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A lobbyist who worked for both Bernie Sanders and Fortune 500 clients explains what democratic socialist wins mean for business, and how to prepare.
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I Campaigned for Bernie Sanders Then Lobbied for Amazon
Nov 09, 2026
In 2016, my political outreach company, Firehouse Phones, worked on the presidential campaign of a democratic socialist. It was one of many campaigns my firm touched, but that one stays on my resume for a reason: it taught me more about how persuasion actually works than any client engagement before or since.
Today I run Ohio River South, a government affairs firm focused on the nation's fastest-growing region — the American South. Over the past decade we've advocated for nearly two dozen Fortune 500 companies — Amazon in my earlier lobbying years, and later growing a client roster that included Alphabet, Microsoft, General Motors, United Healthcare, and Capital One.
During last week’s historic night for the Democratic Socialists of America, a record number of candidates endorsed by the DSA and its local chapters were elected to the House of Representatives. Socialists now count at least 6 members of Congress among their ranks, not including DSA-aligned candidates. Also, the newly-elected mayors of DC, LA,NYC and Seattle all identify with the party. In the aftermath of their wins across the country, I’m being asked by executives what it means for their future since I've been an advisor on the other team.
Here is the read I give corporate leadership — and the to-do list that follows from it.
Start with a clear-eyed definition, because the confusion is doing half the damage. Democratic socialists are not proposing that the government seize your company. They want the basics working people struggle to buy on the market — housing, health care, child care, transit, utilities — provided or guaranteed publicly, and they want to get there by winning elections. That's the descriptive half. Here's the other half, and boardrooms should take it seriously: the program includes rent freezes and expanded rent regulation, campaigns for publicly owned power, higher taxes on corporations and high earners, aggressive labor standards, and open hostility to the incentive packages that anchor corporate site selection. Mamdani's first hundred days show both the capacity and the limits — a childcare deal struck with Albany, a signature fare-free bus plan stalled for lack of state funding. No, this is not the Comintern, and companies that treat it that way end up negotiating with a caricature while the actual organizers register voters in their host county. But it is a disciplined movement whose agenda touches your rate base, your rent rolls, your labor costs, and your next incentive vote.
Next, size the exposure precisely — it's operational, not existential. The agenda lands on specific line items: rent regulation where you hold residential assets, public-power campaigns where you're the utility — or the data center driving its load growth — state-level corporate tax proposals, labor standards, and organized opposition to the subsidy deals that used to sail through commissions on a Tuesday afternoon. What changes for most companies is process. Entitlements take longer. Incentive votes draw opposition that shows up with spreadsheets. Community benefits agreements move from exotic to expected. None of that is fatal to a project — all of it is priceable, the way you price currency or interest-rate risk. The companies that fall behind in this moment aren't the ones facing the strongest opposition; they're the ones that mistook a priceable operating condition for an existential threat, and either overpaid in panic or stalled in denial.
Then run the affirmative playbook. What this movement does well reduces to a discipline any company can copy: show up, listen, and give people a way to say yes. In practice, five moves. Map political exposure the way you map rate exposure — every jurisdiction where a permit, variance, rate decision, or incentive vote is coming in the next twenty-four months, and who organizes there. Build presence before you need it: fund the rec league, join the community development corporation, be a known quantity two years before you're an applicant. When opposition forms, engage early and without lawyers, and send an operator with authority to trade rather than a spokesperson with talking points. Price a community benefits agreement honestly against the alternative — eighteen months of entitlement war, a moratorium, a ballot question with your project's name on it — and treat signing one as procurement, not surrender. And look inside your own walls: the under-35 cohort that now tells Gallup it prefers socialism to capitalism is also your junior workforce and your customer base. Build the same listening discipline internally — the company that hears its own people early is rarely ambushed in public. One more, for the board: political risk belongs on the enterprise risk register next to cyber and currency — reviewed quarterly, owned by an executive, not delegated to a PR retainer.
