This story is part of Inside The Loop with Christian Perry, a community organizer, leadership strategist, and political operative from the Southside of Chicago who serves as Campaign Manager for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s re-election campaign.
Photo/Associated Press
Democrats have spent decades asking Black voters to save the party. Now they must put those voters at the center of its leadership—with the power to set the agenda, build the coalition, and shape the country’s future.
On Nov. 3, voters will deliver their verdict on Washington. History suggests the party occupying the White House will lose House and Senate seats. But whatever Tuesday brings, Democrats cannot confuse a rebuke of Donald Trump with a wholesale endorsement of their party. Winning because people reject your opponent is not the same as winning by building something you believe in.
Whatever the margin of victory, the energy behind it is already visible: Politico reports that early voting across the South shows Black turnout exceeding the electorate at large — a surge driven not by enthusiasm but by Trump’s redistricting push and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The question is not simply who wins this election; it’s who can build a coalition capable of transforming this country and destroying a system content with severe socioeconomic inequity.
The answer: Black working-class leadership.
Not Black faces attached to the same corporate agenda. Not another ruse disguised as a seat at the table—an invitation to deliver votes and wait outside while the decisions get made. I mean leadership rooted in the lives of people who work, worship, organize, and still wonder whether their government will ever work for them. The Democratic Party must answer to and center them, not merely count them.
Trump secured his return to the White House utilizing his particularly potent brand of civic manipulation. His politics offer an old bargain: that the exclusion of someone else will make your life better. Your quality of life suffers because they are taking what’s yours. He and his party have perfected electoral othering: the social and psychological process of treating individuals or groups as fundamentally different, inferior, or as “outsiders” relative to a dominant “in-group.” The Left cannot defeat that bargain by asking people to protect a democracy he’s intent on dismantling without a solution for how that democracy must be remade to meet their material needs.
Chicago has a history worth studying.
“We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.” – Chairman Fred Hampton Sr.
Photo/Family of Fred Hampton Sr.
Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. helped bring Black Panthers, Puerto Rican Young Lords, and poor white Young Patriots into the original Rainbow Coalition. Their circumstances were not necessarily identical, but their socioeconomic interests overlapped. From police brutality, substandard public accommodations, and intentional political repression, they had meaningful reasons to organize together without pretending racism had disappeared.
Harold Washington’s 1983 election as Chicago’s first Black mayor demonstrated the electoral possibilities of a multiracial coalition anchored by Black political power. Mayor Washington gave the Black community an ambitious goal before he agreed to run; they had to register 50,000 new voters. They more than doubled that goal to elect the city’s first progressive champion. In his inaugural address, he said: “My election was the result of the greatest grassroots effort in the history of the City of Chicago.”
This year Chicago said goodbye to a giant of the movement, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. officially appointed 24-year-old Jackson to serve as the director of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, Dr. King’s economic development program established to improve job opportunities and economic power for African Americans. His economic populism would mature into two landmark presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, in which he carried a rainbow coalition framework nationally, bringing workers, farmers, and the dispossessed into a shared political project. A young Bernie Sanders was a student at UChicago at the same time Rev. Jackson began organizing in Chicago.
In 2024, on the eve of the DNC, Bernie Sanders paid Rev. Jesse Jackson tribute:
“I happen to believe that Jesse Jackson is one of the most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years. Jesse’s contribution to modern history is not just bringing us together; it is bringing us together around a progressive agenda. When I ran for president in 2016, I talked about Medicare for All and healthcare as a human right. Well, guess what. Jesse Jackson was there 30 years before I was. Thirty years ago, he was talking about healthcare as a human right and universal healthcare. Thirty years ago, he was talking about profoundly changing our national priorities, taking care of our kids, not giving tax breaks to billionaires.”
The progressive movement in this country is birthed out of a Black liberatory framework. These were not appeals to abandon Black people’s particular struggle for some supposedly broader cause. They demonstrated how that struggle could give a broader coalition direction.
That distinction matters today.
Bernie Sanders helped put economic inequality at the center of the Left’s electoral conversation in 2016. He and, by extension, the progressive wing had a problem: a Black problem. Black folks failed to see or feel themselves represented in this progressive populist wave that saw AOC catapulted into the national consciousness. Voting behavior may be influenced more by what one feels and less by what one knows. Often the electorate must feel like they can relate to the messenger before they open themselves up to consider the message.
Before New York elected Mayor Mamdani, the heir apparent to Bernie Sanders’ East Coast progressive movement, Chicago—the birthplace of the labor movement—sent a Black former middle school history teacher turned union organizer, who may have missed his calling not accepting the mantle to lead his father’s church, to lead the third-largest city in America.
The Johnson coalition, with Black voters as its foundation, brought together progressives, working class, and particularly young voters to send a movement mayor to the fifth floor in 2023.
And that group of Black young voters is holding with the next generation: the fall 2026 Harvard Youth Poll finds Black voters ages 18–29 favoring Democrats 80 percent to 10 percent — the strongest support of any demographic — even as the party’s overall standing strains.
