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Thousands in Midwestern GOP Districts Attend Sanders' First Stops on Tour to Fight Oligarchy
"It's like there's only one person who is actually able to sidestep the demoralization and frustration," said one observer.
Feb 22, 2025
After addressing more than 3,400 Nebraska residents in Omaha Friday evening, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday made his second stop on his National Tour to Fight Oligarchy—telling Iowa City, Iowa residents that "Trumpism will not be defeated by politicians inside the D.C. Beltway."
"For better or worse, that is not going to happen," said the Vermont Independent senator, whose broadly popular policy proposals have long been dismissed by Democratic leaders as unrealistic and radical while President Donald Trump has increasingly captured the attention of the working class Americans who would benefit most from Sanders' ideas.
"It will only be defeated by millions of Americans in Iowa, in Vermont, in Nebraska, in every state in this country, who come together in a strong grassroots movement and say no to oligarchy, no to authoritarianism, no to kleptocracy, no to massive cuts to programs that low-income and working Americans desperately need, no to huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country," said Sanders.
The senator announced his tour earlier this month as Elon Musk, the head of the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) who poured $277 million on the president's campaign, swept through numerous agencies, with DOGE staffers setting up illegal servers, seizing control of data, shutting federal employees out of offices, and working to shut down operations across the government.
Since Trump took office for his second term just over a month ago, roughly 30,000 federal employees have been fired or laid off—part of Musk's push to cut $2 trillion in federal spending in order to fill the $4.6 trillion hole that Trump's extension of the 2017 tax cuts would blow in the deficit.
Republican lawmakers have also pushed to include cuts to Medicaid, and Trump this week signaled he would back Medicare cuts after repeatedly insisting he would not slash the popular healthcare program used by more than 65 million Americans, in order to save money while handing out tax cuts to the same corporations and ultrawealthy households that benefited from the 2017 tax law.
"Today in America we are rapidly moving toward an oligarchic form of society where a handful of multibillionaires not only have extraordinary wealth, but unprecedented economic, media, and political power," said Sanders in Iowa City, which like Omaha is represented by a Republican U.S. House member who narrowly won reelection last November and has faced pressure to reject the GOP budget plan. "Brothers and sisters, that is not the democracy that men and women fought and died to defend."
Sanders began his tour in Omaha and Iowa City to pressure the Republican House members there—Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) out of supporting the GOP's proposed cuts.
"Together, we can stop Republicans from cutting Medicaid and giving tax breaks to billionaires," said Sanders ahead of the Iowa City event.
Sanders drew loud applause when he noted that the increasingly oligarchic political system extends past just Trump, Musk, and Republican lawmakers.
"The role of billionaires in politics, it's not just Musk, it's others," he said. "It's not just Republican billionaires, it is Democratic billionaires. It is the corruption of the two-party system."
Progressive activists and journalists in recent weeks have expressed growing frustration with Democratic leaders as they have publicly appeared to throw up their hands and deny they have any power to fight Trump's attacks on immigrants, transgender children, and other marginalized people.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has garnered scorn for meeting with Silicon Valley executives to "mend fences" with the powerful tech sector—where numerous CEOs have signaled support for Trump during his second term.
Ken Martin, the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, said last month that the party should continue to take money from "good billionaires."
Some Democratic senators have voted for Trump's Cabinet nominees even as members of the caucus have accused Musk of orchestrating a coup on Trump's behalf, and leaders including Jeffries have reportedly become "very frustrated" with progressive advocacy groups like Indivisible and MoveOn for organizing grassroots efforts to pressure the Democrats to act as a true opposition party.
Meanwhile, Sanders this weekend has captured the attention of thousands of people in Republican districts along with hundreds of thousands of people who have watched his anti-oligarchy tour online.
"The energy around what Bernie is doing is insane," said Matt Stoller, a researcher at the American Economic Liberties Project. "It's like there's only one person who is actually able to sidestep the demoralization and frustration."
Jeremy Slevin, a senior adviser to Sanders, reported that in Iowa City, the senator gave "not one, not two, but three different speeches to overflow crowds," with 2,000 people lining up to see him speak "on a freezing cold day in a Republican district."
Pointing to the enthusiasm shown in Nebraska and Iowa, Sanders supporters questioned the idea, reportedly embraced by Democratic consultants and politicians, that "Americans don't understand the word oligarchy."
"Bernie Sanders launched an anti-oligarchy tour, and it's the only thing that has popularly resonated within the Democratic Party base," said Stoller. "That's fascinating and notable."
