Hint: Select Someone Like Bernie Sanders
How can Democrats win in 2028? Not by doing what the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been doing—chasing corporate money, currying favor with AIPAC, and catering to the donor class. That may enrich the DNC, but it’s not a winning strategy.
Winning elections requires inspiring people to vote for you—to believe you’ll actually fight for them. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because too many people stayed home. Many of those same voters had once turned out enthusiastically for Joe Biden in 2020 and Barack Obama before him.
Nominating “Cheney-adjacent” Democrats—candidates who sound like Republican-lite fiscal conservatives and foreign policy hawks—hasn’t worked. These are candidates who embrace militarism, defend Israel no matter what, and cater to big money interests. That’s the path Kamala Harris chose in 2024, and even she later admitted it likely cost her the election. Establishment Democrats keep chasing the mythical “moderate Republican” who dislikes Donald Trump but could be persuaded to vote blue. It didn’t work for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it failed again in 2024.
The reasons for the 2024 loss aren’t mysterious. Democratic leaders lied about Biden’s fitness for another term. They betrayed their base. They allowed the party to be captured by moneyed interests. And they ran a hollow campaign—focused on the “joy” of Kamala rather than on real issues like raising the federal minimum wage, reducing student debt, or protecting workers and the middle class.
Today’s Democratic leadership—an aging, entrenched gerontocracy—is out of touch. Obsessed with fundraising and self-preservation, they offer no charisma, no moral courage, and no compelling vision. Yet America desperately needs a strong, principled Democratic Party to counter Trumpism. What we have instead is a party that’s too old, too corrupted, and too timid to resist it effectively.
Democrats need to rediscover the spirit of Robert F. Kennedy Sr., George McGovern, and yes, Bernie Sanders. Remarkably, Trump now seems to many voters more “worker-friendly” than the average Democrat politician. He’s seizing traditional Democratic issues like lowering prescription drug prices while Democrats, paralyzed by caution, are doing little to challenge him.
Sanders himself has said the Democratic primary process is rigged against candidates like him. Voters recognize when they’re being sold a false bill of goods. When they feel manipulated, they stay home—or worse, cast protest votes for demagogues who seem more “authentic.” Sanders has also called both major parties “largely corrupt,”and sadly, the Republicans—corrupt as they are—are currently better at winning than the Democrats.
For his honesty, Sanders deserves respect. He’s one of the few major politicians willing to say plainly that the Democratic Party has become an obstacle to genuine democracy—rigging its own primaries and processes to favor establishment figures like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, while marginalizing the progressives who actually energize voters.
As Sanders noted in a recent interview (see above, after the 40-minute mark), the Democratic Party would rather lose an election than risk upsetting the status quo. Which brings us to 2028: it’s easy to imagine the DNC once again anointing someone like Gavin Newsom (handsome but hollow), Pete Buttigieg (a corporate technocrat who happens to be gay), or Josh Shapiro (a reliable Zionist), all while ignoring the lessons Sanders tried to teach.
And when President J.D. Vance takes office in 2029, Democratic leaders will once again blame the voters—never themselves.
Bracing Views 
[My comment from the Substack version.]
1. Among other reasons Kamala Harris turned me off was her “most lethal military” boast upon her acceptance speech in Chicago. Splendid, that’s what this country has come to, #1 in killing people. That and her cowardice toward standing up for Palestine.
2. I’m not expecting anything, as there’s nothing to expect, from the Democrats. This country is now at the point where we need someone to stand up on the political stage and say, “I’m gonna cut that goddamn, obscene $1+ trillion so-called ‘defense’ budget in half, stop all aid to Israel, and put the over $500 billion saved there into revamping our ill-performing health care system and establishing truly universal health insurance for everyone. There should be money left over from that to address public education, transit, and infrastructure. Any shortfall will be made up by taxing back from the wealthy what they’ve stolen from the rest of us, what they’ve avoided in paying for the good of all, through fitting taxes on them.”
With these prerequisites in place, we can then focus on creating what LBJ called “The Great Society.”
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Good to see Graham Platner drawing big crowds and getting a flood of money from small donors. He’s running against dinosaur Susan Collins in Maine.
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