A Sixty-Point Warning
Financially struggling voters favored Trump by 30 points in 2024 and House Democrats by ~30 points in 2026: a roughly 60-point reversal. Political Polls summarized the comparison below.
In the wake of the Republicans’ midterm disaster, some putatively rightwing accounts have started turning against Trump. Christopher Rufo, a longtime backer of Ron DeSantis, reports that DeSantis is frequently mentioned in discussions about rebuilding the Right. For 2028, DeSantis represents an alternative to Trump’s political heir, JD Vance.
Scott Greer’s postmortem of the midterms puts the Iran war and tariffs at the center of the Republican defeat.
He’s right that telling voters the economy is great rings hollow when their bills say otherwise. But electoral costs and long-term merits are separate questions. Reshoring takes time; families buy groceries every week.
In What Trump Should Do Now, we called for ending the Iran war, lowering energy costs and making trade policy predictable. Trump also needs to give Americans a personal stake in rebuilding the country, with benefits they can see along the way.
Pocketbooks Have Changed Party Loyalties Before
By 1936, a majority of black voters backed Franklin Roosevelt, whose party still included powerful Southern segregationists. Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation within living memory. Former slaves were still alive; the Federal Writers’ Project was interviewing thousands of them.
New Deal jobs and relief helped pull those voters away from the party of Lincoln. The House historian’s account of the realignment identifies emergency assistance and patronage jobs as crucial attractions.
Political gratitude has limits. Trump’s immigration successes and rollback of DEI deserve loyalty, but keeping voters requires improving their household finances.
The Grasshopper Party
Gina Hinojosa’s Texas campaign offered $1,500 for every household. Her platform proposes taking $17 billion from rainy day reserves it puts at $27 billion, leaving $10 billion. She calls accumulating reserves “hoarding.”
That’s the grasshopper party: enjoy the harvest now. Texas created the reserve after an oil-price collapse and recession.
Trump should make exposing waste, rebuilding industry and raising productivity pay for ordinary Americans. Democrats already understand the political value of putting money in their supporters’ pockets.
Democrats Already Pay Their Base
Democrats have something for every socioeconomic layer of their base.
For college-educated women and minorities, DEI initiatives open doors to corporate and government jobs and promotions (or at least did, until Trump’s rollbacks). Biden made them a federal-workforce priority in 2021; Democratic attorneys general have fought to preserve them.
Not a real jobs person? No worries: Democrats will use Medicaid to pay you an hourly wage to help eligible elderly or disabled relatives, friends and neighbors with meals, shopping and daily care, or at least claim to be doing that.
Supplemental Security Income pays cash benefits to poor people who are disabled, blind or 65 and older, including those who’ve never paid into Social Security; Elizabeth Warren and fellow Democrats have proposed increasing those checks. If you’ve never heard of it or realized it’s separate from retirement Social Security, The Last Psychiatrist explained why in his 2010 essay:
it’s not for you. It is for the entire class of people we label as poor, about whom comic Greg Geraldo joked: “it’s easy to forget there’s so much poverty in the United States, because the poor people look just like black people.”
Democrats even have something for repeat arrestees: cash-free bail lets defendants approved for release get out without tying up their families’ money. For criminals who haven’t been caught, state-subsidized daycare and other poorly policed programs offer a payday; Minnesota’s auditors documented millions in proven daycare fraud back in 2019.
These programs sustain a constituency of providers and administrators as well as their beneficiaries. Trump should build a constituency of Americans who get paid to expose fraud and recover stolen taxpayer money.
Pay Americans To Catch Thieves
Minnesota’s legislative auditor found that the education department received at least 30 complaints involving Feeding Our Future or its sites between June 2018 and December 2021. Investigations were inadequate, some complaints went uninvestigated, and the department asked the organization to investigate complaints about itself. That case involved child-nutrition programs. In a separate review of alleged kickbacks in an autism-services program, the auditor rejected the human-services department’s claim that it had lacked investigative authority.
Trump should ask Congress to expand rewards for citizens who uncover fraud against taxpayers. A headline offer could be up to half the money actually recovered, with a published formula accounting for enforcement costs and existing whistleblower awards. A tip would have to produce a substantiated case and collected money before the reward was paid. Successful investigators could earn serious money while leaving taxpayers ahead.
There’s an existing foundation. Successful False Claims Act whistleblowers typically receive 15% to 30% of recoveries. The Trump administration’s antitrust program has already made its first $1 million award. A broader, easier-to-use program with a larger potential reward would turn exposing fraud into a financial opportunity for enterprising Americans. And if they expose corruption among members of the Trump administration or its allies, so be it.
Trump Accounts For Adults
Trump Accounts already give eligible children an investment account, with a $1,000 federal contribution available to qualifying children born from 2025 through 2028. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has separately pledged $6.25 billion for eligible older children born from 2016 through 2024. The administration’s new rules also permit qualified donated shares of publicly traded domestic companies. Elon Musk has also pledged to give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in America in 2027.
Open Adult Trump Accounts to savers: tax-deductible contributions of up to $5,000 a year, a federal match, and taxable withdrawals after five years.
Fund the match with shares from Washington’s industrial investments, and have Congress cap the matching pool. Intel supplies a precedent: in August 2025, it announced an $8.9 billion federal investment for a 9.9% stake.
That rewards the ants who contribute their own money and wait. Give those savers a stake in America’s reindustrialization and AI buildout, with the opportunity to profit as those investments succeed.
A Paycheck And A Piece Of The Upside
Pair those future assets with good paychecks now. Trump should bring unions into the industrial and AI buildout, tying pay and profit-sharing to productivity.
Think Toyota’s Japanese union, not the late-20th-century UAW. In its account of 2025 bargaining, Toyota describes its union linking wage and bonus demands to productivity and competitiveness.
Unionized Reagan Democrats got their economic security from their jobs, leaving them free to vote Republican for cultural reasons without relying on Democratic government programs. Trump should help create more of those paychecks.
Imagine union workers building Optimus robots and sharing in the productivity gains. Give them a stake in making automation work.
Give People Something To Show For It
These ideas operate on different clocks. Fraud-recovery awards pay successful investigators after money comes back. Ownership accounts build a future asset. Better wages and profit-sharing can reach workers through their paychecks. A five-year account won’t cover this month’s grocery bill, so lowering energy costs and restoring purchasing power remain urgent parts of the program we outlined in our earlier post.
Our case for containing excess demand still stands. Fund fraud-recovery awards from collected money, cap the federal matching pool, and tie better pay to higher productivity. Congress should account for the public assets it transfers into private accounts.
For investors, that agenda would create questions we can act on: which domestic manufacturers are winning orders, which employers are translating investment into higher output, and which automation businesses are making their customers more productive? Those are developments we’ll be watching as we look for our next trades. Americans should have a financial stake in answering those questions well.
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Great stuff.
"Supplemental Security Income pays cash benefits to poor people who are disabled, blind or 65 and older, including those who’ve never paid into Social Security"
I'd add, encouraging major companies to make contributions directly to the fund (like with Trump Accounts) would be a great "put up or shut up" move to squash at least some of the virtue signaling, too. Oh, and universities with massive trust funds too, lol.
One thing slightly unrelated -- why has nobody bought out a large section of the US media and just redirected it to being reasonable news? We had this at one point -- it was called local news, and whatever bias Journalist grads had didn't make it toxic as today's national news. Honestly, I don't see how the right and frankly even center can last if this isn't done. (My preference is, as always of course decentralized news/media...but anything's an improvement on the current state of affairs).