We Can’t Address Affordability Without Tackling Corporate Power
After a demoralizing defeat in November 2024, the Democratic Party has been enjoying an electoral surge across the country; throughout 2025, the average result in special House races was a 15.6 percent improvement on the 2024 baseline. The party’s worst showings, in fact, were a pair of 13 percent surges in Tennessee and Arizona. Democrats romped to impressive victories in New Jersey and Virginia. An energized left scored major wins in mayoral races in New York City and Seattle. For the first time in decades, the party notched statewide office wins in Georgia. So far, the trend does not seem to be abating; a recent state Senate race in deep red Tarrant County, Texas, saw a 34 percent swing and the election of Democrat Taylor Rehmet. Usual disclaimers about the unrepresentativeness of special elections aside, these are some seismic shifts. A lot has happened in the past year. President Donald Trump is singular in his ability to pack a whole 52 decade-long weeks into a single trip around the sun. But there are some commonalities across all of the Democratic overperformances. They all focused relentlessly on cost of living issues and channeling widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo. Freed from the polite norm of defending a floundering, disliked incumbent, candidates are emboldened to rage against the machine. Whether we’re talking about democratic socialists in New York, middle-of-the-road liberals in New Jersey, or blue-collar unionists in Texas, everyone has built their coalition on a pillar of directly addressing economic anxiety. It even has a name: affordability politics.But just beneath the surface of the affordability messaging that has been propelling Democrats to victory is something far more profound than annoyance at high nominal prices: anger at corporate power. To create a durable affordability agenda, Democrats must embrace widespread feelings of economic powerlessness head on—and embrace making enemies of the corporate behemoths controlling our lives. The party’s leadership that is still in thrall to an outmoded form of politics that no longer works must be jettisoned. Americans are simply fed up, and with good reason: Corporate power is taking a dive for the benefit of Trump.In 2022, jury-selection consulting firm Orrick found that 45 percent of survey respondents had somewhat or very negative perceptions of large corporations, compared to 40 percent with somewhat or very positive perceptions. That represented a doubling of negative sentiment from Orrick’s 2019 findings. And while the firm noted increased skepticism of institutions broadly, distrust of corporations outstripped the other categories Orrick analyzed: the courts (17 percent, up from 8 pre-pandemic) and police (36 percent, up from 11). In its 2025 follow-up research, Orrick determined that the high level of distrust in institutions, foremost major corporations, had “cemented over the last three years.” In 2025, 86 percent agreed with the statement that “corporations use their power and money to improperly influence regulatory agencies or lawmakers.” Orrick’s findings are not anomalous; both Gallup and Pew have shown marked declines in sentiment toward big businesses. Gallup has big business’s approval rate falling from 52 percent in 2019 to 37 percent in 2025. Pew shows a less marked drop, mostly because it found a far lower 2019 approval rate, moving from 36 percent believing large corporations have a positive impact on the nation’s direction to 29 percent over the same period. Notably, Pew’s research shows that, while Democratic-leaning voters have been relatively consistent—the percent believing large corporations improve society was in the 20s for the entire time—Republican-leaning voters’ faith in big business has plummeted. The American National Election Studies, using data from late 2024, found the most negative perception of big business on record since 1964. This tracks a large and growing body of evidence showing that since at least 2020, Americans have become deeply skeptical of large corporations and their influence over the government and economy. According to polling outfit Navigator, 71 percent of Americans blame the wealthy and large corporations not paying enough taxes for their own tax burden. In 2021, Data for Progress and the Revolving Door Project found that 75 percent believe the federal government “prioritizes the interests of corporations and the wealthy” and 80 percent agreed that “wealthy people and corporations are regularly not punished for breaking the law.” A fall 2025 poll from YouGov and The Economist shows 80 percent of people think the rich have too much power.Crucially, large majorities of Americans blame corporations for their affordability issues. In the YouGov/Economist poll, 72 percent think that developers maximizing profits is somewhat or very important in making housing costs more expensive. Data for Progress and Groundwork Collaborative research in 2022 found 63 percent of people believed large corporations were unfairly raising prices. In 2023, 90 percent of respondents told YouGov that they blamed corporate profit-seeking at least some for inflation, with 61 percent blaming it a lot. The public is right; executives were openly saying on earnings calls, where lying is prohibited by federal law, that they were using the inflationary environment to rent-seek.The rage over affordability issues has everything to do with the public’s exhaustion with being ripped off. Understanding this is the first step toward building a real politics of affordability. The next is to embrace open conflict with