Did Democrats Win—Or Did Trump Lose?

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If it wasn’t perfectly obvious going into the midterms, it’s certainly clear now: Democrats, from different states, with different histories and political leanings, all hovered around a unified message, which can be loosely translated to: You can’t afford your life, and someone is responsible for that.

Adam Hamilton, the moderate megachurch pastor in Kansas, used a common-sense version: “Lower Costs. Protect Healthcare. Listen to Kansas.” James Talarico of Texas named the perpetrator, calling Elon Musk’s wealth a “spiritual sickness.” Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed connected the perpetrator more closely to the victim, describing MAGA as the ones “picking your pocket.”

This discipline resulted from months of research and fine-tuning by the Democratic establishment, according to the Atlantic staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. They reported on a coordinated strategy by the Democrats that began with the simple insight that they could not compete with Donald Trump for voters’ attention, so they had to fit their message into the tiny span of attention that people had left. The result, Parker and Scherer explain on Radio Atlantic, was a push from the likely next House speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, to keep the message simple and repetitive. Over time, it evolved into what could be called a soft populism, broad enough to include the midwestern pastor and the Michigan progressive.

Like all populist narratives, however, this one has its limits. The party that now controls Congress will shortly discover that Elon Musk is not, in fact, the only reason Americans think that their lives are unaffordable, and that Donald Trump is, in fact, still the president. What will the next two years look like, given that Trump and Jeffries have no relationship? Can either party evolve quickly enough? And can any party meet the voters’ intense expectations?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The banner headline from this week is obvious: “Democrats Rout GOP.” “A Historic Blue Wave.” There are still votes left to count, but it is perfectly clear that across the country, across all demographics, in places that haven’t elected Democrats to national office in decades, the voters sent a message.

Ashley Parker: The first one that made me go, This is absolutely insane, I think, was South Carolina, which came in pretty early, before Texas even.

Michael Scherer: I’ve been watching Election Nights for a long time now. I’m not a big fan of watching prediction markets, ’cause they’re often wrong, but they’re really good close to something happening. And so that was the thing that got me. When I turned into the prediction markets and saw them moving so quickly—and this is, like, hours before, just the first dribbles of votes coming in—it was clear this was not gonna be close at all.

[Music]

Rosin: So yeah, the voters sent a message. But what exactly was the message they were sending? I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. The election was clearly a referendum against the status quo, maybe a confirmation that voters bought the Democrats message: Trump is responsible for much of your suffering, and he doesn’t necessarily care. But was it an affirmation of the Democratic platform? No evidence of that yet.

And Republicans? They have a leader who acts like a king, controls all the party’s money, but now seems to have none of the voters’ confidence.

That’s a hard one. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. On Wednesday, I talked with staff writers Ashley Parker—

Parker: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: —and Michael Scherer—

Scherer: Thank you.

Rosin: —who have inside reporting on how soon-to-be House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic Party pulled this off, and what they’re thinking now.

Scherer: The unifying fact of this election is that every Democrat, even from the far left, you know, the democratic-socialist fellow travelers to, you know, the pastor from Kansas, were running on the same message. That was what was remarkable about this cycle. It was, The prices are too high. One of the reasons the prices are too high is that the system is rigged against you, and I’m gonna focus like a laser on that, and I’m gonna fix it for you. And the rest of the stuff just, all the other issues, all the other things that divide Democrats, you know, was brought up by Republicans, but no one cared, because that wasn’t the thing that the American people cared about right now.

And, you know, what’s been an emergency for decades now in terms of working-class, middle-class people feeling like they’re falling further and further behind from where they were is now, like, a 10-alarm fire. And you had the sort of salt in the wound of the Iran war and the salt of the wound of gas prices. And so there was just only one issue, and Democrats were all singing from the same playbook.

Parker: And this is not quite uniform, because there’s some notable exceptions, and I don’t say this to detract from Democrats’ wins. The wave, or whatever analogy you want, was so big that I think a lot of these people would have won anyhow.

But in a lot of cases, they were running against extremely flawed Republican candidates, including extremely flawed Republican candidates who were only candidates because President Trump had pushed them: Darline Graham; there’s Ken Paxton in Texas. You know, Trump pushed Thom Tillis out to retire. You know, an exception, of course, is Susan Collins, who is a perfect senator for that state and lost anyhow.

