Beyond the Ballot Box: An Advocate’s Path through 2025 and Beyond

Today’s Weekly Perspective is a copy of a speech that I delivered earlier today at our Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit, Empower Missouri’s 123rd annual conference in Missouri. It has been lightly edited and is much longer than our typical blog posts. 

One week ago, Americans elected former President Donald Trump to a second term in office. Some of President Trump’s proposed policies, as well as policy changes outlined in the now infamous Project 2025 plan, could have enormous short-term and long-term ramifications for poor and working class families in America. It will be important for advocates to go into next year with clear eyes, level heads, and a strong plan to both a) fight back against policies that could massively increase hunger, homelessness, and poverty and b) build a stronger coalition of working class Americans fighting for populist economic policies.

As a self-proclaimed politico, I spent a lot of time studying this election over the last several months, watching for trends and reading commentary from a broad spectrum of political analysts around the country. While there is likely a myriad of reasons that over 75 million Americans cast a vote for President Trump, there are three that I think worthy of highlighting because of their implications moving forward. 

1. A desire for change. Voters went into this election feeling extremely unhappy. According to exit polling conducted by NBC News, nearly three-quarters of voters across the country said they felt negatively about the way things are going in the U.S., including 29% who actually described themselves as angry about the direction of the country. What’s propelling this anger? One key factor was certainly that nearly half of all voters said that they were worse-off financially than they were four years ago. This leads us directly to…
2. The economy. While the job market is booming and the stock market is thriving, consumers aren’t happy. High prices are lingering on everything from groceries to childcare to housing, and families around the country are feeling more cash-strapped than they used to. There are still many voters who see President Trump as a business tycoon who is better positioned to “fix” the economy than his opponent, Vice President Harris. During the campaign, President Trump promised many economic reforms that were appealing to voters, including exempting social security benefits, overtime wages, and tips from taxation. 
3. Fear. President Trump’s campaign was one that was dominated by one primary theme: fear. One particularly noticeable tactic was stoking fears of immigrants among his base, making dangerous, xenophobic remarks about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and painting them as dangerous criminals who are an immediate threat to the American public, despite ample evidence that immigrants to the United States commit far fewer crimes than native-born citizens. However, immigrants weren’t the only “boogiemen” in Trump’s campaign. The President-Elect also spewed general fear about the future of our country under a Kamala Harris presidency, predicting that America would be “ruined.” He frequently made baseless claims that the U.S. is on the brink of a global war that only he can prevent, regularly tossing around terms like “World War III” and “nuclear holocaust.” He further postulated that Israel would be “eradicated” if he didn’t win. 

Fear is a powerful beast. A 2009 article in Psychology Today posited that “fear is a primal instinct that served us as cave dwellers and still serves us today. It keeps us alive, because if we survive a bad experience, we never forget how to avoid it in the future.” Therefore, fear is an incredibly important feeling. 

Unfortunately, fear can also be exploited. It’s exploited every day by marketers to sell everything from life insurance policies to cars to hand sanitizer. It’s also exploited by politicians. A meta-analysis of political messaging studies published in 2015 by the American Psychological Association concluded that fear-based messages are nearly twice as effective as non-fear-based messages. There are few emotions that make us more uncomfortable than fear, invoking our fight-or-flight instinct. The same article notes that “our first reaction is often to flee back to our comfort zone. If we don’t know the way back, we are likely to follow whoever shows us a path.” 

President Trump’s campaign was enormously successful in stoking fear, and then convincing the fearful that he had the only pathway to save them. He made people fearful of immigrants, and then convinced them that he would keep them safe by executing a mass deportation. He made people fearful of global conflict, and then convinced voters that he would protect them. He made workers fear that their industries are dying under Democratic control, and then convinced them that he’s the only one who can save their jobs. 

It is important to understand the climate that has led us to this current moment, so that we can successfully operate in this environment moving forward. Nearly 60% of registered voters in Missouri, representing almost a third of our population, voted for President Trump last week. These are our neighbors, our family members, our friends, and many others who we share community with. There may be Trump voters reading this today, and I’m genuinely so glad that you’re here with us! 

However, I know that many of you did not vote for this outcome. I know that some of you may be feeling scared; I’m not here to tell you not to be scared. I know that some of you may be feeling sad; I’m not here to tell you not to be sad. I know that some of you may be feeling angry; I’m not here to tell you not to be angry. I am, however, here to ask you to take any negative emotions that you might be feeling and, when you’re ready, channel them into something positive for the future. So, let’s go back to those three factors that drove President Trump’s election, and let’s consider how we can help leverage those factors to protect our institutions and drive positive change. But, I’m going to cheat, just a little, and combine the first two factors into one that we can address together. 