the corporate villains extorting the public. The public agrees; the DFP/RDP survey saw 83 percent of respondents say that not punishing the wealthy and corporations for misconduct leaves ordinary citizens to bear the cost of their actions. In fall 2024, Navigator found 73 percent of “economically persuadable” voters wanted “cracking down” on corporate price gouging to be a top priority, the single highest share of all economic issues in the sample. Of all respondents, 83 percent said it should be either a priority or a top priority. Only 4 percent said it should not be a priority at all. In a Demand Progress poll from May 2025, 82 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate if they heard the message: “The thing we need to do to make the government and economy do a better job of serving working and middle-class Americans is to get money out of politics, break up corporate monopolies, and fight corruption.”Whether to crack down on corporate misconduct is only a debate in policy-wonk circles; the public has long since made up its mind that a crackdown is the only way to rebalance the economy and restore affordability. The Democrats who ran on affordability in 2025 realized this. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani proudly promised to take on corporate greed and is, according to veteran finance analyst Albert Edwards, the start of a reckoning corporate America has brought upon itself by raking in profits and raising prices while Americans struggled to keep their heads above water. Our current chapter of Democratic bumbling on “kitchen table”–style politics is downstream of a lasting legacy of economic determinism as a view of politics. Clinton’s famous “it’s the economy, stupid” preceded a chapter of political science and punditry in which elections were viewed largely as predetermined by economic factors. This view has haunted the left-of-center world and is directly responsible for much of the worst politics and punditry of the last two decades. In 2009, Democrats looked destined to ride the coattails of the Great Recession into another period of political dominance. Their ascendance looked to be ordained by the combination of complete Republican humiliation from their botched stewardship of the economy—even if the blame was shared with Bush’s predecessors, including the outgoing Clinton administration, especially for repealing Glass Steagall and blocking oversight of over-the-counter derivatives—and the inexorable march of demographic change that was making the nation less white and more diverse. Then came the 2010 midterms: Democrats were knocked off their high horse before they could ride off into the sunset. The official story of Democratic politics centered around two dueling determinisms. In the short run, the party was always destined to lose significant ground in 2010, because sluggish economic recovery would translate into electoral backlash. All the models said so. In the longer run, Democrats would coast on the shifting electorate, guaranteed success as Republicans became saddled with a shrinking base. Nothing corroborated this view quite so clearly as the 2012 Republican National Committee postmortem on Mitt Romney’s campaign, which reasoned that, because of the growing Hispanic voting population, “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” A couple paragraphs later, the report said that the party had to become “welcoming and inclusive” to appeal to minority voters and young people. It’s quaint to remember that the GOP once committed these ideas to print. Four years later, Donald Trump would assume the presidency after doing the polar opposite.Those twin prophecies conveniently offered the Democratic political class both an alibi and an undue confidence in their party’s fortunes. Election losses were temporary setbacks, mere speedbumps on America’s drive along the road to true multiracial democracy. And so the erstwhile party of the people withered into a husk of itself. The remaining vestiges of Democrats’ New Deal– and Great Society–style populism were pruned. President Obama famously set up an organizing infrastructure outside of the Democratic National Committee that competed with official party organs for resources. Centrist pundit Matthew Yglesias at the time described the post-Obama Democratic Party as a “smoking pole of rubble.” Official partisan infrastructure has since often eschewed even the pretense of a mass politics. Rather than prioritize the hard work of political education and organizing, the party shifted toward a reductive model of “persuasion,” where votes were won by strategically triangulating on policy planks to try to approximate the median voter. What the entire mobilization-versus-persuasion debate misses is that no one will be persuaded if the message is never communicated. The lack of a mass politics made the liberal chattering class become myopically focused on appealing to an imagined model voter, rather than building infrastructure for grassroots engagement, which is the engine of both mobilization and message saturation. Rather than using politics to construct a durable majority, Democrats spent their years between the wars chasing ghosts.Perhaps the clearest example of this is Chuck Schumer dismissing worries around losing blue-collar voters by claiming that such losses will be more than offset by picking up moderate swing voters like the phantasmal Baileys—the bespoke ghosts that Schumer consults as he slaloms through his decision-making process. Schumer, perhaps, was unaware that it was not his imaginary friends but the blue-collar voters and the unions that represented them that operated the