But they were running against some bad candidates and just some kind of generic white guys who were so tied to Trump that they might not have been bad, but they weren’t gonna be able to distance themselves in any authentic way from everything that voters viewed as bad.

Rosin: Right. I mean, every state has its own story. We’re talking, you know, about 24 hours after the election. I feel like it’s our job to tell a bigger narrative about the story, and I resist that. But you guys have actually done some reporting that indicates that there is a party story to tell. There was some discipline. So what is it? How did Democrats pull this off? Like, in one sentence, how did they do it? And then we’ll get into the details.

Scherer: In one sentence: They inverted the dynamic of the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump won because Democrats weren’t seen as being focused on the main thing.

Rosin: Okay, two sentences.

Scherer: Sorry.

Rosin: Say more, so—

Scherer: There was a comma. It was a compound sentence.

Rosin: Okay. So let’s start the story at the beginning. There’s such an interesting revelation that you both wrote about, which has to do with voter attention span. It seems like that’s kind of the starting point of their discipline. Can you explain that? Like, what they discovered about how people are paying attention.

Scherer: In the spring of 2025, a media consultant comes to talk to House Democratic leadership and says, Look, you guys have to understand what you’re dealing with. The average American voter spends about four minutes a week thinking about politics, and three and a half minutes a week is focused on whatever Donald Trump’s doing. So you got 30 seconds you’re competing with everything else about. And as you work out 30 seconds by waking hours—I did the quick division. It’s 0.007 percent of waking hours that Democrats have as an opportunity to even engage. And so—

Rosin: It’s, like, one scroll on your phone.

Scherer: Right.

Rosin: It’s so concrete and so insane, but interesting.

Scherer: 30 seconds a week. And so, you know, Hakeem Jeffries and other Democrats thought, Look, we’re never going to be able to win more of those four minutes. That’s not the goal. All we have to do is make something of the 30 seconds we have. And so Hakeem adopted, basically, as a sort of motto, which he repeated endlessly, Simplicity and repetition.

And they just started hammering. From his first speech, you know, before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, this idea that the dynamics that had wrecked Democrats in 2024 were going to still be dominant in 2026: the economy, inflation, costs, affordability—I mean, affordability wasn’t even really a word at that point, but it sort of became the way of framing it—and that they would be the party that focused like a laser on that, and said every time they stood up, That’s the thing we’re concerned about.

And what was interesting is then, as the year goes on, lots of other things happen. Immigration comes up. There’s, you know, immigration raids. There’s Jeffrey Epstein. There’s corruption, all this other stuff. They keep returning, whatever the issue was of the day, back to this, How is it impacting you?

Corruption was not about Donald Trump getting rich. It was about the fact that Donald Trump’s getting rich or his family’s getting rich has a direct effect on whether you have money in your pocket. And then they were just given this gift from the president, who could not for the life of him focus at all on that issue. I mean, he was allergic to it. He said affordability was a hoax.

Rosin: So you start out with this creative constraint. You got 30 seconds to give your message: It’s affordability. But then it seems to evolve. Like, it’s affordability plus an enemy, like a reason you can’t afford it. Like, how does the message become a little more complicated over time and take different forms in different candidates?

Parker: Well, again, I mean, it is affordability, and I think initially from some of the Democrats we talked to, there was skepticism when these issues of corruption came up. And not just of corruption, but also of some of the tech oligarchs that Donald Trump was surrounding himself with, with some of the wealth of his Cabinet. And, you know, I talked to one Democratic pollster who told me, you know, I could not imagine that this would be an effective closing message with Democrats, or with voters, because it wasn’t just Democrats who showed up and voted for Democrats.

But as Michael said, what they quickly realized—and part of this was a focus-group project that the Democratic Senate group did—was that corruption was so closely linked with cost of living for voters, and the sense that Donald Trump and Republicans did not care about voters like that.

And so to go back to 2024, the most devastating ad that the Trump campaign ran was against Kamala Harris, and it talked about: They had her on camera supporting using federal funds for sex changes for transgender prisoners. And they said—the tagline was, Kamala Harris—

Rosin: Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you. No one will ever forget that ad.

Parker: Yes.

Campaign ad: Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.

Kamala Harris: Every transgender inmate would have access.

Campaign ad: Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.

