors who usually “stay out of politics” but who are seeing their investments in education, health, and human services washed away. In short, it’s a memo for the entire spectrum of us in the broad Democratic coalition – from center to left – who don’t want to see our country and our people treated like dirt. Every one of us has agency and responsibility in this situation.

What I’ve seen over 30 years in this work is that anyone who makes an effort can be a changemaker in a meaningful way. I’ve seen it up close with the amazing MVP volunteer team, many of whom are humble introverts without fabulous wealth or previous political experience. 

We are asking everyone to do a simple thing: Instigate generative conversations in your own circles. People are depressed… reeling… feeling powerless… compartmentalizing… walking around in a daze! Many are in survival mode, especially our immigrant and LGBTQ communities, government workers, and so many others who are already experiencing the attacks personally.

As responsible adults, we must move from isolation and hopelessness to collective hope and agency. So consider yourself recruited. Welcome to the team.  This memo is designed to help you play your part. By simply sharing it in your circles you can help others move from despair to hope to constructive action. 

We don’t have to do it alone.

How “Shovel-Ready” Are the Big Ideas in This Memo?

Earlier this year, MVP published a 7 Questions memo laying out the top questions we collectively need to address as a broad Democratic coalition. The MVP team and I have been on a loving agitation campaign to provoke generative conversations to create a paradigm shift towards answering these big questions. This memo is a next step in the series — not a fully baked plan but a directionally-aimed spark to generate big-picture strategic conversation.

To give some context for those who don’t know Movement Voter PAC (MVP), it’s essentially a “mutual fund” for political giving. Our job is to know the landscape and help donors channel money to the most impactful local organizations that win elections and change the country. To be clear, MVP’s role is primarily to fund the work as strategically as possible, not to implement it ourselves. But we are in relationship with hundreds of leaders across the big-tent Democratic coalition, and we often serve as thought partners and help encourage innovation, convene leaders, and dream up big ideas. 

I think of MVP’s strategic orientation right now as a three-layer cake. 

Layer one is supporting local organizing focused in perennial battleground states, flipping the House and Senate in 2026 – and helping the organizing field as a whole grow bigger, better, and stronger. 

This is where MVP directs the vast majority of our funding. Our hundreds of grantee partners are doing powerful, unsung work every day to block autocracy, push for state-level progress, and win electoral power up and down the ballot (see our 2025-2026 strategy memo). Our local partners are organizing communities to address the current crisis, talking with voters, and delivering results that improve millions of people’s lives. Local organizing is MVP’s top priority. It’s too often underfunded. Funding it at scale is a no-brainer.

The second layer is funding new work in three broad areas: new media, innovation, and collaboration. This is emerging work, but it’s still very concrete and shovel-ready. 

We have a media strategy. We have an Innovation and Collaboration Fund (our internal version of Shark Tank) where we scout the most promising high-impact projects worth seed-funding or scaling. For example, we helped to seed Battleground Alliance, a new coalition of local and national organizing groups to deliver the swing districts Democrats need to flip the House in 2026. 

The third layer of the cake, however, is a different beast. These are really big ideas that are much more early-stage and aspirational. The third layer is about generating visionary moonshots and culture changes that are desperately needed but don’t exist yet. By their very nature, these are ideas that no one is yet owning or implementing. For these “third-layer” ideas, MVP’s role is to spark conversation, collective imagination, and help bring them into being. This is what we call Movement R&D. Many of the ideas in this Comeback Plan below (especially Steps 2-7) fall under the category of Movement R&D. They are not yet shovel-ready. That is by design.

How Do We Build a Three-Layer Cake?

As donors, we need to invest in tried-and-true organizing – and take it to scale. Simultaneously, we need to accelerate the testing and deployment of new ideas. Second-layer and especially third-layer ideas are high-risk, high-reward efforts where our goal is to rapidly test and “fail forward” until we finally succeed. Are some of these ideas risky and underdeveloped? You bet! But as one of my colleagues said recently: “What are you afraid of – failing? We already failed. Big time! In case ya didn’t notice... We have to try new things to get ourselves out of this mess. There’s no other way.” 

Movement R&D is not just icing or sprinkles on a two-layer cake. It is necessary. As a movement, we sometimes need to evolve in profound ways and make hard-to-imagine paradigm shifts. We need to be inventing completely new ways of working. 

“What we did that got us here is not going to get us out of here. And it’s not going to get us where we need to go.”

As responsible adults we are called to devote our time, talents, and treasure to all three layers of this Comeback Cake. Right now is an extraordinarily strategic time to make the biggest contribution(s) we can make – ideally our most ambitious ever – and to do so as confidently and strategically as right-wing funders have done – with an eye to our collective legacy.

So what’s the game plan? Let’s dive in. 

→ Short on time? Read the 3-Page Executive Summary here.

Part One: Is a Comeback Even Possible?

Since the 2024 election, we’ve all lost sleep wondering: Can we even come back from this?

In short, I believe that the answer is yes.

The Brutal Facts: The Right Has Built a Stronger Movement

Before we look at what to do, first we need to confront the brutal facts. The other side has built a qualitatively superior model to what we have: what I call the vertically integrated meta-church. 

Where our side is siloed and tactical, the other side is vertically integrated from their grassroots leaders to their bankrolling billionaires. They are also horizontally integrated across issues, constituencies, and factions within their big-tent coalition. They have created the political equivalent of a megachurch – scaling a shared sense of purpose, belonging, meaning-making, and evangelical fervor. Their political church is reinforced in the digital realm, through podcasts and online media as well as traditional outlets like Fox News echoing daily in the lives of tens of millions of Americans. They don’t need to hire thousands of paid canvassers to knock on doors because they have created a surround-sound holistic worldview so compelling and a delivery system so omnipresent that they are “canvassing” each other 24/7/365 – on group chats, in the grocery store, everywhere they go – multiple times a day.

If We Want a Comeback, We Need to Evolve Our Model

Having studied the shockingly impressive evolution of the right-wing movement over the past ten years, I now believe that, collectively, we need to fundamentally evolve our model. Not to mirror the depravity of MAGA, but to build a comparably powerful super-movement. 

If we are serious about winning back hearts, minds, and governing power, we need to compete effectively on new and rapidly evolving terrain: media, algorithms, and culture. Local organizing will always be central to how we win. But we need to reimagine local organizing as part of a more integrated culture and media strategy – with a compelling and visionary worldview and “heroes’ journey” story that people want to see themselves in.

We can totally turn this around. We have so many strengths and so many great people with so much potential we haven’t tapped yet. The real question: Do we want it badly enough to go beyond our normal modes of operating and self-defeating tendencies that are no longer serving us?

A SWOT Analysis for the Democratic Coalition  

A tool for any strategist in assessing a competitive landscape is to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT). The SWOT analysis for the Democratic coalition right now looks something like this:

Strengths: We have about half the voting population and a lot of good people. From the left to the center-left, we have a more diverse coalition with stronger policies and factual grounding. We’re more motivated electorally, and should have opposition-party advantages at least through 2027.

Weaknesses: We are unpopular and internally divided as a Democratic coalition. We are strategically stuck, unclear on how or why to do things differently. Our comms are outdated. The Democratic brand is suffering from its lowest approval ratings, possibly ever. We have lost the trust of our youth and working-class base.

Opportunities: Key voters who shifted toward Trump in 2024 – voters of color, young voters, and irregular voters – are much less fixed in their political convictions, which means we can win them back (see Pew and Catalist). The other side is doing unpopular, incompetent, malicious things that are harming millions of people. We have an opportunity to engage them and offer them a better alternative. Millions of Americans are open to (and desperate for!) new leaders and real change. 

