Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a tight race for a Senate seat, has been on the defensive about a manufacturing renaissance happening in her own backyard.

Thanks to incentives that President Joe Biden's administration has championed in the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation, Michigan alone could see 50,000 or more new jobs by 2030 brought on by the boom in electric vehicles. And yet, in a new ad, Slotkin all but disavows EVs, telling voters, “I live on a dirt road, nowhere near a charging station, so I don’t own an electric car.”

“No one should tell us what to buy, and no one is going to mandate anything,” she says in the ad. “What you drive is your call—no one else’s.” Only in between such assurances does Slotkin allow that if an EV boom is happening, she’d rather those cars be built in Michigan than in China.

Normally, an economic explosion of this magnitude would be the kind of win that any politician would fight for and hinge reelections on. But Slotkin’s party is clearly not winning the information war over electric vehicles. The IRA is spurring General Motors, Ford, Volvo, BMW, and many others to retrofit old car plants and build new battery factories across the U.S., challenging China for control over the technology of the future. Economic stories like Michigan’s are playing out in Georgia, Nevada, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee, too. Yet, according to recent data from the nonprofit advocacy group American EV Jobs Alliance, more than 75 percent of the political messaging about EVs this election cycle has been negative. Donald Trump has been railing against what he and critics falsely call electric-vehicle “mandates” for drivers; Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t exactly been on camera ripping hard launches in an electric Hummer the way Biden did in 2021. Instead, she too has been reassuring crowds that “I will never tell you what car you have to drive.” Democrats have decided to treat what should have been one of the biggest manufacturing and job wins of the past century as a political liability.

“I think the great, irritating tragedy to all this is the actual story of EVs and auto jobs is a very good one,” says Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican political consultant who co-founded the American EV Jobs Alliance and also runs the EV Politics Project, which is dedicated to pushing Republicans towards EV adoption. His group found that most political messaging about EVs references people being forced to drive electric someday under some kind of “gas car ban” that starts with layoffs now and will ultimately kill the American auto industry. None of that is true; nowhere in the U.S. has “mandates” that every person must drive an electric car. Trump has also repeatedly and misleadingly said that EVs “don’t go far” (their ranges can rival gas vehicles) and are “all going to be made in China” while comically overstating the cost of building electric-vehicle chargers. Somehow, it seems to be working. During this election, the narrative has spun out of control, particularly in Michigan, Murphy told me. Tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs are coming to Michigan because of EVs, Murphy said. “The problem is that it’s the biggest secret of the campaign.”

The Biden administration did set a goal of increased EV sales—that 50 percent of all new cars sold in 2030 would have zero tailpipe emissions. Functionally, that means developing a robust local battery-manufacturing ecosystem after America and the rest of the world spent decades outsourcing it to China. And the IRA was meant to give carmakers and parts suppliers the teeth to actually do that work. Ample evidence suggests that the act’s plans are working as intended—especially in red and swing states. The Hyundai Motor Group has sped up the opening of Georgia’s biggest-ever economic-development project, its new $7.6 billion EV-making “Metaplant.” Last week, Scout Motors—a classic American brand revived by the Volkswagen Group—unveiled an electric truck and SUV that it aims to manufacture in South Carolina at a new $2 billion factory by 2027. Tennessee is becoming an epicenter for battery-making, thanks to some $15 billion invested for various EV projects. And Kentucky is also seeing billions in job-creating investments from Toyota, Rivian, and other companies as it seeks to become what Governor Andy Beshear has called “the EV capital of the United States.” Cleaner cars, manufactured at home, with battery technology no longer firmly in the hands of a geopolitical adversary—from an electoral perspective, what’s not to like?

Yet Democrats on the campaign trail are reluctant to talk about any of this. And so far, American car buyers simply aren’t as willing to buy EVs as policy makers and automakers hoped. EV sales have risen significantly since the early days of the Biden administration, but they haven’t taken off the way automakers believed they would. GM, for example, once projected 1 million EVs produced by 2025 but will have scored a major victory if it can sell 100,000 by the end of this year. Those slower-than-expected sales, plus the fact that automakers are getting crushed on still-high battery costs, have led several companies to cancel or delay new EV projects. Plenty of Americans have little to no personal exposure to cars outside the gas-powered ones they’ve been driving for a century, and still regard EVs as expensive toys for wealthy people on the coasts.