Parker: And when, in the moment talking to Democrats, they said, Look, voters are not actually going to the polls and voting on whether or not we’re using federal dollars for gender-reassignment surgery for transgender inmates. That’s not, like, a top-20 voting issue, but the reason it is so devastatingly effective is because it shows that in a moment when voters are hurting, she is not focused on you. Her attention is elsewhere. And that is the exact same thing that in this case corruption did for Democrats against Trump, and it was fascinating because they tried to rerun that “they/them” ad again in some of these races, against James Talarico in Texas surgeries on children.

Campaign ad: And even said parents were abusive if they opposed turning their boy into a girl. James Talarico stands with them, not with us.

Parker: And it doesn’t work. When it is a pocketbook issue and you feel that the president, and the party in charge, doesn’t care about the fact that at the end of the month, you’re maybe waiting to go to the grocery store until your next paycheck comes in, they could care less who’s swimming in what meet.

Scherer: There’s a remarkable interview that Gina Hinojosa, who’s the governor-elect of Texas, gave in the middle of the campaign—I think it was a podcast, I think with The New York Times—in which she’s asked why she no longer refers to herself as a progressive or a liberal. And she was very clear in that campaign: I’m not a progressive or a liberal. She talked about herself as a populist. And she is a liberal. I mean, she’s a progressive liberal who just won the governorship of Texas. But her answer was, Liberal means social issues, and I don’t care about social issues right now. That is not what matters. What matters is populous issues, which means people in power are preventing us from getting what we need, and that is the issue of the day.

Gina Hinojosa: I just think that progressive politics is associated with culture wars, and I have no interest in fighting culture wars at this time.

Fighting culture wars at this time is not a winnable fight. It is the fight that divides us because it is the fight about who we are in our lived experiences.

Scherer: And so it was a complete redefinition of what it means to be a Democrat, what it means to be really a liberal. To be a liberal now is to, in this campaign at least, whether you were [Abdul] El-Sayed in Michigan or a pastor from Kansas, what it means is to be saying, You are getting shortchanged by people in power, and I’m going to focus on that and fix it when I get there.

Rosin: Right. It’s like tying together affordability—you can’t afford anything—with corruption. Like, that was the move. ’Cause I’m thinking of the different ways that it came out. There’s Jon Ossoff’s version: Most corrupt administration in American history. There’s El-Sayed’s version: Every time they say my name and faith, they have their hand in your pocket. It’s like people just tailored this particular connective message to their platform, whatever their platform was.

Parker: And there’s also the ballroom, which is both corruption in how it’s getting paid and how it was done, but is also sort of a physical, tangible reminder, in part because Donald Trump legitimately is obsessed with it and can’t stop talking about it.

Again, he’s not focused on you. When he comes out to talk about the Iran war and how he’s trying to end it and instead lifts up three, you know, dioramas of the ballroom, that doesn’t reassure voters. And that also, stunningly, was essentially his closing argument on Monday, standing in front of the Reflecting Pool and talking about beautification projects in Washington, D.C.

Rosin: You know what’s even more remarkable? Today, Wednesday, the day we’re recording this, Trump gave a press conference. I don’t know if you guys tuned into it.

Parker: We did.

Rosin: He’s talking about specifics of the marble in the ballroom.

President Trump: We ordered the marble for the floor. The marble is really magnificent marble. It’s a cut—it’s a vein that people have been after for 50 years.

Rosin: It is as if he was asleep all day yesterday.

Scherer: He signed the steel beam.

Rosin: Yeah. “Love.”

Scherer: Yeah, “Love.” (Laughs.) That’s right.

Rosin: What is that about?

Scherer: I mean, we wrote a story several months ago now, “The YOLO Presidency,” and that was really about, I think, like, the defining characteristic of Trump’s second term, which is that he is doing everything he’s always wanted to do, and he has always seen the world through his own prism, and he is still seeing it through his own prism.

I think, like, the tension right now in Washington is how much the sort of narcissism and selfishness of the president is going to face a rebellion in his party or not. So far, they’ve been very quiet, but now they have a lot of reason to actually rebel, and that’s gonna be very interesting to watch. But he’s not showing, you know, much introspection there. I think he still believes that one of his greatest legacies will be beautifying Washington, D.C., regardless of what voters say in polls.

Rosin: I mean, the thing about narcissism is: It’s both extremely big and extremely small. And the two of you have written about both aspects of it—the grandiosity, like, I run the country; I run the world, that I think was also the headline of one of your stories.

Parker: Yes.

Rosin: And also the ability to just narrow the focus to such, like, a tiny pinpoint and absolutely ignore the audience and everything around you.

