This week, voters didn’t just shout down the politicians who have failed to make life more affordable in the last two years. They soundly rejected the oligarchs who have ransacked their economy and left them with the bill. Voters insisted on a different future, and across the country, their demands were strikingly similar.

In Michigan, we saw Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed win a race critics once called unwinnable with the message “get money out of politics, put money in your pocket” and a promise of Medicare for All. In Ohio, voters sent Sherrod Brown back to the Senate—despite the staggering $63 million the crypto industry spent to defeat him—on promises to ban insurers from overriding doctors and to bar drug companies from charging Americans more than they charge abroad. In Texas, voters stood up to the world’s wealthiest man and his $205 million bid to buy a Senate seat and instead threw their support behind James Talarico’s agenda for rooting out billionaire corruption so Texans can afford everyday necessities.

There was a consistent theme: taking on the powerful interests that have blocked change, sweeping aside incrementalist approaches that haven’t delivered a good life for working people, and making way for a more populist and human-focused vision for the economy. Less talk of tax credits, more promises to tackle corruption and concentrated corporate power at its roots.

After this election, we could well be on the precipice of a twenty-first-century New Deal moment. To see why, let’s travel all the way back to the 1930 midterms—the first domino toward the New Deal three years later.

In many ways, the early part of the twentieth century is a mirror image of our current political juncture. Then, as today, the populace was rightfully angry with a rigged, increasingly oligarchic economy; with obscene wealth and income disparities; and with the political leaders who allowed their quality of life to take a backseat to Wall Street’s interests.

By the time the 1930 midterms and follow-on special elections came around, Democrats were able to ride that anti-institutional zeitgeist and take control of the House. Republicans clung to the Senate by one seat after losing eight—many of them held by people closely aligned with Hoover. Democrats also saw victories at the state level, including in reliably red states like Kansas. And over in New York, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt won reelection in a landslide, setting him up as frontrunner for the 1932 presidential race.

Many are familiar with what was to come later—the accomplishments of FDR’s presidency, his unprecedented four election wins. But any Democrat who wants this week’s energy to translate into longer-term results should pay close attention to what FDR did in the two years after those 1930 midterms. Winning elections is one thing; using the time before the next presidential election to demonstrate what you stand for, deliver tangible results, and build the foundation for a governing agenda is another.

Ahead of his sweeping 1932 presidential victory, FDR used his governorship to do just that. In breaking up concentrated corporate power and building people power, he delivered what people most wanted, creatively and fearlessly. It might not have been clear even to FDR at the time that he was paving the way to the New Deal. But in hindsight, the trajectory is clear, and so are the lessons for leaders today.

Breaking & Building Power

The New Deal era delivered broadly shared prosperity that lasted five decades, and its banner programs stand strong nearly a century later. That legacy wasn’t built on one-off policy battles alone; it required fundamental shifts in who holds power. That was the work FDR set in motion in the run-up to his presidency.

As governor, FDR was unafraid to name villains—and then to go after them with policies that dismantled their undue power. As President, he put the stakes plainly: “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

In a historical echo of today’s fight to ensure that all Americans share in the benefits of generative artificial intelligence, one of FDR’s main priorities throughout his political career was confronting the monopoly power of utilities. As governor, he successfully passed the Power Authority Act in 1931 “to give back to the people the waterpower which is theirs” after private utilities were caught price gouging New Yorkers. The law created a public corporation that would later develop some of the state’s greatest rivers for the public benefit, rather than leaving them to the private market.

The New York law helped lay the groundwork for the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. The federally owned utility corporation and regional development agency deployed an electric-power program that was intended to create a standard “yardstick” rate (a public pricing standard) for electricity. This effectively pressured private companies into lowering consumer rates, rebalancing power into the hands of the public. A couple of years later, President FDR signed the Public Utility Holding Company Act, authorizing the Securities and Exchange Commission to break up massive electric utility conglomerates just months after he denounced “the evil features of holding companies” in his 1935 State of the Union address.

