Politics

The Democrats Didn't Lose Their Brand. They Sold It for a Song

And the bill of sale was signed in 1971, long before most of us were paying attention.

Let's get something out of the way first.

Every few weeks, some pundit with a podcast and a Substack and a Patreon fires off a breathless take about how the 2026 midterms are basically already over. The polling looks decent for Democrats – a 3-point lead on the generic ballot as of late March (RCP shows this as ~ 5% today), motivated base voters, Trump's approval cratering on the economy – thus the conclusion, delivered with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything [1], is that we are six months from a blue wave that will wash the rot out.

I've been here before. Specifically, in early September 2024, watching the same class of people tell me Kamala Harris had a comfortable win locked up. Not a blowout, just a solid, comfortable win. The kind of win that was basically already priced in.

We know how that turned out.

So forgive me if I'm not popping corks. The sticky 41% approval Trump has been sitting at on the RCP aggregate isn't a president in freefall. It's a president with a floor. And floors matter, because they tell you something the ceiling does not: the Republican Party still polls about 5 points higher in favorability than the Democrats. The party being led by a man with 35% approval on the economy polls better than the opposition. Sit with that for a second. Yeah, that sucks to think about, don't it.

The Democrats have an image problem. That's not a controversial observation. What is controversial, apparently, is saying out loud that this problem isn't new, it isn't fixable before November, and the reason it isn't fixable is structural in a way that no messaging consultant or rebranding exercise can touch.

This isn't about vibes. It's about money. And to understand the money, you have to go back to a memo most people have never read. Time to roll up the sleeves and excavate the ruins, because this is neither new, nor simple to unpack.

Buckle up, it's gon' get wild.

Act One: The Blueprint Nobody Talks About Anymore

In August 1971, a corporate attorney from Richmond named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," and it was, to put it plainly, a declaration of war.

Powell's argument was that American business had been asleep while liberals, consumer advocates, and the regulatory state had been systematically dismantling the conditions that allowed capital to accumulate and operate without friction. His prescription: wake the hell up, organize, and fight back. Not just through lobbying, but through think tanks, legal architecture, university outreach, and sustained long-term political investment.

The response was, in retrospect, staggering. Within five years, the Business Roundtable -- formed in 1972 directly from Powell's framework -- had enlisted 113 of the top Fortune 200 companies, accounting for nearly half of the U.S. economy. The Heritage Foundation (1973), ALEC (1973), the Cato Institute (1977), the Manhattan Institute (1978) all followed. The number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington went from 175 to nearly 2,500 within a decade. That's not an evolution. That's a coordinated insurgency.

This is the context in which Carter was elected in 1976. The New Right wasn't a reaction to Carter. It was already built, already funded, and already running by the time he got to the White House. Carter walked into a reorganized playing field and apparently didn't notice until it was too late.

And here's where your Democratic Party story actually begins, not in 2016, not in 2008, not even in 1994. Here, in the late 1970s, when the capital class figured out it could buy the game, and the Democrats looked at the receipts and decided: if you can't beat them, take their money too.

Act Two: The Faustian Bargain, Quantified

The Southern Strategy is real, documented, and ugly. The exodus of the Dixiecrats after the Civil Rights Act remapped the electoral college in ways we are still living with. But that story – the cultural realignment – often gets told in a way that obscures the economic story happening simultaneously, which was arguably more consequential in the long run.

By the 1990s, the Democrats were staring at three consecutive presidential losses [2] and a donor landscape that had been systematically reorganized against them. Their response was the Democratic Leadership Council – the "New Democrats" – and a strategic pivot toward the same corporate money the Republicans had been drinking from for a decade.

The man who operationalized this most bluntly was Tony Coelho, who ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s. His philosophy, delivered without apparent irony, was:

"Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we're the majority." The Democrats proceeded to achieve rough parity with Republicans in corporate and Wall Street campaign contributions. Coelho considered this a win.

It was, as Newsweek later put it, a Faustian bargain. The Democrats became financially dependent on the very corporate class whose priorities were structurally opposed to the working-class coalition that had been the party's reason for existing since the New Deal. And the working class -- the union halls, the industrial midwest, the people who voted Democratic because it was part of who they were, a matter of loyalty to their coworkers and community -- noticed. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not articulately. But they noticed.

