Those elections helped Democrats zero in on what they see as a strategy to help grow their ranks in office and recover from big losses in 2024, when voters put Donald Trump back in the White House and gave Republicans majorities in both houses of Congress.

The plan is to focus intently on making life more affordable, a message they hope will work even in some conservative-leaning states.

“We have to be laser focused on people’s everyday concerns and how hard life is right now for the American people,” said Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the new chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and a possible candidate for president in 2028. “Everybody wants the economy of tomorrow, but paying the bills today is absolutely critical.”

He and other governors said Democrats can use the affordability message as a cudgel against Trump without making him the central focus of their campaigns.

“Yes, we can judge a president, and we should judge this president,” Beshear said. “But we never judge those voters.”

Democrats hone in on costs

The meeting of Democratic governors comes as blue states have been under fire from the Trump administration, which is exercising power in novel ways against the president’s perceived enemies.

Trump has deployed the National Guard in California, Oregon and Illinois over the objections of their Democratic governors. His administration has demanded detailed voter data and threatened to cut off food assistance for states that don’t provide information to support his immigration crackdown.

Heading into a primary season in which factions will battle over the future of the party, Democratic governors largely sang from the same sheet over the weekend. A dozen candidates and sitting governors all said they plan to talk extensively about the costs of housing, child care, utilities and groceries during Trump’s second term.

But the unified focus on affordability papers over real divisions in the party’s ranks over how aggressively to confront Trump, who won all of the presidential battleground states last year, and how to deal with the rising costs that are squeezing Americans.

On the same day Democratic moderates with national security credentials, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, won their governor’s races, Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won election as New York mayor. All ran on promises to tackle affordability, but they offered very different visions for how to deliver.

The affordability strategy isn’t without risk. Economic conditions could change, making concerns about prices less salient or urgent.

And Democrats could be setting themselves up for disappointment down the road if they win in 2026 but are unable to bring down costs to voters’ satisfaction, allowing Republicans to capitalize on the same buyer’s remorse Democrats are now seeking to stoke.

For Democratic incumbents seeking reelection, they can’t rest on fighting the Trump administration, said two-term Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico. They need to show results.

“Deliver for me. But don’t forget to fight this,” said Lujan Grisham, who is barred by term limits from seeking reelection. “They do want both, and finding ways to cross-cut those and marry that I think is going to be a winning set of messages.”

Affordability also becomes a focal point for Trump

After the New Jersey and Virginia elections last month, the White House began shifting its message to focus more on affordability. Trump, who has not done much domestic travel during his second term, is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania on Tuesday to highlight his efforts to reduce inflation.

The president has talked more about affordability recently, and he reduced tariffs on beef and other commodities that consumers say cost too much. But Trump also has said the economy is better and consumer prices lower than reported by the media.

“The word affordability is a Democrat scam,” he said during a Cabinet meeting last week.

He continues to blame his Democratic predecessor, former President Joe Biden, for the increase nationwide in inflation rates that occurred this year after his return to the White House. Overall, inflation is tracking at 3% annually, up from 2.3% in April when Trump rolled out a sweeping set of import taxes.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday said the administration will be intent on reducing inflation, after tackling immigration and pushing to have interest rates cut.

“I expect inflation to roll down strongly next year,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Democratic governors and candidates were largely aligned in the conclusion that many voters in 2024 didn’t feel as if their party was focused on their concerns or shared their anger at a system they believe is failing average Americans.

“I think if there was any failure in the presidential election, it’s we forgot what real people care about,” said Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, who is expected to seek a second term next year.

“We’ve got to listen to people,” said Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta who is running for Georgia governor.

Democrats believe some red states could be in play

Once Spanberger takes office in January, Democrats will control 24 governor’s offices, a significant improvement from the low point of just 16 following the 2016 election but still slightly behind the Republicans’ 26 seats.

Thirty-six states will hold elections for governor next year.

Among the hardest-fought contests will be in swing states that flipped between supporting Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. Those include Arizona, where Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs is seeking a second term, and Nevada, where Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is up for reelection. Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia all have open seats that are widely expected to attract a large field of candidates and big spending.

The retirement of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly in Kansas, an overwhelmingly Republican state in presidential contests, gives the GOP the upper hand there. But Democrats are talking about expanding the field by competing in states such as Iowa or Ohio, where the party used to be competitive but has struggled in the Trump era.

