Six years ago this month, in the middle of the first Trump administration, I quit my job and launched a campaign for Congress against a Democratic incumbent in the city where I was born and raised – Columbus, Ohio. I ran because Donald Trump posed a clear threat to the stability of the United States, and I knew fending off his growing Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement would take a different type of leadership than what most congressional Democrats were providing.
Now, after passing the 100-day mark of Trump’s second presidency and with the country wondering when an economic crisis of his own making will hit, we are once again witnessing our political leaders mount an almost tragically insufficient opposition. Democratic party leadership has not applied the policy or political lessons that the MAGA era has taught us—and it’s time we stop waiting for them to try. Instead, communities across the country must connect and determine our own vision for the next phase of American life.
Economic Challenges Too Big for Consumer Protection
Deciding to run for Congress in 2020 was a pivot from my career trajectory up to that point. I had never run for office, and I considered myself more of a policy person. For much of my life, I was convinced that if we came up with good ideas and had the right people in charge to implement them, we could solve the economic issues plaguing the people of central Ohio, and the country writ large.
My firsthand experience in Washington disabused me of this notion. I worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for a little over three years, first as a regulatory attorney and then as an adviser to the first Director, Richard Cordray. He was laser-focused on bringing financial relief to American consumers after the 2008 financial crisis—a goal the CFPB’s top-notch talent accomplished, securing billions of dollars in restitution through enforcement actions.
But after a few years, I had to acknowledge that restitution checks for a few hundred dollars were not fully solving Americans’ financial troubles. Many of the Central Ohio neighborhoods struggling over the course of my entire life were still struggling all the same. Formerly stable middle class neighborhoods were slipping further behind after waves of foreclosures, steady job losses paired with declining job quality, and a failing city school system. Small businesses that had been staples of the community continued to disappear with seemingly no explanation aside from vague notions about the inevitability of neighborhood change.
Then Trump won. He won running on racism and Islamophobia, certainly, but he also won on rhetoric that spoke to the reality I had observed on the ground in Ohio – all was not well in American life, and Democrats were not being honest about it. The financial crisis was supposedly over but the economic challenges facing working-class people continued to compound. And this reality faced people not only in rural areas, a phenomenon Keith Orejel has noted previously in these pages, but also in the very center of an urban area like Columbus – Ohio’s economic crown jewel. If Democrats would not acknowledge this reality, meet people where they were, and become even more aggressive than Trump in tackling economic challenges, I didn’t see a path to stopping him or his burgeoning political movement.
Lessons from Challenging the Democratic Party
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty – the representative for the 3rd Congressional District of Ohio covering most of Columbus – embodied the many limitations of the typical Democratic member of Congress. While representing a safe blue seat for more than a decade, she voted the party line and proudly touted her record of securing federal funding for Columbus non-profits and city initiatives.
To be sure, as we are seeing now, federal funding is essential for many critical community services. But it should not be the beginning and end of federal policymaking. Representative Beatty’s approach did little to confront the bleak economic circumstances facing parts of the district and did nothing to broaden the electorate or build public support for the policies needed to restructure the economy in a way that would meaningfully improve conditions for workers and small business owners everywhere.
So, I launched a grassroots campaign – with a bold policy agenda – to represent the 3rd District myself. We recruited volunteers and knocked thousands of doors, focusing on those who did not typically vote in Democratic primaries and were skeptical of the political system altogether. Community members stepped up and hosted the first debates since Representative Beatty had been elected to the federal seat. In the last month of the campaign, we held mini-town halls at small businesses across the district where people could come, meet their neighbors, and ask questions about anything on their mind. People told us they were struggling to make ends meet and that they felt disconnected and defenseless against a city, state, and country changing around them. Repeatedly, we heard that Democrats only showed up when they needed votes and that they weren’t solving peoples’ material problems.
Ultimately, we didn’t win. But what we heard on the campaign trail inspired my team to start Columbus Stand Up!, a non-profit built to organize year-round and respond to people’s real concerns: economic stress and a lack of connection. We started a free rideshare program to transport people to vaccine appointments during the pandemic. We launched a campaign to stop the electric utility monopoly from raising prices. We organized candidate forums for primary elections to encourage people to vote at a stage before the electoral die is already cast.
At the same time, I started working at the American Economic Liberties Project to build support for an anti-monopoly policy platform that could address the systemic causes of the material conditions I was seeing locally in Columbus. This agenda was rooted in the idea that neighborhoods haven’t just changed on their own, but instead have been transformed by dominant corporations to whom the government has handed the reins of our economy. The resulting market concentration has reduced workers’ wages, increased prices for consumers, and made it virtually impossible for small businesses to succeed. This economic precarity has contributed to the fraying of American communities – individuals and families in economic distress (or who fear falling into it) have little time to connect with the people around them.