Parker: Well, it’s also just great to be Donald Trump right now, to hear him tell it, right? It’s that he has nothing to do with this loss. Had he been on the ballot, Republicans would’ve won, and those who lost were horrible candidates, and he had no choice but to try to lift them across the finish line, but there’s only so much you can do for these mediocre candidates. And you know what? At a certain level, he believes it.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: what the next two years of divided government might look like, and what to expect going into 2028.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, the election is over—almost over. It’s not quite over. There’s still votes to be counted, but let’s still look at what’s coming. First, I wanna get your thoughts on something that Vice President J. D. Vance tweeted on Wednesday. It’s part of a longer tweet. It’s about the war. It reads. in part, quote:

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost [to pay]. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.

But [everyone] knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.

So this is the beginning of recriminations. Why did we lose? What do we do now? What do you read into this?

Parker: Well, first I just wanna take a step back and say it was already weird enough to have a vice president who was sort of a Twitter troll, right? Arguing with people whose photo was an egg, and now he’s leapt into the punditry game.

I mean, it is just wild to have a sitting vice president who is messaging to the nation and behaving in this way. So that’s the broader macro, and then Michael, you can take the specifics of Iran.

Scherer: Well, no, and the other thing is: I don’t know if Americans tuned in, but Vance has been on the road for a month and a half. He’s been doing TV, town halls, and big speeches, and in almost every one of them, he defends the Iran war. He’s on the record. He basically was on the campaign trail saying, This was something we needed to do. We don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. He has also tried to maintain that he was a skeptic always early on. We’ve had leaks from the White House about the degree to which he was skeptical of the president’s decision and pushing back on the president’s decision. But this is about him trying to salvage the Republican Party for 2028.

Rosin: Okay. So this is him beginning the process of repositioning possibly himself or possibly the party, and actually I wanna get into that. But first, the next two years: Congress and the president are gonna have to work together. You guys were reporting on Hakeem Jeffries. What do you know about his relationship with the president?

Scherer: There is basically no relationship. They’ve been in the same room during the inauguration, and then there was one meeting at the White House before the shutdown in the fall of 2025, in which, as it was recounted to me, he walks in with Chuck Schumer, the president says, Hey, do you guys want some Diet Cokes? They both say no, and someone puts Diet Cokes in front of them, and then as they’re talking, someone puts Trump 2028 hats in front of them, and then a photographer starts circling them, trying to get photos of Hakeem and Schumer with the Trump 2028 hats.

I mean, it was like a circus of a meeting. Now, that said, Hakeem is, I think, very serious about what he’s been saying, which is that he believes the future of the Democratic Party is actually finding a way to deliver on this simple and repetitive message they’ve had, which means, I don’t think—I mean, it is gonna be an ugly relationship. There was a point last year where Hakeem Jeffries stood in front of a camera and said, “F Donald Trump.” Like, they are not on great terms. But they are gonna try and work together, and think there are areas in which they can work together. One of the things the president’s very proud of are things that have lowered costs.

The most-favored-nation drug-company deals, the no tax on tips, the no tax on Social Security, the Trump Accounts for kids—those things can all be expanded. There’s gonna be fights over Medicaid funding. There’s gonna be fights over Obamacare subsidies. But one of the interesting things here is, like, how Republicans choose to engage with Democrats and try and reposition themselves now before 2028, because it’s very clear to the Republican Party that if they don’t get back on the right side of this one issue, and another issue doesn’t pop up, I mean, this has been the one issue for 30 years, so it’s probably not gonna be a different issue next time. But if they don’t get back on the right side of this issue, they’re in a lot of trouble.

Rosin: In some ways, what you just outlined is the most positive version of a scenario of what could happen. There’s a whole other version—

Parker: Do you want me to do the dystopia?

Rosin: You can do the negative one, the dystopia, sure. But aside from it being a dystopia, there is a legitimate reading of this election that it’s about accountability, that this was a moment of reckoning and accountability. The nation had reached its limit. They’re tired of corruption. And that implies showdowns. Like, Who are we gonna investigate for this corruption? How are we gonna restore certain government institutions? And that’s likely to be, like, real warfare. So is that the apocalyptic scenario, or is there an even worse one?

Parker: So first I should also say, just on the positive scenario, is: For all of the tension that Trump may have in his relationships with Democrats, he’s incredibly transactional, and he can change on a dime. And if he wants to get something done or Hakeem Jeffries says something nice about him, he would be totally willing to forget Hakeem standing in front of a microphone and saying, “F Donald Trump,” right?