Threats: The other side is winning the information war. Their flood-the-zone strategy is working. They control much of the media ecosystem, including most recently TikTok and CBS. They are led by cruel, shameless liars who dislike rules and fairness. They are at war with both the Democratic coalition and with democratic norms. They are implementing the authoritarian playbook, from threatening journalists to weaponizing the Justice Department, putting troops in our streets, and perpetrating election interference. They are gaining ground and escalating on all fronts. 

While Strengths and Weaknesses are in our sphere of control, Opportunities and Threats are primarily external factors. Reflecting on this simplified SWOT analysis, my initial instinct was that the smartest, most actionable problem to address first is our weaknesses. If only we could to change ourselves to be more compelling, more media savvy, and less judgmental, less scolding, and less alienating… then, in theory, we could win back a lot of the hearts and minds we’ve lost.

In the spirit of honestly addressing our weaknesses, I went down a rabbit hole of studying right-wing strategy and media, and have written over 100 pages on what we need to do differently as a movement (working title: We Have Spinach in Our Teeth: a family conversation on the left).

Which to Tackle First – Weakness or Opportunity?  

I’ve been sharing early drafts of this “spinach” memo and the main reaction is that, while a lot of the self-critique rings true, it would have been more helpful to read immediately post-election. We’re in a different phase now. We’re feeling the hot breath of tyranny on our necks. Right now,  psychologically, we need realistic hope, solutions, and concrete plans of action more than we need self-critique. 

As rational humans, as a first-order question, we need to truly believe that our time and/or financial support will make a difference before we feel inspired to volunteer or donate. 

I know I feel this way. Without a realistic vision of how we get to a better place, what’s the point of donating or volunteering or doing anything? We may as well buy a gallon of ice cream, watch Netflix, and hope for the best. 

It’s not enough to believe that our political situation is incredibly important or existential. We have to also believe three additional things: 

1. That the situation actually can be fixed. 
2. That we have found the right leadership and/or strategies to fix it. 
3. That our personal contribution of time and money will make a difference. 

My sense is that many of us who care deeply and understand the existential nature of the threat do not feel clear that any of the three (above) conditions have been met (i.e., we’re not confident the situation can be fixed! We don’t know who or how to fix it! And we don’t believe that our personal contribution is likely to make a difference!). 

As a result, we feel an acute lack of clarity about what is to be done, a lack of decisiveness in taking action, and a lack of hope and agency that anything we do will actually matter. 

In short, as rational humans, we need to see a viable pathway in order to feel motivated to take action. So let’s talk about our opportunities.

Opportunity 1: Millions of Pissed-Off Voters

All across the country, millions of Americans are waking up to the negative consequences of the Trump regime – described below – often in visceral personal ways. 

Millions of Trump voters and independent voters from across the political spectrum are being personally harmed by Trump’s policies – and millions more will be harmed – including: 

• Consumers impacted by tariffs (all of us)
• Seniors
• Medicaid recipients
• Disaster survivors screwed by FEMA
• SNAP recipients
• Veterans
• Farmers
• Business owners
• Immigrant families
• Trans and gender non-conforming people and their families
• Women and people of reproductive age
• Racial minorities
• Religious minorities
• Union members
• Government workers
• National Guard members
• Students
• Student debt holders
• Nonprofit workers
• Health-care workers
• Clean-energy workers
• The agriculture, restaurant, home care, and construction industries
• People with family members from “banned” countries
• Most people making less than $50,000 per year
• Countless other categories of Americans, large and small

What is Our Job in this Moment? Show Up, Listen, Organize

Our opportunity is to show up for the millions of people who are hurting. To empathize, to welcome, to connect the dots, and to support them where possible. 

Ultimately we want to help people feel connected to a sense of community and belonging, while offering pathways to real solutions to their immediate needs for health care, child care, housing, and more. 

This is how we transform hearts and minds, one conversation and relationship at a time. This is the art of organizing that we need to scale – both in-person and through online communication.

MVP’s partners are showing up to listen to people and grow their bases of support – and working hard to expand their organizing to reach more people. In the short term, we only need to win back a few hundred thousand voters in the right places to regain our electoral majorities. But in the long run, the opportunity and the need is much greater – if we can make the necessary shifts, we have the opportunity for a major political realignment.

Opportunity 2: Trump World Dumpster Fire

The data points are piling up and they overwhelmingly point in one direction: The luxury Trump aircraft is losing altitude. 

Trump has been consistently seven to ten points underwater in aggregated polling since July. The top things driving his unpopularity (economic pain, tariffs, cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, immigrant abductions, etc.) are likely to worsen and drive down both his support and enthusiasm over time.

Trump’s 2024 Voters Are Abandoning Him

Trump’s coalition is fraying and losing enthusiasm – from the Epstein files to broken promises on inflation, Medicaid, and war, his approval is slipping among his 2024 voters. His coalition is a tenuous, fractious alliance that is beginning to show cracks – from podcasters Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, and Theo Von to Marjorie Taylor Greene and others. Trump’s drop in approval has been steepest among young voters, Latinos, and voters of color, whose Trump approval rating has cratered by about 20 points since the 2024 election. 

More Pain Is Coming for More Voters

Trump and his cabinet will continue to do harmful and idiotic things that drive embarrassing news cycles, and harm, impoverish, and kill people. CDC resignations! FEMA unresponsiveness! IRS whistleblowers! Hegseth! Bondi! Homan! Every week, we’re seeing more crises, more scandals, more flubs, more cover-ups, more corruption, more disasters. The pain points will add up.

Meanwhile, the economy – the biggest driver of public opinion – is being pummeled by Trump’s tariffs and deportation regime and is trending toward stagflation. Job numbers are barely above water – and are already quasi-recessionary in every industry besides health care, with 22 states already effectively in a recession and more trending in that direction. On top of this, people are about to start losing health insurance or seeing their premiums spike. This will cause suffering in millions of people’s lives. The wave of tariff price hikes is only just beginning to reach consumers. 

Approximately 1.5 million people left the country in the first half of 2025 due to deportations and “voluntary” departures. If that trend continues, we will lose 1% of the US population (and workforce) by early 2026 – causing acute worker shortages in industries from construction to agriculture to child care and elder care. 

Trump’s war on renewable energy will drive up energy costs. Consumer confidence is on the rocks. Uncertainty and chaos have frozen business investment and are harming exports and tourism, as our international allies seek alternatives to the United States – or avoid traveling or investing here because they see it as too dangerous, as 300 Korean workers at an EV battery plant in Georgia recently learned the hard way.

Trump’s Personal Decline Is Almost Inevitable

Finally, Trump himself isn’t getting any younger, healthier, or more articulate. He couldn’t walk straight on the red carpet in Alaska, was recently diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, disappeared from public view for multiple days in September, and has been behaving even more erratically than usual. 

Trump is not immune to the dynamics that plagued Biden’s final years in office. It’s almost inevitable that these issues will contribute over time to an overall perception of unfitness for the job among swing voters. The likelihood of health-related cover-ups will further weigh on his trust and approval. 

Trump’s Unpopularity Is Our Untapped Opportunity

The pendulum has already swung back at least part way. Historically, presidents tend to become more unpopular over time. The more he harms the economy and the more people are personally hurt, the more his former supporters will walk away from the trainwreck. All the transgressive media personalities who supported Trump are now having to defend every unpopular thing he does, which isn’t great for their ratings or clicks. Many are edging away from him or jumping ship. 

The more Trump’s approval and enthusiasm sinks, the more it will create opportunities for us to expand our coalition. The more Democrats overperform down-ballot over the next three years, the more it will weaken the spine of our opponents — and the more it will strengthen the spine of persuadable judges, media, businesses, faith leaders, military, influencers, law enforcement, Republican electeds and government workers at all levels to challenge him, leak stories, blow whistles, and undermine his project of authoritarian control. 

