Kudos to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach for calling out the use of junk polls by mainstream media and many social scientists. And further honor to them for framing their conclusion so clearly: that Democratic candidates running as “moderates” are buying one-way tickets to oblivion.

The broader argument they make, though, skirts important underlying issues; it doesn’t pinpoint the real causes of the Democratic Party’s current malaise. This doesn’t make their prescriptions for 2026 and 2028 worthless—yes, indeed, opposing corruption is vital. But their appeals are incomplete and court unnecessary risks. In particular, their analysis falls short in explaining why so many former Democrats, especially lower-income Americans, have abandoned the party—making it all too easy for their advice (focus on democratic and small “r” republican values) to end up sounding like just another version of the empty “moderate” Democratic campaign appeals that helped so much to get us where we are.

Their case hinges on the claim that U.S. politics changed fundamentally sometime after the mid-1990s. Until then, they assert, the classic “median voter” model of political party competition functioned fairly well; then “structural” changes came along. Their first structural factor is misleading: that in the new order, “who the median voter is depends on who shows up to vote.” Setting aside historical variations in U.S. electoral turnout that Walter Dean Burnham and I have long emphasized, this condition is true for every mass election in any era. Their second factor is more compelling: “local politics has been swamped by national tides.”

This is where specificity matters. The mainstream political science election analyses they cite are overly stylized and selective, largely ignoring evidence of real political behavior as revealed in archives and documentary records. Money mostly runs quietly in the background, with hardly any questions asked about where it came from and why. The attention is all on the shadows flickering on the walls of America’s coin-operated mass media cave.

To some extent, this is understandable. The most basic data sources for the role of money in U.S. national elections, the trove of national party records on file in the National Archives, have been virtually inaccessible to both political scientists and historians until a few months ago, when I made them available on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. As a result, most discussions of the subject have been little more than impressionistic sketches. Even more seriously, mainstream election analyses are all but blind to the macroeconomic and international economic considerations that have animated candidates and parties at virtually all periods of U.S. history, including now.

For Bonica and Grumbach’s case, this really matters. The Democratic Party’s historic links to working-class Americans had been fraying for a while, but Jimmy Carter’s decision to replace G. William Miller with Paul Volcker—well before the nineties—transformed a slow downward spiral into a catastrophe. Stanley Kelley’s dissection of how Volcker wrecked Carter’s reelection effort in his important 1983 book Interpreting Elections was a fine start. It should have been aggressively followed up by studies of how the Great Volcker Deflation destroyed the Democratic brand as the heartland collapsed over the next few years. The fact that a Democrat appointed him is rarely pondered by political scientists.

Together with colleagues like William Greider and Joel Rogers, I have worked through the dismal details (including opinion polling), so I will simply dismiss the idea that any appeal to the median voter was responsible for any of this. Carter’s decision reflected massive pressure from financiers and financial markets in a panic over what in hindsight was a trivial uptick in the government deficit. Ever since Democratic financiers and business groups lined up behind fiscal austerity, their demands have defined the party’s center of gravity.

This was certainly the case in 1984. Almost everyone agrees that Walter Mondale’s promise to raise taxes doomed his bid for the presidency. But as Rogers and I document in Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, Mondale made that decision after two key Democratic financiers, Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, flew out to Minnesota and pressed him to drink from the poisoned chalice.

The story four years later was similar, if less melodramatic. Under pressure from the party’s financial bloc, Michael Dukakis resisted calls for stronger fiscal spending that might have helped workers whose jobs were disappearing amid the first great surge of imports and overseas investments by U.S. firms. He lost in a landslide. Two of the most prominent Democratic financiers supporting his campaign were, once again, Rubin and Altman, while Larry Summers, closely connected to Rubin, advised the campaign. Thereafter the Democratic elite’s emphasis on austerity, lower taxes, financial deregulation, and the benefits flowing from free trade, unrestricted overseas investment, and a high dollar has barely shifted. Their indifference to investing much in average Americans, reconstructing heartland communities, or coping with falling rates of unionization reflects a policy fixation rivaling that of an Egyptian dynasty. Its devastating long-run effects on the party’s position in the Midwest and South are only now being widely recognized.

So much, then, for median voters. This is how money-driven politics works: voters, including the median voter, lack the resources to mount viable alternatives unless they pool resources among unions or community groups, both of which have steadily declined under both Democratic and Republican presidencies. Meanwhile, every congressional election since 1980—the earliest data available, not likely a turning point—demonstrates the robustness of the investment theory of political parties: outcomes have been linear functions of money, which in many cases did not follow the polls but actively shaped them.