Just as FDR insisted that American water belongs to the people, Democratic leaders today have to remind leading AI companies that the data and public research they built their companies on belong to the public. If today’s corporate titans believe AI might be the new utility, then anyone wishing to capture voters’ allegiance should take a page out of FDR’s playbook.

A New Deal-scale solution would assert the people’s rightful claim over the technology through a combination of public ownership and regulation. That might include taking public equity stakes or even nationalizing elements of the largest AI companies. It could also mean imposing rules on industry structure to limit the amount of power these companies can amass and exercise over our economy, our safety, and our democracy. Driving true shared prosperity through industry rules and taxation could help solve problems voters have been voicing for years.

This people-first approach was reflected in El-Sayed’s calls on the campaign trail to transfer half of the equity in top AI firms into public hands, and to create a Cabinet-level government agency tasked with ensuring new AI models are safe prior to deployment. And this week voters began laying the foundation for these and other bold policies in the states most affected by the AI buildout. In Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona, some of the fastest-growing hubs for new data centers, communities made clear that tech giants chasing profits won’t be allowed to run roughshod over their land, drain their water, or drive up their power bills.

These are critical steps in breaking concentrated power. But doing as FDR did means understanding that you can’t create the kind of economy people want without also building people’s power to control their own lives. For workers, that begins with the bare minimum—basic workplace rights—and ramps up to a fuller-scale strategy to empower employees and promote unionization as a counter to employer dominance.

You can see that arc in the legacy of Frances Perkins, whom FDR appointed in 1929 as New York’s industrial commissioner, the top role in the state labor department. Perkins would spend her time in FDR’s gubernatorial administration designing and implementing minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws, investigating factories for labor violations, and reducing women’s workweeks to 48 hours.

These were the first steps to a more ambitious, power-shifting agenda that FDR and Perkins would champion once in the White House. When FDR won the presidency, he appointed Perkins as his labor secretary. Her ideas were instrumental in the drafting of the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act—chief accomplishments of FDR’s presidency that helped expand the share of unionized Americans to nearly a third of the workforce in less than a decade.

Today, a series of assaults on labor law have diluted worker power, bringing union membership rates to historic lows, leaving wages stagnant, and concentrating monopsony power in the hands of big employers. We need to go beyond combating those trends and get creative in empowering our current workforce. A modern version of FDR’s approach could look like sectoral bargaining—uniting workers across whole sectors, like the fast food and nursing industries, which are subject to poor wages and erratic schedules with last-minute changes.

This people power approach was on the ballot this week. In Montana, for instance, union leader Sam Forstag won his House race on a platform to rein in corporations that engage in union-busting, restore collective bargaining rights for more than a million public servants, and extend labor protections to independent contractors.

A people-powered agenda could also look like what Zohran Mamdani’s administration has been doing in New York City. The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, a first-of-its-kind municipal office, helps private-sector employees unionize; creates institutional channels among government, labor organizations, and workers; and aggressively enforces wage theft and misclassification. The administration is applying that same power-building logic to its “Rental Ripoff Hearings” and efforts to promote tenant organizing. And this week, that logic resonated on the other side of the country, as Los Angeles voters backed democratic socialist Nithya Raman and her plan for an Office of Tenant Protections to enforce renters’ rights.

Delivering, Creatively and Fearlessly

Voters don’t want to hear excuses for why government can’t get things done. They want results. FDR understood that sometimes that means getting creative with policy design and tapping tools that haven’t been used before—or haven’t been used to their full potential. Since the 1980s, policymakers have gotten so unambitious that standing up something like Social Security—among FDR’s signature achievements and one of America’s most popular programs—would be an uphill political battle today. Governor FDR’s success should remind federal and state leaders alike that bolder social programs can get the outcomes voters want and serve as a blueprint for what the left might seek to accomplish in 2029.