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What Can Be Done About the Left’s Diminished DNC Presence?
The recent race for DNC chair raises questions about how the progressive wing of the party can and should move forward toward 2028.
Feb 09, 2025
Just before starting to write my lament about what a dramatic step backward the recent campaign for Democratic National Committee chair had been, I opened an Our Revolution email that told me, “We beat back the party establishment at the DNC.”
Now Our Revolution being a direct organizational descendent of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and me having been a 2016 Sanders convention delegate, I feel pretty confident that our ideas of who “we” means are pretty much the same. So what accounts for the widely divergent takes?
For those who haven’t been following this, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was just elected to lead the DNC for the next four years, defeating Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler by a 246.5–134.5 vote margin. There was no contested election four years ago, because by tradition a just-elected president selects the new chair; contested elections generally follow defeats. In the last one, in 2017, former Obama administration Secretary of Labor Tom Perez won the job, beating Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison in a second round of voting, 235--200.
At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign.
Ellison’s candidacy came in the wake of his having been just the second member of Congress to support Sanders in the prior year’s presidential primaries, and the fact that Sanders people harbored serious grievances with the DNC over its perceived favoritism for the ultimate nominee, Hillary Clinton, lent a distinct edge to the election, bringing it considerably more buzz than the one that just occurred. At the time, former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, a vociferous opponent of Sanders’ run—who had once declared, “The most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals... is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year”—now thought there was “a great deal to be said for putting an active Sanders supporter in there,” so as to clear the air “of suspicions and paranoia.” But Clinton and Barack Obama apparently didn’t think so, and Clinton’s past Obama cabinet colleague, Perez, took up the torch in a race that produced a level of grassroots involvement seldom if ever before seen in this contest.
Although the office is traditionally considered organizational rather than ideological and the 2017 candidates did run on those issues, the underlying political differences were obvious to all. This time around, the race was generally understood to involve little if any political disagreement on the issues. By way of explaining its support for new party chair Martin, Our Revolution characterized runner-up Wikler, as “an establishment candidate backed by Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, and bankrolled by the billionaire class.” We understand that election campaigns are about sharpening the perception of differences between the candidates, but still this seems a rather thin, flimsy basis for hailing the vote as an anti-establishment triumph, given that Martin has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the party to take money from "those bad billionaires" only from "good billionaires;”and one of the two billionaires who gave a quarter million dollars to Wikler’s campaign was George Soros—probably the DNC’s model “good billionaire.” Besides Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg probably aren’t thinking of donating anyhow. Oh, and Chuck Schumer actually supported Ellison eight years ago.
Actually, “we” did have a horse in the race—2020 Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir. Shakir, who has been running a nonprofit news organization called More Perfect Union, dedicated to “building power for the working class,” argued that Democrats needed a pitch for building a pro-worker economy to go with their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy proposals. His viewpoint presented a serious alternative to that of Martin, who told a candidates forum that “we’ve got the right message... What we need to do is connect it back with the voters,”—seemingly a tough position to maintain following an election in which NBC’s 20-state exit polling showed the majority of voters with annual household incomes under $100,000 voting Republican, while the majority of those from over-$100,000 households voted Democrat. But even though Shakir was a DNC member and thereby able to get the 40 signatures of committee members needed to run, he entered the race far too late to be taken for a serious contender and ultimately received but two votes.
Mind you, none of this critique comes as a criticism of the work of the two state party chairs who were the principal contenders. Martin touts the fact that Democrats have won every statewide election in Minnesota in the 14 years that he has chaired the party, and anyone who understands the effort that goes into political campaign work can only admire that achievement. Nor is Our Revolution to be criticized for taking the time to discern what they thought would be the best possible option in a not terribly exciting race that was nevertheless of some importance.
At the same time it’s hard not to regret the diminished DNC presence of the “we” that Our Revolution spoke of, after “we” legitimately contended for power in the last contested election. Certainly this lack of interest was in no small part a consequence of the extraordinary circumstances that produced a presidential nominee who had not gone before the voters in a single primary—for the first time since Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who believe that the structure and history of the American political system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic Party—uncomfortable and unpleasant as that may be at times. As the social scientists like to say, politics abhors a vacuum, and absent a national Democratic Party presence for the perspective that motivated the Sanders campaigns, people seeking action on the big questions on the big stage may start to look elsewhere. And elsewhere always looms the possibility of the cul-de-sac of yet of another third party candidacy that holds interesting conventions and debates, but ultimately receives only a small share of the vote, but a large share of the blame for the election of a Republican president.
