Before Luigi Mangione, There Was Gaetano Bresci
May 22, 2025
The Republican Party’s Populist Betrayal
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In a recent CNN town hall, an audience member named Grace Thomas asked Bernie Sanders how the Democrats could win back men, particularly white men, without abandoning marginalized communities. A fiery Sanders, who moments later would be shouting at Anderson Cooper about CNN’s insufficient attention to America’s health care crisis, answered Grace with his nice-Jewish-grandpa-explains-right-and-wrong voice. There are certainly things that Americans disagree over, he said, but there are also many things most of us agree on, particularly when it comes to economic issues that impact people’s daily lives.
To illustrate, Sanders asked the bipartisan audience a question of his own: “Who thinks the American health care system is broken?” Everyone raised their hands.
While President Donald Trump and his brigade of billionaires ransack the federal government, Sanders is one of the few opposition politicians actually trying to do politics. His tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has drawn packed crowds across the country. Their message: fight oligarchy by standing up to corporations and addressing the pressing needs of the working majority.
Despite drawing these huge crowds, the energy that Bernie and AOC are gathering has few places to go in electoral politics. There is no way to get the kinds of policies they talk about through the current legislature, neither of them are running for office at the moment, and the Democratic Party has proven that it will resist its social democratic wing harder than it does MAGA.
The Fighting Oligarchy Tour’s success is driven by Bernie’s and AOC’s ability to validate the frustrations of the American majority and connect working-class grievances to commonsense solutions that put people before profit. Sanders’s unifying move in that bipartisan CNN town hall was a perfect example. Now imagine if we could take all those raised hands agreeing that our health care system is broken and convert them into votes for a solution. With ballot initiatives, we can.
At the Center for Work and Democracy, my colleagues and I have spent the past four years cataloguing and studying the results of citizen-initiated ballot measures. Put simply, people vote a lot differently on policies than they do on politicians. Setting partisan politics aside, strong majorities around the country are voting for egalitarian measures like raising minimum wages, expanding Medicaid, and defending abortion rights.
Bernie and AOC have a national platform, an audience primed for action, and the infrastructure to gather enough small donations to stand up to the billionaire class. If we really want to fight oligarchy with a policy agenda that tangibly improves working people’s lives now, ballot initiatives are the best chance we have. Bernie and AOC should throw their weight behind direct democracy and back initiatives for people-first policies.
The American political system doesn’t give ordinary people many opportunities to weigh in directly on the laws that govern us. In half the states and in most municipalities, however, voters can propose and pass their own legislation through ballot initiatives. The results of these votes show an American population that agrees on a lot of core issues.
Over the last fifteen years, citizen-initiated ballot measures at the state level passed just under 55 percent of the time. Egalitarian policies, meaning policies that broadly equalize society, passed over 65 percent of the time. This category includes everything from minimum-wage increases to labor protections to abortion rights to un-gerrymandering districts.
Egalitarian measures that focused on economic redistribution passed 75 percent of the time. Here we’re talking about policies like raising the minimum wage, expanding access to Medicaid, curbing predatory debt collection, and taxing the rich to fund public services.
Most importantly, these wins are happening in “red” and “blue” states alike.
In fact, in states controlled by the Republican Party, economic justice initiatives passed 92 percent of the time. 92 percent! When given the chance to choose policies that make society fairer and more equal, red state voters vote “yes” more than nine times out of ten.
As Kelly Hall, director of the Fairness Project, the organization with the best track record of supporting successful egalitarian measures, told Jacobin: “People want Medicaid expansion, so let’s get out there and get people covered. Otherwise, there isn’t much for anybody in the legislative minority to do except rend their garments and gnash their teeth.”
After the Barack Obama presidency’s Affordable Care Act, Republicans made Medicaid expansion enemy number one. But when voters in eight red and purple states put Medicaid expansion on the ballot, it passed in all but one — with an average 60 percent majority. There is no other way to expand Medicaid in Republican-controlled states, and this one works.
Let’s look at some other examples. In the twenty-first century, there have been twenty-eight statewide votes to raise minimum wages and twenty-seven passed — again, with an average 60 percent majority. The success shouldn’t be surprising. A majority of people work for a living, and many jobs don’t pay enough for workers to make ends meet without taking on additional jobs or going into debt. At a time when the cost of living is one of Americans’ most pressing concerns, voting to raise wage floors is a no-brainer for most people.
For half a century, partisan politics made abortion seem like a political third rail dividing the country down the middle. Yet of the seventeen states where the issue has appeared on the ballot since 2022, fourteen supported reproductive freedom, including in red states like Arizona, Missouri, and Montana. And one of the three losses, a failed bid to put abortion rights in the Florida state constitution, received 57 percent of the vote despite all manner of repression; it only failed because of the state’s 60 percent rule for initiatives.
“For abortion, we let people tell their stories,” Lisbeth Espinosa, organizer at Healthcare Rising Arizona (HRA), told Jacobin. HRA led Arizona’s successful 2024 initiative to protect abortion rights, along with the Fairness Project and a host of other local organizations. She continued, “And we connected people’s stories to the exercise of direct democracy, so we let people grab a hold of it, and democracy goes from a noun to a verb. It’s way more powerful than political parties right now.”