on-the-ground political organizing that had powered the Democratic Party for decades. Schumer modeled explicitly what the party as a whole was implicitly oriented around: abandoning living, breathing constituents for the imagined model voter. But the Baileys don’t vote in the real world.The reduction of politics to an optimization problem was, however, extremely good for the donor class and corporate media. If economic backlash is a flash in the pan, and you’re predestined to prevail in the long term, then the opportunity cost of eschewing old-fashioned populist politics is essentially nil. All of this was happening downstream of what David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher have called a “Master Plan” being implemented from the 1970s onward. Spelled out in the infamous Powell memo, corporate interests were executing a coordinated plan to weaken the left, empower private interests, and subordinate the common good to business interests.Against this backdrop, the Obama administration’s choice to let Wall Street off easy and consistently not pursue the investigation and prosecution of high-ranking executives is entirely rational. Doing so wouldn’t fix the economy in the short term and was thereby irrelevant to the midterms. It was largely irrelevant to the march of demographic diversification and so was totally unnecessary to the party’s long-term performance. All it would do, from this point of view, was antagonize business interests, inconveniently undermine donors’ networks and friends, and make dinner parties more awkward.President Clinton first choreographed this dance when, in 1993, he pivoted aggressively away from his economic populist campaign planks and fully embraced the neoliberal consensus. But it was President Obama’s approach to banks and big business, bailing out corporations and executives while failing to deliver promised aid to homeowners and “Main Street,” that marked the conquest of this view of politics. But politics hadn’t been solved. That inexorable liberalizing of the electorate was revealed to be entirely exorable.Since that fateful decision, Democrats have championed a status quo where the wealthy amassed ever more treasure and privilege while employment conditions have continued to stagnate or deteriorate. The rise of populism, both traditional left economic populism headlined by Bernie Sanders and the faux-populist revanchism of Trump and MAGA, were powered by the widespread discontent with a government that abandoned workers in the name of economic efficiency. The increasing powerlessness we all encounter in more and more economic interactions is part and parcel of a broad shift in how we structure our economy that began decades ago but has accelerated in recent years. Against the backdrop of the “war on crime,” increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement, and mass incarceration, government regulation of corporations and prosecution of white-collar crime have plummeted. Fiscal year 2025 had the lowest prosecution rate for white-collar crimes since at least 1986. The number of white-collar prosecutions in 2024 was less than half of what it had been in 1994. Looking at nearly any benchmark of corporate enforcement, the past decade has seen a major drop in penalties and the number of cases, just in nominal terms. In the context of rising inflation, a growing economy, and population growth, we should be seeing higher penalties and more cases. As inflation cheapens the dollar, penalties need to grow to pack the same punch. As the economy and workforce grow, even a relatively constant rate of illegal conduct would see the raw count of violations increase.And yet, most federal enforcement peaked in the second Obama administration and has since fallen markedly. The number of cases brought against companies for wage and hour violations by the Department of Labor has been dropping since 2012. Total corporate penalties peaked in 2014 and have only come close to the level seen under Obama’s second term once since, in 2023. Some measures peaked sooner. The prosecution rate for white-collar crime hit its maximum of just about 50 percent in 2009; the second George W. Bush term is the only period in the last 40 years that consistently saw more than 40 percent of criminal referrals to the Department of Justice result in prosecutions. And in those rare instances where corporate enforcement has been reasonably robust, billionaires and executives have been visibly enraged. Billionaire donors led by Reid Hoffman made a huge fuss over ditching Lina Khan as a test of Kamala Harris’s fealty to business interests, despite the fact that Khan’s tenure at the Federal Trade Commission was broadly popular and she became something of a folk hero. Gary Gensler’s Securities and Exchange Commission was tarred by the crypto industry and Chamber of Commerce types for daring to (gasp) enforce long-standing securities law. Corporate America responded to Rohit Chopra’s effectiveness at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in forcing firms to provide restitution for violating consumer protection laws by seeking to litigate the agency out of existence.It isn’t just that corporations, executives, and the ultrarich are above the law; they also flaunt the fact. The billionaire class has, as Michael Hirschorn wrote for The New York Times, “gone full Louis XIV.” People know that our government is more committed to serving wealth and capital than it is to serving citizens because it has become more and more transparent. Student debt relief took over a decade of organizing and campaigning, only to be dashed on the rocks of a Supreme Court case that had to look