Congratulations on your election to the DNC. We are eagerly looking forward to a new era for the Democratic Party and hope you agree that it’s time for the party to seriously change its approach to running and winning elections.

Firstly, the party must recognize that there is no “kinder, gentler” version of Donald Trump’s disastrous policies. The party must not meet calls for mass expulsion of immigrants with lukewarm support for a “modest” deportation regime. Nor should it, in the face of assaults on women and queer communities, call for moderating party members’ language when discussing equal rights for all. There are no votes or anything of value to be gained in staking out a middle ground where the party, in effect, stands for nothing.

Next, the party must embrace the fact that progressive policy is popular. As the Democratic Party seeks to rebuild its platform, it must look to bold, progressive ideas: healthcare as a human right, the climate emergency as the existential threat of our lifetimes along with nuclear weapons, economic justice for working people, an urgent need to end our forever wars, and equality across gender and racial identities as a strength, not a weakness, of American society.

Finally, the party must denounce the influence of big money and corporate donors. The record for outside spending was shattered last year, with billionaires and corporations exercising more influence than ever in American politics. This represents a grotesque distortion of democracy itself and cannot be allowed to continue. Republicans can never walk away from their corporate overlords; Democrats, however, can show themselves to be a party that truly has the interests of working people at heart by shunning big-dollar donations. The party should block outside spending in Democratic primaries and support publicly funded elections.

These are just the beginning steps of an urgently needed realignment. The fate of the Democratic Party, and the whole country, hinges on whether the party is capable of adapting to the cruel new political reality of the second Trump administration. We, and many thousands of activists across the country, look forward to working with the DNC to help realize this vision.