New York City can feel like the center of the American political universe these days.

The president is a New Yorker, as are Democrats’ leaders in the House and Senate. So are the chairs of the Congressional Black, Hispanic, and Asian Caucuses, as well as a faction of Republican congressmen who likely hold the keys to the GOP agenda. Now, state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s all-but-certain victory in the NYC mayoral Democratic primary has once again thrust the city into the national spotlight. The official results won’t be tallied until next week, and an unusual general election still looms: Incumbent mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent and Andrew Cuomo, who wildly underperformed expectations on Tuesday, could still do the same.

Mamdani is not the mayor of New York City yet. But he is now the overwhelming favorite, a fact that is a genuine earthquake to American politics. Here are five takeaways from his likely victory.

A breakthrough for the left

The leader of the biggest and wealthiest city in the U.S., the financial capital of the world, is likely to be a democratic socialist; the leader of the city with the biggest Jewish population outside of Israel will be an outspoken, unsparing critic of the Israeli government — and will have secured that position by notching, at the very least, notable support from Jewish voters. New Yorkers have a penchant for believing that what happens here affects the rest of the world. This will.

For the American left, the significance of Mamdani’s victory is enormous: NYC, population 8.2 million, will be the largest U.S. enclave ever governed by a socialist. More than that, his path to victory represents a long-awaited breakthrough. Well-off, college educated, culturally liberal whites have long comprised the progressive base, to the point that lefties’ struggles with working class and non-white voters — from South Carolina to Philadelphia to Texas — have become a central narrative in American politics (even high-profile victories like AOC’s were powered by white yuppies). That was reason enough for many (myself included) to initially view Mamdani’s campaign with deep skepticism. 

He proved those doubts wrong. Affluent whites remained some of Mamdani’s core supporters (contrary to the histrionics of some right-wing pundits, he would have won by more if the electorate was all-white). But he also did what so many leftists before him failed to do: achieve a genuinely multi-racial coalition. According to all available data, Mamdani made huge inroads among Black voters and seems to have outright won Asian and Latino voters. For a democratic socialist, that achievement, on this scale, is without precedent in modern American politics. How he governs will be enormously consequential for future candidates like him. But for now, whatever else, the left finally broke through its longtime wall. 

The end of an era on public safety 

Many will continue to debate the extent to which Mamdani’s success is attributable to his tactics, approach, platform, or personal brand. There are legitimate arguments in different directions: a young, handsome, articulate polyglot defeating a widely disliked sexagenarian with multiple ethics and sexual harassment scandals can only inform so much. One thing, however, seems indisputable: Mamdani successfully articulated a progressive message on public safety and disorder, two issues that have been an Achilles’ heel for the left in recent years. His shift was both substantive and stylistic: a once-vocal backer of defunding police (with the many tweets to prove it) he explicitly denounced the cause, repeatedly saying cops have a “crucial role to play” in public safety and promising not to defund the NYPD. That on its own was telling — a democratic socialist’s rhetoric this cycle was objectively more pro-police than that of many moderate Democrats (including several of his 2025 rivals) even just a few years ago. 

At the same time, Mamdani went on offense, arguing police were being burdened with too many issues and proposing a “Department of Community Safety” that would reassign some crisis situations to social workers. Crucially, he framed the proposals not as an effort to fulfill a certain vision of justice but as the best way to achieve safety. The approach worked, helping neutralize an avalanche of attacks from Team Cuomo and likely aiding Mamdani’s inroads among non-white New Yorkers, whom polls have repeatedly found to be more concerned with crime than their white counterparts. 

A new path for the left

Mamdani’s hybrid approach on crime and disorder — backing police funding while also proposing progressive reforms — was part of a broader shift away from the identity-centric liberalism of the 2010s. While he did not moderate on certain stances, like abolishing ICE, his campaign’s ads and public messaging almost exclusively focused on economic issues. A New York Times analysis found that it was Cuomo who was most likely to invoke Donald Trump and issues of identity — echoing the dynamics of the 2016 Democratic primary, when Hillary Clinton tarred Bernie Sanders as insufficiently concerned with issues of social injustice. Cuomo attempted a similar strategy, accusing Mamdani of radicalism and anti-Semitism.

It failed. There are a number reasons, including the huge shift of Democratic voters' sympathies towards Palestinians in recent years. But Mamdani also demonstrated an adeptness on cultural issues, dispensing with the academic jargon of Democrats past and defining himself with economic populism. His success could provide a playbook for the whole party. If so, the results may reflect the words of a famous New Yorker: “Something is ending, and something begins.”   

The center left is on notice 

Candidates who presented themselves as Cuomo alternatives with deeper experience and wider appeal than Mamdani — including Comptroller Brad Lander, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and state Senator Zellnor Myrie — flopped hard. Some of that can be attributed to Cuomo and Mamdani dominating the conversation and the airwaves. 

But the results are a warning sign for the center-left: At a time in which rank-and-file Democrats are furious with the political and economic establishments, “I have a plan for that” technocracy seems to have lost currency. Mamdani’s platform includes a number of proposals that even some liberal analysts took issue with, from a rent freeze to city-operated grocery stores (I find the grocery store idea neither radical nor effective: Brooklyn, 70-square miles with a population of 2.1 million, would supposedly find relief or oppression from one store in the entire borough). Those warnings didn’t matter — in large part because Mamdani demonstrated an authentic urgency around the affordability crisis that gave him credibility in voters’ eyes. Put simply: Until and unless candidates show they have the same sense of urgency, more and more Democratic voters may slide to the left. That could have real ramifications in primaries next year.

Democrats’ weakness under Biden-Harris has never been more clear

That there’s no direct precedent for Mamdani in American politics is part of what makes his victory so notable. But in terms of candidate strategy, a close analogue may be one man many Mamdani fans have little love for: Pete Buttigieg. In 2019 and 2020, he punched his ticket from small-town mayor to Cabinet secretary and Democratic superstar with a “go everywhere” strategy, blanketing podcasts, non-traditional media, and legacy press alike. It worked, and at this point, Buttigieg’s willingness to venture into uncertain, even hostile, territory is a core part of his political brand. But the strategy only succeeded because Buttigieg is an articulate and smart person capable of those kinds of conversations. Mamdani demonstrated the same ability, mixing it up with leftist, center-left, and centrist voices, and coming out stronger on the other side. (Underscoring the similarity, Buttigieg’s former chief strategist conspicuously praised Mamdani’s approach.)

It is just plain reality that, from 2020 to 2024, the Democratic Party was led by two people who were fundamentally incapable of what Buttigieg and Mamdani, two very different politicians, are good at. It’s also reality that the ability to effectively present oneself and articulate one’s ideas is not a luxury quality for a politician — particularly if one believes the country is in an existential battle for liberal democracy. I have long argued that it’s an overlooked fact that Biden and Harris were the two candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary who lost the most support in 2019. For a party still licking its wounds over the 2024 catastrophe, this is a simple lesson: Elevating leaders with basic speaking and candidate skills goes a long way. 

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Donald Trump has been president for fewer than four months, but an unexpected political landscape is already coming into view.

For context, the duration of Trump’s presidency thus far (115 days) is barely longer than the time Kamala Harris spent as the Democratic presidential nominee last year (107). Harris’s time leading the party was regarded as a historically quick sprint. By contrast, Trump’s presidency already feels, just as it did the first time, far older than it actually is. Part of that disconnect is driven by the endless glut of news churning out of D.C., where the president has taken a chainsaw to decades of bipartisan consensus and institutional norms. But the sense of eons having already passed points to an emerging truth. Six months after Trump’s victory ushered in a new era of American politics, a fuller picture is coming into view — and it’s not what many expected in November.

It’s easy to forget the environment immediately after Election Day 2024. But the question after November was truly how big of a cultural and political reset Trump’s victory represented. Trump’s inroads with working class and non-white voters led many to call the cycle a “realignment.” The left’s nearly two-decade stretch of cultural dominance was upended, with major institutions like sports leagues, newspapers, tech companies, and movie studios abruptly changing their tone. The Democratic Party, more adrift than any time in decades, seemed to adjust as well: congressmembers pledged cooperation with the Elon Musk-led DOGE and broke a years-long taboo by coming out against transgender women in competitive women’s sports. To many, it indicated the emergence of a new political center of gravity.

Then Trump took office. And while we are only a few months in, it’s become clear that many of the more expansive conservative hopes for the second Trump presidency have, at the very least, stalled. Silver Bulletin’s average now places the president’s approval rating at -7. That’s far from anemic (Joe Biden ended his own presidency polling way worse) but it represents a decline of nearly 18 points since taking office, a drop unparalleled in the modern era for such a short period of time. More significantly, Trump, who rode a tide of rising conservative sentiment on policy questions, has already induced a mood shift among the electorate on several issues. Polls show the slide in support for Ukraine has quickly reversed and favorable views of foreign trade have skyrocketed to the highest point in the modern era.

The multiracial, working-class coalition many Republicans dreamed of also appears to be fracturing. Just months after the president made significant inroads among non-white voters without college degrees, a CNN poll found that just 27% of that group now approve of his job performance. A Cook Political Report analysis found that Trump’s approval rating has dropped the most among young voters and Latino voters, with double digit declines in both subgroups.

The president’s weakened political standing is perhaps contributing to the first seeds of intra-GOP discontent. Over the past week, a litany of Republicans have spoken out against his plans to accept a $400 million jet from the nation of Qatar, generating the most overt contradictions of Trump since he took office. Even more significantly, growing numbers in Congress are expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s reconciliation legislation, the “big beautiful bill” that is central to Trump’s second term legacy.

All of these events would appear to echo 2017, when Trump quickly became unpopular, congressional Republicans constantly bristled with the White House, and Democrats needed to do little more than wait for their comeback.

And yet, there are clear changes from the president’s first term, beginning with the media landscape. In May 2017, MSNBC was riding the energy and engagement of outraged liberals to new heights, beating both Fox News and CNN in primetime ratings for the first time since 2000. This time around, the network badly trails its competitors. The change underscores the wide divergence in media incentives this time around: Newspapers are no longer implicitly positioning themselves as Trump adversaries, and some are openly courting his favor. A similar dynamic is playing out politically. In contrast to the drumbeat of “resistance” during Trump’s first term, Democrats from D.C. to Michigan to California are leaping at chances for high-profile collaboration with the administration.

The overall cultural outlook is also plainly different this time around. While some universities and law firms have begun fighting back against the White House’s demands, the liberal dominance of civil society that was so crucial to the trajectory of Trump’s first term is nowhere to be found. The once-ubiquitous corporate LGBTQ Pride campaigns of the late 2010s are not returning. Neither are the diversity initiatives of the early 2020s. Recent protests against the administration pale in comparison to the millions who had already taken to the street by this time in 2017. There’s evidence that Christianity is on the rise in America, halting the steady secularization of the 2010s. No longer able to dismiss Trump as the voice of a minority, many Democratic leaders are jumping at the chance to appear in conservative and conservative-tinged media.

The sum total beckons to mind a common internet meme: Not x, not y, but a “secret third thing.” With the caveat that we remain only months in — over 90% of Trump’s term remains, if you’re counting — the president’s second stint in office is not shaping up to be a redux of 2017. He is far stronger, more popular, and backed by a much more united party. His opposition is more divided and more dispirited. And, whether through fear, self-reflection, or some combination, liberal and liberal-tinged civil institutions are not in a state of reflexive opposition.

At the same time, it’s become clear that the political landscape halfway through 2025 is not the same as late 2024. Conservative hopes for a popular, consensus-establishing presidency are fading. The Democratic Party, not long ago in strategic retreat, is beginning to get its bearings. In that way, the second Trump era resembles neither 2017 nor 2024. So far, it’s something else. 

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Going into 2024, a clear pattern had emerged in the Senate map.

In the previous two presidential cycles, 2016 and 2020, the outcomes of all but one of the concurrent Senate elections — 68 of 69 — correlated exactly with the top of the ticket. If a state voted Republican for president, it elected a Republican senator, and vice versa.

Maine Republican Susan Collins was the only exception, winning re-election in 2020 even as Donald Trump lost the state. That fact that she, a senator with a very unique profile running in a very unique state, was the sole outlier seemed to only prove a new political rule had been established.

2024 broke that consensus. Four Democrats won election to the Senate on the same night their states voted for Trump: Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, and Jacky Rosen in Nevada.

The feat was made even more impressive by the fact that it happened as all four states flipped to Trump — historically, winning a Senate seat the same night a state flips to the other party at the presidential level is an even taller task. Before happening four times in 2024, it had happened four times total during the 21st century.

In short, given the circumstances, given the outcome at the top of the ticket, given the whole-sale shredding of the Democratic brand the same night, the results were a coup for Senate Democrats. If nothing else, the party was spared from a nightmare scenario: Had those four races followed the overwhelming pattern of the past two presidential election cycles, in which Senate and presidential results were aligned, Republicans would have entered this Congress with a 57-43 Senate majority, potentially locking in control of the chamber for a decade or more.

Beneath the surface, though, tectonic shifts in American politics are flashing increasingly dire warnings for the party. The reasons are complex but the upshot is clear: If it wants the ability to pass national laws anytime soon, the Democratic Party must find a way to compete for Senate seats in Trump country.

To begin with, an increasing number of voters’ behaviors have calcified around their party identity. Split-ticket voting (the practice of voting for candidates of different parties on the same ballot) has been declining for decades. But 2025 has seen the country reach new heights in polarization. According to data from Ballotpedia, 38 states are now single-party states, with their governorships and state legislatures controlled by one party. That is nearly the highest number in the modern political era, second only to one year ago.

