Ten years ago, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) articulated what would become the epitaph of his version of the Democratic Party. On the eve of the 2016 election, he insisted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western [Pennsylvania], we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Eight years after that doomed strategy delivered a Trump presidency, it was championed again by Democrats who opted to close out the 2024 presidential race by shunning populist appeals to the working class and instead campaigning with Liz Cheney — a #Resistance hero who was beloved by cable-TV-addled liberals and the media’s handful of Never Trump Republicans, but who polling data show alienated independent swing voters just before they once again handed a national election to Republicans.

So now that another Boomer Democrat is resurrecting the same argument on the eve of the 2026 election, it is one of those Groundhog Day moments that might be driving you to self-harm.

“Romney Republicans have left the Republican Party,” said scandal-plagued former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is soft launching a presidential campaign by calling for Democrats to purge DSA members and pushing his party to the right. “They’re up for grabs.”

Emanuel is doubling down in a new essay on (of course!) the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal . There he insists Democrats should court the right and eschew the left by championing the smallest of small-bore ethics and economic initiatives. Predictably, his grand strategy proposes absolutely nothing far-reaching to tax billionaires, overhaul the health care system, limit Big Tech, or challenge the power of loathed corporate monopolies. Indeed, there is literally no mention of anything that might inconvenience the donor class that has bankrolled his entire revolving-door career.

Of course, polls show the biggest segment of undecided voters that are up for grabs are those who didn’t vote in the last election. But among those who did vote, it is certainly true that some GOP voters are available to swing to Democrats — a recent poll found 18 percent of Trump 2024 voters are undecided or supporting Democrats in the current election.

But Emanuel and his political faction want us to envision a specific kind of Republican voter when he invokes former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — the mannered centimillionaire who famously lost working-class voters in his 2012 presidential run and who (in theory?) appeals to a narrow segment of upscale country-club conservatives put off by Trump’s slobbery.

The former Utah senator’s name in this context is shorthand for corporate Democrats’ view that once again in the final weeks of an election, their party must focus their outreach and their policy agenda specifically on the apocryphal country-club Republican swing voter allegedly outraged not necessarily at the GOP’s policy program, but merely at its style and radicalism.

You know this “moderate” archetype corporate Democrats fetishize — it is the affluent, college-educated, middle-aged, norms-loving, civility-fetishizing, upwardly mobile, polite white-flighter who left the deep-blue city to enjoy the easier, lower-tax NIMBY life in the red-leaning exurbs. Think: Wonder Years’ Jack Arnold , Mad Men’s Don and Betty Draper , or as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz described it to me in a recent Lever Time interview , “the businessperson.”

Corporate Democrats have insisted these mythical GOP-leaning voters — soccer moms and office park dads believing in the system, pining for the old patrician Republican Party, but disgusted with MAGA’s thuggishness — are the key swing vote that Democrats must court. How? By amplifying left-punching rhetoric, promoting economic neoliberalism, prioritizing the recruitment of former Republicans to run for office, and basically turning the Democratic Party into a welcoming home for neoconservatives and the larger Bush-Cheney GOP.

Like Schumer in 2016, this corporate Democratic faction typically brushes off the possibility that the real swing voter might actually be the mirror opposite of the voter who would like that kind of corporate politics.

They don’t really negotiate with the possibility that swing voters might be those who don’t even know who Romney is, and might not like his anti-populist, rage-against-the-47-percent ideology if they did.

In short, they don’t acknowledge that swing voters could be the younger, less educated, less affluent, more populist working-class independents who have been radicalized by a feudal economy, despise the system, often don’t vote, but will go to the polls to back candidates promising to burn it all down and build something new.

So it is worth asking: Is the corporate Democrats’ political strategy correct? Are Romney Republicans really the election deciders Democrats must obsess over?

And if that strategy is flawed, what explains its persistence?

The Roots Of Democrats’ Anti-Populism

Democrats’ obsession with winning over the erstwhile Rockefeller Republicans via anti-populist politics isn’t new. It is not the creation of Third Way’s recent multimillion-dollar war on the left , nor is it the innovation of the new billionaire-funded political machine exposed by The Lever ’s Katya Schwenk and Luke Goldstein — the network now trying to resurrect old initiatives to preemptively halt a renewed push for Medicare For All while positioning itself as the moderate tone policeman of Democrats’ upcoming 2028 presidential primary.