Trump’s recklessness has damaged the United States on the global stage. But it has put wind in the sails of liberal and anti-authoritarian political parties from Canada and Mexico to Brazil and Argentina, Australia, across Europe, and beyond. Trump is working to kill clean energy at home, but it’s still growing, and globally, it’s surging to record levels, powered by China. Again, all of this is bad for the U.S., economically and diplomatically. But in an ironic twist, Trump’s terribleness is provoking an “anti-Trump Bump” among progressive and centrist political parties worldwide that is helping steer other countries away from his disastrous course. 

All of this is to say: There is hope that all this economic and social pain will provoke backlash. Trump and his cabinet of ghouls is doing half the work for us. We just need to do the other half.

Opportunity 3: Our Side is Showing Signs of Life

Democrats Are Winning at the Ballot Box

Electorally, we have the wind at our backs. Democrats have overperformed in almost every special, state, and local election in 2025, surpassing gains made at this time eight years ago, when they netted 40 U.S. House seats. In 2017, Democrats were overperforming by an average of eight points; in 2025, it’s over eighteen points. And it is not just in quirky special elections or blue strongholds. In the Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this year - where Elon Musk dumped $20 million into the race – Democrat Susan Crawford won by roughly ten points, improving on Harris’ margins in all 72 counties. Hopefully we continue that trend on November 4, 2025 (and that’s our plan).

Grassroots Energy Is Surging

Our activist base is fired up. The scale and scope of protests in 2025 have far outpaced that of 2017. Congressional town hall meetings have been absolutely through the roof. Republican members of Congress have basically stopped doing town hall meetings in the reddest districts because everywhere they show up, they’re getting overwhelming pushback from packed rooms of constituents. This has led to a new type of event: the “empty chair” town hall where members of Congress are held accountable in absentia. 

Indivisible has played an incredible leadership role – in tandem with an emerging No Kings alliance of organizations that have created visibility through nonviolent street protests. The first No Kings day of protest in June over 2,150 rallies with up to 4.8 million people in the streets – three times more geographically sprawling than the comparable-sized Women’s March in 2017 – with so many creative, funny meme-able posters and patriotic American flags and unifying messages. We are excited for No Kings Day 2 (October 18th) as an important step toward building a larger, more deeply committed movement!

Our Side is Evolving in Promising Ways

Our coalition is showing signs of life and at least an openness to the idea that we might need to radically evolve our ways of doing things in this new era.

Our candidates and elected officials are trying things – experimenting with humor, courage, new ideas, boldness, and refreshing displays of honesty and vulnerability. From Mamdani’s inspiration of young New Yorkers, to Gavin Newsom’s mocking all-caps tweets, to Democrats’ growing embrace of populist independents like Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn, to Bernie and AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy tour.

Our organizations are showing up and evolving in myriad ways – from the initial post-election organizing calls collaboratively led by Indivisible, MoveOn, and Working Families that drew over 100,000 attendees each, to renewed efforts in rural, faith-based, and veteran organizing. 

We have a new crop of efforts to organize and engage men and online gamers to create an alternative to the manosphere. We have a lot of experimentation. We have a new holiday, Sun Day, to accelerate the growth of solar energy. Major new grassroots networks like 50501 – with over a million followers – are organizing first-time activists on Reddit. And there is a lot of buzz around efforts at collaboration among leaders to get organized and evolving to meet the moment.

Our side appears to be getting more serious about the digital media game – we have a long way to go, but at least there’s a lot more recognition of how shockingly behind we are, and what we need to do to catch up. We have the anti-incumbent wind at our backs, which is helpful online as well. The digital army our opponents relied on throughout the campaign last year has begun to sour on the new establishment — challenging them on everything from the Epstein files to ICE brutality.

We Are Standing Up to the Bullies

We’ve suffered big losses with institutions getting bullied by Trump, but we’ve also seen growing examples of a courageous pushback from higher education to law firms to the defense of Jimmy Kimmel drawing business and ratings away from the institutions that caved early. Harvard draws support while Columbia suffers. Costco is thriving while Target struggles.

We’ve seen a huge outpouring of energy around immigrant defense. Communities are organizing mutual aid networks, ICE watches, and rapid response teams that show up almost instantly when ICE is spotted nearby. Neighbors bang pots and pans and create human barriers to slow down ICE agents. White women in California are putting Mexican flags on their cars to distract ICE officers. 

This is an important strategy – surviving and running down the clock on the Trump regime’s window to perpetrate harm. Time is not on their side. The government does not have unlimited people hours to deploy. Every hour they spend going after Harvard or James Comey or the guy who threw the hero sandwich is an hour they aren’t spending pursuing other targets. The more we can nonviolently waste their time, the fewer horrific acts they will be able to commit.

And we do still have major and growing demographic strength on our side. 75 million Americans voted for a Black and Asian-American woman for President last year despite political headwinds (nearly as many as voted for Trump). Young people and people of color overall still voted Democratic and their numbers are still growing (which should help us in 2026 and 2028). 

Obviously we need to grow our percentages. But we’re talking about strengths and opportunities here and this is a huge strength. The rising American majority won’t automatically save us, but it matters that the fastest-growing segments of the electorate are more with us than against us.

In short, we have a precious window of opportunity – at least through 2027. 

We have a real chance to pull our country back from the brink of authoritarian consolidation — but it’s up to us now to seize it.

Part Two: So What’s The Plan?

Here is a ten-step plan to turn our country around – starting now. Again, some of this is definitely aspirational and all of it is inherently collaborative – beyond what any one organization can or should try to do single-handedly. Some steps, MVP and our partners are already working on. Many are still in the design phase or early in development. Consider this an exercise in imagination. Imagine if we could put all these pieces together over the next three years. We would reinvent our movement, our political coalition, our leadership, and our country. Please join us in imagining this vision, developing it with us, sparking generative conversations, and manifesting it into reality.

Step 1. Knock Authoritarianism Back on Its Heels

Trump and his cronies are rushing to consolidate power. They’re trying to blatantly rig the system with actions like mid-decade redistricting. Their ultimate goal is permanent one-party rule and a stranglehold on media, culture, and the economy. Before we do anything else, we must be all-hands-on-deck to win the immediate narrative, organizing, and political battles of 2025. 

We are off to a decent start: turning out massively in the streets, overperforming in every special election, making a scene at town halls, showcasing the harm of Trump policies, and driving down the bad guys’ approval ratings. Here is how we block them and knock them on their heels:

Win Big on November 4th, 2025

This is a no-brainer. Down-ballot elections should be a favorable battlefield for us. But in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s horrifying murder, the other side is showing signs of being galvanized as well. We don’t know how this “Kirk Effect” is going to play out, but we can’t take this election for granted. 

We have big things to win this November 4th that will set the stage for political momentum in 2026: We need to win back trifecta control of Virginia; that will get us up to sixteen state-level Democratic trifectas as a bulwark against Trumpism. Dems need to hold their trifecta in New Jersey which is under serious threat. In Pennsylvania, we need to retain three seats on the state Supreme Court, which has a role in, among other things, securing fair districts and election integrity in our largest swing state. We need to win the power to redistrict in California to counteract Republican redistricting in the House. And we have the chance to expand our base, build the bench, shape the narrative, and set the agenda through other key races down-ballot – from the Mayor of New York City to the Public Service Commission in Georgia. And due to a pending retirement, we may also have a chance to win another Wisconsin Supreme Court race in early 2026. 

→ Resource: MVP’s 2025 Electoral Plans

Set the Table for 2026

We also need to turn up the heat on congressional Republicans and make sure their constituents know that their reps are acting against their interests – from the Big Bad Bill to the government shutdown. Battleground Alliance is helping dozens of local and national groups to coalesce and coordinate local organizing capacity in all the key flippable House districts. Consistent voter engagement and accountability set the table for flipping the House in 2018 during the first Trump Administration (which was widely considered impossible at the time). We can do it again.