In an even more jolting metric, the current Congress saw just three states send split Senate delegations — one Republican senator and one Democratic — to D.C. That is the all-time lowest number since we started electing senators by popular vote more than a century ago.

Source: Smart Politics

The emergence of a less-flexible electorate does have upsides for both parties. For example, Democrats are insulated from any real challenge to their domination in states like Illinois and Maryland. Leftward-moving states like Virginia and Colorado are now reliable suppliers of Democratic senators, no matter how talented or compelling the Republican nominee. The problem for Democrats is that far more states lean Republican than Democratic.

In 2024, 29 states voted to the right of the nation as a whole, providing Trump with a greater margin of victory than his national 1.6% spread. This dynamic, in which most states are simply redder than the sum of the whole country, has been stubbornly true for over a decade now, in years of Democratic victory and defeat. In 2020, 31 states voted to the right of the nation as a whole. In 2016, 32 states did. In 2012, 27 states did.

As a consequence — and given the current partisan coalitions and state populations — Democrats can actually win bigger national victories than Republicans but still carry fewer states. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points and carried 25 states. In 2024, Trump won by 1.6 and carried 31 states.

In a chamber that guarantees every state the same number of senators, that conservative tilt has huge ramifications — beginning with the path to a future majority.

In total, 25 states voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Few seem to have processed the full implications of that fact: 50 seats, half the entire chamber, now come from states that backed Trump every time he ran. Moving forward, Democrats could theoretically run the table in the other 25 states, including those that voted for Trump once or twice, but then still need to win at least one more seat.

Right now, the party is a long way from that level of competitiveness. After the 2024 elections, which saw the retirement of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and the defeat of Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, Senate Democrats now hold zero seats from red states, a first for the caucus in the modern era.

Many liberals might be inclined to point out that Republicans are in a nearly identical position, holding only one Senate seat from a solidly blue state (Collins in Maine). In reality, that underscores Democrats’ problem: Simply put, Republicans do not need senators from blue states the way Democrats do from red ones. While 25 states have voted Republican since 2016, just 19 have voted straight Democrat — a difference of 50 to 38 Senate seats.

This asymmetry stems from the combination of two factors: the constitutional design of the Senate, which equally allocates Senate seats equally, and the party’s current coalitions, which have solidified the dominant populations of many small states behind Republicans. Neither condition appears likely to fundamentally change anytime soon, leaving Democrats to face a central fact: The path to a Senate majority now runs through finding victory in at least some reliably red states.

Incidentally, those are the exact areas where the party’s brand is currently the most toxic. The conundrum has led some on the left, including independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, to an unorthodox idea: running populist, Democratic-allied independent candidates not officially affiliated with the party. 

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The plan faces some daunting obstacles. For starters, Sanders and Maine Sen. Angus King are the only candidates to win election to the Senate as independents in nearly 50 years, with candidates from Charlie Crist in 2010 to Greg Orman in 2014 to Al Gross in 2020 repeatedly failing to get over the finish line.

In an interview, a DSCC official denied that the group has any plans to aid Democratic-aligned independent candidates. That public stance is not wholly surprising; in the past, the furthest the group has gone is standing down from direct involvement in a race, like in the 2012 Maine Senate election, when Democrats tacitly backed Angus King over Democratic nominee Cynthia Dill.

At the same time, other national groups have shown more willingness to boost independents. Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with Chuck Schumer, funded ads for Gross in 2020 and Nebraska independent Dan Osborn in 2024 (Osborn, who drew national coverage and overperformed Kamala Harris by nearly 15 points, is planning to run again in 2026).

Some underlying factors may change; eight years ago, few would have expected that Democrats would hold four Senate seats from Georgia and Arizona but zero from North Carolina and Florida. A 2026 wave that flipped the Maine and North Carolina seats, for example, would put the party in striking distance of a majority in 2028. But multiple longshot dominoes would need to fall to structurally change the landscape, making the prospect of a slate of independent candidates as plan as good as any.

And things could become even worse for the party. Six states flipped allegiances in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Right now, Democrats hold 10/12 of those Senate seats, an incredibly good ratio for such purple states.

That dominance is far from guaranteed to continue, leaving the most reasonable assessment of the party’s Senate situation as extremely dire. 

In that way, those four victories last November may end up resembling Democrats’ performance in the 2022 midterms: an expectations-beating overperformance that temporarily papered over a deeper issue. After 2022, many Democrats allowed that experience to lull them into complacency. This time, they need a plan. 

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The last New York City mayoral race was a disaster for progressives. This time might not be all that different.

The 2021 primary was a cavalcade of setbacks for the left, beginning with the collapse of several left-aligned candidates’ campaigns. Comptroller Scott Stringer, a one-time frontrunner and the first choice of many unions and liberal groups, saw his candidacy crumble following sexual harassment accusations. Dianne Morales, a non-profit executive who ran a campaign largely consisting of Instagram-ready slogans, briefly gained the backing of many leftist groups and online activists. But her campaign then imploded in even more spectacular fashion: a tangled mess of alleged union-busting, sexual misconduct coverup, racial bias, and amorphous “harm.”

By the final month of the primary campaign, only Eric Adams, the moderate Brooklyn borough president, and Kathryn Garcia, a technocratic former sanitation commissioner, led any public polling. But rather than coalescing around Garcia, a mainstream liberal to Adams’ left, a progressive cavalry arrived for Maya Wiley, the slightly-to-the-left MSNBC commentator and former city official who trailed the frontrunners. In the race’s closing days, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, the city’s highest-ranking progressive, even urged voters to choose both Wiley and Adams over Garcia.

The actual mechanics of the election then became an embarrassing indictment of urban Democratic governance: It took the city, which was using a ranked-choice-voting system for the first time, a full two weeks to count ballots and declare a winner. Adams ultimately prevailed by just 7,000 votes, his dominant performance among non-white and working class voters the final humiliation for the left.

His actual tenure, of course, has been a chaotic mess. The first sitting NYC mayor to be indicted, Adams was already a distinct underdog going into this year’s mayoral race. His implicit alliance with the Trump administration this winter made him so radioactive in the Democratic primary, set for late June, that he dropped out to run an almost-certainly-doomed independent campaign.

Adams may be out of the running for the Democratic nomination, but the landscape that led to his 2021 victory hasn’t changed much. Over the past few years, progressives’ struggles with non-white, working, and middle-class people in major cities like New York has become a defining feature of Democratic primaries across the country. And the problem might be spreading to general elections: Trump made deep inroads in the city’s working class enclaves, powering him to the best performance for a Republican nominee in the city since 1988.

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That dynamic is the backdrop for a brewing battle between mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, the moderate, scandal-tarred former governor who is seeking to reassemble Adams’ coalition, and Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who’s emerged as his chief opponent. With just over two months to go before primary day and Cuomo comfortably leading in the polls, it looks like the end result may echo 2021: a tough-on-crime centrist prevailing by running up the score in the most diverse, working-class neighborhoods.

The exact attributes that have endeared Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, to so many committed progressive voters and activists are ones that may limit his potential for wider appeal: A registered socialist, vocal critic of Israel, and outspoken backer of causes like defunding the police, Mamdani has all the characteristics of other lefties who’ve caught fire online only to fizzle with actual voters, especially working class Black and Latinos voters. A recent Data for Progress poll underscored his challenge: In the final round of ranked-choice voting, Cuomo beat Mamdani by 44 points among Latino voters, 70 points among non-college voters, 82 points among Black voters, and 86 points in the Bronx. The similarities to Adams’ 2021 coalition are obvious, except that Cuomo leads by far more than Adams ever did.

The poll pointed to an emerging nightmare scenario for some Cuomo opponents: Mamdani proving popular and strong enough to box out other more moderate Democratic candidates in ranked-choice rounds, only to lose widely to Cuomo in the final one-on-one matchup.

Some argue that’s exactly what the former governor’s team wants. “There’s a reason you see Team Cuomo hyping up Mamdani,” said one strategist working on a rival campaign, who called him a “perfect foil” for the former governor. “They want a race where it’s ‘DSA socialist versus Andrew Cuomo,’ but that’s not the race they’re going to get.” Others see a path for Mamdani, but say he needs to move quickly. “If I was Zohran and I had $8 million I would be on television right fucking now,” said another operative involved in the race. “He needs to define himself before they define him.”

For now, it is undeniable that Mamdani’s money and momentum have eclipsed that of far more experienced candidates, several of whom have been planning mayoral campaigns for years. That fact isn’t lost on those seeking to move strategically to block a Cuomo victory. “Mamdani has brought a level of enthusiasm to the race that’s surprising to everyone from voters to longtime politicians,” said one left-aligned elected official, who plans to back Mamdani in the coming weeks. “I expect the energy he brings and builds to be an enormous boost to progressive electoral efforts,” they added.

Mamdani has also proven to be a charismatic campaigner, and he brings strengths that other lefty candidates of his ilk have lacked. His advocacy for taxi drivers and his connections in Muslim and South Asian communities, for example, could prove useful (it’s quite common now to see Brooklyn and Queens bodegas bearing his campaign poster). He may also benefit from a contrast with his opponent in visibility and access: Cuomo himself has kept a remarkably isolated schedule, seemingly betting he can ride on name recognition and money without much risk-taking. Still, an outright victory — against a political titan like Cuomo, no less — would defy recent history. And that’s part of what makes the coming primary intriguing.

Publicly, the Cuomo opposition movement expresses optimism about the months ahead, arguing most New Yorkers are still tuned out. “If you look at those polls, the other candidates have no name recognition. People have no idea who these folks are,” said Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for New Yorkers for Better Leadership, an anti-Cuomo super PAC.

One variable: Two sources expressed confidence that the Working Families Party, a progressive party with a guaranteed ballot line in the general election, will run its own candidate in the general election if Cuomo wins the primary. That could create an unusual four-way race come fall: A Republican nominee, Cuomo, Adams as an independent, and a progressive. If Mamdani finishes second in the primary, he’d be the most likely bet for the WFP line. If that’s the case, the June primary may be just a warm-up.

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It’s a weird time to be Tesla — or its competitors.

The company’s CEO, already the richest man in the world, is now one of the most powerful, amassing influence in the federal government so expansive even the administration’s lawyers seem unsure where it ends. It’s a perch other major CEOs could only dream of (partly because, until two months ago, it would have been considered legally and ethically unthinkable).

At the same time, his company’s business outlook is facing a growing number of threats: Boycotts and backlash have driven down Tesla’s sales projections and protests have spread across the country. Its stock has lost nearly 40% of its stock value since an all-time peak in December. Most of all, after years of benefitting from government loans and subsidies, the company faces an industry-wide threat: a looming congressional fight over clean energy subsidies that could undercut the still-nascent electric vehicle market.

About a fifth of U.S. carbon emissions come from personal vehicles and cars, making the sector a prime focus for environmentalists in recent years. Joe Biden’s presidency in particular coincided with sizable expansion for the EV industry: The share of new cars sold in the U.S. that are fully electric rose from 2% in 2020 to over 8% in 2024. The growth was attributable to both organic movement in the auto industry and the passage of big federal infrastructure and climate legislation — most notably the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in U.S. (and by some measures, world) history.

All the while, Musk’s company has dominated the field: Even as Tesla’s market share eroded the past few years, about half of all new EVs in the U.S. in 2024 were made by the company. Just a few years ago, the brand’s supremacy might have been enough to create an awkward tension for the Democratic Party, which frames both climate change and Musk’s slash-and-burn power grabs as existential threats to the country’s way of life. But with the EV industry experiencing steady growth in Europe, China, and the U.S., there are enough options that consumers angry with Musk can now comfortably pick other manufacturers — and many seem to be taking the opportunity to do so.

Unlike other ill-fated campaigns (February’s “economic blackout” never seemed to escape Instagram) the Tesla backlash can no longer be dismissed as mere liberal teeth-gnashing. In Europe, where Trump is deeply unpopular and Musk’s forays into far-right politics are even more controversial, Tesla sales have dropped nearly 50% year-over-year, even as EV sales overall continue to climb. One poll in Germany, where Musk publicly endorsed the far-right AfD party ahead of last month’s elections, found more than 90% of respondents now unwilling to buy one of the company’s cars. And while Republicans have largely focused on incidents of vandalism and violence, peaceful market trends are more alarming for Musk: One analysis this week found consumers are trading in their Teslas at record levels, and another found both demand and prices for used models dropping rapidly.

The backlash has even reached Capitol Hill, where some congressional Democrats have announced in recent weeks that they themselves are ditching their rides. In a statement, California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove confirmed she was one of them — and called on other Americans to join her. “I fully support the peaceful Tesla boycott movement — my family got rid of one of our Teslas and we’re in the process of selling the other,” Kamlager-Dove said. “Tesla is not the only EV game in town and democracy is not for sale.”

Liberal environmental groups were hesitant to outright endorse the boycotts, but they clearly took some satisfaction in the Tesla backlash, informed by the irony that the CEO of the country’s top EV provider is part of an administration rolling back environmental protections. “It’s no surprise that public anger at Elon Musk is growing,” said Katherine Garcia, the director of the Clean Transportation for All campaign at the Sierra Club, who argued Musk’s legacy as an electric leader has largely been undone. “Musk’s accomplishments as an innovator on electric vehicles are undermined by his alarming decision to align himself with climate deniers and sow chaos and discord in our country for his own financial gain.”

Sunrise Movement, a combative left-wing environmental group, came the closest to a clear endorsement. “I think it’s clear from Elon Musk’s reaction in the last couple of weeks that this is striking a nerve, and it is leveling a cost on him when few other things have,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the political director for Sunrise.

On the other end of the spectrum, some conservatives see hypocrisy. “Progressive climate activists’ strict litmus tests and unwillingness to work with anyone on the right is actually sabotaging their goals to deploy clean energy and innovative technologies,” said Chris Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environmental group. “The protests against Tesla are just the latest in a long history of virtue-signaling from extremist climate activists.”