Finally, expect this everywhere you operate — not just where the headlines are. The temptation is to file this as a coastal story. It isn't. The energy travels wherever affordability bites, and it has already arrived in the region absorbing the corporate migration: the South — hundreds of relocated headquarters, the Battery Belt, a data-center buildout worth tens of billions in Georgia alone, in what my firm's new report, Accelerating South, documents as the country's largest economy and its least settled electorate. Atlanta seated its first democratic-socialist council member in January. Carrboro, North Carolina elected another. And the same energy shows up in Southern county commissions without the label — data-center moratoria, utility-rate revolts, anti-subsidy backlashes that cross party lines. A company could once dismiss a Brooklyn assembly race as somebody else's politics. It cannot dismiss the city council seating its next zoning vote.
People ask how I square the two halves of my resume. Honestly: I've stopped treating them as halves. The Bernie campaign fell short of the nomination — but it reached people the system had stopped hearing, and the organizing craft it modeled is exactly what's winning elections today. My corporate practice is, at its best, the discipline of making institutions listen before they're forced to. The failure mode on both sides is the same — mistaking your own talking points for the public's actual concerns — and so is the fix.
The democratic socialists are having their moment because they mastered a discipline the rest of American politics let atrophy. The companies that navigate it best won't be the loudest critics or the quietest bystanders. They'll be the ones that learned the same discipline — before the next rate case, the next site-selection fight, the next election in a county where they just bet a billion dollars. The people across the table learned to organize. The question is whether you did.
Howard Franklin is the founder and CEO of Ohio River South, a government affairs and political-risk firm that works across the South from offices in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
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The Latino Vote Keeps Changing. Why Do We Keep Calling It a Realignment?
Nov 09, 2026
After the 2024 presidential election, the headlines suggested that Latino voters were moving toward the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s gains were interpreted as evidence of a possible political realignment, particularly among working-class Latino voters and younger men.
Two years later, the story has reversed. Latino voters, we are told, are returning to the Democrats.
Both interpretations risk making the same mistake: treating changes in voting behavior as though they necessarily reveal changes in political identity.
Political scientists have long distinguished relatively enduring partisan attachments from shorter-term influences on elections. Realignment refers to more durable changes in political coalitions. The problem is not the concept itself, but the tendency to interpret changing election results as evidence that such a transformation has occurred.
I spent decades teaching voting behavior at California State University, Bakersfield, at the southern end of the Central Valley. As a public-opinion researcher, I also conducted dozens of surveys throughout the region, including communities that would eventually become part of Republican Congressman David Valadao’s district.
That experience taught me to be cautious about treating demographic characteristics or party registration as reliable predictors of voting behavior. The people who participate in an election are not necessarily representative of the larger population, and their choices can reflect considerations that national partisan statistics overlook.
The Latino Vote Reverses Again
The 2026 midterms produced another substantial change in Hispanic voting patterns.
According to the Associated Press Voter Poll, approximately six in ten Hispanic voters nationally supported Democratic House candidates, while about one-third supported Republicans.
That represented a reversal from 2024, when Hispanic voters were nearly evenly divided between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
The longer history makes the problem clearer. Pew Research Center’s validated-voter research found that Hispanic voters supported Joe Biden over Trump by 61% to 36% in 2020. Four years later, Harris received 51% and Trump 48%.
These estimates come from different surveys and, in 2026, a congressional rather than presidential election. They should not be treated as a precise measure of individual vote switching. But the broad pattern is clear: Latino voting margins have changed substantially across recent elections.
If each change represented a lasting transformation in partisan loyalties, Latino voters would appear to have repeatedly remade their political identities in just six years.
Election results cannot establish that.
Some individuals may have reconsidered their candidate preferences. Others may have stayed home, while people who did not participate in the previous election voted in the next one.
A voter can identify as a Democrat and support a Republican presidential candidate. An independent can vote for one party in a presidential election and another in a congressional election.