The Democratic Party behaves as though passing genuinely people-first policies requires a nearly impossible feat of political gymnastics. But it turns out that when it comes to a lot of these issues, you can just ask people. Tellingly, these initiatives commonly outperform the winning politicians on the same ballot.
The tools of direct democracy were intended for moments like ours, when the majority wants and needs policies that neither party will deliver. Grassroots campaigns for egalitarian ballot initiatives present a unique opportunity to channel popular resentment toward real solutions.
The best part? It’s already happening. Egalitarian measures, especially those that focus on economic justice, are winning around the country.
In fact, ballot measures have been so effective at passing egalitarian policies that statehouses around the country have declared war on direct democracy, with dozens of legislative and bureaucratic maneuvers designed to kneecap citizen initiatives or kill the initiative process altogether.
“There are a lot of politicians who are incessant on coming up with more and more ways to take power out of the people’s hands,” said Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a think tank and hub for progressive ballot initiative campaigns. “It’s mostly coming from the Republican Party, but if we’re being honest, it’s the Democrats too in spots.”
In this context, egalitarian wins can’t rely on an issue’s raw popularity. They require strategic, well-organized campaigns.
The Fairness Project has gone twenty-nine for thirty-two at state-level egalitarian measures in the past decade, mostly in red states, in addition to a dozen other initiative victories. Despite operating with a tiny national staff, the wins they have racked up are a major component of the staggering success rates we see for egalitarian initiatives. Their model is simple: focus on achievable, high-impact, popular issues in red states, provide the best resources to local grassroots coalitions, keep partisan politics out of it, and commit to year-round organizing.
“We get rid of the performative and focus on what things are highly effective,” Hall told Jacobin.
It works. A prime example: their abortion rights campaign in Arizona gathered so many signatures that the deep-pocketed anti-choice opposition basically folded. Prop 139 won with 62 percent of the vote — hundreds of thousands more votes than either Trump or Kamala Harris got in the state.
Grounding our movement in direct votes for people-first policies doesn’t just enable us to get these laws on the books. It also changes our political terrain. “The best defense is a good offense,” said Hall. “I still am very concerned about what they will do at the federal level on abortion, but I’d be far more concerned that we would be facing a national abortion ban if we had not shown just how unpopular that is even in red states.”
We are already seeing a similar effect with Medicaid. Missouri senator Josh Hawley, darling of the January 6 contingent and sworn enemy of Medicaid circa 2018, did an abrupt about-face after his state voted to expand Medicaid in 2020. He is now one of the Republicans defending Medicaid against Trump’s threats.
“These citizen initiatives are people’s way of reclaiming some autonomy in the political system,” Savwoir told Jacobin.
Ballot initiatives are the best tool for the task at hand, but they are no miracle cure. Only twenty-three states currently have citizen initiatives at the state level, and putting something on the ballot is difficult and expensive (though less so than candidate elections). Meanwhile, the rules are complicated and restrictive, and the entire process is facing a coordinated assault from legislators and wealthy interest groups who would rather keep the policymaking domain to themselves. Wins that stand to redistribute significant resources from the rich are sometimes typically attacked by the statehouse and courts after they pass, like Arizona’s 2020 initiative taxing high incomes to fund public education.
Ultimately, the full implementation of egalitarian policies will require a national, cross-sectoral movement to uphold and expand popular measures. But with the Republican Party off the rails and Democrats committed to hiding under the bed, citizen initiatives offer the only realistic path to forcing people-first policies onto the political agenda and passing them directly.
The United States is at a critical juncture. Trump and his billionaire friends are attacking the services, programs, and functions of government that until now have prevented society from collapsing into profit-driven mayhem. They are openly flouting the courts and even having judges arrested when they rule against the regime.
At the same time, the destruction of the liberal status quo is forcing Americans to confront big questions about what kind of country we want to live in and how we achieve necessary reforms. As the popularity of the Fighting Oligarchy Tour demonstrates, most people want a society that works for everyone, not just the 1 percent.
So how do we get there?
The shortest path from one place to another is a straight line. Direct votes cut through the disaster that is two-party politics and allow popular movements to go on offense. Health care for all? Guaranteed paid sick and family leave? More affordable housing? Environmental protection? Tax billionaires to fund public education and transportation? We could vote on it, and we don’t need to wait for a hypothetical third-party surge or fantasy future when an insurgent-led Democratic Party seizes a filibuster-proof trifecta. We can do it right now.
Many organizations are leading the fight to pass impactful ballot initiatives on the ground. They need resources and support, but the real missing piece is a coherent national movement connecting these efforts. That is exactly what Bernie and AOC can provide.
Americans are ready to directly legislate the ideas being put forth by the Fighting Oligarchy Tour. Bernie and AOC should use their platform to support and expand local ballot initiative fights across the country and consolidate that momentum into a coherent, national people-first agenda.
Great Job Ben Case & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