But the damage that liberals could do to Tesla’s bottom line is only one piece of the picture. In the months ahead, conservatives on Capitol Hill may strike their own blow, as congressional Republicans debate whether, and how much, to pare back the Inflation Reduction Act. The law has swelled in impact in recent years, with multiple analyses showing its cost exploding far past original projections due to the popularity of its tax credits. That has dissolved the goal set by one of its chief backers, former Sen. Joe Manchin, to reduce the deficit, but has supercharged the law’s potential to reduce emissions. It’s also drawn more Republicans to the idea of making changes to the law, partly to finance their own planned tax cuts this year.

The likelihood of IRA cuts is an open question. While some Republican leaders seem dead set on clawing back provisions, rank-and-file members have signaled some resistance. This month, two dozen House Republicans, many hailing from areas already reaping the benefits of IRA investments, signed a letter of support for preserving core provisions. Where they ultimately land could have a big impact on the entire EV industry — including Tesla, which benefits enough from the law to advertise IRA credits on its site. And while the law’s provisions and impacts are deeply complex (by making EVs more affordable overall, it has arguably helped Tesla sell more cars but also helped erode its market dominance), analysts still say a repeal would hurt Musk’s company.

Robbie Orvis, a Senior Director of Modeling and Analysis at Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a non-partisan think tank, says Tesla has “absolutely” reaped rewards from the IRA. “It’s been beneficial for them,” said Orvis, who recently co-authored a report outlining the economic cost of an IRA repeal. “They probably have a higher share of their vehicles qualifying [for tax credits] than a lot of the other automakers.”

For now, it’s clear that Tesla is experiencing real pain. But the uncertainty around the long-term trajectory of the EV industry is likely to continue for as long as the GOP debates its plans for the IRA. “The private sector wants certainty above all else,” said Orvis. “It seems like every week there’s a pull in both directions, and it’s really hard to know, at the end of the day, where things are going to settle out.”

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It’s the rare hyper-online discussion with actual real-world consequences. What is up with Democrats’ social media right now?

The question has seemed to consume online Democratic circles in recent weeks. Senators coordinating a response to the president’s address to Congress? Compiled into an embarrassing compilation. Lighthearded attempts at joining in on old memes? Roundly mocked. Members freelancing on their own? Brutally ratioed. Even stabs at policy wonkery were met with enough backlash to prompt public self-reflection from DNC staff.

It would appear that, in the eyes of the internet, none of Democrats’ efforts are quite hitting. The depth of dissatisfaction suggests a broader malaise no tweet or TikTok alone can correct. But the fact that no approach has broken through points to deeper questions facing the party: What exactly is their online presence seeking to achieve? Who is the audience for their content? And in a time when social platforms are amplifying controversial, engagement-bait content more than ever, what exactly is the premium to place on going viral?

The fundamental purpose of virality was a common theme in the conversations I had with nearly a dozen digital staffers. “I think there’s always a push to just have the biggest [engagement] number you can have,” said one staffer, who runs digital strategy for a Democratic senator. “That can definitely cause a lot of people to just chase whatever posts will get big numbers, and a lot of times that’s kind of while ignoring some of the message.”

Several Democratic Hill staffers made mention of the accounts of Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a longtime Connecticut congresswoman. DeLauro has an impressive resume — she is the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee — but is most well-known to journalists and political junkies for her eclectic and colorful personal style. A tattooed octogenerian with a technicolor bob and a staunchly liberal record, she would seem to have all the makings of a viral Democratic star. But her accounts have largely careened between standard Democratic messaging and stale memes. In one video, she reads from a list of Gen Z slang. A recent tweet saw her account responding to DOGE cuts with “I know your real tea, diva.”

Interestingly, the approach divides some campaign and Hill staffers. One remarked that, while it’s clear staff are “making her do that,” they found the result “funny, especially knowing that’s not really her vibe.” Others were less generous with their assessments. “It’s just stupid,” said one staffer, who handles digital for a Democratic member of Congress. “Those [videos] could be made by anyone.”

The strategy is far from unique — corporate brands now also lean into the memes du jour — and not wholly unreasonable. Anyone who has spent time in digital media is familiar with the order of things: Optimize for algorithms and tap into existing conversations online. And if something works, do it again, then do it ten more times. It’s a way of thinking born in the 2010s internet, when many staffers first came up. “Some people try to focus so much on just chasing whatever big number they can get,” said one staffer leading digital operations for a Democratic member. “They kind of ignore what at the end of the day is the purpose, which is reaching actual people and our constituents.”

But as the dynamics of social platforms — including the political leanings of their owners — evolve, the emphasis on virality may be outdated. With Meta’s recent shifts, every major social platform now essentially prioritizes posts with a lot of negative engagement over those with mostly positive, but fewer, interactions. The upshot may be that, in the years ahead, the Democrats or liberal accounts most likely to go viral are the worst-positioned to persuade the broader electorate.

That dynamic is part of a long-time tension between content intended to persuade undecided voters and content intended to galvanize true believers. “There's certainly a limit with persuasion when it comes to digital," said one former staffer, who ran digital operations of Kamala Harris’s campaign in a swing state last year. “If someone’s following the Kamala [...] account, for example, they’re already on board.”

All of these issues feed into uncomfortable questions about culture, demographics, and Democrats’ modern coalition. The past few election cycles have seen the party steadily improving among voters who have college degrees and follow the news closely — incidentally groups from which Democratic digital staffers overwhelmingly hail. One source estimates around three quarters of private sector digital staffers are women, and 90% have college degrees. In the political realm, any staffer is obviously a close follower of the news cycle. The data points to a reality that’s hard to ignore: Democrats’ messaging to the electorate is largely being driven by people belonging to the only groups that have moved towards the party in recent years: high-information news followers and the college-educated.

It’s an awkward but notable fact, particularly after Democrats’ erosion with young men and non-white voters in 2024. “There are very, very few straight men doing digital at this point,” said one veteran of Democratic campaigns, who runs the popular anonymous Twitter account ‘Organizer Memes.’ “But even more so, there’s almost no Black and brown men.” At the same time, the staffer argued that senior leadership deserves more scrutiny. “I think a lot more about the people at the top that get to make decisions about what comes out and what tone we take, a lot less about the digital strategists and digital organizers that are taking orders,” they added.

Calls for a more diverse staffing pool were a common theme in conversations. “I don’t think you need a college degree to effectively communicate in a digital environment,” said Caleb Brock, the newly-hired digital director for Rep. Ro Khanna. “You’ll get people posting stuff that just absolutely misses the moment if they haven’t had the lived experience of normal, everyday people.”

There are reasons to believe Democrats’ digital problem isn’t quite so dire. At the moment, public messaging is the rare lever of power in which Democrats have any direct input (contrary to some assumptions, the party’s leadership is not actually in possession of a “Stop Elon” button it is declining to press), which is clearly intensifying reactions. “While there has been content that people may consider ‘cringe’ or ‘embarrassing,’ it hasn’t been overtly harmful,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist with experience in Democratic campaigns. “The real risk lies in letting these moments scare us off from continuing to try or not learning from these experiences.”

The Democratic Party is also, plainly, an easy punching bag right now — polls show the party’s image is at a historic low, with more of its own voters expressing disapproval than any other time in modern history. “The leadership vacuum that Democrats have offline is really translating to a communications problem online,” said Kyle Tharp, who writes the Chaotic Era newsletter on online influence and Democratic messaging. “A lot of people are taking to the internet to criticize Democrats en masse because they want to see them fight harder and prevent all these terrible things from happening offline.”

That may well be true. But for a restless party, it may not be a total consolation. As many have found over the years, you can’t just escape your life’s problems online. Eventually, they find you. 

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On the surface, the conditions surrounding Democrats’ political standing seem increasingly similar to those that led to a conservative revolt in 2009. Longtime incumbents in deep blue districts are facing restless party activists back home. Three polls last week found registered Democrats disapproving of their party’s congressional leaders by nine, thirty-eight, and fifty-one points. On Monday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, a channeler of the liberal id, pressed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, with thinly veiled exasperation, for evidence that he “understands the scale of the threat.” Outside groups are promising primary challenges. “Our goal is to beat some of these incumbents,” said Usamah Andrabi, Communications Director for Justice Democrats.

But a closer look at the state of the American left shows a landscape still missing key ingredients for a liberal insurgency — beginning with the willingness to cut its former leaders loose.

Any simple narrative of the Tea Party movement is lacking. Sixteen years after its rise, it’s clear that the Great Recession, working class anger, long-simmering frustrations with Republican elites, cultural anxiety, opposition to the bipartisan consensus on immigration, backlash to the first Black president, and the amplification of conservative media all played some role in the movement's rise. The fact that it came to be associated with deep cuts to the social safety net, which few Republican voters ever actually supported, makes its legacy even more complicated.

But by any fair reading, a crucial aspect of the movement’s success was its willingness to break with George W. Bush, who left office in 2009 historically unpopular. A new generation of Republicans was able to earn credibility with voters by signalling, in both tone and substance, a departure from the previous Republican president and establishment. That ultimately culminated in the party’s elevation of Donald Trump, who ran explicitly against Bush’s domestic and foreign policy legacy, even declaring from a 2016 primary debate stage that Bush had knowingly “lied” to the nation in order to launch the Iraq War. Statements like that horrified other Republicans, but they shouldn’t have. Trump’s ability to distinguish himself was crucial to his 2016 victory and remaking of the GOP. 

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So amid speculation of a “liberal Tea Party,” it’s worth considering the prospects for a similar Democratic break with Joe Biden, who not only departed office with an approval rating closer to Bush’s than Barack Obama’s but left his party in unique disrepair. For generations, every presidential election saw the losing party improve in at least some states, even when the country as a whole moved against them. Those outliers were more than mere consolation: John Kerry's growth in major cities presaged Democrats’ urban dominance. John McCain's advances in Appalachia and the south foreshadowed a new Republican base. Hillary Clinton’s inroads in suburbs previewed Democrats’ subsequent comeback.

But in 2025, Democrats have no such green shoots. Kamala Harris became the first nominee — Republican or Democrat, winning or losing — in forty-four years to fail to improve her party’s margins in a single state. Even more significant, she was the first nominee in ninety-two years, going back to the Great Depression, to fail to flip a single county. 

The implications of that performance are worth considering. Every single state in the country moved right. Democrats couldn’t convince a single of the 2,588 counties that voted for Trump in 2020 to change its mind. The president improved his margins in nearly every congressional district (with the few outliers some of the wealthiest enclaves in the country). Unlike defeated parties past, the Democratic Party of 2025 has no natural starting point for a rebellion.

And yet, a clean break from the president and vice president who led Democrats to that performance does not appear imminent. Just this week, MSNBC announced the elevation of two Biden-Harris administration veterans to the network’s primetime lineup: Former Biden campaign and White House communications aide Symone Sanders and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. The decision was ultimately a business one — and potentially wise, given the network’s flagging ratings — but it was a window into a crucial difference between the 2025 left and 2009 right: At the outset of Obama’s presidency, Republicans were not watching primetime Fox News programming hosted by former Bush aides. Its rising stars were not finding virality and attention by defending Bush — a contrast with Rep. Jasmine Crockett, for example, who appeared on The View last week to brag that Democrats were right to prefer “Sleepy Joe” in 2024 (no matter that Biden was not in fact their nominee for president last year).

The hesitation to immediately move beyond Biden may speak in part to a broader challenge for Democrats right now: No corner of the party has a clear edge in credibility. While many of the party's moderates were the earliest and most outspoken against Biden’s re-nomination, and are closer to public opinion on cultural issues, they also tend to be the least eager to lean into populist energy. While the progressive wing would seem a natural birthplace for a rebellion, it faces a daunting landscape: Congressional Republicans were already moving right by 2009, but the Democratic caucus has drifted to the center in recent years; and while Republican voters were prizing conservative purity in 2009, Gallup last week found fewer than a third of registered Democrats want the party to become more liberal.

For now, one part of a potential Democratic revolt is absolutely present: widespread dissatisfaction with party leaders. Andrabi predicted progressives’ fortunes would reverse in 2026, saying multiple incumbent Democrats will “absolutely” go down in primaries next year. Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, which played a key role in grassroots organizing in 2017, says he sees reason to be “hopeful” about the coming months. But he too cautioned Democratic leaders are on notice. “Either you gotta do something to reassure Democrats that you are indeed leading the way,” said Levin, “or you should expect for them to take it out on you the next chance they get.”

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Of all the ways the 2024 election has decimated the Democratic Party’s political identity, the movement of young voters towards Donald Trump might be the most painful.

The exit polls were undeniable: The Associated Press VoteCast found Kamala Harris carried 18-29 year olds by just 4 points, a 21-point erosion from Joe Biden in 2020 and the worst performance for a Democrat in twenty years. The shift was across the board, among both men and women, and especially acute among young Asian, Black, and Latino voters, who swung to the right by 19, 27, and 32 points respectively.

What happened? One popular theory in recent months attributes the shift to the COVID pandemic, zeroing in on the divergence between 25-29 year olds, who moved just 3 points towards Trump, and 18-24 year olds, who swung more than 20. It argues the younger cohort, who were in college or high school, were harder hit by shutdowns and social isolation, causing radicalization and an eventual backlash to lockdown policies. In this theory, the shift in November was less a realignment and more a freak aberration. There may be something to that. “It’s clear that [COVID] was a formative experience and an inherently negative one,” said Daniel Cox, the Director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute. “It may be that that’s a sort of a blip.”

