Voters Are Furious at Capital. Democrats Are Running on Comity.

Here is the pattern worth naming as the midterms approach: the energy moving voters toward the Democrats is anger — at an AI building boom, at Trump's lies — while the party's own candidates keep retreating into the safe language of bipartisanship. The grievance is material. The pitch is managerial. The gap between them is the story.

Start with the edge, because it is real. More than half of Americans tell Gallup the Democrats would do a better job keeping the country prosperous, against just 37% who say the same of Republicans. The Guardian reports the party heads into the midterms with a strong edge. That is a mandate to confront power, not to conciliate it.

And yet, across the country candidates are trying to burnish their bipartisan credentials, leaning on cross-party partnerships as the judgment nears. This is the reflex of a political class that mistakes a lead for permission to say nothing — that treats an opening created by disgust at power as a chance to look reasonable to it.

The edge is not evenly held. The marquee races from Maine to Michigan pull in the attention and the money, while a significant batch of lower-profile contests could still deliver upsets — and some of those leave openings for Republicans. Where the money and the cameras concentrate, the quieter races where ordinary life is actually contested get starved. In Massachusetts, voters will decide whether to force cities and towns to allow smaller homes on smaller lots — the kind of material fight over who gets housed that a bipartisan brand has nothing to say about.

Look at where Democrats are genuinely gaining, and the lesson is the opposite of comity. In Ohio, voters in both parties are souring on the AI building boom, and Sherrod Brown is betting that the data center backlash can unseat the Republican Jon Husted. That is not a handshake. It is a confrontation with capital. Even the IMF's Kristalina Georgieva concedes the AI investment sustaining global growth does not necessarily mean better career prospects for young people — the boom offers workers no way up. The anger crosses party lines because the injury does.

Trump's own coalition is cracking on the same terms. The New Republic reports that Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark ran a focus group of people who voted for Trump in 2024, showed them his taxpayer-funded ad raging about expelling “globalists” and “Marxists” and the “fake news media,” and watched them come away revolted. These were his voters. What repelled them was the spectacle of a man spending public money to perform grievance while delivering nothing.

Put the reports together and the shape of power is clear. The right is bleeding support because its own base has turned on a man it watched spend public money to perform resentment. Voters in both parties are turning on the AI building boom. And the Democrats best placed to seize that anger are instead advertising how well they work across the aisle — or worse. In California, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has endorsed Proposition 42, a measure that would cancel out a proposed one-time tax on the state's billionaires. That is the tell: handed a fight with capital, the party's biggest name takes capital's side.

Who pays for that timidity? The down-ballot campaigns left to fight on their own while the money chases the marquee races. And every voter who has already concluded the people in charge offer nothing — now asked to settle for an opposition that insists on meeting that power halfway.