Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
As we approach the upcoming midterm elections, I am stunned when I think about how little we learn from history. Both Democrats and Republicans believe if their nominees get elected, the serious problems our country faces will be tackled with a new vigor, and real change will actually occur.
So often in our history a new Congress convenes with newly elected representatives who have lofty ideals, only to be stymied by the system. It just might be that we all overplay the importance of the outcome of presidential elections in determining the direction our country will take in the four years following the election. More often than not our national elections merely validate an establishment that never really changes.
Something new is needed — a new paradigm in advance of midterm elections that changes the way citizens think about and participate in our democracy.
One such effort is Bridge Alabama, a program inviting citizens under the age of 40 to join a series of three conversations to decrease polarization, build community, and support community-led storytelling and news in advance of the state and midterm elections.
A diverse group of participants will join conversations with other Alabamians about the issues that matter to them, build relationships and have their voices heard. The goal is for this to be more than just a three-day event but to provide ongoing support and tools to make it easier for folks to continue collaborating, connecting or supporting each other moving forward.
This project will help address three timely and essential needs in states across the Deep South between now and the 2022 election. First is the need to create spaces for engagement with younger people in the South to tell new stories and create new possibilities for community and civic engagement. Bridge Alabama is focusing on people and places often invisible to national and state policymakers — and among a demographic with increasing political power, creating new ways to come together to talk about what matters most, then translate those conversations into news stories and collective action.
The program is predicated on the belief that we will be strengthened by more pluralistic community conversations. Bridge Alabama will inclusively bring people together to collectively understand the problems and issues that are most important to address in advance of the 2022 election and decide together what happens to their communities.
As we approach the 2022 midterms our nation needs more productive ways by shifting media coverage, deliberation and polarization to combat the division and dysfunction that defined 2020. Bridge Alabama is a grand experiment aiming to foster inclusion, pluralism, community and civic engagement in new ways for new times.
The nonprofit Essential Partners will design and facilitate the conversations and local partners will help with outreach. Cortico will record the discussions and produce transcripts, which will be accessible to participants and our partners. The nonpartisan Bridge Alliance will provide access to resources and support. Journalists from The Fulcrum (which is operated by the Bridge Alliance) and Reckon will then be empowered to tell new stories that raise up the concerns and hopes of Alabamians under 40.
America doesn’t just need new people in office. We need a new commitment to a new politics of problem-solving and citizen involvement and collaboration. Bridge Alabama is a step toward an election process that values a core belief that the search for solutions should be based on reason, logic and inquiry, where a conclusion follows from a set of premises, not the other way around. Bridge Alabama will allow room for people from different parties and with different beliefs to sit around a table to collaborate on tough issues facing our nation.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.