Gina Hinojosa, a Texas lawmaker running for governor in the nation’s second-most populous state, is making the case to Democratic donors that investing in Texas will be crucial to her party’s hopes of winning power in Washington before the 2030 census. Her state is projected to pick up at least four House seats and Electoral College votes at the expense of blue states such as California and Illinois.

“If we don’t flip before the end of the decade, there won’t be Democratic control of Congress or the White House,” Hinojosa said. “Because the math doesn’t work.”

Despite playing a crucial role as the first line of defense for vulnerable communities, nonprofits are at risk of being left behind in the age of AI. Society is asking nonprofits to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century tech. At the same time, they are up against sociopolitical headwinds, loss of funding, and existential battles. 

We cannot expect nonprofits to invest in technological innovation unless we come together across sectors to provide them the resources. The engineers and the activists, the policymakers and the philanthropists. If AI is to be a force for good, we need to fund the tech, fund the future, and fund together.

An emerging, creative class of entrepreneurs — AI-powered nonprofits — represent one of the most promising fronts in social impact. While for-profit companies are building AI that’s fundamentally changing daily life and the global economy, AI-powered nonprofits are using the same tech to solve humanity’s most urgent challenges. They’re banding together to transform education. To advance economic empowerment. To change health outcomes. They are demonstrating resilience in ways the private sector alone cannot. 

Take CareerVillage. Since 2011, CareerVillage has been on a mission to democratize access to career information and support those who need it most. Rather than shying away from hard questions about how AI will impact the labor market, CareerVillage is leaning in. Their AI-powered “Coach” platform helps job seekers navigate the changing labor market by offering mock interviews, resume support, career navigation, and more. Coach has already delivered personalized guidance to 50,000 learners, the majority of which have been youth from low-income households, students of color, and women.

But that’s just one example. New data from Fast Forward’s 2025 AI for Humanity Report, created with support from Google.org, finds that AI-powered nonprofits like CareerVillage are leading an early-stage transformation of AI in the nonprofit sector. We found that nonprofits are building AI solutions at every size and every stage. 40% of AI-powered nonprofits surveyed have been using AI for a year or less. And nearly a third (30%) have budgets of $500K or less.

It isn’t a surprise that the smallest, nimblest nonprofits are leading the way. Nonprofits have always looked for ways to do more with less. In this way, AI-powered nonprofits are similar to traditional nonprofits — they care about impact and efficiency. But AI-powered nonprofits are organized differently, and they have a different set of needs. 

For one, AI-powered nonprofits need tech expertise in their C-suite and on their staff. Tech and data aren’t extraneous. They’re core program costs. It costs money to build the technology responsibly, and it takes time for impact to follow. This puts a lot of AI-powered nonprofits in a catch-22: needing capital to prove impact, but needing proven impact to unlock capital.

To that end, AI-powered nonprofits need support at every stage of the impact cycle: from research and development, to sustaining mid-stage growth — the point where many nonprofits otherwise stall — to scaling proven models.

Importantly, 84% of AI-powered nonprofit respondents said funding would most help them further develop and scale AI. This insight matters because the data shows a clear relationship between resources and reach. At the smallest budgets, AI-powered nonprofits are serving thousands, a median of just under 2,000 lives. By the time budgets cross $1 million, median reach jumps to half a million people. And at more than $5 million, AI-powered nonprofits are reaching millions of people — a median impact of 7 million lives.

To unlock their full potential, they need the support of coalitions, shared infrastructure, and cross-sector collaboration with technologists, policymakers, and funders. 

There is no better example of this than Karya. The smartphone-based platform employs workers in rural India to complete AI data tasks to train large language models, like translation for less-commonly spoken languages. Karya seized an opportunity to flip the script on the AI economy — improving global technologies while enabling income and upskilling opportunities for over 100,000 workers. 

Karya also licenses its technology to local governments and peer organizations. Using Karya’s Platform-as-a-Service model, Digital Green sourced speech data directly from farmers in Kenya to fine-tune an agricultural AI model. The localized model outperformed leading models on domain-specific tasks, proving that community-generated data can drive smarter, more relevant AI. Karya provided the technology, Digital Green led on-the-ground operations, and philanthropic funding helped bridge the two. 

Partnership, even within the nonprofit sector, acts as a force multiplier. AI can unlock positive benefits for humanity, but we all play a role in making sure that happens.

Every once in a while, history presents us with moments that demand a fundamental shift in approach. This is one of those moments. 

