Photo – Richard Scalzo
By the League Basic Needs Electoral Committee
The 2026 U.S. midterm elections are emerging as a life-and-death test of strength in the war for and against fascism in America. The dominant section of the ruling class has made its intention clear: to use the election as a referendum for the full-throated corporate dictatorship described in Project 2025. Only the broadest possible participation by the working class and its social movements can defeat this. The midterms are an urgent opportunity to elevate the fight against white supremacy and for class unity that is happening in the streets, and link it with the broader battles for democracy and people’s basic needs.
A key step is to repudiate the lie of white supremacy that prevents some people from defending their African American and Latino neighbors and fellow-workers when they come under attack. “This tactic is powered by old anti-Black tropes,” wrote Oakland Community 4 Care leader Tur-Ha Ak: “Black criminality, Black irresponsibility, Black cultural inferiority, Black emotionality, and Black irrationality.” Another ridiculous lie, about immigrant criminality, is exposed every day when federal agents kidnap gardeners, farm workers, construction laborers, and restaurant workers, and are later forced to admit that few, if any, ever have criminal records. “That’s the No. 1 conservative tactic,” said an anti-ICE organizer in Boone, North Carolina, “being tough on crime, even when that crime doesn’t exist.”
The second step is to realize that white supremacy disarms all low-income workers, including whites, preventing them from uniting to resist the system’s attacks on their housing, health care and other basic needs.
The Chicago anti-ICE resisters are already beginning to understand this. Gabe Gonzalez and Kelly Hayes in Chicago’s community defense movement pointed out that while Operation Midway Blitz definitely attacked migrants, its real aim was to terrorize all low-income workers whether they had papers or not. “We’ve seen glimpses of that, with U.S. citizens being targeted, and also with what’s happened in Washington, D.C., where we saw unhoused people being targeted en masse, regardless of their immigration status, and we saw Black and Brown people targeted with abandon.”
Other Chicago leaders report that the deliberate MAGA attempt to drive a wedge between African American and Latino workers failed completely. Resistance to the raids has dramatically increased their unity with each other and with all residents in their working class neighborhoods, as they banded together to protect their schools, workplaces, churches, and community centers.
LESSONS OF PAST ELECTIONS
The lesson of every election since 2018, when the Squad went to the U.S. House, and especially since the Zohran Mamdani campaign of 2025 in New York, is that the key to victory is to focus on the immediate class, racial and social issues impacting people’s lives.
The A.I. (artificial intelligence) economy is creating a new, multi-racial class of people – mainly but not entirely under 40 years old – who have no future in society as it is currently organized. Jobs are being eliminated, the health care system is collapsing, rents are unaffordable, homelessness is rising and the possibility is increasingly remote for new families to buy homes.
Workers who experience these things are beginning to move from social awareness, where they fight for one social grouping or another, to social consciousness. They start to see their social group as part of a working class that is in a fight for survival against a billionaire system intent on exploiting and abusing all of them.
Seattle voters on November 4 elected Katie Wilson as new mayor because her campaign directly addressed these issues. The campaign emerged from struggles for free public transit, higher minimum wages and an excess compensation tax that passed decisively in February 2025 and will raise $60 million a year for social housing.
Electoral platforms win when they avoid technocratic double-talk and instead offer concrete programs for racial equality and decommodification of housing, water, transportation, health care and every other basic need. When they advocate public ownership and democratic governance, they isolate the apologists for corporate profits and inspire and motivate the voters.
As progressive strategist Waheed Shahid pointed out, “Mamdani’s message loop – rent, buses, childcare affordability, cost of living – is short enough to remember and broad enough to fit almost any question. … He treats the loop like a tether: stretch too far and you risk snapping the thread that keeps the message coherent. … Culture wars, pundit traps, shiny objects – everything tries to knock him off rhythm. But every time, he finds the same anchoring refrain.”
POLITICAL PARTY REALIGNMENT
These pro-working class electoral campaigns advance the movement because they build class unity among workers and they open up and deepen class divisions among Republicans and Democrats. Major party polarization opens the door to raising working-class demands. The MAGA movement is already polarizing between the tech billionaires in the second Trump administration, and the masses who voted for him because they thought he would address their economic condition. When tech corporations double down on A.I., cryptocurrency and data centers, workers fear job loss, rising utility costs and environmental destruction. When the Big Bad Bill cuts Medicaid, workers rise up to demand their health care.
Mayors like Mamdani, Wilson and Chicago’s Brandon Johnson are voicing an urban movement for public wealth for public good that is polarizing the Democratic Party. Revolutionaries align themselves with the workers who refuse to compromise around defending economic human rights and defend the equity necessary for class unity.
The imperative in 2026 is to defeat fascism. Fascism cannot be defeated in the short run without working–class leadership. Fascism cannot be defeated in the long run without replacing the private property system that creates fascism in the first place. We strive for the peaceful and sustainable cooperative society that modern technological abundance makes possible.
Published on January 5, 2026
This article originated in Rally!
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