Other 2026 races could also play a key role in thwarting authoritarianism, particularly Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General races. Governors play a big role in the resistance. AGs drive court fights which help both in winning and in the discovery process. Secretaries of State oversee elections. We need to invest early in sustained local and digital community organizing if we want to win these elections — and do it in a way that builds power beyond Election Day. 

→ Resource: MVP’s 2025-2026 Strategy

Resistance in the Streets

We need to use all the tools in the toolbox to challenge the legitimacy of this regime and invest in growing our organized people power. Massive No Kings protests are building energy for civil resistance, strikes, lawsuits, whistleblowers, asymmetric strategies, and economic actions – from Disney to Tesla to Target boycotts which have hurt their bottom lines and sent a message to other companies not to follow suit. Overall, what we most need now is a groundswell of people rising up to say “no” to the regime. MVP’s local and national partners – including Indivisible, MoveOn, Working Families, and others, are critical in this effort – along with the No Kings alliance of local organizers. We need all our actions together to add up to a shift in popular opinion and public will. 

If we do well this fall, we’ll start 2026 with momentum. We will put more cracks in the Death Star. This will lead to better candidate recruitment and more fundraising, volunteer energy, and GOP congressional retirements (November and January are the top months for incumbents to announce their exits). And GOP defections! All this will bring an infusion of hope and agency. 

Step 2. Reimagine the Left (and Ourselves) as Confident, Joyful, Bridge-Builders

As the left, we need to honestly face how much we have lost ground in the media, narrative, culture, and branding war since 2020. 

Not so long ago, in the Obama era, our multiracial, cross-class, left-to-center coalition was both culturally and politically ascendant. In ten short years, the other side has capitalized on backlash to Obama’s presidency, leapfrogged us in organizing, and completely turned the tables. Now it’s our turn to go into the wilderness, do soul-searching, remember who we really are in our heart of hearts, and make a powerful comeback with a compelling, unifying way to talk about our shared vision, values, and identity. 

Obama at his best was an archetype of a confident, joyful, bridge-builder. Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah are confident, fun bridge-builders. Across ideology, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, Wes Moore, Sarah McBride, and Zohran Mamdani all have some similar happy-warrior attributes. They are authentic. They see and empathize with people. And at their best, they make us remember why we love this country. Remember people chanting “Yes we can!” and “USA! USA!!” at Obama rallies with a deep sense of pride and connection? We need a movement that makes us feel like that again.

The Right Has Accomplished a Branding Coup

In the post-Obama era, the right-wing brand has captured a lot of symbolic real estate. In the public narrative, they not only own the symbols of America, our flag, and patriotism – they own Christianity and God, and they are making substantial inroads into Jewish and Muslim communities, as well. They own all the normative identities: whiteness and manliness, getting married, and having a family.

They have stolen the mantle of the working class, and using cultural resentment and gender wedges, they’re making a serious play for Latino hearts and minds and even nibbling at the edges of Blackness. They arguably dominate the attentional landscape around concepts of happiness, wellness, money, success, athletics, parenting, and entrepreneurship – they have even co-opted the idea of greatness. They have dominated new media and made a lot of cultural arenas that were until recently almost solely the domain of the left – authenticity, transgression, free speech, comedy, humor and even vulnerability – into contested territory. Vulnerability! 

Paradoxically, they have threaded the needle to simultaneously own both the normative identities (America, whiteness, maleness, Christianity, winners) and somehow also position themselves as rebellious, edgy, persecuted, outcast, underdog happy-angry cultural warriors. My God. They’re even trying to position themselves as anti-war and anti-violence, and position the left as the purveyors of political violence. It’s wild that they have been able to accomplish this branding coup to the extent that they have (thanks to both their shamelessness and media domination).

To “Rebrand” Democrats, We Must Return to (and Deepen) Our Values

A lot of how the left has unwittingly positioned ourselves in the post-2008 era has been reactive, holier-than-thou, judgmental, risk-averse, humorless (unwilling to laugh at ourselves). Overall, we’re seen as not very fun, and not very empathetic with people’s economic and social anxiety, rage, fear, and longing for purpose, community, family, and emotional connection. As someone said recently, “our intolerance of intolerance has made us intolerable.”

There are very good reasons why we have fought for justice, for truth, and for marginalized communities – and why we have been reactive, and even at times humorless in the face of inexcusable behavior, dehumanization, and worse. We have every right to feel deep anger toward our political opponents. At the same time, we have often let our understandable reactions of pain, rage, and revulsion get in the way of a savvy strategy to welcome potential newcomers. We should forgive ourselves for this! We must be empathetic with ourselves and our fellow travelers in the big-tent Democratic coalition first and foremost. And we must find a way to also find empathy both for our opponents and, perhaps even more importantly, for our imperfect or inconsistent allies whom we desperately need in order to create a governing majority. 

It can feel challenging and contradictory, for sure; if I care about people who are being attacked for being who they are, how can I also be compassionate and welcoming toward people whose differing priorities have led – passively and even actively – to harm for those same people? So many of us pride ourselves on our critical thinking and our ability to hold complexity and creative tension. We can, and must, hold these complexities and make space in our shared sense of humanity for folks who we disagree with on important things.  

If we’re telling someone who is married to a Trump voter or who has family members who are Trump voters essentially that their spouse or parent or sibling is bad and dumb and wrong then we are driving people out of our movement and into our opponents’ camp.

What can we do? While we fight the immediate fights, we need to make big adaptive changes to reinvent the Democratic coalition and the progressive movement. We need to bridge internal divides, and as Loretta J. Ross writes, we must let go of the equation of dissent with betrayal. We need a full narrative reset. And we need to adapt culturally to the attention economy and be savvy about in-group vs. out-group dynamics and how to practice addition rather than subtraction in our coalition.

If we are not actively welcoming our imperfect and inconsistent allies – people with whom we disagree about some important things – and working proactively to hold them within our coalition and treat them with care and kindness, we risk losing them to the welcoming arms of the right wing’s vertically integrated meta-church. 

This is true across all demographic groups! The right wing is coming for Black men, white men, Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Muslims, Jews, queer folks, white women. They’re even coming for Black women, the most reliably progressive of us all. We cannot afford to take any of our people or communities for granted!

The Democratic Party’s brand is damaged. We need a big-tent rebrand rooted in truly inclusive values that resonate across class, race, gender, culture, and geography. 

A New Fusion of Populism and Pragmatism

Fundamentally, we need a new fusion between Obama and Bernie energy.

For example, the left and the center-left are fighting over the abundance agenda (“less red tape for building housing!” vs. “more public investment in housing!”). There is also a tug-of-war on the economic policy agenda broadly: a pragmatic “kitchen-table” agenda (represented by “frontline” Democratic governors and House members in red or purple districts) versus a more expansive vision of fighting oligarchy and taxing billionaires to expand universal public goods, health care, preschool, etc (represented by Mamdani, Bernie, and progressives). The truth is, we need bold populism and bold pragmatism to win the next phase, and there is common ground to be found.

We need a left + center-left agreement around a shared agenda that is pragmatic and bold (see Step 4 below) – supportive of our communities facing direct attack, and also inclusive of a diverse coalition that doesn’t need to agree on everything. We need to emphasize the bold policy points we consistently have majority support on, like taxing billionaires, building housing, and shifting to clean energy. We need to get better at saying: We don’t agree about everything and that’s OK.

Leading With Love: We Need a Culture Shift on the Left

Finally, we need to rethink our culture, strategies, and habits. Much of liberal and leftist social-justice culture is rooted in an inflated sense of our own moral righteousness, and normativity. Basically, we act like everyone should think and act like us or else they are wrong and bad and stupid and contemptible. 