No, Democrats’ fetishization of moderate Republican swing voters goes back decades to the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of the Reagan Democrats. As an ascendant new faction of corporate Democrats courted donors and alienated working-class voters with initiatives like NAFTA (which Emanuel himself helped spearhead ), Republicans wooed those same voters with conservative cultural appeals, while purging the GOP’s liberal faction.

The results were stark : working-class Democratic bastions quickly became Republican strongholds.

Democrats desperate to staunch the electoral bleeding — while still appeasing their donor class — have spent decades homing in on the affluent suburbs and their troves of urban-fleeing, socially liberal, economically moderate Republican voters who were alienated from the modern-day GOP. Since the late 1980s, Democrats have shifted from branding themselves as an economically populist, pro-labor party to a technocratic yuppie party of light-touch regulation, targeted tax cuts, fiscal austerity, and business largesse, paired with social libertarianism and West Wing -like paeans to democracy and the soul of America.

Led by the Democratic Leadership Council and the party’s Clinton wing, the rebrand sort of worked — but only sort of, and only for a time. Democrats’ neoliberalism — progressive on some social issues, corporate on economics — turned the wealthiest locales into their strongholds . But the party also conceded much of the working class to the GOP: 2024 exit polls show Trump won voters whose households make under $100,000, and he almost won union households.

Amid this transformation and realignment, Democrats routinely walked into the trap of being typecast as Hollywood movie tropes – the hated rich know-it-all snobs in a battle with endearing conservative slobs. The result: Corporate Democrats’ control of their party and obsession with courting country club Republicans coincided with Democrats going 5-for-12 in presidential elections, and only concurrently controlling both houses of Congress for a grand total of six years over the last three decades. It is at best a mediocre record, but considering the caliber of top-ticket Republicans, it is pathetic.

Here in 2026, the mathematical problem with continuing this Schumer-style, court-the-affluent, screw-the-working-class strategy is twofold. In a downwardly mobile country far more economically stratified than it was back in the DLC ’s heyday, there are generally fewer affluent voters to counter electoral losses among the growing ranks of the working class. There are also now fewer of the specific Rockefeller/Romney Republican affluent voters who haven’t already become Democrats.

On that latter point, consider the swing locales that voted for Romney. Among the 47 House districts that flipped parties between 2012 and 2020, more than half were Romney districts that ultimately went Democratic. In other words, those districts and their Romney Republican voters are already part of the coalition Democrats rely on for their current minority status.

So if you are thinking about how the party can now add voters, there aren’t that many more Romney Republicans to convert with the kind of corporate politics Emanuel, his donors and his faction champion.

Meet The Anti-System Voter

By contrast, there are plenty of voters to add among the working class — specifically among those who don’t seem like they are pining for a restoration of a kinder, gentler, more moderate politics, and who don’t seem to be yearning for a new generation of Romneys calling them ungrateful loafers.

The swing voters are instead a cohort that pollster G. Elliott Morris has labeled “anti-system voters” — ie. those who have come to distrust institutions, who perceive the political system as endemically corrupt, who have little partisan loyalty, and who want change, regardless of which party is offering it. In other words, the swing voter loathes everything that Emanuel himself personifies.

The latest Washington Post poll confirms the “anti-system” hypothesis, finding a whopping “one-quarter of Americans dislike both major political parties, but as often happens, these ‘double-haters’ swing against the party in power” — regardless of which party it is.

A Data For Progress poll from earlier this year offers clues about who exactly these swing voters are and what they seem to want — and here’s a preview: they don’t seem to be the middle-aged, affluent Romney-loving country-clubbers that Emanuel and his faction envision. According to the survey data, they tended to be younger voters without college degrees in the last election. This cycle, they tend to be those who avoid political news and who detest the Democratic Party as much or more than they despise the Republican Party, even if they are now leaning toward voting for their local Democratic candidate.

