Why Democrats and Voters Should Consider Corruption an Economic Issue (Q&A)

“The future of the country relies on us responding to what people really want and need even when it's hard.”

Every election in recent memory has been described as “existential.” This time, all signs indicate that whether Democrats can wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress in 2026 and then the presidency in 2028 really will determine whether we will retain democracy as we know it.

How can Democrats win? I spoke with Rajan Narang, senior director of states at the Pro-Democracy Campaign and senior advisor at Stand Up America. After years of experience directing democracy programs at state-level and national organizations, including End Citizens United, Narang has a unique perspective on what Democrats need to do to turn this country around.

Meaghan Winter: What lessons have recent elections shown us about how Democrats can win with anti-corruption messaging?

Rajan Narang: In order to defeat authoritarianism right now, the country needs a strong Democratic Party. But starting from the basics, Democrats are extremely unpopular. Republicans are pretty unpopular, too, but less so. What we see consistently in the research, including from End Citizens United polling, is that voters see the system as completely broken, and they believe that nobody is fighting for them. And that’s been the case for years, going back to 2016. Democrats’ failure during the last decade is that the Republicans have addressed voters’ concerns on that more effectively than Democrats have.

The reason that we saw the success of Bernie Sanders and of Donald Trump, even though they’re ideological opposites, is that they both made a case to voters that they would fight to fix a broken system. I think that was a really difficult thing for a lot of political types, journalists, and other folks who are used to the old way of politics to wrap their heads around, in large part because that system has worked really well for people who are upper-class or upper-middle class, and it’s not working for everyone else.

Democrats have an opportunity to fix their branding on economic issues, for sure, but they would also be really well-served to think of anti-corruption work as an economic issue. To voters, the issue is fundamentally that public money is being taken out of their pockets to go to kickbacks, corrupt giveaways, etc. Voters know that this is a pay-to-play government. Confronting that head-on, rather than dancing around the issue, would help Democrats.

Where Democrats run into trouble is when they think that by calling out Trump, they’re doing enough on anti-corruption. That’s not the case at all. Democrats still have not recognized that voters see every level of the system as broken. Voters don’t see this as some sort of problem that’s unique to Trump; they see it as an entire systemic issue. They feel it most acutely as it plays out on the state and local level. And so, state-level Democrats have a huge opportunity to be the ones driving the rebrand of the Democratic Party by taking really bold stances to make the Democratic Party the anti-corruption party.

Meaghan: Can you talk about why state and local organizing is so important?

Rajan: One of the most important trends that we’ve seen in this post-2016 era is a renaissance of local organizing. A big part of what gives me hope is this reinvigoration of the progressive movement at the state and local level. There’s an increasing recognition that building power by organizing people is ultimately going to be what delivers us majorities.

I think that the term “organizing” got oversimplified or misunderstood in the broader culture when it went very mainstream in the Obama era. People thought organizing was showing up for a few weeks in October to knock doors for Democrats. That’s what my first job in politics was like! But that’s mobilizing, not organizing.

Organizing as a vocation is different; it’s always been this year-round exercise of constantly building and deepening relationships in community and shifting your own priorities to reflect what the people in your community are looking to accomplish. It’s about building that up from that local level into organizations that can wield power regionally, statewide, and ultimately nationally.

Right now, we’re in this really long and painful process of rebuilding. But there are now fantastic organizing-focused groups out there that have risen up to fill the void left after the hollowing out and under-investment that occurred in state and local Democratic parties during the 2000s and early 2010s. And from just a few days ago, there’s exciting new analysis, I think the most comprehensive that’s ever been produced, about how these groups had a tremendous positive impact on who voted in the last election, and how we need to double down on those strategies.

We are still fighting for the soul of the movement and of the party. The future of the country relies on us responding to what people really want and need even when it’s hard, rather than letting polling constantly shape our perception of what’s politically possible. We have to be proactive and create solutions that match the scale and scope of these problems. We cannot be reactionary.

Meaghan: You’ve done a lot of work with state-level ballot amendments. Can you explain why state ballot initiatives are such an important tool for progressives to use?

Rajan: Yeah, absolutely. Because we’re going up against a rigged system, it becomes impossible to pass a law in red states – and sometimes in purple or even blue states – where we don’t control the levers of state government.

And so, in red states that allow constitutional amendments and statutory initiatives, like Missouri, North Dakota, Utah, we’ve seen grassroots groups organize and achieve really significant wins at the ballot box.

At the same time, there are some places with a Democratic trifecta where Democrats in office don’t see corruption as a concern, refuse to take action, are more interested in supporting the corporate donors than standing by Democratic principles. So you see grassroots organizations pushing for these reforms being absolutely stifled, with huge consequences in all issue areas. And so, breaking corporate power becomes a necessary prerequisite to pass reforms on all of these issues that we care about. That’s why broader anti-corruption measures are necessary all over the country.

With that said, in some really unfortunate ways, we’ve seen some people say, “Well, everybody’s corrupt in politics. You can’t trust a single one of them.” And that’s not true either. There are a lot of elected officials who we agree with on the majority of issues, who take some really unfortunate money from bad actors and hold some really unfortunate stances that we disagree with. And at the same time, we might need them in office, because we still do generally agree with them. So, it becomes our job to make a judgment call on whether we can move them on the issues we disagree on, as opposed to cast them out of the tent entirely.

Both the challenge and the promise of politics is figuring out when you can work with somebody who’s mostly good, versus when they are so captured by a corrupt system that they’ve stopped representing the people they’re supposed to represent. And then it’s necessary to say that they should not have a position of authority and power within this movement.

Meaghan: Are there any initiatives that you suggest that people support now, and if so, how can they help them?

Rajan: I think the Money Out of Politics initiative in Michigan, which would ban donations from major government contractors, is the exact kind of model we need in every state across the country.

We have a ban like that at the federal level. It’s not enforced very well these days, because we have a corrupt and captured presidential administration, Congress, and Supreme Court, but we do have it on the federal level. Huge kudos to the grassroots organizations in Michigan for coming up with this idea.

Meaghan: With all these terrible things happening, how are you coping?

Rajan: There is a lot of clarity in having a task immediately ahead of you that you need to get up and go do. For anybody who’s sort of still working through that post-election hangover, which is completely understandable, it’s a rough time.

But that’s why people rallying together in joint public action is incredibly important; we all gain strength from being in community. And it’s also so helpful to have a really strong personal life in order to cope. Having good people around you, having things that you enjoy doing that are not political, feeling like you’re helping your community in ways that are not explicitly political. I’m really lucky to help fundraise for my local library that I grew up going to as a kid. I’m lucky to be on the board of a local health organization. And so these are both things that are being affected, of course, by Trump’s budget cuts, but they’re not inherently partisan.

Creating room in your life to be civically involved is incredibly important. Virtually every community in America at this point has a local group that is active on this, and many have a robust grassroots organizing group like a Pennsylvania United or an ISAIAH or a Down Home North Carolina.There are so many groups you can find in your own community who care about what’s going on, who will plug you into more ways to help. You just have to start looking.