Our values of freedom, fairness, justice, peace are rooted in a deep bedrock belief in interdependence and a recognition that we are all equally worthy. We are all “God’s children.” We are all worthy of dignity, rights, respect, and human flourishing. 

Yet too often, not unlike our opponents on the right, we operate from a place of fear, reactiveness, defensiveness, scarcity, judgment, condemnation, and separation instead of empathy, curiosity, and love. Don’t we? Again, it is completely understandable that we do this. We’re human too, and we should be empathetic toward ourselves. But politically, lack of empathy is an act of self-sabotage. This constant incoherence with our own values is driving millions of people into the arms of our opponents, who have, ironically, become much better than us at meeting people where they are at, welcoming people, and creating a sense of authenticity, purpose, and belonging.

We need a culture shift on the left to more deeply and confidently act in accordance with our own values. It starts with each of us reimagining ourselves as generous, joyful, bridge-building warriors. This will require shifts in how we think, talk, and act. The good news is that this culture shift, in theory at least, is within our control. Every single one of us gets the chance to practice being a confident, joyful, bridge-building warrior in small ways every day. 

Having talked honestly with over a hundred movement leaders about this phenomenon, I see more and more of us coming to recognize the depth of the problem and wanting to see us evolve away from our self-defeating reactive culture on the left – and towards a more healthy, confident, hopeful, welcoming, and bridge-building culture. 

We are capable of creating a better and more fully inclusive culture and vision for the future that feels new and attractive. It is the foundation of how we are ultimately going to be trusted with governing power – by building a kind and welcoming culture that reflects our deepest values and that a majority of people actually want to be part of.

We can do it.

Step 3. Rebrand our Coalition (AKA Team America)

The Democratic and progressive social-justice brands are both unpopular. We need to confront this reality and adapt accordingly. The GOP brand was very unpopular ten years ago when Trump created MAGA as a charismatic meta-brand (capitalizing on the success of its predecessor, the Tea Party) with an appealing new identity that lives both inside and outside the Republican Party. 

From a branding and culture perspective, the right wing has pulled off a brilliant cultural feat: They own the red, white, and blue American flag. They also own the dark, distressed, transgressive-looking version, as seen on t-shirts and memes. And they own the blue-line, pro-police version. They basically own all of the dominant symbols and narratives of American patriotism and they own transgressive rebellious energy at the same time. It’s a branding triumph for them that they own both the establishment and the rebellion – a common theme in the authoritarian playbook.

We need to reinvent and reboot the Democratic coalition with a new, attention-grabbing, values-based, big-tent, charismatic meta-brand (our equivalent of MAGA) with the spirit of new energy. To create a sense of belonging, we need something new and compelling for people to belong to. Something that bridges the division that MAGA politics feeds on. Like the red MAGA hat, it needs an easily recognizable symbol, a couple of words – and ideally a bold color or color scheme. And it has to imply a sense of belonging. This story has to be fun and attractive and culturally inclusive and embrace the happy-warrior spirit of loving America and fighting for it. It must make people feel part of something larger than a candidate, political party, or identity group. 

We Need a “No” Coalition – and a “Yes” Coalition Too

For example, the largest coalition of groups on our side has chosen “No Kings” as a charismatic meta-brand that captures the pissed-off, anti-establishment energy of the moment. 

No Kings is super short: two syllables – nice and concise, just like MAGA. Its visual symbol is a crossed-out crown – easily recognizable. Its primary color is yellow (like bees, we swarm in the millions, make honey, and sting when attacked). 

No Kings is a smart meta-brand for the spirit of resistance we need right now. It mirrors what has been effective in other countries: A big “No” coalition that the broadest range of people can join to simply say “no.” They don’t have to agree with or believe anything else besides the fact that the current regime is wrong and needs to go. 

No Kings is a great example of a negative meta-brand. We are also going to need a positive meta-brand that a broad group of people can say “YES” to. 

As a hypothetical example: Imagine millions of people gathering all over the country for America’s 250th anniversary next July, wearing blue Team America baseball caps - with white lettering, and some sort of well-designed flag imagery. This would be an example of a “yes” brand. Another version could be Team Everybody or Team Working Families which would probably be a lot more appealing to most folks on our side who are frankly uncomfortable with explicit appeals to America and patriotism – myself included. At the same time, I think we also need to interrogate our discomfort with patriotism. As many have noted wisely: We can’t lead a country we don’t love.

No Bad Ideas in a Brainstorm

My goal here is not to rally everyone around this idea and print a million baseball caps tomorrow, but to get our creative juices flowing. What is the phrase and symbol that should be printed on millions of baseball caps, lawn signs, t-shirts and bumper stickers – something that captures the identity, aspiration, and values that our entire coalition can embrace? We want to hear your ideas!

Whether or not “Team America” with blue baseball caps is the perfect name or symbol or brand for this reimagined meta-movement at this moment in our history, it has several strong qualities we should look for in whatever meta-brand we coalesce around. I’m spelling this out more to get the ball rolling than to make the case for Team America per se…

• It centers the collective idea of a “team,” in contrast with the individualistic, exclusionary version of America pushed by the right. People love teams. We get teams. We all want to be part of a team. There is deep emotional resonance with “team” across race, class, age, gender, and geography. If we could own the idea of being one big team that is fighting for America, we would be well on our way to winning.
• It reflects one of our deepest values: interdependence. It repositions America as a team. We sink or swim together. We can’t throw anyone under the bus. Our fates are “tied in a single garment of destiny.” Those are our transgender and immigrant neighbors, our Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends. Our small business owners. Our scientists. Our farmers getting tariffed into bankruptcy. This is OUR COUNTRY dammit. We’re going to fight for it.
• It reclaims the concepts of nationalism and patriotism as progressive ideas within a values-based, competitive, Realpolitik framework — without invoking xenophobia. 
• It needs an explicit motto along the lines of: “Together We Win” or “No Kings Since 1776” or “No One Gets Thrown Under the Bus.” None of these brainstorms is good… But we do need a clever, catchy motto of some kind that is an easy and potent rejoinder to all the divisive rhetoric from the other side (and also, let’s be honest, from our own side too). 
• For better or worse, Team America is a sly pop-culture reference. It was the name of a movie by the creators of South Park who are having a moment right now. Ideally it could be seen as funny and retro-ironic by younger generations who might find humor in repurposing it, initially as an inside joke, and over time as something people could believe in more earnestly. Yes, the movie was completely ridiculous and offensive, but I think we could chalk that up to… not taking ourselves too seriously.

Regardless of whether our charismatic “yes” meta-brand is called “Team America” or “Team Everybody” or “Team Working Families” or something else, we need some type of muscular and appealing new meta-movement with a clear visual symbol, a color, and a few words, that tens of millions of people feel passionately connected to and a majority of Americans feel at least passively connected to at the level of identity and belonging.

How Do We Create Our Next Great Meta-Brand?

It is very hard to achieve a meta-brand that creates a sense of belonging at scale when we don’t have a singular standard bearer like Barack Obama or Donald Trump to lead it. 

But it’s not impossible to create charismatic meta-brands in a bottom-up way. Think: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, #MeToo, and yes, the Tea Party – each powerful, memetic, viral, social movements with a unifying narrative that large groups of people saw themselves in.  

Similarly, our meta-brand must reflect a deeply compelling story — told repeatedly by prophetic voices, grassroots leaders, and everyday people: Who we are, where we’ve come, our values, the challenges we face, and what we need to do. 

The first challenge is getting a new meta-brand to catch on. The second challenge is to get it to stick for more than 5 minutes. The third challenge is keeping it going and making sure it doesn’t blow itself apart. This is why a unifying narrative is so key: it ties our brand to the big picture.

Part of what has been so impressive about MAGA is its staying power. Once we find the next great meta-brand with wide appeal across our winning coalition, we need to embrace it in a ride-or-die way that creates a sense of belonging, identity, and staying power when it gets attacked.