At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to make it our business to find one.
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Ahead of Chair Vote, Progressives Say DNC 'Failing Disastrously' to Learn From Loss to Trump
"Voters—and all Americans—deserve better than two corporate-controlled parties," asserted the leader of Our Revolution.
Jan 30, 2025
The head of a leading U.S. progressive group on Thursday accused the Democratic National Committee—which will choose new leadership this weekend—of trying to silence rank-and-file activists and voters, showing that the Democratic Party's governing body is failing to connect with the working-class Americans who helped deliver the White House and Congress to Republicans.
"This moment demands a Democratic Party that provides more than just reactive opposition to an administration bent on rigging our economic and political systems in favor of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals on Earth," Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, an offshoot of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, said in a statement ahead of Thursday evening's final DNC candidate forum. "It demands leaders who put the party's grassroots base ahead of the donor class and articulate a real vision that rejects [Republican President] Donald Trump's corporate rule—starting with renouncing corporate money themselves."
"Unfortunately," Geevarghese lamented, "Democratic leadership is failing disastrously to meet this urgent mandate. Ahead of tonight's forum, the DNC is actively working to silence rank-and-file Democratic activists and base voters calling for a ban on dark money in primaries and the rejection of corporate funding. In a last-minute move, they shut the event off from the public and even deliberately shared the wrong address for where grassroots supporters are allowed to gather."
Trump has forged an unholy alliance between state and corporate power. With the help of Big Tech, Big Oil and other oligarchs, he is ushering in a new era of authoritarian capitalism in America. Where is the Democratic Party? Where is the leadership and where is the opposition required in this mom
— Our Revolution ( @our-revolution.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 10:15 AM
A post-election survey of 5,000 Our Revolution members found that only 14% of respondents were "very confident" that the Democratic Party and its leaders in Congress, state houses, and city halls will fight against the worst parts of Trump's agenda. Furthermore, 88% of survey respondents said they support efforts to transform the Democratic Party into a real opposition party and to get the party to reject corporate money and power, while the remaining 12% said they've already given up on the Democratic Party.
Forty-one percent of survey respondents said they want Our Revolution to primarily focus on fighting Trump and oligarchs, 32% said the group should concentrate on taking back the Democratic Party from the corporate class, and the remaining 27% think Our Rev should prioritize electing progressive candidates.
"Voters—and all Americans—deserve better than two corporate-controlled parties," asserted Geevarghese, whose group hosted a DNC candidate forum earlier this month. "The election of the next DNC chair will shape the opposition to Trump's second term, and we are already seeing glaring red flags from party leaders who are unwilling to part with the ways of the past that ushered in four more years of a would-be tyrant."
An
Our Revolution petition signed by more than 10,000 active grassroots Democratic volunteers, donors, and local and state party leaders is calling on the DNC to:
- Ban dark money in primaries and reject corporate money;
- Invest in state parties and uplift grassroots organizing;
- Make the DNC budget transparent and hold consultants accountable; and
- Commit to a progressive platform and small-donor democracy.
Longtime progressive strategist Faiz Shakir, who managed Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, is
running for DNC chair on a platform of making Democrats the party of the working class.
"The question to my mind now is that if there is consensus around the working class confronting oligarchy, then what new ideas are we bringing to the table in how we utilize the power and authority of the DNC?" Shakir said in interview published Thursday by The Guardian. "My election would send the strongest message that we're doing something different."
As The Guardian's Joan Greve noted:
Shakir faces an uphill battle to capture the chair position. He only announced his candidacy earlier this month, while the front-runners in the race—Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party—have been campaigning for two months. Ahead of the leadership elections on Saturday, Martin claims to have already secured the support of at least 200 DNC members, which would put him within striking distance of a winning majority, although his opponents have questioned that whip count.
Undaunted, Shakir said he is the best candidate for refocusing the Democratic Party on serving its working-class base.
"Can we open the doors and let people in? Can we start from the premise that this is a people-powered organization?" he told Greve. "That we could be and should be in service to others beyond ourselves, that is the core of what I would believe as a kind of organizing philosophy of the Democratic party right now to rebuild the brand."
"The nation is calling upon the Democratic Party to say, 'Hey, we need you,'" he added. "I'm trying to fight the notions of insularity among groups of people who understandably are focused on reforming structures within the DNC. But we've got to think beyond the DNC.
Disclosure note: Brett Wilkins is the co-chair of San Francisco Berniecrats, an Our Revolution affiliate.
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