The Future We Deserve

I’m going to ask for your support, you ought to know what I believe in.

I’m proud to release my campaign’s The Future We Deserve Agenda, outlining detailed policies on a number of critical issues facing our country, from education and civil rights to foreign policy and economic justice. In all, there are more than 100 different structural changes, policy ideas, and existing federal bills included in this plan that I believe will make our country and our planet a better place for everyone to live.

A quick perusal of the websites of the other candidates in this race reveals that this isn’t a particularly common approach to running for office these days, and a lot of mainstream political consultants will tell you that publishing all this information is a big mistake. Their reasoning goes that, on the one hand, few if any undecided voters will read so much text, whereas on the other hand people who are hoping to see me lose will scrutinize every word, looking for something that, if taken out of context, could seem risky or damaging.

Nonetheless, I thought it was important to lay out these thoughts and opinions. For one thing, if I’m going to ask for your support, you ought to know what I believe in. But that’s not the only reason.

Everywhere I go, I get some version of the same anxious question: how can Democrats start winning again? What do we need to do to win back the voters who’ve been drifting toward MAGA Republicans in recent years?

Though that’s a complicated question that doesn’t have one simple answer, there’s one component that does seem straightforward. Democrats have lost ground among working class voters of all races, and in the 2024 campaign, the American people had deep concerns about the economy in general and inflation in particular, while Democrats didn’t have great answers – and in some cases struggled to even acknowledge the legitimacy of the question.

What’s more, the economy is changing. A lot. The cost of housing is skyrocketing, particularly in the places with the greatest economic opportunity, and artificial intelligence threatens an unprecedented wave of economic dislocation and job loss. All of this is against a backdrop of enormous and growing costs of health care, child care, and higher education; larger and more monopolistic corporations; massive economic inequality; and weakened labor unions.

A Democratic Party that doesn’t credibly express empathy for the pain caused by these problems, articulate a theory of where they came from, and put forth a plan to solve them will be a party that continues to shrink and lose.

That’s why my The Future We Deserve Agenda leans in heavily on structural solutions to the root causes of this situation. I focus on corruption not because it’s unattractive but because it further empowers the wealthy and large corporations to tilt the playing field in their favor. I focus on making it easier for workers to organize because labor unions are the single best bulwark against corporate power run amok. And I lead with corporate consolidation because it sits at the intersection of economic injustice and dysfunctional democracy.

I have no illusions about reversing the Democratic Party’s misfortunes with long white papers. And this is just an initial set of ideas on a limited scope of issue areas – we will continue to add more as the campaign continues. But I do think that if we want to win, we’re going to need a strong message rooted in bold new ideas. That starts with a policy agenda that’s responsive to the real problems in people’s lives, and that’s why I hope you’ll give my The Future We Deserve Agenda a look.