The Announcement

Does this sound like something that should exist?

I want to build a Super PAC that acts as an original researcher, a media machine, and a campaign operation that runs ads in areas where press attention is heightened by circumstances or by our message itself.

I’m calling it A Fight Worth Having.

For nine months I’ve been writing about why Americans can’t afford to live. Three essays a week. Over 100 pieces on healthcare costs, housing costs, how the system got rigged and how to unrig it. More than 115,000 subscribers. Almost 1,300 people paying their own money to support the work.

Now I want to scale it into something that can actually shift what’s politically possible.

Why It Matters

There’s a fight brewing that most people don’t know about.

Justice Democrats is recruiting candidates right now. They’ve got a slate of six, some really incredible people with a real shot at continuing what we started. Indivisible is launching primary challenges. Leaders We Deserve is building candidate pipelines. Sunrise is planning to jump in. Across the country, people are organizing to take on a Democratic establishment that keeps telling us to be patient.

Zohran Mamdani is about to be the mayor of New York. He ran on affordability, with 15% of his votes in Queens coming from Trump voters. Aftyn Behn in Tennessee closed a 22-point Trump gap to single digits. Going big works.

But these campaigns are scattered. They need a unified economic vision. They’ve got Medicare for All, but Medicare for All doesn’t mean much when we’ve closed 500 hospitals in the past decade. They’ve got climate policy, but climate policy doesn’t work if we can’t build solar panels and wind turbines here or run the power lines we need to deliver that power.

They need a vision for an America to fight for, not just something to fight against.

That’s the gap I’m trying to fill.

The Case We’re Making

We’re entering a fight over whether this economy works.

The neoliberal consensus believes that everyone is better off. The Fed says it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says it. Most economists say it. They measure GDP and stock prices and “real wages” and call it prosperity. They are going to pretend to be populists for a cycle or two but their heart isn’t in it. This system works for them.

I’ve been a different story. One that tracks with reality. Measured intime, not dollars, because time tells you what’s actually happening to people. In production not spending. In capacity not bills passed.

In 1950 a house cost 2-3 years of median income. Today it’s 8-10. Healthcare used to take a few weeks of work a year. Now it takes months, to boot we have fewer hospitals per capita than we did in the 1970s. Farmer only gets ~14 cents of every food dollar. Oligopolies taking the other 86.

It’s not just that things cost too much. We’ve lost the ability to build. We deindustrialized. We tried to go “post-industrial” and shipped our capacity offshore. We lost the learning that comes with making things. The know-how is gone.

The trendy answer right now is “abundance,” cut regulations and let the market rip. That’s eerily similar to Reaganism. It’s simply just not the full answer.

What We’re Fighting For

Not just “tax the rich.” Not just “fight the corporations.” An actual vision for what America builds.

Public competition. Not just regulating monopolies, competing with them. Nebraska public power is 30% cheaper than the national average. Chattanooga municipal broadband delivers gigabit internet for half what private companies charge. It works.

Healthcare capacity, not just coverage. Medicare for All is the payment system. But we also need doctors, nurses, hospitals. 80% of counties are healthcare deserts. We need to build supply, not just shuffle around who pays for a shortage.

Farmer and rancher co-ops that capture more of the retail dollar. Let them process the wheat and pork instead of letting four meatpackers take the margin.

Shared ownership of what’s coming. AI, robotics, automation are going to transform production. We can’t let two people own all of it. And we can’t offshore it all to China either. We need public stakes in the productivity gains.

This is the counter-narrative to forty years of “the market will handle it.”

What We’re Up Against

The establishment says everything is mostly fine. Just get rid of Trump and things will work themselves out.

By God, I hope we’ve all seen by now that the Supreme Court is a problem. That some of our institutions are the problem. That “just beat Trump” isn’t a plan for anything.

The moderates have think tanks coming out of their ears. They’ve got media arms. They’ve got an entire class of economists ready to tell you the economy is working fine if you’d just read the numbers correctly.

You can see their worldview in the New York Times editorial board piece that just dropped, called “Overmatched.” They’re finally noticing something’s wrong — in Pentagon war games against China, we lose every time. Our military is fat and vulnerable. We can’t produce missiles fast enough. We’ve lost the ability to build at scale.

But they’re diagnosing a symptom, not the disease. They think this is a Pentagon problem. A procurement problem. A defense contractor problem.