Jimmy Carter kicked off deregulation. Clinton consolidated it. Clinton presided over the growth of the loosely supervised shadow financial system and the repeal of Depression-era restrictions on commercial banks -- not exactly the platform of a party that remembered what it was supposed to be for. The "New Democrats" rebranded the party's Wall Street dependency as pragmatic modernity. What it actually was, was a slow-motion abandonment of the people who had built the coalition in the first place.

The brand didn't collapse overnight. Brands rarely do. What happened was that the Democrats spent twenty-plus years paying lip service to working-class priorities while cashing checks from the people whose interests were orthogonal to those priorities. And eventually, voters in places like Macomb County, Michigan -- which went 63% for Kennedy in 1960 and 66% for Reagan in 1984 -- stopped seeing Democrats as champions of their middle-class aspirations and started seeing them as a party working for someone else entirely.

This is not a mystery. This is math.

Act Three: Citizens United, or How the Lock Got Changed While Everyone Was Asleep

If the 1970s and 1980s were where the Democrats sold their soul, Citizens United in 2010 was where someone else changed the locks.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision didn't invent money in politics. But it industrialized it in a way that made everything that came before look quaint. In the 2024 election alone, just 100 billionaire donors poured $2.6 billion into the election, nearly 20% of total spending. One single donor contributed over $290 million to outside spending groups -- roughly equivalent to the combined donations of 3 million small donors. That's not a campaign finance system. That's an auction.

Here's the part that should make Democrats deeply uncomfortable, and that I have not heard nearly enough Democratic strategists say out loud: Trump, across multiple elections, was significantly more dependent on small donors than his Democratic opponents. He raised less total money in every cycle he ran. He lost the money fight every single time. And he won anyway, in part because his small-donor base was a genuine expression of working-class political identity that the Democrats – still running to the same bundlers, still dependent on the same Wall Street infrastructure they've been using since Coelho – couldn't match or credibly claim.

The ideological inversion is now complete, and it is almost funny if you don't think about it too hard. The party of FDR is now the party that raises more money from corporations and wealthy professionals. The party of the country club is now running on small-dollar working-class grievance. Neither party is what it claims to be. But one of them has figured out how to perform the identity its voters want, and one of them is still getting caught mid-sentence explaining why NAFTA was actually fine, actually.

The Catch-22, Stated Plainly

So. Can the Democrats fix their brand before the midterms?

No. Not really. They can sharpen their messaging. They can recruit better local candidates who can credibly distance themselves from the national brand – and to their credit, that's already happening. They can hammer on tariffs, on grocery prices, on the very concrete economic pain that Trump promised to fix and has so far made measurably worse. Those things help at the margins.

But the brand – the deep, structural, "whose side are you actually on" brand – cannot be repaired without getting out from under the donor class. And getting out from under the donor class requires campaign finance reform. And campaign finance reform, in any form with actual teeth, requires a Supreme Court that doesn't believe money is constitutionally protected speech. This Supreme Court – the one that has spent fifteen years expanding on the Citizens United rationale rather than questioning it – is not that court.

So we are left with this: the Democrats have a brand problem rooted in a money problem rooted in a structural problem that the current legal architecture has made essentially unreachable. A nesting Russian doll set of badness. Every cycle they go back to the same donors. Every cycle they make the same compromise(s). Every cycle they lose a few more of the voters they need most, and pick up a few more college-educated professionals who will vote for them but will also never, ever let them raise taxes on unrealized capital gains.

The pundit class will tell you 2026 is a lean. They're probably right. Gravity, historical midterm patterns, and Trump's genuinely awful economic numbers should produce Democratic gains. But a lean is not a wave, and a wave is not a fix. And if the Democrats spend another two years mistaking electoral improvement for structural repair, they will be back in this exact spot in 2028, staring at another race they were supposed to have locked up.

I've seen this movie. The ending isn't great. I want to believe that I am wrong, but my inner realist screams "Danger Will Robinson, DANGER!"

Want to discuss or argue? Drop it in the comments, and let's talk it out.

[1] I'm not naming names, but you know exactly which podcast you're thinking of right now.

[2] Carter (1980), Mondale (1984), Dukakis (1988) – three losses in a row that broke something inside the party and sent it sprinting toward the center and the donor class simultaneously. (an earlier version of this says by 1980, that was a typo, my fat fingers)