But the rightward drift of America’s youngest voters may not have been an isolated event — data suggests that Democrats, still held together by a defense of institutions and modernity, could face a long-term competitive challenge. On many key indicators of sociopolitical identity, America's youngest voters increasingly resemble conservatives: distrustful of institutions and mainstream consensus, prone to conspiratorial thinking and social disconnection, and nostalgic for the past.

Skepticism of establishment authorities and institutions, once a cross-partisan trait, has become a prime marker of conservative identity in the Trump era. It’s also a centerpiece of young voters’ political outlook. An August 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found Gen Z adults were by far the generation with the least confidence in four major institutions: the criminal justice system, the federal government, police, and the news media. Gallup echoed that result last October, finding that 18-29 year olds now have less confidence in the news media than registered Republicans did for most of Barack Obama’s presidency. 

The lack of trust in the establishment may help explain polls showing young Americans’ partiality towards conspiracy theories, a trait that also now skews Republican. A December 2023 YouGov poll found 18-29 year olds nearly twice as likely to buy a range of conspiracy theories as registered Democrats, from whether vaccines lead to autism to whether there exists a “group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” More than a third of those under thirty bought the theories that both top Democrats and top Republicans are participating in secret child sex trafficking rings, and they were the age group most likely to believe that the moon landing was fake, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that mass shootings have been faked “to promote stricter gun control laws.”

The propensity to conspiracy theories even extends to the realm of pop culture. In February 2024, Monmouth found 18-34 year olds were the age group most likely to believe in the existence of “a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election.”

This trend is somewhat understandable. The youngest Americans have witnessed epic failures of elite consensus and are able to instantly access unprecedented amounts of evidence of past “conspiracy theories” proven right. At the same time, it’s hard to disconnect from the indiscriminately conspiratorial content that now floods platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter — which young voters depend on for news more than anyone else. Both Pew Research Center and the American Press Institute have found that adults aged 18-29 are the least likely to read newspapers and the most likely to get news from social media. Again, that tracks with indicators of Republican voting: In 2024, polling and studies consistently found that news consumption correlated to voting intention. Those who consumed traditional news outlets leaned Democratic, while those who relied on social media leaned Republican.

Even the structure of younger Americans’ social networks aligns more with the right than the left. In recent years, a number of studies have found that social connection is now a direct predictor of voting patterns: Those with smaller personal networks lean conservative, those with more social ties lean liberal. The same research shows that young people have “substantially smaller” social networks than any other age group. While COVID may have exacerbated the trend, the overall decline of social connections, like that of social media use and traditional news consumption, precedes the pandemic. “It does seem that there’s a fairly linear trend going on in terms of experiences and socializing and dating and just time spent with other people,” said Cox.

That cultural nostalgia is a central part of Trump’s political magnetism has been obvious for nearly a decade — his slogan literally advocates a return to past greatness. It’s notable, then, that nostalgia is also the defining feature of Gen Z pop culture, and it’s worth at least questioning how a generation pining for the past may be primed for politicians promising its restoration. “They hate the policies of the 80s and 90s, but they yearn for what they view as the material comforts of that period,” said Charles McElwee, a contributing writer at CityJournal.

Despite all these indicators, the question of Trump’s individual appeal can’t be ignored. The president is uniquely both more culturally liberal and anti-establishment than the median Republican, giving Trumpism credibility with young people as a “rejection of both the Democratic and Republican Party,” according to McElwee.

To an ascendant younger generation of Democrats, there are still concrete solutions. David Hogg, the gun control activist recently elected a vice chair of the Democratic National Convention, said he expressed concerns about the party’s standing with young voters at a Democratic gathering last year only for party leaders present to call his comments “ridiculous.” Now, Hogg argues for a change in tactics more than a broader reset. “I think part of it is a brand problem, but I think if it was truly a massive one, we would see far worse results in midterms, in special elections, than we’re hitting right now,” he said. “Something that we really need to improve on as a party is making sure that our candidates are much more fluent in talking like normal human beings on social media about what’s going on.”

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the only Gen Z member of Congress, attributes Democrats’ problems in part to an asymmetry in resources. He pointed to the efforts of Turning Point USA, the conservative youth group. “Every single Republican running in the primary will stop by the Turning Point conference to speak to the young people of the Republican Party,” Frost said. “Is there a Democratic young conference where every single person running for president comes to prove themselves to young people? There isn’t.”

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Democrats’ time in the wilderness after Trump’s 2016 win was, in retrospect, short-lived.

The party spent a brief two months reeling and ruminating (in a too on-the-nose metaphor, its defeated nominee literally wandered in the woods). But for all their initial navel-gazing, Democrats gained purpose and direction almost immediately following Trump’s inauguration. The new administration’s message was dogged by amateurish PR misfires. Its sheer inexperience and incompetence made thorny questions of bipartisan collaboration and compromise moot.

Most importantly, large-scale, organic opposition emerged: The Women’s March became the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history and people flooded airports to protest new travel restrictions, seizing the narrative of Trump’s presidency in its earliest days and never really relinquishing it.

It’s against that performance that many are unfavorably measuring Democrats’ relatively muted response to Trump’s second term. Until this week, party leadership appeared rudderless to both its own members and the electorate. But Democrats’ quick rally in 2017 was unusual. Historically, it’s far more common for defeated parties to spend months casting about for a direction and message. And history suggests that, if 2026 reverses the parties’ fortunes, the forces that could drive such a change won’t emerge for several months.

Early in Obama’s presidency, neither party expected the seismic rebellion that would come in 2010. In one indicator of just how much the political sands would later shift, a July 2009 Politico headline warned that Wyoming’s sole House seat was “no longer a Republican lock.” It wasn’t until the winter of 2010 — when job losses had proven far more enduring than expected and healthcare reform had become a political morass — that the conditions for a GOP wave truly arrived.

It was a similar story after President George Bush’s 2004 re-election: The Iraq war was actually popular for the first few months of 2005 and it took until the summer for Republicans’ effort to partially privatize Social Security to collapse. Hurricane Katrina, the turning point for Bush’s approval ratings, did not make landfall until August, and several high-profile ethics scandals, which ultimately became a defining issue in the 2006 midterms, were not yet public. Even skyrocketing inflation, the phenomenon to which Republicans owed their 2022 and 2024 victories, did not really become apparent to either party until mid to late 2021.

In that light, Democrats’ present struggle for a clear message, whether real or purported, looks eminently normal.

In recent decades, political scientists have posited that the electorate’s views on policy issues tend to move away from whichever party is in power, becoming more conservative when liberals are in control and vice versa. The theory, known as “thermostatic public opinion,” was developed by Christopher Wlezien, now a professor at the University of Texas Austin. 

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“The best way to avoid thermostatic backlash is to not overshoot [a mandate],” Wlezien says. That may seem intuitive. But it’s a particularly apt warning for an administration that seems to earnestly believe it has a sweeping mandate — and especially after a week in which it attempted a sweeping effort to halt spending on popular public programs and, without evidence, publicly blamed diversity efforts for the tragic aviation crash on the Potomac.

Certain issues do appear more susceptible to thermostatic effects. “Immigration opinion is pretty highly thermostatic,” Wlezien said, pointing to Americans’ rising dissatisfaction with immigration as border crossings skyrocketed under Biden. But he argues that media coverage and general public perception are just as important as policy itself. “The policy part of this is just part of the story,” he said. “There's a lot of other stuff that matters that’s more performance based and that maybe is only loosely connected to policy.”

The performance element helps explain the small sense of momentum many Democrats are now feeling: For the first time in months, the party was a relevant player in the political battle of the day, uniting around a coherent message to help pressure the administration to reverse the (still legally dubious) funding freeze. “Yesterday was the first day I actually felt good about Dem messaging in, like, six months,” one Democratic strategist told NBC.

Still, Trump’s presidency is less than two weeks old (there are 206 weeks remaining, for those keeping track). Ultimately the most open question about his second term is how much similarity it will bear to his first, which, by gifting Democrats a consistent and clear message right out of the gate, defied the usual pattern governing parties’ comebacks. Until now, the story of his second term — winning the popular vote, being welcomed by elite power brokers, positive approval ratings, the lack of immediate popular resistance — has been how different the rules are now. This was the first week since November in which things began to feel similar to the first go around.

For his part, Wlezien believes Trump’s moves thus far have been significant enough to begin reshaping the electorate’s views. “It does start kicking in when they start taking action,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if [his approval rating] has dropped.”

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Immediate assessments of presidencies are often difficult.

After all, it took only a few years for Americans to return to a favorable view of George W. Bush, who spent his final days in office with an approval rating in the 20s. The fact that Donald Trump, who left office in 2021 as a political and cultural pariah, is himself days away from returning to the White House is a testament to the difficulty. That Biden’s age likely means his post-presidency will be extremely short further complicates the picture.

Furthermore, the 2024 results clearly indicated a growing gap between Americans’ experiences and historians’ assessments. So instead of grand historical analysis, we decided to do something different. With Joe Biden’s presidency drawing to a close, here is the story of his time in office through five clear issues: Manufacturing, poverty, immigration, unemployment, and political standing. 

1. Manufacturing: Spending soared — but jobs growth still lags

Sources: Steve Rattner, BLS, Peterson Institute for International Economics

Biden premised his 2020 campaign on the core claim that he was uniquely positioned to reverse the legislative paralysis that had gripped Washington. For all the criticism and mockery in his final days, the president can boast a promise kept. In 2021 and 2022, he signed multiple pieces of big-ticket legislation that both of his immediate predecessors would have sacrificed an aide for. Chief among them were the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which collectively poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the manufacturing sector.

When factoring in private investment, the total effect of the laws is well over $1 trillion (the scope of the IRA in particular has risen as its clean energy tax credits and subsidies have proven more popular, and more expensive, than projected).  Collectively, the efforts have resulted in a level of factory investment unseen in decades.

At the same time, that rebound has not resulted in a return to the halcyon days of widespread manufacturing employment. The reasons for that are complex — modern manufacturing is far more expensive, meaning the spending is simply not going as far, and many of the new jobs won’t be hired for several years. But much of it is attributable to the deep hole U.S. manufacturing has been in after decades of decline. Reversing that trend takes longer than four years. 

2. Poverty: A complicated picture that tells a broader story

Of the many complicated economic indicators, none get to the paradox of the country’s post-COVID economy more than the poverty rate. Beginning in 2009, the federal government began to publish an additional measure of poverty, the “Supplemental Poverty Rate.” In contrast to the longstanding official rate, which simply measures how many Americans’ annual income places them below the designated poverty line, the SPM takes into account government aid and household costs, which can fluctuate more than incomes.

For years, the two measurements tracked closely. Then, during the COVID pandemic, the country unleashed trillions of dollars in aid programs, massively expanding programs like Medicaid, the child tax credit, and unemployment insurance. Those programs largely ended during Biden’s presidency, resulting in a SPM spike even as the official poverty rate declined.

The unprecedented divergence underscores the complex economic picture under Biden: While macro-level growth was robust, outstripping other nations and economists’ expectations, the loss of pandemic-era aid and the rapid rise in consumer costs meant many Americans — including the poorest — did indeed see their actual standard of living decline the past few years. That fact goes a long way towards explaining the significant shift of working class voters towards Donald Trump in November.  

3. Immigration: The largest surge in history

On no other issue did the center of political gravity shift as much during Biden’s term as immigration. After four years in which Trump’s efforts at border enforcement were associated with xenophobia and cruelty, Biden entered office with over two-thirds of Americans supporting immigration kept at current levels or increased, according to Gallup. Now, a firm majority support decreasing immigration levels for the first time in decades.

The sea change is not hard to decipher: By its own admission, the administration faced sustained, very public difficulty in managing the country’s immigration system. Almost immediately after Biden took office, crossings exploded at the U.S.-Mexico border to the highest level in history — a surge initially attributable to the end of the COVID pandemic and the perception of a more welcoming U.S. after Trump. But in the years that followed, the situation only worsened. 2022 broke 2021’s record and 2023 saw only a small decline.

By the time 2024 dawned, Democrats were scrambling to redefine their immigration record, lobbying for a bipartisan deal that Trump ultimately played a hand in scuttling. Biden was forced to reverse many of his own policies by executive action, a tacit but significant concession towards the right. In December, the New York Times published an analysis that assessed the past few years in stark terms, revealing the surge of new arrivals was “the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s.”

4. Unemployment: The U.S. ran laps around other countries

For those who closely followed employment and inflation numbers, the past four years have been a roller coaster. After unleashing gargantuan federal recovery aid in the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration watched the American economy bounce back quicker than experts forecasted and peer countries experienced. The swift recovery was especially significant given the anemic growth after the Great Recession. Quickly though, the economic story transitioned to inflation; by 2022, most mainstream analysts predicted at least a small recession would be necessary to tame prices.

That proved incorrect. As Biden leaves office, inflation has closed in on the Federal Reserve’s target of 2% and the U.S. never entered recession. No other developed country can tout a recovery that so robustly reclaimed jobs and so quickly tamed inflation. There are still warning signs — inflation is not conquered and there are signs of a weakening job market — but for all the legitimate complexity of Biden’s record, the employment picture is a genuine achievement.

5. Political standing: Democrats lost little ground

In 2021, Trump left office as the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee his party losing the House, Senate, and presidency in one term of office. That political failure, which became reality the evening of the Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5th, 2021, was always a key driver in Republicans’ repudiation of Trump for the attack on January 6th, 2021: His time atop the party coincided with the GOP experiencing a repudiation not seen since before the Great Depression. 

Four years later, Biden too is departing D.C. having lost the House, Senate, and presidency in one term of office. At the same time, he avoided the wave elections and midterm wipeouts the previous four presidents endured. This is partly due to the historically slim margins Democrats commanded when he entered office; there was simply far less ground available to lose. Still, compared to his immediate predecessors, Biden oversaw his party losing substantially less ground in Congress.

