When my father started his PhD at the University of Florida, he had one plan: to study hard, work hard, and leave his children better off than he started. It was what he was told to do, and the world let him. I am a few months away from graduating from Boston University with the same goal in mind, but the economy I am graduating into overwhelms me with genuine anxiety. Democrats have the chance to address our anxiety and win us back for the upcoming midterms. The problem is… they don’t know how.
My friends and I often joke about the “cooked” job market (a Gen Z slang for a frightful situation). We joke about it, though, because it is easier to think of it that way than to sit with it and consider how it affects our future – the future we were promised with our degree and hard work. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates climbed to 4.8%, and job postings aimed at college graduates dropped by 16%. We are all competing for the remaining few spots, most of us having never had the chance to prove ourselves.
The Democratic Party has spent decades building exactly the policy infrastructure that speaks to this problem — labor protections, workforce investment, and economic safety nets that shift power back toward workers. The agenda exists, it’s theirs, but what we hear from the Democrats on campaigns is empowerment for people who do not resemble me or my struggles. It is not that their issues are unimportant. But at the end of the day, I need a job, and I think about my future employment more than the inequities of the world. And the thing is… I don’t even need to choose my job over helping the marginalized. Democrats already have the policy. They just do not know how to talk to us.
I come from a conservative Asian family, where I was raised to be an independent man who provides. We do not want to be told we are weak, or that we need saving, or that we need to depend on someone, let alone the government, to survive. We understand that capitalism has structural flaws and that the political economy gives asymmetrical power to employers over workers. What we are rejecting is not the solution — it is the language. Democrats speak the vocabulary of vulnerability, of uplift, of marginalization. We need help. But we do not want to feel like losers being recompensated; we want to feel like winners reclaiming what we deserve.
The contrast with Republicans is instructive. Republicans offer nostalgia: a promise to reclaim the gilded economy that no longer exists and will likely never return, without a feasible plan to change anything. But they speak to young men as if we are capable, as if we are worth fighting for, as if our desire to provide is something to be proud of rather than interrogated. The way they addressed us was unproductive, but ultimately compelling – at least they addressed us. Democrats have the policies and the brains, but somewhere in the communication, the message becomes about everyone else but us. 2024 felt that way, and I hope 2026 is different. Democrats do not need new policies. They need to show up and make the connection — to look young men in the eye and say: what you are feeling is real, it has a cause, and we have spent decades building the structural solutions to fix it. Not as charity. Not as uplift. As a straightforward proposition between a party that believes in worker power and a generation of young men who want nothing more than to work. My father's plan was simple. Study. Work. Provide. Build. I want to execute that same plan. I am not asking for sympathy or kind words. I am asking for the party that already believes workers deserve more power to remember that I am a worker too.