The first factor was a desire for change. The second factor was the economy. We know that many people’s desire for change was rooted in this idea that the economy is not working for them. According to an in-depth quantitative study conducted by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, many Americans believe that greed is driving our economy. Academy staff published an op-ed on the study results in The New York Times; one quote reads, “They believe the rich and powerful have designed the economy to benefit themselves and have left others with too little or with nothing at all.”

I would tend to agree with this sentiment, and how could you not? In 2020, Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey, and as of March 2020, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. A short four years and one global pandemic later, in March 2024, the country had 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase. Billionaires aren’t the only ones doing great; the CEO-to-work pay gap has widened tremendously in recent years. According to data tracked by the Economic Policy Institute on the nation’s 350 largest companies, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965. That figure jumped to 59-to-1 in 1989 and an eye-popping 399-to-1 in 2021. 

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a level of economic uncertainty that many families have still not recovered from. Millions of families struggled to afford housing and food, and for those who did have savings or another financial safety net, those resources may have been entirely wiped out. These are important factors in understanding the economic insecurities that families are facing today. Here are a few data points that demonstrate current difficulties: 

• A June 2023 industry report found that auto loan delinquencies were higher than they were at the peak of the Great Recession. 
• Credit card use has ballooned, and delinquencies are at among their highest rates in a decade. 
• Child poverty more than doubled in 2022 after the child tax credit expansion expired. 
• In 2022, rates of food insecurity reached their highest levels since 2015.

Researching this data helped me to understand why so many Americans voted for Trump.  People are scared about their financial futures, and they are hungry for a change that will reduce their economic anxieties and help them build a safety net for themselves and their families. This is an important goal that is shared by hundreds of millions of Americans nationwide, and we can build on that shared hope for our future. So, what does that look like? 

While our economy may be strong by measures utilized by academics, economists, and government officials, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t still feeling squeezed at home. A high-flying stock market and increased GDP means very little to families who are struggling to make ends meet—families who are working multiple jobs, families who are scrimping on healthy food or necessary medications to keep up with rent and utilities, or families who are one emergency away from plunging into financial disaster. These families need wages that keep pace with inflation, employers who are providing high-quality, low-cost healthcare, affordable childcare, and federal safety net programs to catch them when times get hard. 

Concerns about the economy are a shared, common ground for anti-poverty advocates, Trump voters, and many other groups of Americans. We have a shared charge to create an economy that works for all of us, not just a handful of executives and billionaires. And, we know that folks across party lines will vote for populist economic policies in Missouri. Missourians just passed Proposition A, raising the minimum wage to $15.00 (the second time we’ve raised the minimum wage by popular vote in just six years) and creating a new requirement for employees to provide paid sick leave. As you likely remember, we also passed Medicaid expansion in 2020. When we frame the policies that we seek to implement as common-sense, populist policies that appeal to the average person, we can attract politicians from both sides of the aisle to implement these changes.

So, what might some of those policy proposals be? 

Healthcare: President Trump has indicated that he will not attempt to repeal that Affordable Care Act again. This is a wise decision, as public opinion has swung heavily in favor of the ACA over the last five years. Average Americans want their healthcare needs met, and supporting the ACA and all of its groundbreaking provisions, including requiring coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, will be a crucial part of our collective work. However, President Trump has also said that he plans to make massive cuts to the federal budget, and so it is very possible that his administration will allow subsidies that were passed under President Biden to expire, substantially increasing the cost of coverage under the ACA. We will need to aggressively lobby Congress to renew these subsidies and keep the cost of healthcare affordable. 

Childcare: One federal-level policy where we may be able to build consensus will be to reinstate the expanded child tax credit that the government estimates lifted two million children out of poverty during the pandemic, cutting child poverty in half. JD Vance has indicated support for this proposal, so advocates should plan to hold him accountable for that campaign promise. Decreasing childhood poverty through the child tax credit is a wildly popular proposal. 90 percent of voters think that childhood poverty is a problem in this country, with 49 percent saying that it’s a “big” problem. Nearly three in four voters who received the expanded child tax credit in 2021 said that losing it impacted their financial security, and 71 percent of voters express support for expanding the CTC. This is the type of proposal that we can build real coalition and connection around. 

