Since its devastating loss to Donald Trump’s GOP last November, the Democratic Party has struggled to turn things around. Trump’s popularity has been flagging, but Democrats’ approval ratings seem to be far worse. The party is also beset by deep internal conflicts, well-illustrated by the case of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who decisively won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor in June on an economic populist platform but has been faced with indifference or hostility from much of the party establishment.

What explains the Democratic Party’s low standing with the public and its inability to get its act together? For Thomas Ferguson, director of research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, the answers are to be found in the economic failures of the Biden administration and big money’s outsize influence on the party. Ferguson is well-known for his pioneering work on how capitalist interests shaped the development of the New Deal coalition; in recent years, he and his colleagues at INET have continued to demonstrate how large-dollar donations determine electoral outcomes and how discontent with the neoliberal status quo has laid the groundwork for Trumpism.

Ferguson argues that the inflation shock under Joe Biden deeply alienated working-class voters from the Democrats and that the party is riven by a major conflict between the interests of working people and those of capital — especially the high-tech capitalists invested in artificial intelligence and crypto. Jacobin’s Nick French recently sat down with Ferguson to discuss big money’s role in elections, how Silicon Valley’s shifting priorities are roiling the political landscape, and what, if anything, might break the current impasse within the Democratic coalition.