Step 4. Launch A Bold and Catchy “ABC” Economic Agenda

We need to say what we stand for. Mamdani has done this well with free buses and rent freezes. So did Trump with Build the Wall and No Tax on Tips. We need catchy, memorable policies that people can see, touch, and feel in their day-to-day lives. We could start with something like a simple “ABC” Economic Agenda – connecting the Obama and Bernie wings of our coalition:

• Affordability Affordability Affordability. We need a progressive version of an abundance agenda. We’re going to bring down prices by building more houses and clean energy, reversing Trump tariffs, fighting price gouging, monopolies and more. How do we make things more affordable? By building more houses, more factories, more clean energy, and smart grids — combined with higher take-home pay for working people and affordable public goods like education, paid for by higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy (see below). “Build Baby Build!” could be a positive chant at rallies – as it has been in Canada – as a counterpoint to “Drill Baby Drill!” or “Build the Wall.” And – see below – we can bring together a progressive abundance agenda with a populist agenda – the best of both worlds!
• Billionaire Tax. We need to tax billionaire wealth (not just income) and create a "billionaire dividend” check that every American receives in their bank account ideally every month – so that people experience the results immediately. Extreme wealth is a threat to national security – and a danger to nation-states worldwide. We can’t have billionaires buying up our country and stealing our elections. We need an international compact to progressively tax multi-billionaires and multi-national corporations, go after tax evasion, and raise wages for regular people. Build America not Billionaires!
• Care Care Care. Universal health care! Child care! Elder care! The health insurance system is breaking and it’s getting worse. Parents are struggling to afford child care. The crisis in elder care is bursting at the seams. The cost of higher education is saddling generations in debt. We almost won major national progress in 2022 and 2024. We almost won free community college and trade schools. As the affordability crisis worsens, bold solutions will become more appealing and expand political will. We are a movement by and for working families who are getting crushed and desperately need affordable care and education. 

Whether it’s the ABC Agenda or something else, we need something catchy, bold, and memorable. When people ask “what do Democrats and progressives stand for?” the answer should be as simple as “ABC.” 

Step 5. Train and Deploy Thousands of Empathetic Organizers

Simultaneous with Steps 1-4 (winning 2025, a reinvented coalition, a new meta-brand, and a compelling economic agenda) we need to get out there and talk with people. We need to rebuild our coalition, our brand, and our agenda as part of the organizing process. Taking a page from Lean Start-Up methods, we want to iterate quickly in conversation with our “customers” and fail forward fast until we succeed! 

MVP’s local partners undoubtedly do effective organizing, mobilization, and political work. The question is, how can we help scale up their work with more breadth, depth, sense of belonging, connection, and shared worldview? We need both a top-down and bottom-up approach.

On the top-down side, we need compelling national leadership, vision, strategies, and networks. We need on-ramps for people to get involved through digital, cultural, and events-based funnels as well as national brands and personal followings. We need money to flow to organizations and creators who inspire, absorb, and develop new leaders, volunteers, donors, and organizers. 

On the bottom-up side, we need local organizations to do the same at the local level. We need to scale up labor community partnerships, which were so successful in Minnesota and so many other places where we have won meaningful change. And most of all, we need to scale up and support youth and student organizing. The right-wing invested massively in youth and students (with $100 million annual budget for Turning Point USA and $70 million for Prager U while our largest youth organization, the Alliance for Youth Action has a core budget around $10 million). We absolutely need to massively invest in youth organizing – this should be the core of our whole strategy.

Deep Local Organizing, Not Superficial Astroturfing

There is no cookie-cutter formula to connect local, regional, labor, community, and national organizing efforts. Our country is vast. We have more than 340 million people spread across 3,100 counties, 41,000 zip codes, and 176,000 precincts. There's already been an incredible surge of new organizing energy in cities, like LA, DC, and Chicago, where Trump has deployed ICE and the National Guard. With an eye on the midterms, MVP is concentrating on funding  organizing in the key 2026 House, Senate and perennial battleground states.

In some places, local groups have more capacity. In other places, labor unions or chapters of national organizations like Indivisible or the NAACP have better reach. In many places, organic local formations or social networks have the most reach. In many places, honestly, vibrant local organizing needs to be revitalized, built upon, or even built from scratch!

The local organizations MVP funds do a lot of heavy lifting. But there is only so much that a few hundred local organizations can do in a country so vast. We need to support a wide range of organizing structures to engage many more people and create a sense of belonging, shared identity, and collective participation at scale. 

We need to create a hybrid organizer swarm that draws on deep canvassing (empathetic listening, storytelling, and persuasion) and community and labor organizing (developing leaders, bringing groups together, and taking collective action). This strategy must work in tandem with digital, cultural, brand and candidate-based forms of attention engagement. And it must continue – and be funded – after Election Day, regardless of whether any one candidate wins or loses. When we win, we need to fight for concrete policy gains that people notice in their lives, and keep building toward the next fight, whatever it may be; and when we lose, we need to make sure organizers stay on the ground to minimize policy backslides and build power for the next electoral contest. 

We need scale, and that will require decentralization. Collectively, we need to train and deploy tens of thousands of paid organizers to support millions of volunteers, precinct captains, digital communicators, and movement ambassadors to meaningfully reach a majority of Americans. 

Building a Real Movement, Not a Candidate-Driven Flash in the Pan 

If the 2028 presidential campaign is effective, it will temporarily absorb a lot of the energy. But the real goal is to build a scaled organizer swarm bigger than any presidential campaign including Obama 2008, Bernie 2020, or Trump 2024 – bigger than any candidate or political campaign.

As part of this effort, we (a coalition of the willing) must collectively recruit and train tens of thousands of organizers and millions of volunteers by next summer to organize tens of millions of voters around a shared plan. It has to feel both like an exciting new thing – like Obama’s Organizing For America (OFA) but not owned by a candidate or subsumed by the Democratic Party – and it also has to channel passion and language as bold as the crisis in people’s lives. 

The immediate political goal is to meaningfully connect with millions of fence-sitters and couch-sitters – in key states and districts – to inspire them to vote for Democrats in 2026 and 2028. But the real goal is much deeper and more transformational. It is to build a sense of shared identity and worldview at scale that is compelling enough to win back hearts and minds. To be truly effective, the deeper transformational work has to come first. Basically, this is our window right now to build a real long-term people-powered movement before the 2028 Democratic Presidential candidates come along and build their superficial flash-in-the-pan ones.

Step 6. Build Our Digital Swarm

Alongside our massive Organizer Swarm, we need to build a Digital Swarm of content creators, micro-influencers, and niche cultural icons. The goal of our swarm must be to surpass (or at least match) the reach and influence of the digital armada on the other side.

This means investing in a vast fleet of creators and platforms, attention-getting ideas, revenue strategies, technology, and talent that can sustainably tell stories, interpret the world, and be cultural go-tos on topics from sports to health, life advice to comedy, money to beauty. By any means necessary, we need to win hearts and minds.

Our Digital Swarm needs to be able to accomplish everything the right’s media ecosystem does – and more. This is a tall order. It’s going to cost a lot of money. It’s going to require a lot of trial and error. And we’re not going to get there overnight. But we cannot win without it. We have to dive into the deep end of this toxic media cesspool and swim until we figure it out. The good news? A lot of the money to fund it can be repurposed from the billions of dollars we currently spend on TV ads that fewer and fewer voters are even watching, let alone trusting. 

→ Resource: MVP’s Plan to Win the Media War

Step 7. Influence the Candidates – and the Culture 

Obama emerged in part from the anti-war movement. Bernie rode the narrative wave of the Occupy movement. Trump capitalized on the energy of the Tea Party movement. Going back way further, Lincoln was continuously pushed toward supporting emancipation by the black abolition movement. As many have pointed out: “Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision. Social movements come second. Political change comes last.”

