“We’re doing it in every corner of the country,” a national Democratic strategist told NBC News, speaking on condition of anonymity. The “it” is a campaign message that ties rising costs to corruption in Washington. Pair the two, the strategist said, and you get “the most potent mix of the two arguments.”
Jason Miciak, a Raw Story columnist, thinks the approach is sound but risks being badly packaged. His column, published June 27, 2026, is opinion, and its argument is straightforward: Democrats should not make corruption the headline.
Start with the pocketbook
Miciak’s starting point is that Americans vote first and foremost with their pocketbooks. He argues Kamala Harris lost partly because moderate voters misremembered the economy under Trump’s first term as strong, when in his telling it mostly coasted on the stable footing left by the Obama years after the Great Recession. He says the economy now looks vulnerable at best and, in the view of many, is failing fast.
He gives a sample of the pitch he thinks would land: gas costs $5.00 a gallon, everything is getting pricier, and the administration spends more time helping people who build data centers than parents dropping kids at daycare. Elsewhere he says a pound of hamburger costs twice what a gallon of gas does while wages refuse to rise.
His charges against Trump are blunt. The column lists the president’s new 747, his handling of the Epstein investigation, stock trading that coincides with moves in company fortunes, and pardons for wealthy convicts. Miciak presents all of these as evidence for his case. They are his characterizations, not findings reported by Raw Story.
Empathy first, then the charge
The columnist’s caution is about order. Candidates should first show voters they understand and share the pain, he says, and only after that point to corruption as the reason nothing is getting fixed. Being merely against something is never enough, in his view; a candidate also needs a plan, and he writes “ABC-123” as a placeholder for the specifics. He would rank corruption as “exhibit C” under a first argument about the economy.
He gives examples of what the broader platform could include: restoring healthcare, raising wages and scaling back A.I.
Miciak also speaks directly to politically engaged progressives. Many of them see the real stake in November as whether democracy survives, and he says he agrees “100%.” But the voters who decide control in purple districts and states, which he puts at 20% of the country, pay less attention to politics and will not be persuaded by a lecture on authoritarianism. There is no time to do that work before the midterms, he writes.
His last point is a hopeful one. The steadier the economy and the better wages keep up with prices, the more open voters become to talking about climate, LGBTQ concerns and DEI. Voters, he says, will not care much about anything else while they are worrying about buying food that month.
