Monopoly Round-Up: Voters May Be About to Terrify Corporate America

Lots of news, as usual. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Trump’s tariffs, there’s a major de-escalation between the U.S. and China, and big tech continues to ramp up data centers investment, which is apparently all America does these days.

But I want to focus on something that will set the template for the next three years of politics. This Tuesday, there are going to be a few elections in America, contests that will give us the first real indications of how voters think things have gone since they rejected Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2024. And it looks like the key issue is going to be how corporate power has made life in America unaffordable, with electric utility rates forcing all candidates to talk to that problem.

These elections are happening in just a few places. New Jersey and Virginia, as well as the city of New York, have contests during the first year of the Presidential term. But even though they happen in just a few places, they are only thing we have besides unreliable polls to understand what the public wants. So these elections indicate, broadly to power centers, from corporate leaders to politicians to foundations, what some significant chunk of the public thinks. Here, for instance, is The Economist’s cover for this coming week, focusing on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s election on Tuesday.

It says something about the importance of these elections that The Economist chose to emphasize a local municipal decision for its cover.

Setting the Stage

Before discussing specifics, it’s important to go over how the last set of these elections set the stage for the current moment, because that will help us understand why they matter so much.

After Biden’s win in 2020, and Trump’s behavior on January 6th, the GOP internally was both shattered and ashamed, believing the Trump experiment had ended in disaster. Worldwide, elites felt a sense of relief.

Over the course of the next year, Democrats felt they were in a strong position. They governed by spending large sums of money in the Covid era, while investigating the right. The corporate world tried to go progressive; big tech firms de-platformed Trump and conservatives over everything from the election to content around Covid. The concept of eliminating “misinformation” was important to the citadels of the establishment, as were masking, protests, and social controls. Here’s a