A Fight Worth Having

The machine that beats us is real. So is the one we have to build.

I am launching a PAC called A Fight Worth Having. In this piece I tell you why.

Almost exactly one year ago I wrote one of my first pieces for this Substack. I called it The Right Builds Power and The Left Holds Rallies. I laid out what I saw coming. No coherent vision. No real plan. No financial infrastructure capable of backing candidates at the level they actually need. No super PACs. No capacity for the kind of independent expenditure campaigns that AIPAC runs, that the crypto lobby runs, that corporate PACs run in congressional districts all over this country. I said it was going to bear fruit in losses.

North Carolina. Illinois. Here we are.

Progressive, Nida Allam ran in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District. She had Bernie Sanders. She had Justice Democrats. She had the Working Families Party. She had a ground game and a message and a story that connected with people in that district in a real way. Outside groups spent more than $4.4 million in that primary. The single biggest spender was Jobs and Democracy PAC, which dropped $1.6 million in ads for the incumbent Valerie Foushee in the final weeks of the race. Jobs and Democracy is the super PAC funded by Anthropic, the AI company. They backed Foushee because she co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI. They were buying a friendly regulator. An AIPAC-donor-tied group called Article One PAC threw in another $600,000 for Foushee. The biggest counter-AIPAC group in the country, American Priorities, spent more than $1 million for Allam. One million against two and a half. The two candidates combined raised and spent about $811,000 from actual people who believed in them. The outside groups outspent them by more than five to one. Allam lost by 1,200 votes. She said exactly what it was. “The AI lobby just bought its first seat in Congress.”

Now go to Illinois, where the numbers get worse.

AIPAC and its donors spent $13.7 million across the Illinois primaries, funneled through shadow PACs with names like Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership, so voters wouldn’t know where the money came from until after it was over. They put $3.9 million behind Melissa Bean in the 8th District, a former Blue Dog who hadn’t held office since 2011, pulled back out of retirement specifically to stop Junaid Ahmed, who was running on Medicare for All and working-class economics and refusing corporate PAC money. It worked. Robert Peters had Bernie Sanders. He had Elizabeth Warren. He’d been a DSA member, a community organizer, a state senator who spent years doing real work on criminal justice and labor rights. The progressive PACs backing him scraped together about $200,000. Affordable Chicago Now dropped nearly $4.4 million for Donna Miller. Peters didn’t crack the top two. You can’t fight $4.4 million with a fundraising email and a Sanders endorsement.

I helped build Justice Democrats. I was in that room. I recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress. I watched what happened after she won and I watched what didn’t get built around it. Individual candidates. No machine. The energy got absorbed into a system designed specifically to absorb it. Nine years later we’re watching the same thing happen to a new set of people who deserved better.

The organizations on our side are trying. The money they put into these races is real and it matters and the people running them are genuine. But the entire progressive funding ecosystem combined could not match what one lobby spent in one state on one day. That’s not a criticism of the people doing the work. That’s a structural problem. And the structure doesn’t get fixed by writing bigger checks alone.

Nobody on our side is running a unified slate. Nobody is putting a group of candidates on a stage together around a mission bigger than any one of them. We campaign on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and a living wage and those are good things worth fighting for. But they’re policies. They’re not a vision. And a vision is what builds a movement big enough to actually scare the people writing those checks.

The groups spending that money against us are single issue. AIPAC needs compliant foreign policy votes. The crypto lobby needs light regulation. The AI companies need friendly committee chairs. That’s it. Their asks are narrow and their money is deep and they have decades of institutional momentum behind them. They’re not fighting against anything. They’re protecting something they already have.

Brand New Congress tried to build a united front. Justice Democrats tried. AOC and the Squad moved the conversation in ways that genuinely scared people with power, and the amount of money spent to destroy individual members of that group tells you everything about how seriously they were taken. So many people have tried, and tried hard, with real sacrifice.

But we have never been able to get candidates to fully understand that their race is only as important as the races around it. That a seat you win in isolation doesn’t shift power. That the person running in Memphis and the person running in Sacramento and the person running in a Chicago suburb are either winning together around a common purpose or they’re each losing alone. Mostly they’re losing. Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois was on everyone’s radar because the race got nationalized. People knew her name, knew what she stood for, knew the money being spent to stop her. Nida Allam almost nobody knew about. I was on Jake Tapper’s show the day of the North Carolina primary talking about Texas races and mentioned her by name and he had never heard of it. No polling was showing how close she was. No one was sounding an alarm. She nearly beat an incumbent with $4.4 million in outside money working against her and it barely registered as news until she’d already lost by 1,200 votes. A united slate of candidates talking about each other, lifting each other up, pointing to the same map and the same mission — Allam’s race gets nationalized. It gets resourced. It gets watched. Those 1,200 votes don’t disappear without a fight.

