While We Sleep
Democrats like to say “this is not normal.” We should act like it.
In 1938, the year that Prime Minister Chamberlain declared that he had negotiated “peace for our time,” Winston Churchill published his account of the United Kingdom’s failure to prepare for the German threat. While England Slept captured Churchill’s deep frustration at his country’s refusal to recognize the danger and to plan for it. Two years later, John F. Kennedy echoed Churchill with his senior thesis, published as Why England Slept, in which he explored the causes of that failure: denial, weak leadership, and inertia. That year, Churchill became Prime Minister, the Battle of Britain began, and England was awake.
America faces a different threat today. Instead of attack by a foreign power, we are confronted by the dismantling of our national strength and rule of law from within. The danger is just as real.
The Democratic Party, our best hope to end this disastrous era, is in a moment of historic weakness. The party has been losing voters for years and its approval rating is in the low 30s—much worse than even the President’s. To lead the nation, Democrats need to rise to the challenge, with a clear understanding of the problem and the resolve to win.
But the Democratic Party is asleep.
Democrats around the country are making fiery speeches, holding rallies, and making their cases on social media and podcasts. They’re telling anyone who will listen that they’re ready to fight. But beneath the veneer of outrage is a party going about business as usual, running the same campaigns on the same platforms. We suffer from denial, weak leadership, and inertia.
First, Democrats are in denial about what we can accomplish under this administration.
Today, the President and his party hold the White House and both houses of Congress, with the benefit of an extraordinarily accommodating Supreme Court. Even if Democrats win the House in 2026, we will still have a Republican Senate and the President’s veto to contend with. What’s more, the administration is ruling through illegal executive orders and intimidation; they’re barely working with a Congress that’s already on their side. That’s only going to get worse if Democrats win the House.
We know all that, but you wouldn’t know it from watching us. In Congress and in campaigns around the country, we’re promising to rein in the administration by blocking legislation, holding officials accountable, and even passing bills on Democratic priorities. In my race, one candidate wants to establish that presidents don’t have criminal immunity, stop the President from cutting funding authorized by Congress, limit the President’s ability to impose tariffs, and more.
These are empty promises, with no chance of happening while this administration—or the next one that believes in total executive power—is in office. We can’t begin to fight until we see the danger clearly.
That brings us to the party’s second problem: weak leadership. We don’t have a standard-bearer or a message, but we also don’t have the right goals.
Today, Democrats are focused on winning back the House of Representatives in 2026. That’s a typical midterm strategy, and of course we have to do it. But, it’s not enough this time around. For all the reasons above, winning a House majority is not going to stop our country’s slide into authoritarianism. If anything, it will push the administration to assert boundless executive power even more forcefully.
We can’t stop them in Congress, but we can win back the presidency. 2028 is when we can put an end to the destruction, and so 2026 has to be about more than flipping competitive seats. It has to be about building a party that can win decisively, and so we need elected Democrats in every seat to have the profiles and platforms that can bring more people to the party. A myopic focus on winning a majority in one chamber won’t deliver that.
Which brings us to our third problem: our platform is a product of inertia.
To win in 2028, more Americans need to choose us to lead, and that’s going to take a platform that can turn around our declining support. We won’t be able to pass any of it now, but we can show the American people what we’ll do if they put us back in office.
After November, the party quickly coalesced around “affordability” as the centerpiece of that platform, and of course we have to fight for it. Americans are struggling with the cost of everything, and we need to fix that so each of us has a chance at a life of dignity, hope, and joy.
But affordability will not win in 2028. Democrats are already the party of affordability, and we have been for generations. We defend safety nets, fight for labor and consumers, advocate for affordable housing and living wages, and work to keep the tax burden off the working and middle classes. And, after years of fighting for those policies, we are actually losing ground with the voters we want to reach. Why do we believe focusing there will turn our approval around? What are we going to do about affordability in the next two years that we haven’t done in the last fifty?
I can understand how we got here. Voters said that they chose Trump because costs were too high, and that insight quickly became orthodoxy. We like it because it’s concrete, but also because it’s convenient. It lets us talk about issues we like to talk about anyway; it gives us a new label so we don’t have to come up with a new platform.
But in a time when the President is radically and recklessly reshaping the nation, and when many Americans chose that, “affordability” is a pitifully small pitch. It shows that we still don’t understand the larger context. When the President crosses a line, we rush to say, “this is not normal.” “Not normal” is exactly what many Americans are looking for, and we aren’t offering anything like it.
We are facing a singular national crisis, but our platform and approach could have been cut and pasted from a decade ago—except this time it’s on TikTok. We need to recognize that the constitutional ways to check executive power won’t work with this administration, so our focus has to be on winning back the presidency. That means using the 2026 election not just to win a few more seats, but to turn the party around so we can win in 2028. And that means defining an ambitious platform equal to this transformational moment.
Twenty-one years after he published his book, President Kennedy signed a copy for a college student:
For Andy—With the hope that he will not be compelled in his senior year to write ‘Why America Slept.’
Democrats have been sleeping for ten years, maybe more. We can still win, but only if we wake up.