Step 7 will build on the success of Steps 2-6. Candidates tend to follow larger movements and reflect them. Ideally, build a lot of momentum and energy by mid-2026 and the Democratic candidates who are running will pick up on the most popular and successful aspects of our reimagined movement. And the movement will in turn embolden Democrats and inspire exciting new candidates to run in novel ways that meet the moment. 

In 2018, organizers in Minnesota worked with political linguist Anat Shenker Osorio and We Make the Future to develop a narrative campaign called “Greater than Fear” – a play on the phrase “Greater Minnesota” which refers to rural Minnesota which is often pitted against urbanites in the Twin Cities. The campaign spoke to the elephant in the room: that Republicans were using racial and religious fear to mobilize voters. 

To combat Republican wedge issues, the Greater Than Fear coalition developed an inoculating “race-class” counter-story that the Republicans were intentionally sowing racial division in order to pit the working class against each other for their own financial gain. The counter-narrative was so smart and effective that soon the entire Democratic Party, including Governor Tim Walz, was embracing and running on the message.

This is the kind of effect we need to create – first in 2026, and again in 2028 and beyond. Our job is to create the cultural wind to embolden Democrats to ride to victory in a way that creates a real mandate to govern boldly.

→ Resource: MVP’s Plan to Embolden Democrats

Step 8: Overperform in 2026: Win Congress and the States 

Speaking of winning, we obviously need to win big in 2026, both in Congress and at the state level, with a compelling over-performance that tells a confident story about our ascendency. 

For starters, we need to flip the House, ideally by a comfortable margin. We have the potential to flip 20-25 GOP House districts. That means fighting wherever you can right now on mid-cycle redistricting – from California to Missouri. It means continuing to organize swing-district voters to hold their GOP reps’ feet to the fire for selling out constituents to MAGA. We need to help Americans connect the dots between closing hospitals, higher prices, and the pain in their lives to their members of Congress. Even factoring in likely Republican gerrymandering, voter suppression, and dirty tricks, we have a strong chance to win back the House – and every seat matters. Winning the House by one seat versus two seats versus five seats will make a world of difference in our ability to govern.

We can make gains in the Senate as well. We have a decent chance to flip three seats: North Carolina with popular governor Roy Cooper; Maine by ousting Susan Collins (potentially with an appealing veteran oyster-farming populist, Graham Platner); and Ohio with economic populist Sherrod Brown.

If we win all three races, and we don’t lose any of the Democratic seats in Georgia, Michigan or elsewhere, it gets us to a 50-50 tie in the Senate – in striking range to re-take the chamber in 2028. And if we get lucky and win a long-shot upset race in a volatile red state like Iowa, Alaska, Florida, Nebraska, or even Texas, we could win the chamber outright in 2026. We have to go all-hands-on-deck to win the Senate back in either 2026 or 2028 if we want to have any shot at advancing progressive policy at the federal level, or impacting the judiciary.

Beyond Congress, most of the important races in 2026 will be at the state level. We need to win power in as many states as possible to create a bulwark against authoritarianism. In a really big wave year, organizers could win (or win back!) Democratic trifectas in several more states: Michigan and Minnesota are eminently winnable, followed by Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Alaska. We should collectively also aim to break or prevent Republican trifectas or supermajorities in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, and New Hampshire. And we need to win as many races as we can for Attorneys General and Secretaries of State who administer elections and serve as a check on Federal legal power. 

For a really dreamy version of what we ultimately want to do at the state level, watch this video about the wildly successful ten-year playbook organizers architected in Minnesota – this is what we are ultimately aiming to do in as many states as possible, and then nationally. 

In the meantime, we need to make the 2026 anti-incumbent wave as big as possible and win as much power as we can in as many states as we can. We have an historic opportunity to win progress at the state level and we need to seize it.

Step 9: Win a Democratic Trifecta in 2028 (Whew!)

Coming out of 2026 with some wind in our sails, some accountability for Trump, and momentum going into 2028, it will be our turn to be bold. We will have a solid foundation under us. Imagine: We have rooted ourselves more deeply in our values and built a bigger tent. We have made progress in Congress and in the states. We’ve learned to fight back in clever new ways. We are no longer crouching in fear – or reacting from a sense of angry powerlessness. We have survived the worst. We have learned and adapted. We are ready to fight now with a new feeling of confidence. We can smell hope. We can taste victory. We can see our way out of the labyrinth. 

We have Presidential candidates who are inspired by our energy and who are rising to meet the moment. Remember back to the feeling we had from 2006 to 2008: We were still living under a horrible Republican regime, but we could see that it had an expiration date. We could feel our people’s growing energy for hope and change. This time around, we have a much deeper hole to climb out of, but we have a lot of the same things going for us. We can make this right-wing backslide temporary. There will still be headwinds. Securing the election won’t be easy, but we can ride the anti-incumbent wave and bring a lot of people along with us. 

When we win, we need to remember the lessons we have learned. We need to govern boldly – as boldly as the crisis in people’s lives.

Step 10: Govern as Boldly as the Crisis in People’s Lives

Organizers in Minnesota, who in 2023 won the most amazing cornucopia of progressive legislation in recent US history, had a motto. They said to their elected leaders: “We need you to govern with an agenda that is as bold as the crisis in people’s lives.” 

This is the vision and spirit we need at the national level. If we accomplish Steps 1-9, it will set us up to deliver on Step 10. How should Democrats govern when we win back power? That is a big and complex question. The short answer: We should govern as boldly as the crisis in people’s lives. 

If you haven’t already, seriously watch this video on the “Minnesota Miracle” all the way to the end – it is the best video we have ever seen about how to both support and push Democrats to govern boldly as happy warriors and deliver on our promises to make life better for everyday people. 

The Big Reboot – Our Project 2029 

Our 2028 campaign and first 100 days of 2029 is The Big Reboot, the governing program of the Comeback Campaign – which isn’t just going back to what we had before. It’s a full reset to create a better system. We should campaign on this Big Reboot and be ready to implement it as quickly as possible. Once we win back trifecta power, we need to do five major things well in the Big Reboot:

1. Repair the damage of the Trump regime – a huge undertaking. We will need our own version of Project 2025 for 2029 and we will need at least the first 12 months to begin to repair what has been broken.
2. Address the affordability crisis and help people economically right away – and pay for it by taxing billionaires and multinational corporations.
3. Communicate constantly in attention-grabbing ways that let people know we are listening. We are taking bold action. And we are on their team. We are Team America.
4. Reform the system in noticeable ways – from expanding voting rights to affordable housing to supercharging clean energy and phasing out fossil fuels to getting money out of politics to ensuring that AI benefits all Americans, not just the titans of big tech.
5. Modernize government to anticipate and address emerging threats – there will be many. We have to transform our government to be ready!

That’s a starting framework. Ideas are welcome! Again, all of this should feel like a big exciting reboot of our political system– before, during, and after!

If we do these five things in 2029, we should have a decent shot at staying in power and heading off an immediate resurgence of Trumpism in 2030 or 2032. 

A key condition for our success will be to continue to innovate and to constantly organize, communicate, create a sense of belonging, and contest for hearts and minds. We need to make deep community building, organizing, and communicating persuasively at scale our #1 priority.

We have a lot of big mountains to climb. But there is no reason we can’t climb them.

It’s not an easy path. But it’s a possible path – we can do it!

When I started writing this memo I was feeling low-key depressed. I was writing it in part to figure out a roadmap for myself and MVP. The more I am writing it, the more I am imagining it, the more possible it is starting to feel. I’m actually starting to get excited. 

