By Ralph Nader October 23, 2026 Progressive candidates should be winning landslide victories over corporatist Republicans and replacing corporate Democrats on the merits of an authentic people-first agenda and legislation that makes big corporations and their government toadies our servants, not our masters. If progressive candidates fail to deliver, they, too, should be replaced. Voters, have a civic duty beyond casting a ballot or staying home in despair to impress upon the candidates what must be done—and how to meet the long-neglected necessities of the citizenry, especially the families and children and workers, so long deprived of overdue changes and reforms. For example, a majority or supermajority view the following as immediate “kitchen-table” needs. 1. “Affordability” is about more than high prices and interest rates. It is also about too many people having too little income and government doing too little to crack down on corporate crooks who drain consumers’ hard-earned dollars and savings in both Red and Blue States. Passage of legislation to raise the minimum wage from a frozen federal $7.25 per hour to a living wage, will give tens of millions of workers a long-overdue raise. 2. Cracking down on the fleecing, cheating, and outright theft from consumers and workers can come from “law and order” criminal law enforcement and civil actions by the wrongfully injured plaintiffs. This enforcement has the backing of over 85% of the people who despise the double standard of justice, which they see every day. 3. Reverse the huge tax cuts, escapes, and evasions by large corporations and the super-wealthy like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (see the October 2026 Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy report: After Two Rounds of Trump Tax Cuts, Corporate America Paid Less Than Ever in 2025) to the levels of the prosperous Nineteen Sixties. End huge corporate welfare outlays for the giant corporate freeloaders paid for by taxpayers and the massive billing fraud paid by patients and shoppers. These restorations and prosecutions, supported by huge majorities of left-right voters, will more than pay for full Medicare for all, everybody in, nobody out, a real child tax credit, child care, maternal and family sick leave, and lots of public infrastructure projects, which will create good jobs in communities everywhere. Don’t we need more of the money already extracted from taxpayers sent back home? How about the runaway, bloated, unaudited military budget and its giant corporate monopolistic military contractors like Lockheed Martin and its F-22 budget buster, or General Dynamics, the sole endless builder of the doomsday Trident submarines? Multiple nuclear warheads from only one of these subs can destroy 200 cities in the world within an hour. How many have Trump, Biden, and Obama, commissioned? Read President Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech to newspaper editors in April 1953 to see how many schools, hospitals, bridges, etc. can be built by reducing gigantic military waste and corporate/Empire extravaganzas. (See speech.) How about this? Who’s talking about raising Social Security benefits, unchanged since 1971, by raising the individual income cap, now $184,000 for Social Security taxes? Trillionaire Musk, the bosses of the subsidized oil and gas giants, the big bankers and health insurance giants, and the executives of the giant hospital chains, who make at least two million a month, paid Social Security taxes on only the first $184,000 of their income. In 2022, two hundred Democrats supported Congressman John Larson’s bill, the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519), which would expand benefits and strengthen the program’s finances by requiring higher-income Americans to contribute more. Unfortunately, corporatist Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a vote on the House floor on a measure overwhelmingly supported by about 60 million retirees. The Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 election to the Republicans in part due to Pelosi’s terrible obstruction. Working people don’t recognize that each one of them who sends tax dollars to Washington every year sends more dollars than half the giant companies who have made enormous untaxed profits in the U.S. and pay zero federal income taxes! The average taxes paid by corporations are just barely above 10%. Compare that to working people’s tax payments. (See, the ITEP report mentioned above.) There are so many ways to landslide the corporatist candidates from both Parties. See my recent column: Winning Strategies for Progressive Candidates in the Final Stretch, the online report Crushing the GOP, or my later book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People,” pages 219-232. There are simple, clearly reasoned and just changes and transformations in these works. You can add public funding of public elections, which will stop corporate lobbyists from raiding Congress and the U.S. Treasury with their cash registers politics. Other ideas and strategies can be found in my column at Nader.org, radio/podcasts (ralphnaderradiohour.com), interviews with the media, public letters, and many tweets. Other authors have put forward similar advances. Although there has been very little disagreement with how justice, fairness, economic production and life-saving proposals can save and improve lives, almost none of them have been adopted by these campaigners. WHY? Here’s my take: - Campaigns get into routines and ruts that impede new thinking, readjustments, or re-directions by the candidates, regardless of Party.
- Campaign staffers become possessive and turf-minded and reject the truism that “none of us are as smart as all of us.”
- Candidates contract out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who take over campaigns, become control freaks, and exclude outside inputs, such as from progressive civic groups and labor unions. (See my column: Midterm Elections Too Close: Dems Need to Fire Their Corporate-Conflicted Political Consultants)
- Candidates are indentured to the strings-attached commercial campaign donors and corporate PACs. This is a big inhibition, even though it may cost candidates votes as the price of these corrupting dollars register with the electorate.
- Frenzied campaigning, especially in the last few weeks before election day, freezes thinking. An accelerating schedule of repetitive meetings and events exhaust the candidate, while stale messaging bores the media—just when that messaging most needs reworking.
- Gross inaccessibility. Try getting through to any campaigns. Many have no telephone numbers or street-level campaign headquarters. Just email addresses, P.O. boxes, or websites for receiving donations. Even worse—try getting through to either Parties’ campaign committees, such as the Democratic or Republican National Committee, to discuss policies, programs, strategies, and ways to clean up elections and empower the people.
Alas, the days are dwindling to November 3, 2026, as are many opportunities to elect enough determined lawmakers who will stop the lawless, lying, corrupt, cruel, violent, war-making, people-exploiting, corporatist Tyrant Trump and his worsening dictatorship over our Constitution and Republic for which it stands. It is only going to get much worse and war-like with Trump in the next two years unless he is impeached and removed from office (“You’re Fired!”) or induced to resign and install a Trump rubber stamp J.D. Vance presidency, letting Trump play golf at his Mar-a-Lago retirement compound. See my October 2, 2026 column titled: What Could Persuade Trump to Resign Should Democrats Win Congress?). | 
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