Battered by an economy turned feudal by both parties and their donors, these voters aren’t the Bobos In Paradise from Emanuel’s dreams — and they don’t seem to be pining for incrementalist Romneyism/Clintonism of targeted tax credits, corporate subsidies and deregulation that oligarchs desire and that Emanuel has peddled for the last quarter century amid the bonfire of the middle class.

They instead appear to be workers struggling to get by and so fed up with politics that they often tune out. Additionally, survey data show many of them believe Democratic leaders of Emanuel’s ilk are too old and too out of touch. The same data show that after nearly two decades of watching Democrats turn campaign promises of hope and change into more of the same neoliberalism, many see Democrats as liars who “don’t follow through on their promises.”

What’s more, many of them seem most motivated to vote for Democrats who promise to raise taxes on billionaires, enact Medicare For All, and ban AI-fueled surveillance pricing — the mirror opposite of the agenda of the tech-aligned, DLC Democrats.

Democrats’ campaign machine appears to have belatedly recognized this new political topography, as evidenced by the party apparatus abruptly shifting its ad strategy to economic populism. A quarter century late, some party strategists have finally discovered the salience of pitching voters on the connection between corruption and affordability. And in key battleground states, Democratic candidates aren’t offering up Third Way-esque incrementalism – they are hammering Republicans for slashing Medicaid, one of the original liberal Big Government programs that Third Way types have spent two generations triangulating against.

Apparently, some party bosses can read the room – and the polling data – about this era of rage politics and its particular swing voters, even if the party’s 1990s has-beens can’t…or won’t.

The Democratic Elite’s Dream Is A Hallucination

But why won’t they? What explains the persistence of corporate Democrats’ obsession with the mythical swing voter of their corporate faction’s imagination — the somehow still-not-yet-converted anti-Trump Romney Republican reading leatherbound books in a home that smells of rich mahogany ?

And what could possibly explain their obsession with this Ron Burgundy-ish unicorn at the expense of a populist agenda that appeals to millions of deeply disillusioned working-class voters?

The answer has nothing to do with data or empiricism — and everything to do with wishcasting.

If you are a Democratic elite — a politician, operative, pundit, think tanker, or a revolving-door careerist like Emanuel — your dream is that America’s quintessential swing voter is the affluent suburbanite, because if that were true, then you would finally achieve the ultimate self-serving alignment: the oligarchic policy agenda that enriches you and your sponsors and would concurrently appeal to the voters most likely to flip elections.

You could have your cake and eat it too: you could seduce your billionaire and corporate paymasters with a plutocratic policy agenda — and you could also win campaigns.

By contrast, the opposite form of politics — anti-oligarch populism — is the same Democratic elite’s nightmare. It may appeal to disaffected, anti-system working-class voters, but it destroys the money formula that enriches the political class. Such an agenda precludes any kind of policy alignment between the donor class and the working class.

In short, a populist agenda designed to reach disaffected, loathe-the-system voters makes corporate Democrats have to choose sides between oligarchs and the rest of us — and they don’t want to have to choose. They want a middle path — a third way, if you will — that lets them solicit cash from oligarchs and also solicit support from voters, and the only way to justify that kind of politics is to depict it as a shrewd strategy to win over swing voters. And so they cast the swing voter as the Romney Republican rather than the working-class anti-system independent who left the Democratic Party when it became a corporate party.

In my Lever Time discussion with Walz about Democrats’ decision to close the 2024 race by campaigning with Cheney, he suggested the strategy has run its course — and is now harming the party.

“Democrats had a huge built-in advantage where not only was there a perception that they supported the working class, they actually did,” said Walz, who two decades ago flipped a Republican congressional seat and later won two gubernatorial terms in purplish Minnesota. “There's no small number of those disenfranchised voters, especially those that lean left, that say [Democrats are] more concerned about appeasing the business interest than you are about making sure that we got housing.”

It doesn’t take a political scientist to know Walz is correct. It just requires an honest assessment of reality rather than more spin from self-interested Democratic elites trying to pretend a donor-class agenda is what is necessary to win elections.

No large group of swing voters wants that agenda. The only constituency that does is the oligarchs and the politicians they own.