In August 1931, as New Yorkers were reeling from Depression-era unemployment, Governor FDR called the legislature into special session, arguing that relief was the state’s responsibility and that its cost should fall on those “fortunate enough to have taxable incomes.” Just two months later, his administration created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), funded by an increase in the state income tax. The program provided in-kind relief and public works jobs to 10 percent of New York families.

As President, FDR scaled the TERA model up to the federal level. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided direct cash assistance to state unemployment agencies and established the Civil Works Administration, which almost immediately put about four million Americans to work and, within a matter of months, began an overhaul of critical national infrastructure. By 1935, the program had transformed into the Works Progress Administration, which would employ more than 8.5 million people and build roads, bridges, schools, parks, and airports across the country.

Governor FDR applied that same innovative approach to his New York state old-age pension system, which provided aid to tens of thousands of New Yorkers within a matter of months and set the stage for the bolder Social Security program he’d create as President. Social Security quickly became a foundation of the U.S. social safety net—a hallowed status it maintains to this day. Some 71 million retirees, people with disabilities, and families of deceased workers rely on the program, and nearly nine in ten voters considered Social Security an important issue heading into the midterms.

And yet in recent years, Social Security has come under attack from the right, while both parties have failed to update it for a twenty-first-century labor market in which a growing share of wages flows to the highest earners, much of it above the payroll tax cap. Policymakers today should do what those before them have repeatedly done and update the program to keep pace with a shifting economy and deliver on Social Security’s core promises: guaranteed benefits, a progressive structure, and straightforward access free of means testing.

But merely doing the basic maintenance that’s required for existing programs to keep up with the times is far from sufficient. FDR understood that the goal of policymaking is to ensure people can live good lives.

There’s no reason we can’t think as big as FDR did or apply the same resourcefulness. Policymakers need to use public power to solve the large-scale problems private markets couldn’t solve even if they wanted to—whether it’s providing child care that works for both parents and workers or expeditiously ensuring that any gains from AI translate into better jobs and shared prosperity. Millions of workers reasonably fear that AI will come for their jobs, that getting left behind is inevitable. An FDR-style approach would remember that the way AI development advances is within our control, and that work itself isn’t just a way to earn a paycheck, but a source of purpose and dignity as well.

Policymakers need to assert their power to both put guardrails on how workplaces deploy AI and invest in ensuring jobs are there when people need them. Putting millions to work on the kinds of public interest projects that make people feel more human is one way to keep the New Deal spirit alive.

On all of these fronts, the 2026 midterms offer hope that we could be heading in the right direction.

In Colorado, voters backed Gen-Z House candidate Melat Kiros, who made universal child care and elder care a core pillar of her platform and declared caregiving essential public infrastructure that should be treated as a public responsibility rather than an opportunity for profit maximization. In Minnesota, Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan won on her track record in state government of successfully raising the state minimum wage and passing paid family and medical leave. And in Pennsylvania, Chris Rabb won his House race with a convincing call for tackling the affordability crisis in part by reintroducing an idea inspired by FDR: a Civil Climate Corps that would create millions of well-paying jobs and ensure a strong green transition.

What these winning messages tell us is that it won’t be enough to restore the drivers of economic security as they were—as important of a first step as that is. There must be an approach to social insurance and economic security that takes on the basic challenges working families face today. FDR, after all, did not set out to resurrect the pre-Depression economy that had failed so many. Instead, he dared to redefine the power imbalances that had robbed people of a dignified life.

Realizing Our New Deal Moment

When voters began their rebuke of concentrated wealth in the 1930 midterms, it became the foundation for a new era—a New Deal. As the 2026 midterms just demonstrated, Democrats now have the chance to go beyond narrow affordability politics and build a similarly transformative movement: one that gives working people more agency and power to live the lives they want.

As Mamdani said earlier this year, “You think about the New Deal; that’s what the Democratic Party once was. That’s what it could be again. And if we want to win, I think that’s what we have to become.”