We Are About to Miss the Opportunity of a Lifetime

2026 and 2028 can be our time.

Apr 04, 2026

Morning y’all,

2026 and 2028 can and should be the beginnings of something transformational.

We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.

The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.

But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…

Thirsty fo more?

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.

Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.

So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.

Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.

Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.

But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.

But you’ve got to understand how we got here.

Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.

It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.

We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.

And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.

If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the status quo. They’re done being told our system is functional when they can see with their own eyes that it isn’t. They want it burned down. That’s a rational response to decades of betrayal. It’s also a catastrophic one. But it’s what happens when nobody offers an alternative vision. In the absence of hope and vision anger will do.

That is what so many elected Democrats lack, a vision. A mission. The folks running this party have failed and they have names. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gregory Meeks, Pete Aguilar, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Lieu. Those are the names of the leaders that 55% of Democrats think are failing.

We’ve been so afraid of words like socialism that we’ve allowed these folks to contort our values into shapes that are almost unrecognizable.

Here’s the dark irony. MAGA isn’t calling out corruption. They are the corruption. But they’re willing to tear down institutions that too many treat as sacred. The DOJ, the SEC, the FDA, the courts, it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismantle anything. They’re doing it for greed and power and not a damn thing for the American people, but the lesson is still there. No institution should be untouchable. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government shouldn’t just be stopped, the people who came in through it need to be removed. We should’ve been saying that for years. Some of us were. Nobody in leadership heeded the call.

But some of us are done waiting for leadership to listen.

Saikat Chakrabarti built Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected AOC by unseating a ten-term incumbent the Democratic establishment said was untouchable. He was her chief of staff. He wrote the Green New Deal. He took on the most powerful people in the party and won. He’s running for Congress again. Graham Platner is publicly calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside. He’s not just running his own race. He’s campaigning alongside Chakrabarti, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, alongside a growing list of candidates who are building a coalition before they even get to Washington. They’re rallying together, organizing together, building something real together. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway.

These candidates are calling out corporate PAC money, calling out AIPAC, calling out the Iran war, calling out our own party’s leadership on the things that actually matter. They’re proving you can run without selling out before you even start.

But they’re not just running against the establishment. They’re running to stop the next great extraction. AI is going to do to the top 20% what offshoring and NAFTA did to factory workers. The project manager. The paralegal. The coder. The analyst. Same story, faster timeline. It doesn’t have to go that way. But the only path that doesn’t end there runs straight through public ownership. A share of the economy for every American. Because the more automated production becomes, whether it’s software or automobiles or medicine, the more important it is that it gets built here and that we own a piece of what it produces. The alternative is the Rust Belt, but for everyone.

We’re roughly 30% of the electorate. Independents who support healthcare, housing, a government that actually builds things, those people are with us in enormous numbers. What they don’t agree with is our leadership. What they don’t trust is our track record. What they’re waiting for is someone to actually mean what they say.

So the question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick. Letting them convince us with their metrics and their models that we’re better off than we think we are. Letting them talk us out of believing our own eyes. They’ve been doing it for decades and we’ve been letting them and the results are sitting right in front of us.

This party belongs to us. Not to its donors. Not to its consultants. Not to its leadership. It’s time to squeeze it back toward our values and away from the people who’ve been writing the checks. We’ve got to be brave enough to back the people willing to break the cycle. With money. With hours. With our voices and our votes in primaries that most people ignore.

Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.

Let’s back the fighters.

Corbin Trent

I have been writing about this for over a year. The thing I hear most, from people who read every word, is some version of yeah, I get it, but what do we do about it.

A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment actually requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know what winning is for. We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter matters as much as the fuel.

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains
Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission?
Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

When we find those candidates we go to work for them through independent expenditure campaigns. That is a legal term for us doing the work ourselves, separate from the candidate, without them having to ask. It means we can move fast, hit hard, and build the kind of infrastructure that the other side has been running for decades.

If you have been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and get in.