In my view, the Democratic Party is simply the lesser evil in a two party system that serves only the interests of the rich. However, as a person with dual loyalties, it is in my interest to know what is happening in the country of my birth: Mexico. Therefore, when I started hearing positive comments about Mexico’s new Democrat president, Claudia Sheinbaum, coming from my fellow Latinos here in the United States, I began wondering what she truly represented.
The Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), or the National Regeneration Movement, is a Mexican political party founded in 2011 by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Morena came to power in the 2018 federal elections, and its mandate was reaffirmed by an overwhelming majority in last year’s elections when Claudia Sheinbaum was elected president. The working class vote, recently one of the most difficult for American liberals to reach, played a pivotal role for the campaign: Morena successfully captured the working-class vote by adopting predistributive policies.
Predistributive policies reorient benefits from the gains of the market by increasing pre-tax income and guarantees for working people. Today, neoliberal policies have led to an increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of a small elite. The solution proposed by many affluent, college-educated progressives is to tax the rich, or to redistribute. But this slogan alone does not capture the wishes of the working class, who are tired of living undignified lives in an economy that does not pay them what they deserve for their hard work. To imitate Morena, and truly serve the working class that liberals claim to care about, the United States needs dramatic reorganization of its market economy through predistributive measures such as raising the federal minimum wage, empowering labor and guaranteeing federal jobs.
The Democratic Party should adopt predistributive policies instead of redistributive ones. Predistributive policies address the fundamental causes of economic inequality, whereas redistributive policies merely serve as band-aid solutions. At the same time, predistribution tends to be favored by less educated working-class individuals, who once made up the core of the Democratic base but have since shifted toward the Republican Party.
Mexico’s Morena Party offers a repeatable example of a political movement that has successfully implemented predistributive policies and consequently obtained enormous popular support. Therefore, if the Democrats were to adopt similar policies, they would not only become a more popular party but also improve the material conditions of the American working class. So don’t cling to classic liberal by-lines and support Democrat’s best path forward.
Morena rose to power with the promise of addressing the enormous inequality that resulted from the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. In efforts to make Mexico’s industry internationally competitive, previous governments have kept the minimum wage frozen for nearly 30 years, at roughly $5.25 a day.
During his term, AMLO more than doubled the minimum wage and has increased wages of 8.4 million workers. The impacts of this policy have been astounding to say the least. 4.1 million Mexicans have been lifted out of poverty directly as a result of the increase in the minimum wage, while 10 million in total as a result of broader policies.
Mexican business owners warned the hike in minimum wage would result in high inflation and unemployment, but that never came to pass. As a result of the labor market’s extreme concentration, predistribution has not led to higher unemployment.
Claudia Sheinbaum, AMLO’s successor, won with 60 percent of the vote and has maintained approval ratings of around 60 points, meaning that roughly 80 percent of the population supports her. By contrast, 64 percent of Americans currently view the Democratic Party unfavorably.
The underlying reasons Western and Northern European countries tend to be more equal than the United States lie not in redistribution through taxation but in the structure of their markets, where unions and cooperatives are stronger, meaning predistribution plays a larger role in these economies.
In 2024 the Democrats’ only managed to obtain 42 percent of voters without a college degree compared to Morena which won 66 percent of the same demographic in Mexico. But this isn’t just due to its efficacy: A separate study has illustrated that Americans with a college education tend to favor redistribution, while less educated Americans tend to favor predistribution. As the authors of this paper explain, during the New Deal era, the Democratic base consisted largely of less educated, working-class voters, but that began to change in the late 1970s as this demographic shifted toward the Republican Party.
This realignment can be explained by the Democratic Party’s evolving economic platform, which began moving away from predistribution when the centrist New Democrats became the dominant faction. These New Democrats often came from upper-middle-class, Ivy League-educated backgrounds and redefined the party’s priorities. In my view, the Democrats could reclaim much of the working-class vote if they embraced policies that genuinely resonate with working-class interests. At present, the Democrats are not a left-wing party in any sense of the label, since their strongest faction remains the New Democrats.
Many Mexican leftists have rightly pointed out that Morena is still deeply intertwined with segments of the Mexican elite, such as the military. Nevertheless, Morena has implemented policies consistent with its left-wing label. The same cannot be said of the Democratic Party in the United States. Progressives in the United States should not necessarily adopt predistributive policies in the exact same manner as Morena, since labor markets in Mexico are unique. Nonetheless, the popularity of predistribution is noteworthy.
The American working class clamors for change. Our current economic system works for the rich, while the working class laborers toil their health away. The liberals attempt to rile working people by promising to take away a few gold coins from the coffers of the rich and give them to their rightful owners. The workers, however, know that the rich will never accept such a direct assault on their fortunes, so they demand a readjustment of the system in order to guide the market gains into working hands. Predistribution is about creating a just market that provides for the ones that make it run: the workers.
The old dog of the American Democratic party clearly needs to learn new tricks. The working class that it supposedly defends is fleeing to the Republicans, not out of insanity but desperation, as voters have seen through the boiler-plate promises to “tax the rich.” To make good on its promises, and recapture the imaginations and support of the workers that power our economy, we as American Democrats need to follow the lead of Morena and accept that predistributive policies are the way forward.
Rafael Hernandez Guerrero, PZ ’29 is from El Refugio, San Luis Potosí, México and immigrated to Boulder, Colorado as a child. He doesn’t really know what’s going on and hopes you do.
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