Criminal Justice: During President Trump’s first term, he worked with a bipartisan group of legislators to pass the First Step Act, a solid criminal justice reform package. According to a summary from the Brennan Center, the law has done two things, both aimed at making the federal justice system fairer and more focused on rehabilitation. The sentencing reform components of the bill shorten federal prison sentences and give people additional chances to avoid mandatory minimum penalties by expanding opportunities for judges to impose sentences lower than the statutory minimum. Once the act was signed, judges immediately began sentencing people to shorter prison terms in cases coming before them. Similarly, people in federal prisons for pre-2010 crack cocaine offenses immediately became eligible to apply for resentencing. Second, the law’s prison reform elements are designed to improve conditions in federal prison, starting with curbing inhumane practices, such as eliminating the use of restraints on pregnant women and pushing to place incarcerated individuals in prisons that are closer to their families. A more complex part of the law seeks to reorient prisons around rehabilitation rather than punishment, and that is no small task.  We will seek to work with the Trump administration to finish the work that he started six years ago. 

Of all of Empower’s policy priorities, criminal justice reform is the least polarizing. We work with advocates from every inch of the political spectrum, from the ACLU to the Conservative Political Action Caucus. There is consensus that our punitive justice system is failing, and we can work with a broad coalition to continue this progress. 

So, we’ve talked about capitalizing on a desire for change and a shared belief that we need to reimagine our economy. The third and final factor that we need to discuss is fear. 

Let me start here by saying that I recognize that I just painted a fairly rosy picture of policy possibilities over the next four years. However, we also know that there are some really dangerous policy proposals presented by President Trump during his campaign and many even more draconian proposals outlined by the team who created Project 2025. President Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, but it remains unclear how many of their policy proposals that he’ll adopt while in office. Project 2025 calls for imposing targeted time limits or lifetime caps on Medicaid benefits as well as allowing states to mandate harsher work reporting requirements. It proposes the elimination of Head Start, a program that has provided nearly 40 million children of families earning low incomes with early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services. And, it outlines a plan to end summer meal programs outside of a summer school setting, including the brand new Summer EBT program. Obviously, each one of these proposals would be devastating to working class families around the country, and we will have to fight hard to stop these proposals from being implemented. 

But. 

We have a choice to make. We can choose to give into the fear—to allow it to paralyze us, to allow it to swallow us up, or, perhaps most dangerously, we can allow it to harden us. We can allow it to sow hatred in our hearts, and we can allow it to color our perceptions of our neighbors who voted for the President-Elect. This is a path of darkness. 

Or: we can choose the light. We can push ourselves to see the bigger picture and to believe that many people who voted for President Trump did not do so because they were in favor of mass deportations or ending Head Start or increasing military spending but simply because they are struggling and scared and trying to survive. I know that this might be hard for some of you to believe—that people could ignore the President’s racist rhetoric and sexist behavior and criminal record and vote for him simply because our economy is broken and they are trying to protect their own families. But, I’m here to tell you that it’s true. I have spoken with some of these voters. They are willing and ready to fight for a brighter economic future. 

I want to share two more statistics from NBC’s exit polling that I found interesting. First, the largest share of voters polled described themselves as moderate (42%) over conservative (34%) or liberal (23%). I think that there is a giant chunk of America’s working class in that moderate bucket, and they are primed to coalesce around populist economic policies. Second, despite feeling negative about the country’s current direction, nearly two-thirds of voters said America’s best days are in the future. This means that the majority of the country has hope.  We can work with that. 

Now is not the time to close ranks and wall ourselves off from those who think differently from us. It is time to build a bigger tent. I fully understand that I’m asking you to walk a fine line here. I don’t know about all of you, but over the last couple of days, I have seen many folks posting this screen grab from a Wikipedia article about the “paradox of tolerance” on social media. It says, “The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) where he argued that a truly tolerant society must not tolerate those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.”

I think that it is absolutely correct that we cannot condone intolerant words and actions. We must call out racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia wherever we see it, including from our newly elected President. But, I also believe that we should not blindly assume that every person who voted for Trump holds all or any of those beliefs. We should call out the people who are intentionally stoking false fears about immigrants and trans folks and childless cat ladies—but not the people who are afraid. Because so many of the people who are afraid are the folks who we are actively trying to protect, to support, to build solidarity with. We must not abandon them because of choices they made at the ballot box. 

When we advocate in the Capitol, we are consistently invoking empathy in lawmakers. We bring them stories of people who are personally impacted by bad policy in Missouri, and I’ve watched legislators change their minds once they were exposed to the stories of people who are suffering. We live in a society that is racially, socioeconomically, and ideologically segregated. We must continue to seek to break down these artificial barriers and be willing to listen to others who do not share our life experiences. Only then will we be able to build the power necessary to rise up against the power structure that is hoarding wealth while millions suffer around them, day in and day out. 

I want to close today by sharing one of my favorite poems from author and activist Marge Piercy. It’s called “The Low Road.”

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.