America’s 2026 midterms are being presented as a referendum on Donald Trump. But the deeper crisis is the collapse of the party system itself.

In this discussion with Radhika Desai, I argue that the decisive political struggle may not occur in the general election at all. It will take place during the Democratic primaries, where corporate-funded establishment candidates will fight to prevent democratic socialists and other grassroots candidates from challenging Wall Street’s control of the party.

Trump is politically vulnerable. His economic policies have enriched his financial, cryptocurrency and Silicon Valley backers while leaving working Americans facing higher costs, debt and declining living standards. Even sections of the MAGA base are beginning to recognise that his populism has largely served the people financing him.

But Democratic unpopularity remains almost as deep. Since the Clinton administration, the party leadership has abandoned its former working-class base while presenting corporate candidates as the only responsible alternative to the Republicans. Whenever genuinely popular reforms threaten financial interests, enough Democrats can usually be found to block them.

This is why the primaries matter. The Democratic establishment would rather lose an election than permit candidates committed to regulating monopolies, taxing economic rent, restraining financial power or opposing permanent war. Its battle against democratic socialism is therefore not merely an internal disagreement. It is the class conflict taking political form.

Meanwhile, Trump is attacking mail voting, supporting stricter identification requirements, encouraging electoral distrust and expanding the executive powers that could be used during a political or economic emergency. The danger is not simply that one party may lose. It is that the United States may be losing the institutional capacity to translate public opinion into political power.

Both major parties increasingly campaign by saying they are less dangerous than the other. Neither offers a credible economic programme for the majority.

As I ask at the end of our discussion: who are people going to believe, the television advertisements or their own experience?