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Over the past fifteen years, few figures have been as reliable a barometer of elite consensus as Mark Zuckerberg.

In 2010, the CEO of the company then called Facebook announced he was donating $100M to the struggling Newark school system, most of which flowed to the charter schools that were then experiencing the enthusiastic support of the Obama administration and Democratic mayors throughout the country. In 2013, Zuckerberg aligned himself with Democrats’ efforts to reform the country’s immigration system. In 2015, he planted his company’s flag behind same-sex marriage legalization. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, he acquiesced to calls from the left to impose new policies around “fake news” and misinformation. He publicly opposed the administration’s 2017 ban on transgender people in the military and announced tens of millions in donations to racial justice initiatives following George Floyd’s killing in 2020. After the violence of January 6th seemed to end Trump’s political career, Zuckerberg “indefinitely” suspended him from Instagram and Facebook (before allowing his return shortly after his reelection bid announcement).

So it carried special significance when the Meta CEO announced on Tuesday that his company was ending a number of policies around fact-checking and content moderation on its platforms. Zuckerberg’s statement was laced with obvious appeals to the right, decrying “the legacy media,” calling the 2024 election a “cultural tipping point,” and announcing he was moving the company’s content moderation team from California to Texas.

For Meta’s partners in the fact-checking program, the announcement was a blow. “This is really challenging,” said Katie Sanders, Editor-in-Chief of Politifact. “We are really proud of the program.” Sanders argues public criticism often ignored the organization’s work outside of politics, like combatting fraud schemes and scam efforts. “To see it kind of summed up as censorious, or biased is not our truth,” she added.

Sanders said the group was given virtually no heads-up about the decision. But it heard an unmistakable message. “This was a move that had the incoming administration and Republican-controlled Congress in mind,” Sanders said. “It does feel like the tides have changed, and pretty dramatically.”

Meta’s announcement came during a week full of indications of changing tides. Over the weekend, Politico reported that congressional Democrats largely plan to attend Trump’s inauguration, in contrast to 2017, when dozens boycotted. On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who came to personify the brand of technocratic liberalism that found viral currency in the late 2010s and early 2020s, announced his resignation — likely clearing the way for a populist conservative to ascend to power next door to the U.S.

On Tuesday, the House passed the Laken Riley Act, a Republican-led bill aimed at making it easier to detain illegal immigrants accused of crimes and the kind of measure congressional Democrats had previously held firm against during Trump’s first term. Forty-eight House Democrats voted for the bill, and enough Senate Democrats have announced their support to make overall passage likely.

Also on Tuesday, Sweetgreen, the nation’s largest salad chain, announced it was launching a “seed oil-free menu,” a not-so-subtle appeal to “Make America Healthy Again” conservatives among whom the ingredients are considered toxic. Thursday brought former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, the kind of D.C. establishment affair from which Trump was largely exiled over the past eight years. And yet, there was the president-elect, smiling and laughing among the other presidents, vice presidents, and spouses, a group into which he was never truly welcomed after 2016.

It all adds up to a clear fact eleven days before Inauguration Day: The core pillars upon which Democrats built the “resistance” to Trump’s first term — the new administration’s perceived illegitimacy, near-lockstep Democratic opposition to his agenda in Congress, a favorable social media landscape, an implicit alliance with big tech and corporate America — have crumbled. It remains unclear what will take their place, a fact that is not lost on the party’s rank-and-file.

In November, Pew Research Center found that Democratic voters are more pessimistic about the direction of their party than voters of either party have been since 2016 (including Democrats after 2016 and Republicans after the distinctly larger defeats of 2018 and 2020). The survey also found Republicans commanding a seven-point advantage on the question of which party represents “people like them” — the first time the GOP has led on the question since Trump’s first election. To Hannah Hartig, a Senior Researcher at Pew, the results speak to a broader “buoying effect that you're seeing in the glow of the election win on the Republican side.”

The pessimism among Democratic voters stands in contrast to some in the party’s political class. “Democrats are better positioned than ever before to meet this moment, to retake power in the upcoming cycle,” said Tomás Kloosterman, National Political Director at SwingLeft, a liberal group that has heavily focused on local races and grassroots engagement. The organization, which was part of a bumper crop of new groups to emerge on the left after Trump’s first victory, has a genuine case to make.

Heading into Trump’s second term, Democrats are in a noticeably better position down ballot than they were in 2017. Republicans now hold a 57-39 advantage in the country’s state legislative chambers, and hold a 55%-44% edge in overall seats; in January 2017, those margins stood at 68-31 and 57%-42%, according to data from Ballotpedia. At the time, the GOP also held a historic 33-16 advantage in the nation’s governors’ mansions; today, they are split 27-23. Most significantly, Republicans’ edge in the U.S. House is far smaller, narrowing from 241-194 in January 2017 to 219-215 today. And in a development with real implications for the 2028 election, the pro-Republican “bias” in the electoral college all but disappeared in November.

For many in the party, the numbers are little consolation, especially after a cycle in which the national popular vote swung six points to the right and was won by Republicans for the first time in two decades. But they point to the complexity of the political moment. In recent years, some theorists have argued that a defining feature of modern political conflict is an overrepresentation of the left, via universities, Hollywood, and coastal hegemony, in American culture, and an overrepresentation of the right, via the Senate and electoral college’s pro-Republican bias, in American government. After November, American society seems to be in the middle of quiet reshuffling, with each side losing ground in its bastion compared to eight years ago. Whatever the achievements of his second term, that may be Trump’s biggest victory of all.        

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It is a dark time in America. Not metaphorically. Despite what one may see in their curated social media feed, much of America seems somewhat content. The economy is in a better position than at any time since COVID struck, the peaceful transition of power is functioning smoothly, and the country is largely satisfied with its incoming president and his advisers.

But it is quite literally dark. In the city around which the sun revolves, New York, the sun will set at or before 4:30 for the final time this weekend. After that, the sunset will begin its long march backwards, culminating in the “spring forward” of daylight saving come March. That is, unless there is a significant change to America’s clocks between now and then.

Talk of changing the country’s seasonal time system has steadily risen in recent weeks after President-elect Trump endorsed the idea in a social media post. The details of a change are hazy but Trump’s backing carries real weight, reigniting a long-running debate among states, scientists, and experts, and prompting a larger question about his second term.

Congress’s involvement in America’s timekeeping first appeared on Americans’ collective radar back in 2022, when the Senate stunned journalists, observers, and many of its own members by passing a bill to establish permanent daylight saving by unanimous consent. That passage was a fluke, achieved via parliamentary luck and the absence of most members (advocates will also soon lose the bill’s longtime champion, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is set to head to the State Department). But it helped raise awareness of a long-simmering debate around the benefits of daylight saving and standard time, which the U.S. has been switching between since 1974. 

Now, lawmakers from both parties see an opportunity. They do not always agree on the endpoint, however. 

On one side are those backing permanent standard time, which would result in the sun rising and setting earlier in the day, bringing lighter mornings and darker evenings. Scientists and sleep experts generally support permanent standard time, arguing it is closer to the natural course of the sun’s movement and humans’ circadian rhythm and that a closer harmony between the two could bring about positive health outcomes. (Two states, Arizona and Hawaii, are permanently on standard time.)

On the other side are those who support making daylight saving permanent, which would result in the sun both rising and setting later in the day, meaning darker mornings and lighter evenings. Sunnier states like Florida are often the biggest supporters of this system. Advocates argue it would reduce the dysfunction and seasonal depression that studies have associated with the annual change to the clocks (one study found the switch costs the economy $400M in lost productivity each year).

The nuances are likely lost on the president-elect, who is widely known to be disinterested in the complexities of policy making; as the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman wrote this week, Trump’s press conference on Monday showed he was “more specific, and in some ways more well versed, in the status of his various lawsuits against journalists and the Pulitzer Prize board than he was in some aspects of how he plans to address Syria after the fall of the Assad regime.”

But even more-informed lawmakers have sometimes been confused. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an advocate of permanent standard time, exclaimed her excitement while presiding over the Senate passage of permanent daylight saving time in 2022. Sen. Ted Cruz initially responded to Trump’s social media post by promising to make a change to the clocks “a priority” — before admitting this week he was unsure which change Trump was calling for.

An actual change to the country’s time system is still a huge long shot. Not only will Republicans have far bigger legislative priorities but their slim House majority will make it exceedingly difficult to move even small pieces of legislation. Most of all, the bipartisan support for ending the current system has a corollary — bipartisan opposition, largely clustered among representatives from states that would stand to lose the most, like those in the most western part of each time zone (where the sun already rises the latest).

Beyond the ramifications of the change itself, the topic of daylight saving points to a broader, more interesting question for Trump’s second term: how far from the establishment he will dare to go.

Trump took office in 2017 amid widespread uncertainty of just how unconventional a president he would seek to be. His first term did indeed break a number of conventions — from his interference in civil servants’ duties to the steady stream of firings and inflammatory statements to the effort to overturn the 2020 election. But in some ways the most remarkable thing about his first four years was how unremarkable they were: no D.C.-induced recession, no new wars, no mass release of state secrets, no break from GOP orthodoxy on tax or social policy.

Now, Trump enters office with far more flexibility and a far different victory than 2016. Many of the same issues on which he either backed down or hit a wall the first time around will present themselves again. Running in 2016, he had promised to release the JFK files, only to backtrack while in office. This year, he made the same promise — and will have far wider latitude to follow through. Despite riding a wave of anger at American foreign policy misadventures in his first campaign, he ended up doubling down on core tenets of the foreign policy establishment, significantly expanding the drone war and the Pentagon budget while civilian deaths in Middle Eastern countries skyrocketed. Now, he will have the opportunity to curtail military involvement and funding for multiple conflicts, including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Despite what histrionic liberals or trolling conservatives may claim, Trump will be gone after these four years. How he chooses to spend them is still unclear. But as the events of this week demonstrated — an appropriations bill negotiated and backed by GOP leadership swiftly collapsed after opposition from Trump and Elon Musk, leaving the basic functions of the federal government in doubt — deep fissures exist within the GOP that can’t be easily remedied. If that continues, it may be lights out for bigger ambitions like daylight saving. 

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As 2024 winds down, when we naturally take stock and turn our attention to the year ahead, it’s worth remembering just how fast things can (and likely will) change.

For some perspective, here’s a snapshot of political news from the final days of 2023: The Colorado Supreme Court had disqualified Donald Trump from running for president; Security officials were warning of threats to the 2024 election’s integrity; Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were ramping up attacks on each other and the frontrunner; and many news outlets were devoting coverage to voters’ unprecedented dissatisfaction with the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch.

In 2024, all those stories ended up not mattering: Donald Trump’s primary challengers became bit players. He defeated Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, and hit new levels of popularity in a secure election that Americans were largely satisfied with. Point being: a lot can change in a year, and predictions can be a fool’s game. So instead of predictions, let’s turn to something we can count on: The calendar. Here are key dates and benchmarks to watch in the coming year.   

January 3rd: 119th Congress is sworn in

The 119th Congress will be sworn in just after the new year, at which point Republicans will have control of both chambers for the first time in eight years. Demographically, it’s a mixed picture: There will be more non-white members than ever before, including an uptick in Black, Asian, and Latino members. But for the first time in 46 years, the number of women in the House and Senate will be lower than the previous Congress — another setback for advocates of women in politics after the second defeat of a female presidential nominee.

January 6th: Certification of 2024 presidential election results

Kamala Harris may not have been elected president, but in early January she will become a member of an even more exclusive club: Vice presidents who oversaw the certification of their own presidential campaign losses. This has sometimes put incumbent vice presidents in awkward positions — including Al Gore in 2000 and Richard Nixon in 1960. Both received plaudits for their graceful execution of their duties but, with Congress becoming ever more partisan and sensationalized these days, expect some taunting and heckling.

February: Global election results begin to trickle in

February brings elections in Belarus and Kosovo, small eastern European states where the outcomes will help begin to paint a broader picture of how the region is responding to Russian aggression after the Ukraine war. The most significant will be Germany’s elections on February 23rd, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fate will be decided. Like most world leaders after COVID, he’s become deeply unpopular. Ukraine aid is a key issue in races.

April 1st: Special elections for open House seats in Florida

With Trump nominating Rep. Michael Waltz and Rep. Elise Stefanik to his Cabinet, and Rep. Matt Gaetz resigning in an ethically murky cloud, House Republicans’ historically slim majority will be razor thin for the first few months of 2025. They will get an opportunity to rectify that when Florida holds special elections for Waltz and Gaetz’s seats. While both districts are deep red, both parties will be watching for any sign of early organic resistance to Trump’s second term.

April: Likely government funding deadline

Congress technically still has to extend government funding before a December 20th deadline. Whatever it passes will likely fund the government until early spring, setting up a key test of the GOP Congress’s fiscal priorities come April.

Late June: Supreme Court decisions (and more)

The Supreme Court’s term generally ends in late June, and the justices often wait until the final days of the month to deliver the most high-profile rulings, which this year will include big decisions around immigration and transgender rights. This is also typically the time of the year that justices tend to announce their retirements. With conservative justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas both approaching 80 years old, they may face pressure from conservatives to give Trump the opportunity to replace them with younger figures.

July: Likely drop-date for raising the debt ceiling

The 2023 spending deal struck between President Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy suspended the debt ceiling until January 1st, 2025. That pause ends when the ball drops, bringing the debt ceiling exactly back to where it was in 2023. The U.S. will already have breached that ceiling but the Treasury Department is expected to employ its typical “extraordinary measures” to buy Congress time. Those maneuvers will likely only last until July at the latest. Congressional Republicans will then have to face a potentially tricky and internally divisive path to raising the borrowing limit.