Party identification, candidate preference and participation are different dimensions of political behavior.
A July 2026 Pew Research Center analysis found that although Trump made substantial gains among Hispanic voters between 2016 and 2024, the partisan composition of Hispanic adults changed relatively little.
A May 2026 UnidosUS survey reported by CBS News found that one in four Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 said they would not vote for him again. Yet Democrats had not necessarily won their allegiance.
These findings illustrate why changing candidate preferences should not automatically be interpreted as changing partisan identities.
What the Central Valley Taught Me
As I discussed in an earlier examination of California’s 22nd Congressional District, Republican David Valadao repeatedly won elections in a heavily Latino region that also supported Democratic presidential candidates.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried his then-congressional district by more than 15 percentage points. Valadao nevertheless won reelection by approximately 13 points. Four years later, he returned to Congress even though Joe Biden carried the district.
Valadao, a Hanford dairy farmer, emphasized agricultural interests, water policy and long-standing community relationships. His victories demonstrated that presidential preferences and congressional voting could produce very different outcomes in the same district.
In 2026, however, Valadao faced a redrawn district and a different national political environment. Democrat Randy Villegas defeated him by a substantial margin, according to preliminary returns.
His earlier victories and subsequent defeat illustrate the interaction of voters, candidates and political circumstances. They do not, by themselves, establish which of those factors mattered most.
What Elections Can—and Cannot—Tell Us
In a March 2026 analysis, political scientists Matt Barreto and Gary Segura raised a familiar question: Were Latino voters changing their preferences, or were differences in turnout producing different electoral outcomes?
Their assessment was that both processes appeared to be occurring.
This is precisely the distinction that matters.
Election returns tell us who won and how voting margins changed. Surveys help us understand attitudes and motivations. Statistical models estimate how demographic groups voted.
But these measures do not necessarily reveal whether the same individuals changed their preferences, whether their partisan attachments changed, or whether a different electorate participated.
A panel study could help answer those questions. By interviewing the same people across elections, measuring their partisan attachments and candidate preferences, and accounting for new participants, researchers could distinguish individual changes from changes in the composition of the electorate. With respondents’ consent, voter records could also help verify participation.
The movement toward Republicans in 2024 was real. So was the movement toward Democrats in 2026. What remains uncertain is how much of either shift reflected changing political attachments, short-term candidate preferences, or differences in who participated.
The mistake is not recognizing that Latino voting patterns changed. It is treating those patterns as an explanation of the voters, rather than something we still need to explain.
The Latino Vote Keeps Changing. Why Do We Keep Calling It a Realignment? was first published by the Latino News Network and is republished with permission.
Kent C. Price is a retired political science professor with four decades of experience in applied public‑opinion research, including extensive work on large two‑thirds revenue elections in California.
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President Donald Trump departs a roundtable discussion on cybercrime with White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller (R) in the East Room of the White House on October 21, 2026, in Washington, DC.
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Trump’s Elevation of Stephen Miller Proves His Promise to Work With Democrats Is a Farce
Nov 08, 2026
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s sweeping midterm election losses, a chastened President Donald Trump struck an unusually conciliatory tone, signaling a willingness to work with Democrats. But the spirit of bipartisanship proved fleeting.
By forcing out Susie Wiles and elevating Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff, Trump has delivered a definitive, defiant message to the American electorate: the era of uncompromising grievance and division isn't over—it is being supercharged.
Selecting Miller is a calculated insult to the democratic process. This is the chief architect of the administration's most draconian, violent, and deadly immigration policies over the last two years. Miller is the ideological engine behind a hard-line agenda that has torn families apart, weaponized federal law enforcement, and brought humanitarian catastrophe to our nation. His policies didn't just stoke fear; they resulted in systemic cruelty that directly compromises the safety, dignity, and lives of thousands.
