We Can Win in 2026 and Repair Our Society. Here's How.

The win-win strategy? Moral leadership and community building.

Jan 22, 2025

The re-election of Trump shows that the problem is in our society, not just our politics. Fortunately, the best way to forge a better and kinder society is also the best way to gain political power. We fight isolation, disinformation, and hopelessness with real-world community building. We demonstrate moral leadership and political courage by fighting for our values and never backing down. That is also how we win elections.

Intro

This issue of Reframing America lays out my larger vision and introduces some major themes I will be writing about this year. I will deal with the actions of Trump, Inc. and provide framing strategies for specific issues. Just not today.

This is about our own behavior, what we have under our control to fix and change. We have spent eight years reacting to Trump and this is where it has gotten us. I am not saying that we don’t need to fight and protect people from his actions, only that the best way to minimize the damage is to make his reign of power as short as humanly possible.

In his comprehensive post-election analyses, Mike Podhorzer sums it up: “The results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of Trump or MAGA.”

We will not win just by telling people how bad Trump is. We need to get people to believe in us again. That is a dialogue we must have, not with our opponents or the national media, but with the American people.

Here is how we do that.

The Laken-Riley Act represents a “sweeping assault on core principles” according to an anonymous Senator speaking to Salon news.

What Ails Us

Before the election, I concluded that if Trump won, it would mean that something is seriously wrong with our society as a whole. Elections are ultimately a periodic “taking the temperature” of a society, and ours has been getting sicker for a very long time.

The corporate-conservative movement spent the last sixty years promoting a self-interest-based belief system. Their free-market, faux-Christian version of “morality” promotes values that researchers would call anti-social: corrosive to our social fabric, as opposed to pro-social: contributing to social cohesion.

Trump’s win tells us that this movement has gained control over too much of our society.

The Right has gained political power by breaking down people’s trust in each other and in government. They have isolated us and “disappeared” our awareness of both our shared responsibility and our collective power. Their mission is to liberate moneyed interests from all forms of social responsibility or oversight and use government to transfer wealth from the public to themselves. The cruelty and white Christian nationalism are just the cocaine on the cake.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of Americans still believe what we believe in terms of core values and the role of government. Unfortunately, they don’t see Democrats as the champions of what they believe because, despite the valiant efforts of many wonderful people, our politics collectively have shown a chronic lack of authenticity and moral courage.

We yo-yo between capitulation: trying to beat conservatives at their own game and inevitably failing, and condemnation: alienating the very people we are trying to win over. Our campaigns are shackled by institutional inertia. We extract money from supporters to fund the carpet-bombing of tone-deaf attack ads. We build a new infrastructure from scratch in every cycle. We look for expensive, high-tech “silver bullet” solutions instead of facing our greater strategic failings or investing in human capacity.

We can and will win again, but we need a different approach. We can only earn back people’s faith in us and in democratic government through moral leadership, political courage, and community building.

What makes this a “win-win”

Over thirty years of research and practice in the field, I have recognized a wonderful truth: the best way to forge a better, kinder, and more mutually responsible society is also the best way to win elections and gain political power.

I have delved into every corner of research on communication and persuasion. If you were to start from scratch and build a strategy for winning elections based on the very best evidence in the social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences:

You would lead, not follow. You would develop and champion a clear set of values, values that knit our society back together, and learn how to frame the public debate in terms of those values.
You would work year-round to build genuine relationships and real-world communities, through which you can engage in massive-scale person-to-person political campaigns.

Thank you for reading Reframing America! I need your help to continue this critical mission. The best thing you can do is to forward this email to everyone you know who cares about improving how we communicate with the American people.

Moral Leadership and Political Courage

Stop acting like helpless victims and start framing the debate.

Public opinion is not a sea with changing winds that we navigate by taking polls and telling people what we think they want to hear. Public opinion is the collective thoughts and ongoing conversations of people across America, grounded in core beliefs and informed by lived experience. It can change, but more importantly, it is malleable: able to be shaped by those who have the guts to get out there and push.

We can use our words to influence the thinking and judgment of others, and we have a moral obligation to learn how and to use that power for good. We can learn how to message proactively. We can set the agenda: make our top priorities everyone’s top priorities. We can frame the debate in terms of our values.

What NOT to Do: The Laken Riley Act

Voting for the Laken Riley Act shows a failure of both moral leadership and political courage. If we are on the losing end of public opinion on immigration now, it is because we failed to lead the charge for our own vision for immigration reform in the past. In fact, other than DACA, I have no idea where Democrats stand on immigration reform.

At minimum, blocking cloture on Laken-Riley would have shown voters that we are capable of taking a stand against something we know to be wrong. What we really need to do is tell voters what a strong Democratic immigration reform plan looks like, one that is consistent with Democratic values. And the sooner we do it, the more time we have to turn public opinion in our favor before the next election.

Political will has always been something that you have to build over time. When did we forget that?

This is how we lead:

by deciding what we believe to be right,
by acting on it,
by convincing the American people that those actions are both morally right and urgently necessary, and
by refusing to back down, despite pushback from our opponents, or the media, or even some of our own people.

We can convert people to our side by inspiring them with our vision of a better society and a government that is genuinely of, by and for the people. This is how we show voters that we have the qualities they seek: leadership, courage, and authenticity.

Helping us learn how to do this is my mission. It is the subject of my training program and what I write about in Reframing America.

Community Building

How do we distribute our values and our vision for a better society? Through the single most powerful form of human persuasion: real-world word-of-mouth.

We must restore the sense of real-world community belonging that people have all but lost to conservatism, corporatism, suburbanization, the pandemic, and social media. By doing so, we also build the capacity to communicate outside the algorithm-dominated virtual world.

How do we build community? We invest in year-round organizing everywhere and make real relationship building our top priority. We give people a way to find others who share their values and the time to develop strong social ties while bonding around a common mission.

How do we build political campaign capacity at the community level? We tap into our volunteers’ and supporters’ vast well of talent, local knowledge, and relationships. We stop reinventing wheels and start building permanent campaign infrastructure so we can run bigger and better campaigns while giving volunteers more satisfying roles.

And this is critical: we build the upper levels of our institutions around giving our people on the ground the support that they need.

Reversing the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon is a big, long-term project. Rebuilding a connected society involves everything from giving people back their free time (by making it possible to support a family on less than two full-time incomes) to restoring “third spaces” (by fighting corporate control over our common space).

We can start by building real-world communities around our shared values, and over time, work toward supporting those communities with physical spaces like club houses, co-ops, and community centers.

Put it all together and what do you get? A healthy and connected society, with thriving communities that double as a national word-of-mouth marketing machine, through which we can reframe the debate and win campaigns.

This is my other mission. The two are related, even interdependent. I will be writing more about this in upcoming issues.

There is a direct connection between our greater societal ills and the strategies I recommend here. It is time to practice a better kind of politics, one that genuinely works because it is grounded in the well-known universals of the human condition. Fascism is fed by loneliness and isolation. We heal ourselves and win back power by taking the fight off the Internet and out into the real world, by giving people what they lack and desperately need: hope, human connection, community belonging, and the power of collective agency. Everybody needs something positive to be a part of: a meaningful and constructive role in their society.

Thank you for reading. I hope this is useful to you in your work and activism!

Keep your spirits up and stay connected to that which brings you joy. We’re going to get through this and build something better than ever.

In solidarity, always,

Antonia

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Reframing America