Opinion: The mandate is affordability. Anything less is a dodge

Before we’re buried in hot takes on what the midterms mean, here is what we know: no one can afford anything. The mandate of this election is that costs have to come down and wages have to go up. Voters told pollsters that the cost of living and government corruption weighed heavily on them and they voted accordingly.

Democrats won and in historic fashion. The party is projected to hold at least 54 Senate seats after flipping seven Republican-held seats and NBC News estimates Democrats will hold at least 258 House seats, the widest House margin in 33 years. Counts are still being finalized. The GOP could lose even more. But the Democratic Party writ large still has a net negative favorability rating — and for good reason. Voters did not hand Democrats a blank check. They handed this new legislative majority a mandate with a deadline.

Who delivered the win

The coalition that delivered victory in 2020 but unraveled in 2024 has returned. In the NBC News exit poll, voters ages 18 to 29 backed Democratic House candidates 72–25, Black voters 89–9, Latino voters 62–35 and Asian American voters 70–29. Tufts’ CIRCLE found Black (90%), Asian (84%) and Latino (78%) youth gave Democrats the strongest support and AP’s VoteCast shows young and Latino voters moving away from Republicans in contrast to what we saw in 2024. In Texas, where Democrats had not won statewide in more than 30 years, James Talarico was projected to win the Senate race.

Jewish voters were the exception. The NBC exit poll found half now identify as Democrats, down from 64% in 2018, though a Jewish Electorate Institute survey still showed a 71–23 Democratic edge on the congressional ballot. In Michigan, Muslim voters backed Abdul El-Sayed 92–8 in the same exit poll. Solid data on Native American voters is scarce, though dedicated 2022 polling found Native voters leaning Democratic. Exit polls are estimates, not final counts. But there is no indication that anyone other than white men and white women decided to stick with GOP candidates for federal office.

There are no pure market solutions

I have already seen too many people with big platforms warn that the DSA wing of the party will lead to ruin and a lost White House in 2028. What they miss is that there are no pure market solutions to the mess we are in.

American history is clear: the only way to undo inequality is to break up concentrated corporate power. Congress passed the Sherman Act in 1890 and it sat mostly idle until Theodore Roosevelt’s administration sued to break up Northern Securities, a railroad trust backed by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The Supreme Court ruled against the trust 5–4 in 1904 and in 1911 it ordered Standard Oil dissolved into 34 companies. Roosevelt sued 45 companies and Taft sued 75. The robber barons did not volunteer. Today’s answer is the same: anti-trust, anti-monopoly, anti-robber-baron action, embraced without hedging or moderation.

Workers need the same muscle. There is no security in employment in the AI era unless it is locked in by a collective bargaining agreement, which means a rapid expansion of labor unions. And the 2028 Democratic nominee will almost certainly run on taxing billionaire wealth and closing the loopholes that let companies like Amazon pay $0 in federal income tax in years of record profit.

The gorillas in the room

Let me be clear about my expectations. I fully expect that the fight over U.S. policy toward Israel will be ongoing. The Oct. 27 Politico/Morning Consult Poll highlighted growing American indifference and negative sentiment toward Israeli leadership. 48 percent of U.S. adults viewed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as either entirely unjustified or initially justified but having gone too far. According to tracking data from the Yale Youth Poll, roughly two-thirds of voters under 30 support reducing or entirely ending U.S. military aid to Israel. This isn't just a progressive trend; a June 2026 Anadolu Agency report highlighted that 51% of Republican voters under 45 would prefer a 2028 presidential primary candidate who supports reducing weapons shipments. 

Because the existing U.S.-Israel aid agreement runs through 2028 and funding remains subject to congressional appropriations, the new Democratic-led Congress could wield substantial influence over how this issue unfolds. Legislation will be debated, but I am positive that Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer will do everything in their power to avoid a showdown. (Expect it to be a 2028 litmus test).

Similarly, I do not expect Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to propose solutions at the scale of the housing crisis. But once Democrats have gone after tariffs, gasoline, grocery prices, electricity and water bills and the data center boom, housing is the elephant, the gorilla and whatever other proverbial animal remains in the room. 

It cannot be handled by tinkering around the edges.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports a record 22.7 million cost-burdened renter households, including 12.1 million paying more than half their income on housing, and a 7.2 million-unit shortage of homes affordable and available to extremely low-income renters. No “tax credit” or “opportunity zone” closes a gap that size. We need a national rent control policy, government-built housing for rent and sale and real protection from eviction and displacement. Otherwise, we keep playing fast and loose with meaningless statistics while the American Dream slips out of reach for half the country.