It’s not. It’s the same disease that shipped our factories overseas. The same logic that told us we could be a “knowledge economy” and let other countries make the stuff. The same 40-year bet that extraction beats production. The military is just where the bill is coming due first.

And their prescription is wrong. They want another arms race. More defense spending. See who can build the coolest drones the fastest.

That’s the wrong race. We don’t need a race toward more weaponry. We need a race toward well-being. Who can have the healthiest people. The most cared-for communities. The cheapest, cleanest energy.

You’ve got to be able to defend yourself. But the best way to do that has always been by being great at stuff. By building things the world needs. By showing that your way of life actually works. That’s what America claimed to do. We just never followed through.

The establishment’s answer is more of the same. And they’ve got all the megaphones.

We need our own.

The Plan

Research. Build the evidence base. Years-of-work analysis. Capacity studies on hospitals, housing, infrastructure. Gather existing research like the RAND study on the $79 trillion wealth transfer and become a clearinghouse for the data that tells the real story.

Content. Turn that research into essays, videos, podcasts, animations. Stuff people actually watch and share. Get out into communities and find the stories that put a human face on the statistics. Door-knocking at scale through screens.

Campaigns. Guerrilla media in key states and districts. Billboards, radio, local papers, digital ads, sound trucks. A billboard that says “Your grandparents bought a house on one income. Why can’t you?” isn’t just an ad buy. It’s a news story. Local TV covers it. National outlets pick it up. $50,000 in paid media generates $500,000 in earned coverage. The goal isn’t to buy attention. It’s to earn it by saying what no one else will say.

We’re not coordinating with candidates. That’s illegal. We’re shifting the environment they’re running in. By the time they show up, voters are already asking the right questions.

Where We’re Aiming

2026 races like Justin J. Pearson in Tennessee, Cori Bush reclaiming her seat in Missouri, Graham Platner taking on Susan Collins in Maine, Saikat Chakrabarti running for Pelosi’s seat in California, plus slates from Justice Democrats and Leaders We Deserve.

2028 presidential primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada.

The point isn’t to elect any specific person. It’s to change what voters expect and demand from whoever’s asking for their vote.

Why Now

Ad rates are cheapest now, before the 2026 and 2028 cycles heat up. We’re buying low.

Democrats are up 14 points on the generic ballot but only 29% of voters have confidence in the party. People want Trump gone. They don’t believe Democrats will deliver. If the next Democratic government governs like the last one, the authoritarian wave swallows us.

What Success Looks Like

By 2026, multiple candidates running on public competition, public ownership, and building healthcare capacity. Our research cited in major coverage of the affordability crisis. 10 million video views across platforms.

By 2028, a candidate says “public hospital in every county” on a debate stage and the moderator doesn’t have to ask what it means. “Years of work” becomes a recognized way to talk about whether the economy is actually working.

The real test is when the question stops being “what is public competition?” and becomes “what kinds do you support?”

What I Need

To do this right takes about $2 million over 24 months. I couldn’t make a dent with less than half a million.

I don’t have that yet.

I’m not going to ask you for $5 or $25 to fund something I can’t get off the ground. Working-class readers are already keeping America’s Undoing alive. That’s enough to survive and keep doing the work. I’m not building a whole new operation on their backs.

This is a different kind of ask.

I’m looking for 5-10 anchor donors who can put in $100,000-$250,000 each, and a handful more at $25,000-$50,000. That’s the core team, the research operation, the first wave of ad campaigns, funded before I ever ask the broader list for a single small-dollar donation.

If you’re someone who can move that kind of money or you can put me in front of people who can I want to talk to you.

So this isn’t a launch. It’s a question.

Are you one of those people? Do you know them? Will you forward this, make an introduction, put this in front of someone who has the capacity to make it real?

If that’s you, reply to this email. Put “A Fight Worth Having” in the subject line so I don’t miss it.

Corbin

P.S. I’ve done this before. I co-founded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats with almost nothing. We recruited a bartender from the Bronx and helped her beat a ten-term incumbent. Between 2015-2018 Brand New Congress raised $800,000. Justice Democrats raised about $9 million. With that we recruited and helped elect AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush. We didn’t just win seats. We changed the conversation. Medicare for All went from “socialist fantasy” to 65% support. The Green New Deal went from a tweet to the centerpiece of the 2020 presidential primary. I know how to take ideas that seem impossible and make them inevitable. I’m asking for the resources to do that again—this time for rebuilding a whole-ass economy.