And when someone does eke through and win, they walk in alone anyway. No unified mission behind them. No machine capable of making the mission real. So they take the small wins and learn to call that progress. They compromise on the things they ran on because the things they ran on require a power they don’t have by themselves. The system doesn’t have to beat you in the primary. It can wait.

People keep telling us progressive policies can’t win. That the vision for a better country is fairy dust. And I keep coming back to one question. If it’s all fairy dust, why are they spending $13.7 million in a single state on a single primary day to stop it?

Either the people writing those checks are the dumbest political operatives in the history of American democracy, or they are terrified of what happens when candidates who actually give a damn about this country get their hands on power. I don’t think they’re dumb.

We don’t need to aim at a bigger version of the same small ideas. A national insurance program and a living wage are the floor, not the ceiling. We should be setting our sights on being the best country in the world at the things that actually matter to people who live here. Not the most expensive healthcare system. The healthiest people. The cleanest food. The cleanest air and water. The best schools. The most innovative and cleanest manufacturing. An economy that builds things the world needs and doesn’t poison the people who live next door to the plant in the process.

We have been choosing wrong for seventy years because we handed all of that to the private sector and told ourselves the market would work it out. What the market worked out is how to move all the money to the top and hire better consultants every decade to explain why that’s good for you. What they built is the most expensive healthcare system in the world that leaves tens of millions of people one diagnosis away from losing everything. Infrastructure that embarrasses us in front of every other wealthy country on earth. Schools falling apart. A manufacturing base that got shipped overseas the minute it was more profitable somewhere else.

It doesn’t bother them. They don’t care how hard it is to make rent. They don’t care how many people can’t afford to get sick. They don’t care who makes the products that keep this world running or what those people breathe while they’re making them. And the same apparatus that buys a committee chair buys a foreign policy. They don’t care about Gaza. They don’t care about Iran. We are at war with Iran right now and they are fine with it. They want control. Their appetite for what belongs to the rest of us is not going to shrink because we asked nicely or compromised in good faith or wrote a good op-ed about shared values.

All the money we keep pouring into bombs could be building schools. Here and in the countries we keep blowing up. We don’t have to spend the next five years watching the headlines and wondering when the shooting starts with China. We could be competing with them to see who builds a better life for their people. That’s a competition worth having. Dropping bombs and blowing up children is not a foreign policy. It’s a moral failure we keep funding and calling strategy.

Taking back what belongs to all of us is the only path forward. Not a progressive wing of a party still organized around the interests of the people writing those checks. A real fight. The kind where you know who you’re fighting, you say it out loud, and you build something big enough to win.

What I want to build is an organization funded well enough and loud enough and bold enough that candidates come to it. Running for Congress is not a job. It’s three jobs. The candidate and everyone around them are already running at full speed just trying to win. If we’re chasing them down to sell them on a bigger mission, we’ve already lost them. They don’t have time to be convinced. The only way this works is if we build something so compelling, so well funded, so full of possibility that they find us. We have to send up a bonfire big enough that they walk toward the light on their own.

And I think we can. Not because of messaging or branding or any of that consultant nonsense. Because the ideas are real and the need is urgent and people know it. Claiming our healthcare system back from the insurance companies and the hospital conglomerates. Shared ownership in our manufacturing base so that when this country builds things, the people of this country benefit from it. A serious reckoning with what artificial intelligence is about to do to every working person in this country and every democracy on this planet. AI has the potential to be as disruptive and as dangerous as nuclear weapons or the Industrial Revolution. It cannot be left in the hands of a handful of oligarchs racing to become the world’s first trillionaires. It has to be owned and governed by the people it is going to affect. That’s all of us.

A mission that big needs real support. It needs money and it needs people and it needs candidates who understand that their race in their district only matters if the person running three states over wins too. That we are building something together or we are losing alone. That has always been true. We just haven’t built the thing yet that makes candidates believe it enough to run that way.

That’s what I’m trying to build with A Fight Worth Having. The numbers in this piece are designed to make you feel small. They’re supposed to end the conversation before it starts. But they only do that if we stay separate.

Sign up. Share this piece. Forward it to someone who needs to see it. There will be candidates coming, people worth fighting for, running on the things you’ve been waiting to see someone run on. When they show up here you’ll know it, and there’ll be ways to help that go beyond reading and sharing. I will not use your email like an ATM. Every message will have something worth reading in it first. That’s a promise I intend to keep.

We will need money too. A lot of it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise after a piece that lays out exactly what we’re up against. But the machine gets built one person at a time, and it starts with you deciding this fight is worth having.

If you’re reading this and you feel what I feel when I look at these numbers and these results and this country, then you’re already part of it. Let’s build the machine.

Corbin Trent