Voters watched this horror unfold, and on Tuesday, they unequivocally rejected it. The backlash was felt most acutely in the very border states the administration claimed to be protecting, where communities bore the brunt of Miller’s radical social engineering. From California to Texas, voters turned out in record numbers to say "no more" to the weaponization of the border and the dehumanization of immigrant communities. They sent a clear mandate to Washington demanding oversight, humanity, and a return to checks and balances.
Instead of listening, Trump is doubling down on the exact tactics the country just repudiated.
The brutal reality is that Trump feels he has absolutely nothing to lose. With no more elections to worry about and his time in office strictly limited, he is untethered from the traditional accountability of the ballot box. He doesn't have to face the voters again, meaning public disapproval holds no power over his instincts.
Because Trump is liberated from electoral consequences, the burden of governance falls squarely on the shoulders of the congressional Republicans who survived Tuesday's bloodbath. GOP lawmakers saw their ranks severely diminished precisely because they refused to stand up to Trump’s worst impulses over the last two years. If they continue to cower, they will remain complicit in another two years of catastrophic failures delivered to the American people.
These remaining Republicans must find their spines, break rank, and put a check on Miller’s dark vision. If they fail to stop this slide into extremism, the political consequences will be existential. They must realize that if they do not act, the 2028 election cycle will make the 2026 Blue Tsunami look like a mere ripple.
Wiles, whatever one’s political disagreements with her, was widely seen as a disciplined, stabilizing force capable of navigating institutional norms. Replacing her with Miller—a combative ideologue who views governance not as a series of compromises but as a zero-sum war—signals that the White House is preparing for total conflict.
By placing a MAGA purist at the gate of the Oval Office, Trump is slamming the door on any potential for bipartisan legislation. He is signaling to Senate Democratic and House Democratic Leaders that they will face maximum resistance, executive overreach, and contempt for congressional subpoenas.
Voters demanded a course correction on Tuesday. By appointing Stephen Miller, Trump has made it clear that he would rather watch his administration burn in the fires of partisan warfare than concede even an inch to the will of the American people.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network, and twice president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
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What Post-1971 Supply-side Economics Has Done to Veterans
Nov 08, 2026
Post-1971 supply-side economics—often referred to as "trickle-down economics" or "Reaganomics” fundamentally transformed the relationship between the federal government and military veterans. The year 1971 marked the end of the Bretton Woods system, the closing of the gold window, and a pivot toward neoliberal economic frameworks that prioritized deregulation, sweeping tax cuts, and aggressive federal deficit reduction via domestic spending cuts.
For veterans, who had previously benefited from the expansive, New Deal-style social investments of the original G.I. Bill, this macroeconomic paradigm shift led to four distinct structural consequences:
The Erosion of Universal Benefits and Introduction of Means-Testing
Before the 1970s, veteran benefits were broadly viewed as an uncompromised societal obligation. However, as supply-side doctrine focused on lowering federal domestic expenditures to offset tax cuts, veterans' health and income programs became targets for cost-containment.
The Shift to Means-Testing: Under the Reagan administration, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) began viewing universal veteran healthcare as an unsustainable entitlement. This shift culminated in proposals to virtually eliminate medical benefits for veterans whose household income exceeded certain thresholds ($15,000 to $18,000 at the time).
Budget Cuts: Instead of treating veterans' care as a protected debt of war, supply-side budgets sought “Cuts in veterans benefits totaling about $500 million” by enforcing strict income-level tests for non-service-related illnesses.
The Privatization and De-funding of the VHA
Supply-side theory posits that private enterprise is inherently more efficient than government-run entities. Over the post-1971 era, this logic drove sustained efforts to privatize parts of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).
Neglect of Infrastructure: In the 1980s, budget drafts consistently aimed to reduce hospital staff and lower patient admissions. For instance, the FY1987 budget blueprint called for “Reducing the number of patients admitted to veterans' hospitals by 62,000” and dropping outpatient clinic visits by over a million.