The pattern endures. The drop-off in voter turnout from the 2012 presidential election to the following off-year contest was the second largest in U.S. history. For anyone who wanted to see, the handwriting was on the wall: both parties were disintegrating. Then, in 2016, a billionaire insurgent became the Republican nominee as the Democratic establishment rallied around Hillary Clinton to turn back Bernie Sanders. Having won the nomination, Clinton ostentatiously courted Republican business groups, but the strategy did not work. Evidence in the American National Election Survey indicates that too many working Americans had lost patience. Significant numbers of low-income voters, including women and minorities who had previously supported Obama, switched to Trump or declined to vote at all. More than a few asserted they no longer perceived significant differences between the political parties.

Joe Biden did not repeat Clinton’s mistake. When he became the consensus choice of party elites to contain Sanders once again, he formed joint task forces with Sanders’s team once he won the nomination and later made places for progressives within his administration. Among other things, their efforts to reorient antitrust exasperated many prominent Silicon Valley figures who had once claimed to be Democrats. The result was the formation of a “Red Tech” bloc that for the time being is firmly massed behind Trump. But alas, Biden’s administration failed to deliver for most workers. The net increase in unionization during his presidency was zero, and despite many claims to the contrary, real wages for most Americans working full-time failed to keep pace with inflation. Meantime the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program enormously increased the wealth of high-income Americans. The Democratic disaster in 2024 was easy to foresee.

The jubilation of many high-tech executives when Kamala Harris took over from Biden was obvious—as loud and clear as her silence when many openly campaigned for her while demanding Lina Khan’s dismissal. By emulating Clinton, courting Republican voters, and campaigning in the final days with Liz Cheney instead of with Sanders, she likely did little to help herself reach average Americans, many of whom told pollsters that doubts about Trump’s commitment to democracy were not enough to keep them from voting against her.

Thus my misgivings about Bonica and Grumbach’s emphasis on “anti-corruption” and the preservation of democracy as a core Democratic appeal. Right now, Democratic congressional leaders clearly think that Trump is so vulnerable that a repetition of 2025’s across-the-board shift to Democrats is likely in the upcoming midterm elections. They talk far more boldly than they act while reveling in crypto cash and other streams of political money. But they and many others have a long history of underestimating Trump’s economics and its appeals, as well as how swiftly and convincingly he is able to dramatize those doctrines as populist and outflank Democrats on the left. With Trump’s ostentatious overtures first to Zohran Mamdani and now to Elizabeth Warren, so reminiscent of how he used to talk up Sanders, the shape of things to come is obvious. As the administration revs up cascading streams of tax rebates, prescription drug price cuts, and other (short-term) goodies for an electorate that considers the Democrats more corrupt than the Republicans, these calculations on the part of Democratic elites can easily prove as misguided as they were in 2016 and 2024.

It is obvious that Democrats cannot win a majority again without being a “big tent” party, in principle open to anyone who supports their platform; they will want to reach out to Republicans, including business groups, and they will need to raise money. But they cannot rely on opposition to Trump and simple support for “democracy.” As Warren recently stressed, building a big tent does not require a “tepid, nibble-around-the-edges approach” that flatters billionaires. Unless Democrats offer a message far stronger than anything they have in a long time—unless, in Warren’s words, they “aggressively challenge the status quo” and “chart a clear path for big, structural change,” especially on the economic front—they will remain easy targets for caricature. Promoting a Whig revival around democracy and Obamacare tweaks, supply-side tinkering and free trade, or abundance-by-deregulation, jobs, AI wonders, and all the rest risks cementing their status as a permanent minority party.

But if money drives politics, is there no other choice? Some years back, my colleagues and I aggregated the raw campaign roster of contributions to the major presidential candidates and congressional leaders to reveal the true size profile of donors to each. The results were striking: all the mainstream Democrats—Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi—depended massively on contributions over $100,000. Essentially no large contributors supported Sanders.

That graph has been widely taken to imply that challenges to big money are hopeless. That’s a mistake. In 2023 Servaas Storm and I showed how the Fed’s latest round of quantitative easing was concentrating spending power in the hands of wealthy Americans. The resulting “K-shaped” economy is now attracting much wider attention. But its political implications are not: that the affordability crisis is hitting a much wider swath of the public than in 2016, when Sanders made such a strong run. It is not at all clear that the many millions of Americans now under pressure are not a base for a much stronger challenge than then.