Climate makes it worse. More hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires will destroy homes every year. A chronically underfunded FEMA and an insurance and disaster recovery market that punishes working-class and middle-class families are symptoms of a bigger problem.

The put-up-or-shut-up budget

The worst provisions of Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) arrive with the new year. Medicaid work requirements take effect January 1, 2027, with the SNAP and hospital closure crisis close behind. The nonpartisan CBO projects that the OBBBA will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 10 million by 2034. When factoring in the baseline expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits, organizations like the Center for American Progress estimate total coverage losses could reach 16 million people. Studies mapping insurance loss to public health outcomes yield widely different conclusions, ranging from 1,500 to 51,000 preventable deaths annually.

Democrats will have to play hardball in annual budget negotiations, send bills that may be vetoed and then find enough Republicans to override. Healthcare, ending the Iran war and fully funding FEMA may be the only places Republican support is within reach. The White House and the Pentagon are aggressively seeking a war funding package from Congress. The administration has requested an emergency supplemental blueprint of $70 billion to retroactively cover unfunded 2026 operations and secure short-term future funding.

Taking money from the Iran war and taking it from ICE, whose budget got a $75 billion infusion from OBBBA, is the play.

ICE is not a bodycam problem

The leadership has already had a chance on ICE. After the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, Democrats blocked DHS funding over a list of demands: body cameras, masks off and judicial warrants. Republicans said they were open to body cameras, which a bill already funded and the standoff dragged through repeated failed Senate votes while ICE kept running on its reconciliation money. A separate Democratic push in the House to mandate body cameras failed in committee. 

Oversight, training and cameras are not what Latino voters came out for. We are furious at what ICE has done. Folks want ICE out of our communities and stripped of its budget and they want the people who killed, maimed and tore families apart fired, prosecuted and jailed. Several Democrats, such as Sen. John Fetterman and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, are lousy on immigration, so Democrats will need to act while fighting their own.

Clean house

Democratic leaders must also pass ethics rules, even over a veto, that bar anyone in federal elected or appointed office from using it for personal enrichment: no stock trades, blind trusts for all investments, no gifts from foreign powers. The record shows why. Oil futures worth more than $500 million traded in the 15 minutes before Trump’s March 23 announcement pausing strikes on Iran, prompting Rep. Ritchie Torres to ask the SEC and CFTC to investigate. Trades before the April 2025 tariff pause and a Polymarket trader’s roughly $400,000 bet on Maduro’s capture also drew suspicion, and a soldier was arrested over alleged Maduro bets. Trump’s disclosure reportedly shows he bought 327 stocks the day before the tariff pause. The White House warned staff not to bet on the war. None of these allegations has been proven, which is the point of an investigation. Even Republican James Comer has expanded a House probe into prediction markets.

This is not only a Trump problem. Bipartisan efforts to restrict congressional stock trades have stalled and the Supreme Court, where gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow to Justice Clarence Thomas drew scrutiny, adopted a code of conduct with no enforcement mechanism. Court packing, term limits, or impeachment may be unlikely, but ethics standards applied across the federal government are achievable. Democrats can and should make this literally criminal.

The story we owe each other

2028 will be the first $1 trillion election. Beyond the candidate spending, AI, crypto and other corporations will break records. Billionaires will pour unprecedented dollars into pop-up PACs. None of these bad actors will win over voters with straightforward arguments. They will lie. How do we know? Because they just showed us their hand in races across the country where they defeated candidates who sought to regulate them by painting corporate candidates as progressives and progressive candidates as hypocrites. The issue of inequality is so egregious that it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Everyone wants to see something done about it, but not everyone agrees on what to do. 

There is a lesson here. In 2020, the Movement for Black Lives drove change while the country was polarized over COVID, with no agreement on what to do. Many who rejected science and vaccines went on to form the MAHA movement around RFK Jr., which helped deliver the White House to Trump in 2024. We could head into 2028 the same way: a lot of people angry about inequality, but little agreement on what to do beyond stopping data center sprawl. In 2020 there was a willingness to confront a broken criminal justice system. In 2028 we need the same willingness to confront a broken immigration system. Without that engine, we will be stuck in a contest of personalities (and egos).

A government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish, but a people without a vision shall. We need a story for We the People for the next generation.

Let us begin writing it now.