Corporate Outsourcing: Decades of underfunding created severe backlogs, which proponents used to justify shifting care to the private sector. This set the stage for modern policies like the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP), which critics argue diverts public funds to corporate healthcare providers and threatens the structural integrity of specialized VA care.
Structural Vulnerability to Economic Stratification
The core promise of supply-side economics—that wealth at the top would "trickle down" to create a rising tide for all—never materialized for working-class Americans, a demographic heavily represented by veterans.
The Post-Industrial Trap: As supply-side policies accelerated deregulation and globalized outsourcing, America’s industrial base hollowed out. Working-class veterans returning from Vietnam, and later the Gulf War, no longer found the stable, unionized manufacturing jobs that sustained World War II veterans.
Compounded Trauma: Lacking a robust public safety net, low-income veterans bore the brunt of macroeconomic shocks. This directly contributed to the modern crises of veteran homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide.
The "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul" Legislative Playbook
Because veterans are a highly visible and politically sensitive group, outright slashing their benefits faces massive public backlash. Consequently, post-1971 fiscal policy frequently relies on zero-sum legislative engineering: expanding benefits for one group of veterans by cutting them for another, all to stay within rigid supply-side spending caps.
Modern Zero-Sum Politics: This trend has persisted into recent legislative cycles. For example, a recent major Veterans Reform Package (H.R. 9237) offered critical expansions (such as full retirement and disability for combat-injured vets) but funded them by raising home loan fees and undercutting disability ratings for conditions like sleep apnea and tinnitus for up to 1.5 million others.
To address the impacts that post-1971 supply-side economics has had on military veterans, several targeted policy adjustments are required. Critics argue that these economic models have systematically underfunded the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), hollowed out the federal workforce, and over-privatized core care networks.
Reverse Privatization and Fully Fund the VHA
The shift toward private care alternatives, accelerated by programs like the VA Choice Act and MISSION Act, has often diverted critical public resources to less integrated, costlier private providers. Research indicates that the VA’s integrated hospital system actually improves health outcomes and reduces 28-day mortality by 46% compared to private options.
The Remedy: End the outsourcing of core medical services.
The Action: Reinvest private-care vouchers back into the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) infrastructure. This will expand institutional capacity and retain specialized staff.
Strengthen Federal Hiring Preferences and Staffing
Supply-side austerity frequently targets the federal workforce through hiring freezes and budget caps. Because veterans make up more than one-quarter of the VA workforce, cutting these positions directly hurts veteran employment and erodes the quality of care they receive.
The Remedy: Protect and expand federal hiring advantages.
The Action: Pass explicit legislative carve-outs that exempt the VA from blanket federal hiring freezes or downsizings. This guarantees stable career pathways for transitioning service members.
Safeguard and Expand Safety-Net Benefits
Proposals tied to supply-side fiscal consolidation often seek to restructure or trim social programs like Medicaid, food assistance, and disability rating schedules to save budgetary costs. Low-income and rural veterans heavily rely on these interlinked safety nets.
The Remedy: Protect broader health and nutritional entitlements.
The Action: Block structural changes like capping Medicaid or restricting the VA disability rating schedule. Ensure these foundational programs remain fully funded to protect vulnerable veterans from severe financial distress.
Upgrade Transition and Credential Transferability
The post-1971 labor market demands high flexibility, yet veterans often struggle with underemployment because military credentials do not seamlessly transfer to civilian licensure.
The Remedy: Federalize and streamline state licensing processes.
The Action: Implement mandatory cross-state compacts that automatically convert military operational training into civilian technical licenses. This quickly absorbs veterans into high-paying sectors without forcing them to redo entry-level schooling.
Reinforce Modern Housing and GI Bill Policies
The erosion of public housing investments and shifting educational landscapes require modern updates to traditional veteran safety nets.
The Remedy: Protect home loan access and adapt education stipends.
The Action: Expand Housing First models paired with wraparound services to combat homelessness. Update GI Bill benefits to comprehensively cover non-traditional, online, and skills-based professional training.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
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