the other way just to find standing to sue. But when crypto and fintech accounts were threatened by lazy asset management, keeping large deposits in accounts at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank over the deposit insurance limits—despite the widespread availability of tools like CDARs that are able to ensure deposits are split up across multiple banks to be fully insured—the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Treasury Department created authority out of thin air to functionally guarantee all deposits despite clear statutory text to the contrary. Still no word from the Supreme Court. (This is not to say that the bailout was bad on the merits; something probably had to be done to contain the damage. But it is both something that people can intuit and extremely telling that we parse the legal authority endlessly when it comes to helping everyday Americans but not at all when it comes to protecting wealthy investors.)Similarly, the Supreme Court, over the course of 2025, made obviously contradictory determinations that Congress cannot insulate administrative agency heads who protect consumers and workers from presidential removal, but that it can insulate leadership of the Federal Reserve from presidential removal. The point here is not that leaders at the Fed should not have that protection, only that, if the primary independent regulator is responsible for protecting capital interests through managing price levels and ensuring stable economic conditions and returns on investment (which is, to be clear, often good for everyone), it does not follow logically that the same protections cannot be extended to independent regulators who protect the interests of workers and consumers. It’s a farce so obvious that it feels ripped from a Marxist parody of our government. The past decade-plus has seen the government, our courts, and big business routinely playing Calvinball with the rule of law, right in front of our faces. That’s why we face a rising tide of popular resentment toward institutions broadly and corporations specifically.The onslaught of corporate power is also corroding the basic logic of economic transactions right in front of our eyes. The very concept of prices is breaking down in real time. Everyone is used to being able to talk about “the price” of various goods and services. Obviously there is hardly ever a true, single price. But they have tracked a general price level enough that we can intelligibly talk about price levels, how much something costs, and whether it ought to cost that much. But no longer.Now, different people are often charged different prices for the same product at the same time at the same retailer through proliferating dynamic or surveillance pricing that seeks to extract the maximum price from each consumer through estimating individualized willingness to pay. An investigation in December 2025 from Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports found that on Instacart, the same product was priced up to 23 percent higher based on dynamic pricing.Corporations and some pro-corporate pundits try to paint dynamic pricing as something that will lead to lower prices for some, higher prices for some, and generally be good because it “tailors” the cost to each purchaser. But we didn’t all just tumble off the turnip truck. Executives are saying on earnings calls that they anticipate dynamic pricing to be able to increase revenue through “pricing power.” Revenue can increase through raising prices or moving more product, and executives are not generally talking about moving more product. So the average price most of us pay must be going up.And this all exacerbates the problem of shifting to an “access economy” dominated by platform monopolies. Not only is the basic logic of how much something costs in flux right before our eyes, but more and more, everything we buy is a recurring subscription, rather than a one-off cost. The result is that we are trapped in a growing cycle of paying over and over again while being less able to predict the costs we face. Since the Great Recession, people have watched corporate behemoths amass ever more control over daily life. The affordability agenda has to not just make it possible for people to live within their means but also to renew a sense of economic agency. Rent-seeking is not exclusive to corporations, obviously, though public corporations do operate under a particularly corruptible incentive structure that compels them to ruthlessly pursue financial returns with no statutory countervailing requirement of good corporate citizenship. But while a homeowners’ association also contributes to higher prices through restricting market access, the platforms that render Americans increasingly powerlessness are in the hands of corporate actors. Junk fees, noncompete clauses, predatory training programs that create debt traps, and more effects of concentrated private economic power serve to raise prices or suppress wages. It isn’t merely that people think the standard of living has gotten worse, but that they can tell that it simply hasn’t improved as much as it should. Most Americans today are better off than a pharaoh in ancient Egypt. But they aren’t comparing themselves to Tutenkamen, they’re looking at how they measure up to Elon Musk. As long as our market structure exacerbates inequality and undermines economic self-determination, people will feel like they are barely treading water. Freezing the rent and utility prices is a good start, but only a start. Prosperity is not possible until those who have schemed against the American people are run to ground and held accountable at last.