What is the Democrats’ single biggest weakness heading into the midterms, and how can it be overcome?

The most important thing for Democrats to do is establish a solid economic frame that includes addressing rising cost of living, creating jobs with good wages and benefits, and helping Americans break through a system that is increasingly rigged against working- and middle-class families. Despite President Trump’s failures, economic chaos and policies that benefit the wealthy and big corporations, Republicans are still competitive on the economy in polls. We will not win if we aren’t strong on the economy. We can’t beat something with nothing. And our compelling populist economic message beats their economic message and is the best answer to Republican cultural attacks.

Celinda Lake is a pollster for the Democratic National Committee and dozens of Democratic incumbents and challengers at all levels of the electoral process.

Democrats’ single biggest weakness in 2026 will be a continuation of their greatest recent struggle: explaining to voters what they stand for. A month into the year, Democratic leadership and establishment candidates have dodged every issue of the day, seem to believe saying “affordability” 10,000 times will move the needle and apparently assume their base voters have nowhere else to go. If the D.C. consultant culture has its way, Democrats will likely take the House, but not with nearly the margin that would otherwise be possible. Meanwhile, they will provide no real vision for the country and no path forward for their party.

Reed Galen co-founded The Lincoln Project. His Substack and podcast are both called “The Home Front.”

The Trump administration has hurt working people more than any previous administration. Tariffs, according to Yale’s Budget Lab, will cost the average household $1,700 in the near term, disproportionately burdening low- and middle-income Americans who spend more of their money on goods. Trump’s gutting of ACA tax credits more than doubled the average premium for 20 million people, and his trillion-dollar Medicaid cut may cause 10-15 million people to lose their coverage.

Trump is driving up costs for working-class Americans — the very people who elected him — and voters know it. Last week, Pew found that only 37% of Americans approve of Trump. Non-college voters have swung against Trump by 21 points since 2024, and only 45% approve of his performance (versus 53% who disapprove).

Right now, the biggest weakness of the Democratic Party is that it isn’t taking sufficient advantage of a possible realignment of working-class people into its coalition. Democrats need to be relentlessly, ruthlessly focused on creating opportunity in the country and helping working- and middle-class Americans make ends meet.

The Democratic Party could be the party of the working class again — if it can redefine itself to appeal to a broad majority, allowing a wider variety of views on security and culture and emphasizing the cost-of-living issues that matter most to working Americans.

Neera Tanden is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and the CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Working people are furious about rising costs, and Democrats are missing their chance to win them over because they won’t consistently pick fights with the billionaire class.

Republicans have made inroads with working-class people of all races by pitting us against each other, while they serve corporate interests and their billionaire friends.

Democrats need to get working-class voters back, and the way to do that is to challenge the corporate interests that have been controlling the party in recent years. Call out pharmaceutical companies price-gouging families, Wall Street firms turning housing into a casino, and billionaires paying lower tax rates than teachers.

Instead, Democrats keep defending the status quo. This may appeal to a shrinking group of more affluent voters, but it won’t win over people choosing between rent and groceries every day.

We need to center a working-class agenda, regardless of corporate donors: guaranteed health care, a home you can afford, time to spend with your family, affordable child care and good jobs for everyone.

Finally, when Democrats take corporate super PAC money, they hemorrhage credibility. Voters won’t believe the Democratic Party will fight for them unless it finally challenges the powerful interests who’ve rigged the game against them.

Maurice Mitchell is the national director of the Working Families Party.

The leadership of the Democratic Party lacks political courage. Too many Democrats are standing by while right-wing and corporate money is funneled into Democratic primaries to suppress the will of voters, or siding with President Trump and the GOP in funding the Department of Homeland Security while ICE and CPB agents round up immigrants and kill our neighbors. Democrats’ coziness with the same billionaire donors, lobbies and super PACs who helped elect Trump is what got us here. Republicans are using authoritarianism to violently assert their control over our communities and to give billionaires a trillion-dollar tax cut at the expense of everyone else’s Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Democrats must lead the opposition, and if current lawmakers won’t do it, a new crop of leaders will. This midterm cycle, we must win back working people by electing a new slate of working-class champions to represent them in Congress. The future of the Democratic Party demands leaders who are accountable to the people and ready to use their megaphones to challenge the status quo.

Alexandra Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats.

At a 2022 American Political Science Association panel on predicting the House midterms, my model produced the most accurate prediction. But all the predictions that year were quite wrong, and mine was just the least wrong.

One mistake many Democrats make is that they are far too confident in their models of how people will vote, and what campaign language will influence those votes. This is especially common among consultants whose business model entails recommending strategic moves toward the center to win swing voters. The evidence for those effects is far smaller and less reliable than most Democrats believe, even for conservative districts.

But shouldn’t Democrats just do the best they can with an unreliable signal? No: When the effect is that uncertain, elaborate fine-tuning is a waste of time and money, corrosive to democracy, and may even repel voters. This goes for minutely poll-testing messaging, such as “abolishing” vs “retraining” ICE, as well as broader discussions of 2028 strategy, which perpetually devolve into over-confident debates about electability. Each Democratic candidate would do better to trust the political science that shows most strategic adjustments are butterfly flaps in a hurricane, and instead just speak their beliefs honestly.

Nick Beauchamp is an associate professor in the political science department and the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University.