Now I’ll move on to dystopia.

Rosin: Okay. Bring it.

Parker: There’s certainly the congressional investigations, and then the potential constitutional crisis, I guess would be the right word, if subpoenas are issued and people from Trump’s administration or former administration officials fail to appear before Congress, and then the recourse that Congress has is to kick it up to a Trump Justice Department, where his key metric on hiring an attorney general is that they will be loyal to him, à la a fixer, not an independent attorney general. So you have that. So if we get to that point, it will be fascinating to see what happens.

There’s also, and again, when I was talking to people about this before, I don’t think anyone was imagining the magnitude of the Democratic wins we saw Tuesday night, but Donald Trump at his core is not like an LBJ-style legislator, right? It’s not that he had broad plans for Obamacare and now he’s never gonna be able to push it through Congress, right? Yes, there are areas where he could make deals, but Donald Trump, even with a Republican Congress where he ostensibly could have gotten more things done, basically was willing to try to go around Congress, flex his muscle, use the levers, use executive authority, push through laws, boundaries, standards, norms.

It might be a little harder to do with Democrats, but Congress holds the purse strings to declare war. Does that mean Trump can’t launch another war? No. And so you could just see someone who is desperate for relevancy, desperate not to be a lame duck, kind of coming up with every way, shape, or form an outlandish controversy to keep the focus on him as the circus inherently moves on towards 2028, which I think could be frightening for a lot of people.

Rosin: Right, and then the Democrats get drawn into that three and a half minutes of time, rather than their 30 seconds of time. I mean, that’s that scenario where Trump keeps creating crisis and disaster after crisis and disaster.

Scherer: He has not been on the national stage yet without monopolizing our attention, and I don’t think there’s a scenario where he suddenly gets quiet.

Parker: I think one concern is that the gambits might need to get bolder for him to keep our attention. So is it invading Canada to make it a 51st state that is the thing that, say, takes away attention from J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio duking it out for the party’s nominee? I think that is a doomsday scenario.

Rosin: Okay, that’s Trump. Let me just ask you about the Republican Party. It’s unclear who a party leader is now. Like, he has control of a lot of the money. He is the president. Then you can already see J. D. Vance and other people vying for attention. If you’re a Republican, where is the first place you focus your energies? Is it finding a new leader? Is it 2028? What is your next move?

Scherer: I think there’s a lot of time for 2028, and mainly because I think the president wants that to be drawn out. He doesn’t wanna have that solved anytime soon. He’s not gonna be endorsing early next year. So that’s a 2027, 2028 question.

I think the immediate concern of Republican lawmakers is to figure out how to solve the problem. One of the big takeaways of this election is how quickly parties can heal themselves, how quickly they can pivot and change. I mean, the Democratic Party that just won is so far from Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, and we’re coming out of, you know, 18 months of everyone saying on every podcast and every article that no one likes Democrats. Everybody hates Democrats, you know? The Democrats polling has never been lower.

Parker: Which is still true. (Laughs.)

Scherer: Which is still true. But parties know how to adapt, and they change, and they transform, and they morph. And so the immediate project of the Republican Party is to figure out how to do that over the next six months to a year, and how to do that while navigating the president.

The biggest affordability piece of legislation this year was a housing bill—bipartisan bill, huge majorities in the House and Senate of Republicans and Democrats, sponsored by far-left liberal Elizabeth Warren—that got passed, and President Trump would not sign it.

And the reason he wouldn’t sign it was he was upset with Senate Republicans that they wouldn’t pass his election-reform bill. He was just in a different universe, totally disconnected from the needs of voters. And I think that’s the issue that Republicans are gonna be fighting over over the next six months. They have to figure out how to actually be able to do stuff and be on the right message and not have it all be about the next steel beam in the ballroom.

Parker: But I would still stipulate—and this is gonna be a challenge for Republicans—that Donald Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party. They may not like it, he may not be as powerful, and he may not lead that full coalition that helped elect him and Republicans in 2024, but Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. You even look at the names who are getting floated for the next—I guess it’s no longer House speaker, but, you know—House minority leader, and it’s Jim Jordan, who is a Trump-lite ally.

So he is still the leader, and they’re going to have to grapple with how much they wanna be led by him, how much they wanna distance themselves, if and how and where they can push back.

