At a rally in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday, Donald Trump officially announced his 2020 Keep America Great campaign, touting low unemployment rates and record corporate profits as the result of his administration’s tax cuts and deregulation. While he hasn’t drained the swamp or built his wall, the president is running for a second term on a “booming economy”. Unless we confront the economic struggles nearly half of Americans are experiencing, he may have another four years in the White House.

We hosted a 2020 candidates’ forum in Washington last Monday as part of the Poor People Campaign’s Moral Action Congress. Nine presidential candidates, including frontrunners for the Democratic nomination, took questions from poor people who know that, however well the stock market is doing, this economy is not working for them.

Poor people have not heard their names in American public life for the past 40 years

One hundred and forty million poor and low-income people in America are a $400 emergency away from not being able to pay their bills next month. That’s 43.5% of the population in the world’s richest nation. While Democrats have championed the middle class and Republicans have promoted tax cuts and corporate welfare, poor people have not heard their names in American public life for the past 40 years, even as the gap between the rich and the poor has grown to levels of inequality we haven’t seen since before the Great Depression.

While both parties work to energize and mobilize their base, it is no accident that the single largest voting bloc in American politics is not those who voted Republican or Democrat in the last presidential election, but those who did not vote at all. Roughly 100 million Americans who were eligible to vote in 2016 didn’t cast a ballot. In 2018, while many celebrated a historic turnout for a midterm election, the numbers of those who didn’t participate were still higher.

Over the past year, since we relaunched the 1968 Poor People Campaign’s effort to build a broad coalition committed to restructuring the American economy, we have organized coordinating committees made up of poor and impacted people, moral leaders, activists and advocates in 41 states and hosted hundreds of local events across the country to lift up issues impacting poor people. When members of this campaign had a chance to speak directly to presidential candidates, they didn’t want to know what candidates plan to do to grow the economy. They wanted to hear how they plan to guarantee living wages for workers, healthcare for all people and a habitable planet for their children. They wanted to know how candidates plan to end voter suppression, attacks on immigrants, mass incarceration and unchecked military spending.

In short, they wanted to know who is committed to solving these problems and making the economy work for everyone.

Corporate interests on both sides of the aisle and in the news media that cover politics have brought us to a bipartisan consensus about the economy that ignores the lived experience of most Americans. This was most clear to us in Washington this week when we testified before the House budget committee about the need to radically shift our priorities to address the real needs of everyday Americans who are hurting. For nearly an hour, poor people shared stories about how systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy cripple them and their communities. But during the question period, their elected representatives rehearsed tired myths about personal responsibility and the need to build bipartisan consensus to expand opportunity to everyone.

After a year of grassroots organizing and power-building around the nation, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival came to Washington this week to say that action on poverty is a moral mandate in this moment. Here’s what we learned: both Republicans and Democrats have accepted ways of talking about the economy that ignore nearly half of us. Within this framework, any effort at bipartisan consensus building can only prop up those who are already in power. Without a radical revolution of values when it comes to whose issues are represented in our public life, Americans will continue to blame the poor for our problems, pit us against each other and be fed the lie of scarcity.

But another future is possible. As we witness the erosion of norms and attacks on vulnerable populations under this administration, we know that nothing less than the future of democracy is at stake. We adjourned our Congress in the nation’s capitol this week with a commitment to go home to our communities and build a movement that will bring tens of thousands of our neighbors back next summer for a Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington. By demonstrating the power of an electorate that has been ignored, we will demand that both parties address the economy that isn’t working for most of us.