Maybe it's the establishment that's out of touch.

As progressives, when we go out into the world, people tell us: “Well, you guys are nice guys. Or maybe you’re not nice guys, you’re communists, whatever you may be. But your ideas — what you stand for — is so far out of the mainstream. You are fringe. Nobody agrees with you. You’ve got to become more moderate. You’ve got to become more conservative. That’s the only way you’re going to gain political success.”

That’s what we are told every single day.

So I just want to chat for a moment about a Wall Street Journal poll that just came out — a very new poll.

And this is what the poll said — and they’re pretty good pollsters.

59% of the American people support Medicare for all. Oh my god. Imagine that. An overwhelming majority of the American people support our position that healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. And we’ve got to have the guts to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies to guarantee health care to all people.

Oh, you can’t raise the minimum wage. It’ll be a disaster for America. Nobody supports that stuff. Well, it turns out that 57% of Americans support a $20-an-hour minimum wage.

Oh, you cannot antagonize the billionaires. They’re so important. You really need them and you’ve got to be nice to those guys or else God knows what they will do.

Well, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the people on top have never, ever in the history of this country had it so good, 61% of Americans support a billionaire wealth tax. Yeah, they think that these guys that are worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars should start paying their fair share of taxes.

And on another issue that’s getting a lot of attention lately — something I’ve been working really hard on — and that is at a time when artificial intelligence, AI, is moving forward at incredible speed, people are concerned about it. And 63% of Americans want a pause on AI development. Quite correctly, they are saying, “Hey, we went we want AI to work for everybody, not just to make the Big Tech billionaires even richer. We got to slow this thing down.”

And by the way, 62%, according to that same poll, support a moratorium on data center construction.

And then, at a time when we are an aging society and more and more seniors are going to be dependent on Social Security, 66% of Americans understand that it is somewhat absurd for somebody making $168,000 a year to pay the same amount into the Social Security trust fund as somebody making 16 million or 160 million. They want to lift that cap. So 66% of the American people want to make the very wealthy pay their fair share into Social Security.

And by the way, on a very contentious issue, 58% of Americans want to end US military aid to Israel. They understand that we need to build housing. We need to take care of the childcare crisis. We don’t need to provide billions more to the extremist government in Israel, which has committed genocide against the Palestinian people.

So what does all of this mean?

What all of this means is that the American people are angry. They are tired of status quo politics and status quo policies. They want real change.

They want the United States Congress to have the guts to stand up to big money interests and pass legislation that will improve their lives and their kids’ lives.

So when anyone tells you that the progressive agenda is ‘way out there’, it’s ‘fringy,’ ‘communistic,’ or whatever it may be, you go back and you say, “Yeah, on almost every major issue that we as progressives are fighting for. That’s exactly where the American people are.”

So thank you very much. Let’s go forward together.

And by the way, let’s make sure that we win these elections, that Democrats regain control of the House and the Senate so we can put a check on Trump’s disastrous policies, and that we elect as many strong progressives as possible.