Rosin: All right, that’s the Republicans. Let’s now end by talking about the Democrats. The message they have for sure is voters don’t like the status quo. They do not have a message yet that voters love Democrats. Because one thing that I’ve thought about this election: It was such a big swing that it was almost destabilizing. Like, there’s no ground under your feet. It felt like the political equivalent of a rebound relationship—

Parker: (Laughs.)

Rosin: —which everybody understands. It’s a bad idea. It never goes well, and it doesn’t last.

Parker: It’s heady and it’s intoxicating and it’s about to blow up.

Rosin: Exactly. So let’s talk about that. What exactly do voters expect from Democrats, and what’s the delicate balance they have to do?

Parker: What they expect, that’s very easy: They expect lower prices.

Rosin: Concretely. Like, I literally have to go into the grocery store and go to the gas station and see that my prices are lower? Because that’s much smaller than the vast inequality between you and tech titans that was the message that Hakeem Jeffries was pushing.

Parker: Sure, and Michael may disagree with me, but I think first off, the immediate pocketbook—when people cannot afford to buy a house, or move out of their house, or fill up their car, or provide groceries for their family when they’re working two or three jobs, that trumps whether or not Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are getting even further away from us mere mortals. I mean, that’s an existential concern compared to a tangible concern.

And I think the way Democrats get in trouble is because this wave was so sweeping. In certain ways, they can learn the lessons, as we reported, of Hakeem Jeffries and staying unified on costs and things like that. But there is sort of enough in there for everyone to claim, for the democratic socialists to claim that it’s not just populism, but it really is liberalism and progressivism, and that trans issues are an equally valid place for them to fight over. And I think that is gonna be a problem for Democrats.

Plus—and this is always true, and this was true in talking to people for this story—it is always harder to govern and message when you’re governing than to just sort of point out what’s wrong with things.

Scherer: One of the first things Jeffries said after Trump was inaugurated was, Look at what’s happened over the last 40 years. We go from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump. Voters are saying the same thing at almost every election. A couple of them had two terms, but almost every election.

Rosin: Change.

Scherer: Yeah, change. We don’t like the way things are going. In almost every one of those elections, economic concerns, rising prices, health-care costs, all that stuff, that’s the issue. And so the trap, the danger Democrats are facing is it’s not clear there is a fix to this. I mean, it’s not clear that politicians have the power to solve the illness that the American people are suffering.

Now, what they can do is they can fight against the Iran war on the premise that if they fight against the Iran war, they’re gonna be lowering gas prices. That’s one you can see very quickly. Everyone cares about it because it’s actually on the street when they drive by. They’ve talked about trying to reinstitute some of the Medicaid cuts that were cut, and go after the Obamacare subsidies. There’s gonna be talk about new entitlements and things like that. I mean, that’s the project they have.

And in the same way that the campaign made lots of issues into affordability issues, corruption, all this other stuff, I think Democrats will be making lots of legislative policy arguments and claiming these are affordability issues. And the question is whether voters still feel like they’re fighting harder for this in a year, and give them a mandate to have a president and two houses of Congress, which would actually give them the ability to do something big again.

Rosin: Yeah, that’s essentially the pitfall that I see. It’s the danger of populism. What you guys described as the successful message is the fundamentally populist message. It’s not just that you’re suffering; it’s that there’s an enemy, and that’s always a very convincing story. The Democrats swap the enemy from, you know, immigrants who are stealing your jobs to tech giants who are stealing your jobs. That is the message that resonates now. But it’s not necessarily completely true. The reasons for inequality are deep and structural, and they really do go beyond data centers. And so that’s why it seems to me voters want something huge from Democrats that is actually a very long-term American project that’s not gonna happen in two years or four years.

Parker: Yeah, and the solutions are often wonky and complicated and incremental.

Scherer: And the other thing is that we may be on the verge of a real economic change coming in the next two years before the next election, with AI, that resets the whole table for us. I mean, we could have really large layoffs in a year or two.

I mean, the amount of economic pain we’re in right now could be much worse in two years. I don’t—I can’t predict these things, but I think this is still a very fluid situation. But I totally agree with you. The problem is so much greater than the capacity of the political system to solve it. But it’s also true that if you wanna be successful in this political system, you have to be focused on that problem.

[Music]

Rosin: Well, Ashley, thank you for joining me.

Parker: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: Michael, thank you.

Scherer: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.