August: Traditional summer recess

Congress typically holds a long recess in late summer, a tradition that has become a kind of canary-in-the-coal-mine in past congressional sessions, as many lawmakers head home to hold town halls. In 2009, fiery opposition to congressional Democrats’ health care reform efforts exploded at meetings back in their districts, imperiling the bill. Eight years later, the script was flipped: Republicans faced legions of voters furious over their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Both times, the August recess was an early sign of the voter discontent that would come to fruition in the following year’s midterms.

October 20th: The last day for Canadian elections

Canada will elect a new government in 2025 — the only question is when. Being a parliamentary system, there is no official date for elections but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is required to call an election on or before October 20th. The results could bring about a new era for one of the U.S.’s closest allies: Trudeau is more unpopular than ever, and current polling suggests the Conservative Party could win control, which would put its populist, Trump-friendly leader Pierre Poilievre in charge of a U.S. neighbor. That would add up to a very different level of regional cooperation and have a big impact on Trump’s trade and immigration agendas.

November: New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections

Five states hold their elections for governor off of the typical, even-year schedule. Virginia and New Jersey’s are scheduled such that they are always held one year after the presidential election. That — and their proximity to the D.C. and New York media — has brought heightened attention to the contests, making them the first referendum on new administrations in recent years.

December: Trump tax cuts and Biden ACA subsidies expire

The 2017 tax law passed by Republicans and signed by Trump made several measures permanent — including slashing the corporate income tax from 35% to 21%. But most measures affecting individuals and families, including rates for individuals and the expansion of the child tax credit, were temporary and are set to expire at the end of 2025. Also scheduled to expire are the significantly expanded health care subsidies Democrats passed in 2022 that made Obamacare plans significantly more affordable for working and middle class Americans. Extending or expanding the tax measures will be a top priority for the GOP Congress but the ACA subsidies are likely to expire. 

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Donald Trump’s Cabinet is still months away from being finalized. But on the other side of Washington, key leadership roles are now set.

On Tuesday, Senate Democrats became the last of the four factions in Congress — both parties in each chamber — to elect their leadership for the next two years. None of the results has been surprising but the elected leadership slates will be crucial to the direction of Trump’s presidency. And together, they paint an important picture of how both parties are moving at the dawn of the second Trump era.

The next two years will be pivotal. Here’s a rundown of the major players and what they’re up against.

Mike Johnson (R-LA) Speaker of the House

Johnson’s path to the Speakership bears remarkable similarity to the path of Trump’s first Speaker, Paul Ryan. Both got the job in deeply unusual circumstances — Ryan in October 2015 after the resignation of John Boehner, Johnson in October 2023 after the vacation of Kevin McCarthy. Neither was their party’s next-in-line, or had spent years learning the ropes of leadership. Ryan’s tenure is a cautionary tale: He consistently struggled to pass legislation, and even basic procedural measures, in 2017 and 2018.

While Johnson is both personally and ideologically closer to Trump than Ryan was, he will be facing an even more challenging landscape: In November, the GOP won the smallest House majority in decades, a mere 220-215 margin that leaves little room for error. It will be a far bigger test for a far less experienced Speaker than any we’ve seen in recent years. 

John Thune (R-SD) Senate Majority Leader

Trump’s first-term accomplishments owed much to the work of Mitch McConnell, who has now stepped down after a record 18 years atop the GOP conference. His replacement is John Thune, a longtime McConnell apprentice who will face big challenges in replicating his old boss’s successes.

The new GOP majority will give Thune some breathing room — with 53 seats, Republicans can afford to lose three votes — but his leadership will be put to the test almost immediately, as Trump aides are signaling quick movement on an ambitious agenda. Complicating his task: the GOP conference is far more conservative this time around.

Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) House Minority Leader

During Trump’s first term, the de facto opposition leader was Nancy Pelosi, whose experience and savvy proved critical to stymieing his ambitions. This time, House Democrats will be led by Hakeem Jeffries, a far greener figure who, even after spending years as a Pelosi protege, remains largely untested in the kinds of high-pressure moments the next few years will bring.

Jeffries will be the face of the Democratic Party in D.C. during Trump’s second term and is a good bet to become the country’s first Black Speaker after the 2026 midterms. But first, he’ll have to steer a caucus teeming with members trying to nudge the party’s post-election direction, including a number who want more collaboration with Trump this time around.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Senate Minority Leader

Come January, Schumer will be the only person to have led their party in Congress during the first Trump presidency, the Biden presidency, and the second Trump presidency. Key to his longevity is a more-is-more approach to his leadership team: 11 of 47 Democratic senators will hold official positions next year.

Schumer’s members may be easier to manage now: For the first time in modern history, the Democratic caucus will have no members from red states, lending it fewer seats but more ideological cohesion. Considered one of the more electorally savvy leaders in his party, Schumer’s chosen levels of cooperation with Trump could be an indicator of which way the political winds are blowing.

Steve Scalise (R-LA) House Majority Leader

Scalise has a record of weathering challenges: He survived a 2017 terrorist attack that left him seriously injured and began chemotherapy last year after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He has also held steady in party leadership since 2014, even as House Republicans have cycled through four different leaders above him. As Majority Leader, he’ll be in charge of setting the House legislative calendar — and will face pressure from Trump and his allies to be as aggressive as possible in moving legislation.    

John Barrasso (R-WY) Senate Majority Whip

Like Thune, Barrasso is moving up a slot and will now be the Senate GOP’s second-in-command. He’s made a concerted effort to position himself as a leader of the growing faction of hardline conservative Senate Republicans: He’s largely abandoned his initial backing of Ukraine aid, for example, part of a broader pattern of opposing GOP leaders on big issues, like increasing the debt limit. That strategy worked — he won the whip job unopposed — but he will soon be responsible for sidelining his own preferences and shepherding leadership priorities through the chamber.

Katherine Clark (D-MA) House Minority Whip

Set to be the highest-ranking woman in elected government next year, Clark’s job of keeping her caucus united will be crucial in the extremely narrow House. With Trump nominating two House Republicans for Cabinet positions and Matt Gaetz resigning, the GOP majority will dwindle to just 217-215 for at least the first few months of 2025 — which could paralyze Trump’s agenda if Clark succeeds at holding Democrats in line. She’ll have some challenges, including Democrats now representing Trump-won districts and aging or ailing members (7/10 of the oldest House members next year are Democrats). 

Dick Durbin (D-IL) Senate Minority Whip

At 80, Durbin is the oldest member of either party’s leadership. He is also up for re-election in 2026 and is already facing pressure to retire, a factor that will weigh over his work this session. Like Schumer, he has held his position since 2016, but his job of keeping Democrats united against Trump’s agenda this time will be simpler with red state moderates like Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp now gone. 

The Supporting Players

Tom Emmer (R-MN) House Majority Whip

Emmer is unknown to the vast majority of Americans — until now, his most high-profile moment was when he became the third candidate to fail in the Speakership race last year. But Emmer’s role in the next Congress will be crucial: As whip, he will be in charge of corralling every member of Republicans’ razor-thin majority to attend votes and stick with the majority. How he fares will undoubtedly increase his profile one way or the other.

Tom Cotton (R-AR) Republican Conference Chair

Cotton is a new entrant into Republican leadership. While he has a Trump-like instinct for bravado, he is arguably the most old-school conservative in GOP leadership, especially on foreign policy issues like Ukraine, which could cause tension with the new administration. Cotton is particularly close to McConnell, whose dislike of Trump and near-certain retirement in 2026 makes him a wildcard in the next two years, and could be a key player in keeping him from breaking with the party.

Pete Aguilar (D-CA) House Democratic Caucus Chair

Rounding out House Democrats’ new generation, Aguilar will be a key player in developing Democratic messaging. His background could also make him influential: The only Latino in congressional leadership, he hails from a state that moved 10 points towards Trump this cycle. Both factors could give him sway as the party seeks to regain lost ground among non-white voters and in blue enclaves.

Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) Senate Democratic Caucus Chair

Klobuchar is also new to leadership, replacing retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow. She is on the younger end of congressional leadership and is considered likely to keep moving up the ladder in the future, especially if Durbin retires. Her record of electoral overperformance — she won re-election in November by 16 points, even as Harris carried her state by just 4% — will also give her a platform as Democrats plan recruitment and messaging over the next few years. 

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“If he says he's a woman, then he's a woman.”

Back in the spring of 2015, that’s how former Senator Rick Santorum described Caitlyn Jenner, who was then receiving a wave of media attention for coming out as transgender. In 2024, the comments may seem remarkable coming from Santorum, a titan of the 2000s and 2010s social conservative movement, but they were hardly exceptional at the time.

As the 2016 GOP primary was getting underway, social conservatives were on the run: In 2012, Obama had won re-election in part by aggressively weaponizing Mitt Romney’s anti-abortion stances. In 2013, the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down. 2014 saw the Civil Rights Act reinterpreted to include transgender protections and Time Magazine declaring the “transgender tipping point.” 2015 brought Jenner to the cover of Vanity Fair and same-sex marriage to all 50 states. For both the left and the right, it was easy to think the arc of history had bent permanently.

Nearly a decade later, the landscape is radically different, as demonstrated by very recent events. On Wednesday, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace triumphed in her crusade to ban incoming Rep. Sarah McBride, soon to be Congress’s first transgender member, from using women’s restrooms and facilities. Mace’s path is in some ways the inverse of Santorum’s: She previously proclaimed herself “strongly” in support of LGBTQ rights, cosponsored a bill to establish federal LGBTQ protections, and even lamented the pandemic shutting down in-person Pride celebrations. Earnest or not, Mace’s transformation points to a broader phenomenon: For the first time in recent memory, social conservatives are ascendant within the Republican Party — and the broader culture. And nowhere is it more apparent than around transgender issues.

“This is the first cycle that voters are really exposed to [transgender-related] messaging at scale,” said Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy at the American Principles Project. “When you back up the attacks with advertising dollars, it's a totally different ball game.” For years, APP was largely alone in seeking to translate transgender issues into a political advantage for conservatives. As early as 2017, it began pouring significant resources into ad campaigns related to transgender youth participating in competitive sports. Those efforts failed to bring victory in several high-profile races — including key 2022 contests and the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial election — creating a sense on the left that the issue was falling flat.

That consensus was upended by the 2024 campaign, in which Donald Trump effectively weaponized Kamala Harris’s support for transgender protections, including an infamous 2019 promise to provide publicly funded gender transitions to immigration detainees and prison inmates.

The success of the Trump team’s messaging, particularly with traditionally Democratic constituencies — the efficacy of one ad reportedly “stunned” campaign aides — has unnerved Democrats and vindicated figures like Schweppe, who expect the GOP to lean into transgender issues even more in the coming years. “This stuff is going to be really critical for Republicans going forward,” he said.

Even within the anti-abortion movement, which saw itself frequently shunned by Trump during the campaign, the results have been empowering. In the two and a half years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion advocates had watched even many longtime allies begin to blame them for Republicans’ electoral struggles. Now, they say, the failure of Democrats’ abortion-heavy messaging has had a stabilizing effect. “As we move farther away from Dobbs, I think we are going to start seeing the country settle down and get into more of a rhythm,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee. Tobias believes the results shift the political consensus on the issue’s potency. “I hope the narrative changes,” she said.

At the same time, social conservatives are watching the second Trump administration configure itself in ways that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, most prominently with the nomination of the staunchly pro-choice Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Health and Human Services Department. Multiple social conservative strategists and operatives acknowledged that, while a pro-choice HHS Secretary would have previously been a non-starter, they have no plans to fight Trump’s nominations. One strategist acknowledged that the GOP’s newly large tent has created some tensions but argued their colleagues “have to live within that political reality.”

The dynamic is very different on the left. In recent weeks, several Democratic members of Congress have gone public with their support for barring transgender girls and women from competitive sports. While the comments have drawn some backlash within the party, their shift has thus far been limited to sports participation. That is in keeping with how many Americans, including Democrats, think of transgender issues: polls have repeatedly found supermajorities favoring non-discrimination protections while also opposing sports participation. In 2023, for example, Gallup found that registered Democrats had become more supportive of the morality of being transgender by 5% — while also swinging 15% against sports participation. But for LGBTQ activists in particular, there’s little expectation of nuance in federal policy in the coming years.

“I have zero trust in the incoming administration,” said Gillian Branstetter, a strategist at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project, who argues the upcoming Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti will be the most crucial event in setting LGBTQ policy for the next few years. But Branstetter, too, sees the past decade as representing a rightward shift, specifically pointing to Mace’s evolution. “I have been watching the right wing grow more extreme on this issue for over a decade, really going back to 2014, 2015,” she said.

That such widely divergent voices agree on the last decade’s trajectory underscores a crucial factor in the coming years: The second Trump presidency will occur in a radically different cultural landscape than the first. A growing number of corporations are scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments. Progressive groups have lowered their policy ambitions. Columnists argue the country has reached “peak woke.” Elected Democrats are increasingly willing to criticize party activists over previously commonplace language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC.” Even pseudo-scientific indicators, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reportedly removing her pronouns from her Twitter bio, point to a snapback.

Both sides agree that the political incentives that prompted Santorum to speak of Jenner the way he once did are gone; after the 2024 election, they feel antiquated to the point of absurdity. When a new Republican Party takes power in January, the once-sidelined social conservatives will be a crucial part of the coalition. “This fight,” Tobias said, “is by no means over.”

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Looking back, the stakes of the Build Back Better debate were plainly laid out.