Three years later, the Democratic Party has an embarrassment of riches in terms of Black leftists seriously contending for electoral power. Folks like Angie Nixon, Justin J. Pearson, and Donavan McKinney are among the Black leaders demanding a government be more responsive to working people. Alongside allies like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, they offer the possibility of something bigger than a protest vote.
Angie Nixon and Justin J. Pearson are challenging more than their Republican opponents–they are challenging the assumption that Black progressive leadership limits where Democrats can compete.
As the American Prospect put it last week, Nixon’s Senate campaign represents the power of progressive Black women in politics — and what happens when the party stops treating states like Florida as write-offs. In Florida, Nixon is keeping a Senate race competitive despite being heavily outspent, in a state Trump won by 13 points just two years ago. The latest New York Times/Siena survey has her within six points of Ashley Moody among likely voters, 50 to 44 — numbers unthinkable for a Florida Senate race two years ago. Her campaign raises a question Democrats should take seriously: what opportunities are they abandoning when they write off both a state and the leaders who might organize it differently?
In Tennessee, Republicans redrew Pearson’s district, splitting apart Memphis and creating a seat Trump would have carried by more than 21 points. Yet a September poll commissioned by groups supporting Pearson put him just four points behind. No matter the outcome, it is clear evidence that a Black organizer, deeply rooted in his faith, campaigning on shared material concerns can reach people across the very boundaries drawn to weaken Black political power.
Both campaigns highlight a shift and give credence to the efficacy of a politics of possibility that demands a broader re-imagination of who can lead—and where they can win.
Michigan presents a different, equally consequential test. Can Dr. Abdul El-Sayed earn the trust and turnout of Black voters while helping build a durable alliance with Arab American voters? That coalition cannot simply be declared into existence by telling Black voters they should “vote their interest”—voting is just as much relational as it is transactional.
That reporting shows that winning Black support requires confronting real tensions and building relationships—not assuming a Democratic nomination entitles him to anybody’s vote. But the possibility is powerful: communities too often treated as separate constituencies organizing around affordable housing, health care, good jobs, and a government that respects their humanity. It would require intentionality, but I believe Black political leadership would not be displaced in that alliance; it would need to be nurtured and co-equal.
If those relationships take root and endure beyond November, Michigan could offer a model for a Black–Arab American voting bloc with the power not merely to decide an election, but to set the agenda afterward. That is the rainbow coalition as a living political project, with power to affect change.
Here in Chicago, the winning coalition that made Brandon Johnson only the second Black man ever elected mayor brought labor, faith communities, young people, and neighborhood organizers into a multiracial, intergenerational movement that shocked the political establishment to its core.
I believe the lesson is straightforward: relationships and an agenda must reinforce each other. Neither identity without substance nor policy without trust is enough.
Consider what’s happening to Black wealth.
Essence recently reported that median Black household wealth fell 25 percent between 2022 and 2025. The Federal Reserve data behind that report, analyzed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, shows median Black household wealth dropping from $49,100 to $36,800 while white, Hispanic, and Asian households all gained — proof the racial wealth gap is widening, not merely persisting (CEPR).
That is not a measure of everybody’s income or a decline confined to Trump’s presidency. It warns how little protection Black families have when economic conditions shift. Taxing the ultra-rich and large corporations is not some high-minded pipe dream; it’s mission-critical for ninety percent of the country. The racial wealth gap is not separate from America’s inequality problem. It exposes it. Recent polling supports the idea that politics that cannot address the insecurity of Black working families cannot credibly promise economic security for everybody else.
Even United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby now supports a national wealth tax. When a corporate executive acknowledges that concentrated wealth threatens society, Democrats should stop treating redistribution as an embarrassment. The public is already there: a September Wall Street Journal poll found 61 percent of voters support a federal tax on households worth more than $50 million.
Our answer should be tangible: stronger unions, affordable homes, accessible health care, well-funded public schools, and a tax system requiring the wealthiest to contribute more. The goal is not simply getting people through Election Day. It is giving them a reason to remain organized afterward.
Labor supplies the collective power. Faith can supply moral clarity.
This moment’s task is to bring the two together. Critical voices like Jemar Tisby write, “The Spirit of justice is always at work to inspire followers of Christ to undertake acts of liberation.” Voices like Tisby’s and Rev. Otis Moss III’s remind us that justice belongs in our spiritual life, not outside it. The Trinity United Church of Christ motto — “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” — claims that same ground without apology. “The two most dynamic movements that reshaped the nation during the past three decades are the labor and civil rights movements.
Our combined strength is potentially enormous.” Dr. King was clear: the labor movement and the Black church can transform society.
Black leadership is not a substitute for class solidarity. It can help make that solidarity honest, refusing the invitation to improve one group’s circumstances by sacrificing another’s humanity.
The destruction of America’s caste system will require class solidarity. The beloved community is the rainbow coalition made manifest.
Whatever Tuesday brings, that work remains. Black working-class leadership must help lead it.