I was convinced that to repair the underlying damage we were seeing at Columbus Stand Up!, the Democratic Party needed to adopt an anti-monopolist, economically populist approach that would steer the economy away from producing gains for just a few dominant corporations and investors and towards economic prosperity for all Americans. It was also clear that building support for such a platform in a disconnected America could not be done solely through TV and digital ads – the party needed to take the lead in talking to Americans of different backgrounds in person to recognize their shared interest in economic reform.
But this is not the path the Democrats followed in 2024. Instead, Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign moderated her economic positions based on input from donors and spent $494 million on TV and digital ads, laying the groundwork for Trump 2.0. In the wake of this repeated failure, Democratic leadership has vacillated on their diagnosis of what went wrong – from a lack of liberal-leaning podcasters to racism and sexism to the “severe headwinds” of inflation. While these factors certainly contributed to the Democrats’ loss in November, this analysis overlooks Democrats’ disregard for two of the primary lessons I have learned in Ohio over the last eight years of the MAGA era.
Building the Connective Tissue for America’s Next Phase
First, Americans are desperate for structural economic change, which Democrats have failed to offer. People of all different political affiliations broadly support taking on corporate power, the cornerstone of the national policy agenda we have developed at Economic Liberties. Today, some congressional Democrats are finally getting with the program and adopting the anti-monopolist approach, pushing the party to more aggressively tackle the material economic issues facing American workers and business owners. Chris DeLuzio (PA-17) launched an “economic patriotism” effort, and Angie Craig (MN-2) and Kristen McDonald Rivet (MI-8) are founding members of the Monopoly Busters Caucus. Josh Riley (NY-19) opened an inquiry into how utility monopolies are hurting his constituents, and Pat Ryan (NY-18) started a docket to investigate how United Healthcare/Optum’s acquisition of physician practices is impacting patients and healthcare professionals in his district.
I applaud these efforts, and I hope more people with this economic populist vision will run for office in 2026 to unseat complacent Democrats as I did in 2020. But this time, I won’t be one of them. Instead, I’m focusing my efforts on a second fundamental takeaway from my primary challenge and our work at Columbus Stand Up! – even with an aggressive, anti-monopolist platform, we can’t defeat MAGA when Americans don’t trust Democrats or each other. After decades of neglect, unfulfilled promises, and waning community connections, Americans have developed wildly different views on the source of their struggles, while at the same time losing venues for coming together across siloes to talk about it. Indeed, a May 2025 Pew Research Study found Americans trust each other less and, whether because of technology, the pandemic, or remote work, spend more time alone than in prior periods.
The MAGA movement offers a litany of both real and imagined villains – from immigrants to a global trading system – for Americans to coalesce around fighting. In April 2025, 36% of registered voters said they identified with MAGA’s vision. The remaining 64% are potentially up for grabs, but Democratic leadership is offering no competing vision around which people could unite.
So, alongside a host of Central Ohio community members of different political stripes, Columbus Stand Up! is focusing on rebuilding this connectivity. We have launched a community dinner series to bring together neighbors who would never normally interact, recruiting people across class, age, and race, from the suburbs and the city. We are creating as big a tent as possible for those who don’t want to see the country slide into oligarchy, and who are hungry for a collective vision of what comes next. These dinners will give people a non-political venue to share their fears, struggles, and wishes for themselves and their families, build trust, and develop a set of shared, affirmative values that honestly reflect the state of our communities, absent the fearmongering that has defined MAGA.
The core need for a connected, community-driven movement is not farfetched or trivial. Even conservative columnist David Brooks has come to the realization that only a mass movement can stop a demagogue like Trump. National Democratic leadership long ago abandoned the type of deep organizing that is necessary to build this movement, and with a 27% approval rating, who would even care if they tried. Instead, the responsibility for building a movement influential enough to course correct the country rests with the people. The Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fighting Oligarchy tour, the 50501 movement, and Indivisible rallies have gotten the ball rolling, but protesting alone will not create a consensus vision for the future capable of withstanding the MAGA-crafted attacks and scapegoating meant to divide us. That must come from in-person, genuine, and community-based connection.
Some may say connection is not enough, that we have to fight back. And I agree. The daily fight against this administration’s lawlessness is essential to uphold the Constitution and protect Americans’ basic rights. But we have spent too much time reacting over the last eight years and too little time building a durable movement meant to last. Beyond policy formation and electoral challenges, we must foster trust on the ground in concert with – not in ignorance of – peoples’ material conditions, listening to what matters to them and together defining what we want to come next after Trump. We can present a united front capable of toppling an oligarchy and rebuilding America, but first we need to know who each other is.
Join us for dinner in Columbus or organize one of your own! Trump 2.0 should be a wakeup call for all of us – community organizers, academics, policy professionals – to get out of our bubbles and aggressively seek to make connections with people with whom we may have little in common on paper, but who share a genuine desire to move America closer to being that more perfect union. Dinner can be a first step.