Delivering his first address to Congress in 2021, President Biden laid out a grand view of the challenge facing his party. “We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works, and we can deliver for our people,” Biden said, announcing a sweeping, multi-trillion dollar package to establish paid family leave, childcare support, housing investment, universal pre-K, public community college, Medicare expansion, and more. Later that year, Sen. Bernie Sanders was even more blunt. “It’s absolutely imperative if democracy is to survive that we do everything that we can to say, ‘Yes, we hear your pain and we are going to respond to your needs,” he told the New York Times.

Across the party, there was agreement that passage of Biden’s domestic agenda, now packaged into the Build Back Better Act, represented an existential test for the party. “Failure is not an option,” warned now-House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. So did Rep. Suzanne DelBene, then-chair of the centrist New Democratic Coalition, and liberal Sen. Ron Wyden. Columnists echoed the sentiment.

But failure was an option. The Build Back Better Act died, and with it the vast majority of the programs Biden had proposed. Democrats were ultimately able to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, but, even as it delivered the party a significant political and policy victory, including the biggest climate action ever taken by the U.S., the law did not even begin to approach BBB’s scope.

When the party lost full control of D.C. in 2022, the scoreboard was clear: Democrats had failed to raise the federal minimum wage. They failed to extend the expanded child tax credit. They failed to pass a public health insurance option. They failed to enact a national paid leave program, or universal pre-K, or public community college, or federal housing investment, or new union protections, or universal drug price reform, or a new national childcare program. They failed to expand Medicare or lower its eligibility age. They even failed to raise tax rates on corporations and high-income earners.

Those measures, largely popular in polls, commanded support from nearly every congressional Democrat. The fault for their failure lies almost exclusively with holdout Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who, despite being frequently conflated by the public, had very different objections to the bill. While Manchin supported elements like aggressive drug-price reform and tax increases on the wealthy, Sinema opposed them. While Sinema supported elements like paid family leave and an expansive child tax credit, Manchin opposed them.

To the more conspiratorial-minded members of the online left, this indicated a coordinated, “rotating villain.” In reality, it was the result of a Senate majority that, because of 2020 race losses and structural Republican advantages in the chamber, was dependent on two very different iterations of moderate Democratic identity — each of which winnowed the party’s agenda from opposing ends. (Sinema’s office did not respond to a request for comment, while Manchin’s office reiterated his 2021 objections to the legislation).

But the nuance behind Build Back Better’s failure, how close Democrats came to defying the underlying political dynamics, how remarkable it was that they were able to pass the legislation they did, changed nothing about a core fact. The party had been swept into power promising structural change to the country’s economic system and was unable to deliver— at the precise moment that global economic upheaval and pain hit the country. In the wake of this November’s results, which saw Republicans making historic gains among the working class, some progressives argue the bill’s failure had a steep political cost.

“It was a huge blow to our being able to show that we were addressing the economic concerns of people, and in this election we saw exactly what that looked like,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Jayapal was a major figure in the 2021 debate, frequently finding herself at odds with Manchin and Sinema. “It was a massive problem to convince the country that Democrats cared, because two people managed to block that agenda,” she added.

“What was proposed in the Build Back Better Act would have transformed the way families are able to afford care and basic expenses,” said Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at New America. Pointing to the bill’s potential impact on Americans’ biggest out-of-pocket costs, Shabo argues it would have changed both the economy and voters’ individual sentiments. “Things would have begun to look substantially different right around now,” she said.

But instead, Democrats found themselves lurching from an agenda once likened to the New Deal and Great Society, to touting traditional indicators of economic well-being: GDP numbers, factory investment, the unemployment rate. When she became the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris subtly changed the party’s messaging, making a point to project more awareness of voters’ malaise. But she also ran in the shadow of BBB’s failure, proposing far more targeted, piecemeal changes.

“We sort of dropped the rest of the [Build Back Better] agenda instead of putting that front and center,” said Rep. Ro Khanna. “Instead, we got ‘ok we’re gonna get homecare workers for the elderly.’ Wonderful. ‘And we’re gonna get a housing tax credit.’ Terrific. But you don’t become the leader of the free world because you’re gonna give your people homecare workers or a housing tax credit. You become the leader of the free world by telling a story: what’s happened to the American dream?”

For its part, the White House continues to hew to Biden’s original campaign messaging. A spokesman called him “one of the most legislatively successful presidents in modern history" and reiterated the administration's view that the United States has “the strongest economy in the world.”

To many in the party, that misses the point. “We can say factually that the American economy is the strongest in the world,” said Khanna. “That has always been the case for the past 50 years. But the point is, there was a hollowing out of the middle and working class.” Sanders’ staff pointed to his scathing Boston Globe op-ed, which included his argument that the party “ignored justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.”

That Democrats, led by Harris, allowed themselves to cede the mantle of anger at the status quo has generally become a point of agreement. “She sort of tried to empathize with voters more, but I'm not sure she was angry,” said Navin Nayak, president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Name me a time when she named a corporation that was ripping off consumers. Donald Trump picks very specific fights with companies, rightly or wrongly.”

There are open debates about whether Build Back Better could have further fueled inflation, and not everyone in the party agrees that measures like it could have changed the party’s fate, arguing liberals are facing an informational problem. “I think it is flawed for Democrats to think that just solving those problems is going to bring sweeping majorities back to the party,” Nayak said. “Biden literally saved the pensions of the Teamsters. I mean, single-handedly saved the pension of the Teamsters. And the Teamsters sat the election out and didn't endorse.”

Still, the legacy of the 2021 battle hangs over election results that can be explained, at least in part, by deep fissures in news consumption. To plugged-in political observers, the two years of Democratic governance were remarkable. Despite historically narrow majorities in both chambers, Congress had pumped out big-ticket legislation, reversed the paralysis of bipartisan legislating, and set the stage for a decade of high-tech growth.

To working and middle-class people viewing the government through a personal lens, the picture may have been very different: a party tasked with rebuilding the country had failed to enact the agenda items it once framed as prerequisites for a fair economy. And that failure may have played a significant role in returning Donald Trump to the White House.

Just as Democrats predicted. 

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Resounding, historic, triumphant, vindicating, realigning. The list of adjectives to describe Donald Trump’s victory can go on. But one that doesn’t belong on the list is “surprising.”

For years now, three data points have been overwhelmingly clear: the Biden-Harris administration was deeply unpopular, the relationship between the Democratic Party and some of its core voters was in crisis, and more Americans than ever considered Donald Trump a mainstream and competent politician. In the end, the gravity of all three proved insurmountable for Kamala Harris — a result that, in retrospect, looks predictable, if no less gut-wrenching for Democrats. But among the party’s strategists, pollsters, analysts, and allies, there has not yet emerged a clear explanation for what amounts to a catastrophic political failure.

For some, the fault lies with the outgoing president and his choice to even run for reelection at all. “As far as I am concerned the original sin was the decision by President Biden,” said Jim Manley, former chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid. “In a shocking display of arrogance and hubris, they decided that Biden was the only person that could beat Trump — despite his obvious infirmaries — and now the rest of the country is going to pay the price.”

Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist at Blueprint Strategies, wondered how much Biden’s decision foreclosed the party’s ability to read the electorate's mood. “I think we might have seen the factors that ultimately doomed Democrats appear much earlier had Biden not ever been the nominee,” Cass said. But she also argued Democrats were battling headwinds that have been building for years. “Voters have been telling us for a long time that what you are offering isn't enough. There's no way to hide from that or pretend you weren't hearing that after last night.”

Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of the left-leaning polling outlet Data for Progress, attributed the results to the salience of inflation and the global anti-incumbent mood — but also joined a growing faction on the left that is increasingly critical of local Democratic governance. “The shift right in big blue states is an indictment of Democratic leaders who have not done nearly enough to deliver a working-class agenda, confront the housing crisis, and offer a vision for a progressive American future in contrast with growing red states like Florida and Texas,” Deiseroth said.

To Matt Bennett, executive director of Third Way, the results represented a “total shattering” of the party’s identity since Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. “Voters do not like what they see in Democrats,” Bennett said, citing lax immigration enforcement and perceptions of Democrats as the “language police.” He predicted a complex debate within the party over economic and cultural issues. “There are going to be elements of a populist economic agenda that moderates adopt and there are going to be elements of moderating on culture issues that the left probably adopts,” Bennett said. “Those things don’t move in tandem the way they used to.”

Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who has spent years warning of Democratic peril with Latino voters called the results a “five-alarm fire” for the party. “Everything they have done has been categorically wrong,” said Madrid. “They need a complete revamp, from the way they think about Latino voters to the consultants that they have dealing with. They need to start all over.”

It will take weeks to fully count all the ballots, but savvy analysts estimate that Trump will ultimately carry the popular vote by about a point and a half — a slimmer national margin than any since 2004. It’s nonetheless a searing indictment of a party that has taken eight years of comfort in the president-elect’s inability to command a national majority. Now, that assumption, like so many that have been foundational to the party’s identity, is no more. In its place is a party fumbling in the dark.

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Even after nine years of Donald Trump laying waste to political convention, the tumult of the 2024 cycle has been striking.

Initially, a race between the two oldest major-party nominees in history and the first presidential rematch since 1956. Then, the first time since 1880 that a person elected to the presidency declined to seek re-election — and the first U.S. presidential election ever in which a major-party nominee ended their campaign after securing the nomination. The first person, since the dawn of the presidential primary contest system in the 1970s, to be nominated by a major party without winning a single primary contest.

The first former president to be renominated by a major party since 1892. The first person nominated for president by a major party three straight times since 1944. The first millennial on a major-party ticket. The first Asian American, second woman, and second Black nominee by a major party. The first time since 1976 that neither ticket includes a Bush, Clinton, or Biden. An end to the era of the Commission on Presidential Debates. An assassination attempt. A result that will bring either the first convicted felon and oldest person ever, or the first woman and first Asian American, to the White House.

For some Americans, the year may be just one more reality TV-style season in an ever more chaotic political show. But for many who’ve spent years advocating for political reform, shattering of norms has brought something different: renewed optimism for change. “Things can't keep getting worse forever,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America who has written extensively on the merits of a multi-party system. “Eventually that leads to positive transformation.”

That most Americans believe the system is getting worse is beyond dispute. Even as public opinion of the candidates has brightened — nearly half of voters now view both nominees favorably, a notable change from just a few months ago — Americans continue to view the electoral system with historic pessimism. A record-low 28% are satisfied with the state of democracy, according to Gallup. Pew finds just 19% consider the U.S. a good example for other democracies. 76% believe democracy in the U.S. is under threat, per a New York Times/Siena poll. Polling averages find less than a quarter approving of Congress’s job performance and a supermajority believing the country is on the wrong track.

For many pushing reform efforts, the data is validating. “The idea that voters don't feel heard or seen by the current system, isn't just a feeling. It's incredibly accurate,” said Alyssa Cass, a political strategist and spokeswoman for National Popular Vote. The group has spent years attempting to build an improbable end run around the electoral college, lobbying states to bind their electoral votes to the national popular vote result. Seventeen states and D.C., comprising 209 electoral votes, have joined the National Popular Vote Compact, which becomes effective only when enough join to reach 270. Cass argues that yet another split between the popular vote and electoral college this year could “create a groundswell” for more states to pass legislation.

Regardless of the election’s final outcome, the group feels the campaign has already vindicated their efforts: According to data from Fair Vote, 93% of Harris and Trump’s campaign stops have occurred in just the seven swing states, a statistic the group is eager to point out. “Maybe it’s the most important election of our lifetimes, but only seven states are going to matter,” said Dr. John Koza, chairman of National Popular Vote.

While residents of the swing states do enjoy outsized influence, they’ve also experienced the downside: a crushing deluge of advertising. As of early October, a record $15.9 billion had been spent on the 2024 election, according to OpenSecrets. Pennsylvania alone has seen nearly $950 million in ad spending — more than twice the combined amount John McCain and Barack Obama’s campaigns spent during the entire 2008 general election. The avalanche of money has helped a cottage industry of scam PACs and partisan dirty tricks to proliferate.

“The public is so sick of this. They know they're being disenfranchised in Washington,” said Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, a leading advocate for campaign finance reform. But Penniman, too, sees opportunity in Americans’ dissatisfaction — and the turmoil of the political environment. “There is an emerging populism in the Republican Party that is starting to convert into a critique of big corporations and the system,” he said. “The system is breaking at this point.”

Still, campaign finance reform requires congressional action, making it a longshot in the current climate. As broader federal efforts remain gridlocked, some activists have turned their focus to the states, where a bumper crop of changes have quietly passed in recent years, most notably ranked-choice voting (RCV). The system, which is on the ballot in five states this year, allows voters to rank multiple candidates while requiring the winner earn a majority.

“At a time when a lot of other issues are stuck in gridlock, ranked-choice voting is actually expanding,” said Deb Otis, Research and Policy Director at Fair Vote. She attributes the momentum to Americans’ dissatisfaction with national politics. “I think it comes from a place of discouragement and has turned into a place of hope.”

RCV has emerged as one of the most fervently debated electoral reforms in recent years, with supporters arguing it could be a powerful weapon against polarization and incentivize consensus-minded candidates. They have some evidence to point to: the two reddest House seats in the Democratic caucus are held by moderates from the two states with RCV, Maine Rep. Jared Golden and Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola.

For advocates, that’s evidence of success. "It's proven to do exactly what needs to be done,” said former Rep. Jason Altmire, who became an advocate for electoral reform after losing a 2012 re-election bid. But Altmire, also a moderate Democrat, acknowledged that the two Democratic victories helped harden some GOP opposition. “Because of the places it's happened,” he said, “unfortunately, Republicans have been the ones that have lost out.” That points to a larger challenge for electoral reform advocates, which many openly acknowledge: Despite broad public support, the issue still skews liberal among elected officials and think tanks.