At first, I had to force myself to clarify and flesh out all the steps. (Admittedly, there are a lot of steps, and none of them are easy!). But I see a path now more clearly than before. It’s not an easy path but it is a possible path. There is no guarantee we will succeed. But I believe our chances of success are greater than I had been thinking just a few weeks ago. We have to be realistic and pragmatic, but we also have to dream big together.

I’m curious what reading this is making you think. Is it helping you see a path? What is the path you see and how is it similar or different from this one? Either way, we will make the path by walking it – boldly and optimistically, starting now. Conditions will evolve. The plan will need to evolve in real time as the world evolves. But there is no reason why we can’t do it.

As a wise colleague from Solidaire said recently, “we need to go from weathering the storm to turning the tide.”

Part Three: Your Role in the Plan

“OK,” you might be thinking. “This all sounds good… But what can I personally do?” 

Every one of us has time, talents, money, networks, and influence to contribute to a greater cause – one that connects all of our causes. This is an invitation for you as a fellow responsible adult to step up, to shake off your demoralization and despair, and to be the mover and shaker you are required to be in this moment. We can’t wait for some other group of responsible adults to fix it for us. We are called on to join hands and meet this moment of political childishness and tantrums with the level of adult responsibility required. Here’s how:

Join the Movement

Talk with friends and get involved as a super-volunteer in the most effective organizations you can find – locally and/or nationally. Then invite your friends and family to join the fun. 

→ Resource: Take action with MVP partners & allies.

Fund the Movement

Obviously,Bottom line financial resources will be decisive in our ability to execute these strategies. Here’s the case for each of us putting our money toward this project - and below are simple steps to follow.

Expanding the Pie: Three Kinds of Donors We Need to Enlist

The Comeback Plan’s success depends on three kinds of donors who might otherwise sit this out:

1. Donors who mostly stay out of politics
2. Donors who usually just give to candidates
3. Donors who mainly give in big election years

Here is the case we must make to each:

For donors who mostly stay out of politics

There’s that old saying, “If you don't do politics, politics will do you.” We can all safely say this is more true now than ever. Science and public health? Funding slashed, grants withdrawn, research canceled. Arts and humanities? Funding slashed, institutional censorship on the rise. Global aid? DOGE’d out of existence. The environment? Don’t get me started.

Bottom line: The Trump regime and the MAGA movement that swept them into power are endangering every cause we care about. Now it’s going to take all of us to stop the harm, vote them out, and keep them out.

For donors who usually just give to candidates

Yes, candidates need money — but organizing and movement-building is how we shape the overall cultural and political environment, and this is hugely determinative of who gets elected and what policies get passed. Up until now, right-wing funders have invested according to this understanding a lot more effectively than Democratic and progressive funders - see here for examples.

For donors who mainly give in big election years

The huge political changes we need are simply not possible if all we do is give money every 2-4 years. If we want to get to real, long-term governing power, we have to invest accordingly!

Imagine two scenarios: Scenario One, where money on our side is scarce and late; or Scenario Two, where money is early and abundant.

Two Scenarios: Scarcity vs. Abundance

In Scenario One – the Bad Scenario – we struggle to win hearts and minds in 2025 and early 2026. Our leaders don’t have the bandwidth to get together and boldly reimagine the movement. They are feeling a sense of threat and scarcity, so leading with a sense of visionary inclusion and abundance is hard. They don’t develop and commit to a meta-brand. They can’t hire more organizers or experiment with new organizing strategies to meet the moment. They don’t go bananas with media. They don’t go bananas with youth organizing (which also needs to be reinvented)! As a result, we don’t get the wave we need in 2026. We limp into 2028. If we’re lucky enough to win in spite of anemic grassroots support, we don’t have a strong mandate to govern boldly. We don’t accomplish much in 2029. And we lose it all again in 2030 and 2032.

Now picture Scenario Two: We crush it this fall and hit the ground running in 2026 with growing momentum. We have plenty of resources and encouragement to reinvent the Democratic coalition. We experiment. We go bananas with media. We go bananas with youth organizing. We invent a sticky new meta-brand. We invest heavily in training and deploying tons of organizers and empathetic deep canvassers and digital creators to bring folks back from both the couch and the Trump coalition. We make big gains in 2026 – in the House, the Senate, and states – similar to 2006 and 2018. Whoo-hooo!!! We are celebrating. We have momentum. We drive into 2028 with a newfound hope and visionary confidence. In November 2028, we bring this national nightmare to. an. end. We hit the Reset button. We bring our country back and make it better in ways we could hardly have imagined. And while we’re at it, we reinvented the left to be a more positive, confident, inviting, fun place. Out of necessity we birthed invention. We surprised ourselves with our ingenuity. Go Team America!

Please, for the love of God, let’s invest in Scenario Two like we want to see it happen!  

Note: I know we said the 2020 and 2024 election cycles were the most important ever and we don’t want to sound like the boy who cried wolf. But ask yourself: Were we wrong? Yes we cried wolf. And lo and behold, there was a wolf – a whole pack of wolves, and they were far more dangerous than most of us imagined. We were right to cry wolf. And we’re right again – the wolf won’t stop until we stand up and stop him. 

Moving money is a force multiplier because it enables many more people to do the work. 

Long-Term Giving for Long-Term Winning: Four Steps for Donors

To make the 10-Step Plan real, here are four simple steps you can take, whether you have $100 or $10 million to give:

1. Pick your groups: Choose organizations you trust, or give to a strategic grantmaker like MVP, which, like a political “mutual fund,” channels money to the best groups nationwide. 
2. Make your plan: Work with your financial advisor (plus spouse or relevant stakeholders) to write a plan: How much you will consistently give each year, and a simple giving schedule. 
3. Fund with consistency: Set up a recurring monthly, quarterly, or annual contribution. The more automated, the better! Contact the group(s) you’re funding to share your giving plans.
4. Update your will: Put your favorite organizations in your will and estate planning – just in case! – and let them know you’re doing it.

→ Resource: Contact the MVP team for support in crafting your giving plan.

So there you are! Four simple steps to change the course of history.

We need hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of people of conscience to make a commitment to take these steps. Will you be one of the first?

Memo to Leaders: Let’s Talk – and Grow Together

If you are a content creator, community organizer, movement leader, elected official, or party operative, this is for you. The success of this plan depends on you and your leadership! 

The goal of this memo is to start a conversation. Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this memo. What are your reflections, critiques, friendly amendments, and plans of action?

A few specific things you can do:

1. Forward this memo to your teammates, networks, and movement friends.
2. Share your reflections on where we collectively need to go and how to get there. Join our “loving agitation” campaign to spark generative conversations (and if you are an MVP partner organization, holler at your MVP State Advisor or liaison!).
3. Pilot your ideas in your organizational or political sphere of influence, whatever that might be. Get together with a colleague, strategize, and sketch out an action plan. Start small if it helps. Or go big! If there was ever a time to be bold, this is it. 

Above all, if you are waiting for “someone else” to take the lead: Don’t. No one is going to save us. We are the grown-ups now (AKA the responsible adults). We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

Let’s Get It Done!

To accomplish this Comeback Plan, we have to organize like we have never organized before. We have to communicate like never before. We have to lead like never before. We need to move money like never before. We have to hold hands, jump, and work together!

Responsible adults, are you with me? Can you think of anything more worthy of your time and attention? If we dedicate ourselves, we can do it. As Nelson Mandela said: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” 

Let’s get it done.

This memo was a collaborative creation authored mainly by Billy Wimsatt, with extensive writing, editing, ideas, and feedback from Doyle Canning, Zo Tobi, Rachel Gordon, Sarah Chaisson-Warner, Rebecca Ennen, Javier Morillo, Haley Bash, Hallie Montoya Tansey, Jamila Martin, Eugenio Owen Smith, Jason Franklin, JPP, Betty Herschman, Rynn Reed, and the MVP Team. Billy takes full responsibility for the final product.