Democrats have not yet figured out how to square these two realities: American voters might support the jobs that EV manufacturing creates, but they can be fearful of or even hostile toward the product. Instead, the party has ceded rhetorical ground to Trump’s line of attack: that Biden’s (and presumably Harris’s) policies are meant to force Americans to someday buy a car they don’t want, or even “take away your car,” as the Heritage Foundation has put it. “The Republican Party in the Senate race has been pounding, pounding, pounding on the [internal-combustion engine] ban, which is a scary thing that tests pretty well if you want to scare voters, particularly in Michigan,” Murphy said. The GOP’s anti-EV sentiment has been helped along, too, by the fossil-fuel industry’s ad campaigns.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of Ford, General Motors, and the EV start-up Rivian have all expressed dismay about how politicized vehicle propulsion has become. The Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be much help: Trump has repeatedly said that Musk has never asked him to go easier on EVs, something Musk cheerfully reaffirmed on X. Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s EV “mandate” on day one of his presidency; whether he can without an act of Congress is the subject of intense speculation in the auto industry. Then again, a Trump sweep could mean he’d get the firepower to do exactly that, by targeting the tax breaks to buy EVs, the incentives to manufacture them, or both. Trump is unlikely to be able to halt a transition happening at car companies all over the world, but he could delay it or put the U.S. further behind the curve.

In theory, no red-state governor or member of Congress should want to give up the jobs that the EV boom is creating. (Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, has contended that EV manufacturing will mean job losses for the auto industry overall, even though Honda and LG Energy Solution are committing some $4 billion to its future electric “hub” in Vance’s home state of Ohio.) But the success of this manufacturing boom in Georgia or Michigan does hinge on people actually buying those products. One recent survey by an automotive research group found that a person’s political identity has become less associated with EV acceptance. But Republican rhetoric could reverse that. Murphy pointed to one recent poll his group conducted showing that 62 percent of Michigan respondents said the government’s push to adopt more electric vehicles is a bad thing for the state. Until recently, he told me, he felt that the auto industry’s leaders weren’t spooked by the political push against EVs. Now, he said, “they ought to be.”

People love underdogs. Researchers have time and again observed that the public, and perhaps especially the American public, is drawn to stories in which an average person, through some combination of luck and gumption, trounces a far more formidable opponent in a lopsided conflict. One of the most plausible explanations for this appeal is that underdog narratives stir our deep-seated desire for a just world, one where virtuous people actually get what they deserve. Personally, as a writer, I’m attracted to these accounts because they tend to be full of what William Faulkner once called “the old verities and truths of the heart” that stories need to succeed—that is, “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

My new book, Valley So Low, is something of an underdog story: It follows a small-time Knoxville lawyer who takes on the powerful Tennessee Valley Authority after a disaster at one of its coal-fired power stations sickens hundreds of blue-collar workers. Over the five years I spent working on it, I looked for inspiration in nonfiction books that took a similar shape. The ones that most resonated were immersive, carefully created works of journalism that followed ordinary Americans facing long odds—in the courts of law, in the workplace, or in their own neighborhoods. The authors of these books in many cases spent years collecting details to bring their characters to life on the page to a degree typically reserved for fiction. These seven standouts are each about everyday people pushing back against wildly difficult, often unfair circumstances. And, even though the protagonists don’t always win or come out ahead, exactly, they at least endure, which is often its own sort of victory.

Vintage

A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr

Most nonfiction books, even immortal ones, like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, rely heavily on scenes that the writer has reconstructed through reporting and research; that is, the writer typically didn’t witness the events described firsthand. A Civil Action—about a lawsuit against two giant corporations, Beatrice Foods and W. R. Grace, over water pollution in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the 1980s—is remarkable in that Harr seems to have been present for nearly every meeting, every hearing, and every round of drinks after each brutal day in court. Harr’s main character, Jan Schlichtmann, is an idealistic attorney representing eight families sickened with leukemia by chemicals that the two companies allegedly dumped into a river near their homes, poisoning their drinking water. Thanks to Harr’s efforts—he worked on the book for eight years, and often slept on Schlichtmann’s fold-out couch while reporting—A Civil Action illuminates, in cinematic detail, why regular citizens struggle to win toxic-exposure suits against corporate polluters: Even if the plaintiffs have compelling facts and a dedicated attorney, like Schlichtmann, the polluters almost always have more money, and money will buy you time. And when your clients are sick and dying, Schlichtmann learns, time is a powerful enemy.

[Read: Why the EPA backed down]

“The Escape of Mrs. Jeffries,” by Janet Flanner

Sometimes an obstacle blocking your path feels like a mountain, and other times the obstacle is, in fact, a mountain. Such was the case for Ellen Jeffries, a middle-aged American expat who was trapped in wartime Paris with no easy way to return to the States after her adopted country fell to Adolf Hitler. Fearing internment, she hatches an audacious plan: flee south through France, cross over the Pyrenees on foot to Spain, then finally catch a flight back stateside. Flanner, who was The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for almost 50 years, thrillingly recounts Jeffries’s efforts to evade the Nazis on her trek to freedom, which include a harrowing nighttime river crossing before a mountain ascent to the relative safety of Spain. In relaying Jeffries’s story, Flanner pioneered a form of nonfiction writing that her New Yorker colleague John Hersey would later mimic to fame-making effect in his horrific 1946 story “Hiroshima,” wherein nearly all traces of the author’s reporting have been excised, leaving only a novelistic rendering of events. But Flanner, the world should know, did it first, in 1943. A stand-alone audiobook version of Jeffries’s story came out last year; you can also read it in Janet Flanner’s World or in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces.