It starts with giving nonprofits a seat at the table.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

The source of the dispute is the fast-growing world of tokenized equities, which let users trade shares of popular companies but in a blockchain wrapper. The likes of Robinhood, Kraken, and even BlackRock are all dabbling in this technology, whose advantages include easy 24/7 trading and instant settlement. Holding stock on a blockchain also reduces middlemen, and expands opportunities to deploy equity-based collateral.

So what’s not to like? According to Citadel, the problem is DeFi platforms like Uniswap. Right now, traders use them to swap billions of dollars of crypto every day—and soon large volumes of tokenized Nvidia or Apple stock could be sloshing around these platforms, too. And if the SEC grants certain exemptions that Andreessen and its DeFi allies are seeking, Uniswap and others will get to operate as de facto brokerages—without taking on the legal responsibilities that go with that. These include displaying the price of every trade or ensuring customers get the best price. Citadel also warns of “fragmenting liquidity” as stock investing gets split between two parallel systems.

In response to the letter, the founder of Uniswap (one of Andreessen’s blue-ribbon portfolio companies) took to X to accuse Citadel of slandering DeFi in order to protect its lucrative role as the “king of shady tradfi market makers.” Other prominent names in crypto piled on as well, accusing the firm of trying to smother innovation.

At first glance, it appears both sides have a point. If tokenized stock trading breaks into the mainstream, it would threaten Citadel’s business model of paying firms like Robinhood for their orders and using that volume to make trading profits. So the company’s letter to the SEC is clearly based in self-interest. That said, Citadel’s concerns about liquidity are not unreasonable—if the pool of U.S. stocks is divided into two separate pools, doesn’t that make trading more expensive for everyone? Likewise, it’s fair to ask if the SEC would be wise to grant exemptions on investor protection rules that have historically served the public very well.

In reading the letter, it’s remarkable to read its claims that the likes of automated AMMs, block builders, validators and layer 2 blockchains are basically brokerages—less for the argument itself, than that Citadel and the SEC are discussing this stuff at all. It wasn’t long ago when only a handful of crypto diehards knew what these terms even meant. Now, they have become mainstream enough to be part of a non-crypto firm’s correspondence with the SEC, and there is no doubt they’re here to stay.

As for which side is going to prevail, it’s worth noting the fight pits two of the most powerful firms in the country against each other. On one side, there is Citadel, which is owned by Ken Griffin, one of the richest and most combative people in the country. On the other is Andreessen, an influential VC firm that doubles as a PR firm and lobbying agency with immense clout in Washington, DC. For now, it feels Griffin may be able to slow down the spread of tokenized equities but, as with any superior technology, he will be unable to stop it.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

DECENTRALIZED NEWS

Binance’s new look: The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange announced Yi He as co-CEO, confirming her status as the most powerful woman in crypto, while also establishing a de facto corporate headquarters for the first time via major licenses in Abu Dhabi. (Fortune)

Alt-coin winter: The recent downturn has battered alts with the sector shedding $200 billion since market peak. Memecoins have been hit particularly hard, due in part to the sheer number of them, but also because they are competing with a growing number of other speculative opportunities like prediction markets. (Bloomberg)

If at first you don’t succeed: Coinbase plans to relaunch in India early next year. It first opened shop in 2022, but was forced to retreat a year later in the face of hostile regulators who blocked its access to the country’s national payments network. (TechCrunch)

Mining mischief: The Malaysian government is using drones and a cross-agency task force to go after thousands of illegal Bitcoin mining operations that hop from place to place, and have stolen over $1 billion of electricity. (Bloomberg)

Saylor selling? The fraught world of DATs got dicier as Strategy said it might sell Bitcoin as a last resort. The move comes as Strategy’s share price fell below mNAV as the firm faces looming dividend obligations—but there is also a case that Saylor’s corporate strategy wizardry means the firm will be just fine. (Fortune)

MAIN CHARACTER OF THE WEEK

Samsul Said—Bloomberg/Getty Images

CZ wins the main character title this week as his debate with goldbug Peter Schiff helped drive a flood of social media attention around the Binance founder who looks very much back in the crypto game.

MEME O’ THE MOMENT

@haonan

After the U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent co-opted beloved children’s character Franklin the Turtle to pitch T-bills, it didn’t take long for CT to expand the meme to stablecoins. 

Fortune Brainstorm AI returns to San Francisco Dec. 8–9 to convene the smartest people we know—technologists, entrepreneurs, Fortune Global 500 executives, investors, policymakers, and the brilliant minds in between—to explore and interrogate the most pressing questions about AI at another pivotal moment. Register here.