That dynamic — efforts to reform or circumvent the two-party system themselves getting polarized along partisan lines — leads back to Drutman’s case for a multi-party system. “Both parties have a monopoly on opposition to each other,” he said, noting most other democracies have multiple viable choices on the ballot. “In a system with multiple parties, there's a way for you as a voter to move to an adjacent party without going against your current identity.”

Breaking the two-party system may be the longest shot of any reform effort, at least in the short term. But the upheaval of the 2024 cycle has rewritten many Americans’ understanding of the possible — and advocates hope the country is near a turning point.

“Things that can't go on forever don't go on forever,” Drutman said. “It’s risky, strange, and dangerous to have a country so evenly divided for so long.”

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On a cloudless 80-degree day in October, Courtney Zelenak, a housecleaner on the Las Vegas strip, and Norma Torres, a guest room attendant, were going door to door in a working class west Vegas neighborhood to turn out voters.

If Kamala Harris carries Nevada this year, it will be due in no small part to the efforts of people like Zelenak and Torres. Both are members of the powerful Culinary Workers Union, a 60,000 member-strong behemoth that has become central to the political landscape in the Silver State. The two estimate that they’ve knocked on “thousands” of doors since September, a microcosm of a formidable ground operation that has helped deliver Democratic victories even in difficult years.

“Truthfully, we’re not a blue state, we’re barely purple,” said Ted Pappageorge, the Culinary’s secretary-treasurer, in an interview at their headquarters. “So there’s something going on here that is different and we think that difference is us.” That difference has helped power Democrats to victory in nearly every statewide race the past decade, including in 2016, when Nevada was the only battleground state Hillary Clinton won, and 2020, when the union continued canvassing even as most Democrats shied away from in-person efforts due to COVID.

In 2022, members knocked on over one million doors to aid Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who ultimately defied most national prognosticators’ predictions to win re-election by 8,000 votes. The union hopes to continue its streak this year. “We plan to hit 950,000 doors by Election Day,” Pappageorge said. “We’re gonna have tens of thousands of conversations, and drive votes.”

But 2024 is shaping up to be a stress test for Democrats in Nevada. The state’s tourism-dependent economy was decimated by COVID: 98% of the union’s members became unemployed. Gas prices are the fourth highest in the nation and the housing crisis is omnipresent. And the state’s demographics — Nevada is one of the most working class in the country and is the only swing state that is majority minority — have gone from being a core Democratic asset to potentially fertile ground for a Trump campaign. Amidst an ongoing realignment sorting the electorate along class and educational lines, polls show Trump has made real inroads among working class and non-white voters, especially Latinos.

Even before pollsters began to warn of Democratic erosion among non-white voters this cycle, Nevada was a red flag: It was one of just six states in which Joe Biden performed worse than Hillary Clinton. That was part of a broader pattern, as Democrats have watched their presidential nominees’ victory margin shrink every presidential cycle since 2008. Republicans clearly see opportunity — but questions remain around their ability to translate that into votes. As in other states, GOP turnout efforts are largely routed through a network of outside PACs, a risky and untested strategy that makes it dependent on groups like America First Works and Turning Point USA. Those groups, in turn, rely on many existing operatives within the swing states. In Nevada, those figures are acutely aware of Democrats’ historical advantage.

“I know that in the past the culinary union has been the sole machinery and mechanism that has driven Democratic victories, but this time is different,” said Jesus Marquez, who helps lead the American Christian Caucus, a religious right organization working closely with America First Works. Marquez served as an adviser to Cortez Masto’s 2022 opponent, former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, an experience he cites to emphasize Republicans’ superior efforts this cycle. “There was really nothing compared with what we have this time around.”

So far, Nevada’s early voting numbers give some credence to that: After years of Democrats’ leading the early vote, Republicans have opened up a 40,000 vote advantage one week before Election Day. One official involved in GOP turnout efforts said that, “with caution,” they believed a Trump win was “assured.”

Nonetheless, Democrats and their allies remain confident — and many are openly dismissive of Republicans’ operation. A culinary union official said they’ve seen “no evidence of a ground game” in the state. Catherine Cortez Masto, the state’s senior senator, called herself “very confident” in Harris’s chances, even comparing enthusiasm for the vice president to “when Obama was running.”

Masto’s assessment carries some weight: She trailed in most polling averages in the final months of her 2022 race, with national Republicans predicting her defeat even after polls closed. Her narrow victory, which was not declared until the Saturday after Election Day, continued the trend of Nevada Democrats’ overperforming public polling. “The strength in Nevada is that [ground] organization,” Cortez Masto said in an interview at the state party’s headquarters. “We organize our way to victory as Democrats.”

Still, Nevada is emblematic of a larger challenge for the party. The state has the highest proportion of voters without a college degree of any swing state. While Democrats have lost ground among non-college white voters for years, their erosion among people of color without degrees is more recent: Biden won Latino voters without degrees by just 14 points in 2020, creating an unprecedented 25-point education gap among the country’s largest non-white voting bloc, according to validated exit poll data from Pew Research.

Those results made Latino voters without college degrees more Republican in 2020 than white voters with college degrees, a change that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. Bacilia Angel, an organizer at Grita Canta Vota, a non-partisan campaign aimed at mobilizing Latino voters, attributes the shift in voting patterns in part to the sheer growth in the Latino population. “Every 30 seconds, a Latino turns 18,” Angel said. “In every state it’s a growing population.”

Whatever the cause, the ongoing educational realignment of the electorate has benefited Democrats in some whiter, better educated districts and states. But Nevada is not one of them. And while its historic infrastructure advantage may still deliver the state, its broader challenge is not going away. “The diploma divide is consolidating it as a wealthy, white, home-owning party,” said Mike Madrid, a veteran political consultant who has spent years warning of Republican inroads among Latinos. “This is all self-inflicted, because the Democratic Party’s culture has convinced itself and is still having a difficult time believing that non-white people can have any other option.”

While Madrid takes a more dire stance than many, operatives in both parties do expect Trump to perform better among Latinos than he did in 2020 — a remarkable feat after eight years of Democratic accusations of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. For Nevada Democrats, it’s a test like no other — and one with bigger implications than just its six electoral votes. Whatever the final result, even optimists like Pappageorge expect a long night.

“This is gonna be a nailbiter.” 

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The presidential election is a toss-up. Control of the House of Representatives is a toss-up. But the crop of soon-to-be new members of Congress is already coming into focus.

Even as 435 districts are technically up for grabs, in vast swaths of the country, Election Day has, for all intents and purposes, already come and gone. The share of House districts that are truly competitive has declined substantially in recent decades: The Cook Political Report, which assigns a “Partisan Voting Index” to all 435 districts based on how much more Democratic or Republican it votes than the nation as a whole, estimates that the number of districts with a rating between D+5 and R+5 has been cut in half since 1998. The hollowing out of competitive seats has been reflected in recent results: 84% of House elections were decided by double digits in 2022.

The lack of widespread competition has led to heightened attention on the roughly two dozen districts that will decide control of the chamber. But it’s also made primary elections increasingly decisive, and meant that, long before the polls close, we already have a good sense of the freshman class set to arrive in Congress — and what their victories tell us about the political landscape. Here are 14 almost-certain new members to know.

Lateefah Simon (D) California’s 12th

A member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit board, Simon is set to win the Oakland-based district currently represented by Rep. Barbara Lee, who ran unsuccessfully for Senate. A former recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant who was given a coveted speaking slot at the Democratic convention this summer, she would be the first legally blind member of Congress and the first member of Congress to have been elected to a transit board.

Michael Baumgartner (R) Washington’s 5th

A former state senator, Baumgartner is likely to succeed retiring Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in a district that covers Washington’s entire eastern border. He would become one of the most reform-minded Republicans in Congress on cannabis policy: As the party’s Senate nominee in 2012, he backed the state’s pioneering legalization of recreational marijuana.

Emily Randall (D) Washington’s 6th

A current state senator, Randall is set to succeed Rep. Derek Kilmer, who is vacating a district centered on Washington’s northwest Olympic peninsula. Her contentious primary campaign was a prime illustration of the cryptocurrency and Israel debates that roiled Democratic primaries this year. She was one of the top recipients of crypto spending and fired her campaign manager this summer after the staffer was revealed to have liked pro-Hamas and anti-Israel content. She would be the openly gay Latina in Congress.

John McGuire (R) Virginia’s 5th

A state senator and Navy veteran, McGuire is likely to win a central Virginia district currently represented by House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good. He narrowly defeated Good in the Republican primary, powered by a retaliatory Donald Trump endorsement after Good backed Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. McGuire represents a shift towards Trumpian conservatism — he’s backed medical marijuana, for example — and is part of an overall trend of tumult for the district: It’s seen four different congressmen in seven years.

Maxine Dexter (D) Oregon’s 3rd

A former state senator, Dexter is set to win a Portland-based district, which is being vacated by longtime Rep. Earl Blumenauer. A pulmonologist by training, Dexter’s primary victory was perhaps the model of success for pro-Israel Democratic forces: After polling put her in third place just weeks before the primary, Dexter became one of the top recipients of outside spending by AIPAC and its affiliates and ultimately defeated the one-time frontrunner Susheela Jayapal, sister of Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal.

Julie Fedorchak (R) North Dakota At-Large

A current member of the state’s Public Service Commission, Fedorchak is near-certain to win the state’s lone House seat, which is being vacated as current Rep. Kelly Armstrong runs for governor. At a time when many anti-abortion groups are dismayed at Republicans’ retreat on the issue, Fedorchak has become a favorite: She’s helped lead passage of anti-abortion laws in the state, which has some of the most restrictive laws in the country. Interestingly, her near-certain election could mean 4/5 states with at-large congressmembers are represented by women.

Yassamin Ansari (D) Arizona’s 3rd

A former Phoenix city councilor, Ansari is nearly guaranteed to succeed Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running for Senate, in a Phoenix-based district. She has carved out a niche on climate change, attending the 2021 and 2022 UN conferences. She defeated former state senator Raquel Raquel Terán, a favorite of national progressives, in the Democratic primary by just 39 votes after receiving heavy support from pro-crypto and pro-Israel groups. She would be just the second Iranian-American in Congress.

Pat Harrigan (R) North Carolina’s 10th

An Army veteran and firearms manufacturer, Harrigan is set to win a newly redrawn district in western North Carolina. The district’s closest corollary is currently represented by Patrick McHenry, who became a national figure as the bowtie-clad House Speaker pro tempore after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy. McHenry was known as an institutionalist who supported certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and worked closely on bipartisan spending bills. But Harrigan is likely to be closer to the MAGA line: One of his earliest endorsements was from scandal-plagued North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

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Maggie Goodlander (D) New Hampshire’s 2nd

A former top official in the Biden Justice Department, Goodlander is likely to succeed retiring Rep. Ann McLane Kuster in a district that covers western New Hampshire. A late entrant into the race with thin connection to the district — she grew up in the state but has spent her career in D.C. — Goodlander bested Kuster’s handpicked successor in part by emphasizing a powerful, timely personal story: she gave birth to a stillborn child in a hotel due to post-Dobbs restrictions. At a time when Democrats are grappling with how much of the Biden administration’s populist economic policy to continue, Goodlander’s experience in antitrust policy could make her influential. She married to current Biden National Security Advisor (and likely Harris administration member) Jake Sullivan.

Sarah McBride (D) Delaware At-Large

A current state senator and longtime LGBTQ rights activist, McBride is considered a lock to win the state’s lone House district, which became open after Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester opted to run for Senate. She has deep roots in institutional Democratic politics: She’s a longtime personal friend of the Biden family and, in 2016, became the first transgender person to address a national convention. She will be the first transgender member of Congress — a hefty platform at a time of an ongoing backlash to transgender rights among many voters.

Abe Hamadeh (R) Arizona’s 8th

A veteran and former county prosecutor, Hamadeh is likely to win a district outside Phoenix, which opened up after Rep. Debbie Lesko’s surprise retirement. He first rocketed to MAGA-world prominence in 2021 after he launched a campaign for state Attorney General largely premised on backing Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud. He lost that race by a razor-thin margin of 280, the closest margin of any statewide race in 2022. He then narrowly bested fellow MAGA enthusiast Blake Masters in a bitterly contested primary for the open congressional seat this year. A son of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, he has Muslim heritage but proclaims himself religiously unaffiliated — both making him a notable standout for a Republican in Congress.

Shomari Figures (D) Alabama’s 2nd

A former chief of staff to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Figures is set to win a newly reconfigured district in southern Alabama. After a lengthy court fight that found the state had discriminated against Black voters and violated the Voting Rights Act, Alabama was forced to draw a second Black majority district. Figures would likely be an influential Democratic voice on crypto policy: He is one of the top recipients of the industry’s spending this cycle and lobbied the DNC to adopt a pro-crypto platform this summer.

Tim Moore (R) North Carolina’s 14th

The current speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Moore is all but certain to win a newly drawn seat in southwestern North Carolina. He’s a good example of the declining power of scandal in modern politics, having survived a litany of ethics investigations, including an FBI probe, as well as instances of infidelity. Moore played an instrumental role in the 2023 Republican gerrymander of the state’s map, with many alleging he “drew himself” a district in which to run. He would be one of a handful of former state legislative leaders in Congress.

Julie Johnson  (D) Texas’s 32nd

Currently a state representative, Johnson is set to succeed Rep. Colin Allred, who is running for Senate, in a Dallas-based district. In 2021, she was one of the Texas Democrats who fled the state in an attempt to block a Republican-backed bill to change voting procedures. She would be the first openly gay member of Congress from below the Mason-Dixon line.  

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