Vintage

Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner

Every wrongful-conviction story is tragic and pitiful, but the ordeal of Edward Lee Elmore is especially so, as Bonner’s tightly written account of his case makes clear. The book opens with the 1982 murder of a well-off elderly white woman, Dorothy Edwards, in Greenwood, South Carolina—a murder for which Elmore, an intellectually disabled Black handyman, is swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But the story really gains momentum when a defense attorney named Diana Holt, whom Bonner profiled for The Atlantic in 2012, becomes convinced of Elmore’s innocence and decides to fight to win him a new trial. Holt has grit: She’s a former runaway who, in her youth, survived all manner of hellish abuse. Still, she struggles to overcome the fact that once a person is convicted in a court of law, not even exonerating new evidence guarantees that they’ll get off death row, never mind get another shot at justice. Elmore, through no shortage of legal miracles, eventually sees the outside of a jail cell, but it’s a victory tainted by the irrevocable wrongs done to him, which is why Bonner dares not call his release justice.

[Read: Why are innocents still being executed?]

Blue Rider Press

Almighty, by Dan Zak

One night in July 2012, an 82-year-old nun named Megan Rice and two companions break into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This, as it turns out, proves to be pretty easy, even though the place is nicknamed “the Fort Knox of Uranium.” But exposing the ease of infiltrating Y-12, where the government produces and stores atomic-bomb fuel, is Rice’s main objective. She’s a member of the anti-nuclear group Plowshares, and in this dynamic, accessible book, Zak, a reporter for The Washington Post, unspools how Rice and other activists seek to end nuclear-arms proliferation through “actions” intended to scare the wits out of policy makers and the public by revealing the poor security at nuclear-weapons sites. Maybe then, the activists reason, nations will agree to decommission their warheads before they fall into dangerous hands. Toward the end, Zak shifts his focus to the lawmakers and military leaders who ultimately decide our nuclear-arms policies. In doing so, he details how emerging threats have reinforced Washington’s view that the best way to avoid the next major-power war is through stockpiling more warheads—and observes that the disarmament crowd’s desire for a nuclear-free world likely won’t be realized in our lifetimes, if ever, unless that dynamic changes.

Power to Hurt, by Darcy O’Brien

O’Brien, the son of Hollywood actors, had a knack for turning lurid crimes of the sort you might find on Dateline or 20/20 into something akin to art, and Power to Hurt is his crowning achievement. Published in 1996, the book follows Vivian Forsythe, a divorced young mother from Dyersburg, Tennessee, who, in a stroke of unimaginably awful luck, applies to work for local judge David Lanier. Lanier rapes Forsythe during a job interview, which O’Brien recounts in upsetting, unwavering detail. Afterward, Forsythe tells no one about the attack, because Lanier and his brother, the local district attorney, effectively control the county. But eventually Forsythe and Lanier’s other victims—and there are many, she discovers—meet an FBI agent and work together to bring down the old judge, a campaign that takes the better part of a decade and comes to involve the U.S. Supreme Court. Power to Hurt is ultimately less a true-crime book than a post-crime book in which victims summon radical courage to confront a monster.

[Read: ‘Nobody is going to believe you’: Bryan Singer’s accusers speak out]

The Last Cowboy, by Jane Kramer

Henry Blanton wants to be a cowboy—a real cowboy. Never mind that he already runs a ranch, and the job is not all that great: He’s an unhappily married foreman of a 90,000-acre tract in the Texas Panhandle. But, at age 40, he still dreams of becoming an old-time gunslinger who roams the open plain, like the heroes of the Western movies he watches compulsively. The problem, as Kramer captures in this sharp 1977 book, is that modernity has made the free-ranging life of Blanton’s dreams almost impossible: Barbed wire constrains the cattle; Eastern conglomerates control many of the ranches; and paychecks are piddly for hired hands like Blanton, whose struggles to get by eventually drive him to a breaking point. Kramer, who’s in her 80s now and seldom publishes new work, has become a name that only serious magazine lovers would recognize, even though she spent decades covering Europe for The New Yorker. That is a shame, because her journalism at its best, as it is in this book, is as textured and compelling as that of her better-known contemporaries, and she masterfully captures life at the edges of America.

Vintage

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson’s masterpiece begins roughly in the middle of the oppressive Jim Crow regime in the South, in the years leading up to and immediately following the Second World War, as three young Black people—a doctor, a sharecropper’s wife, and a fruit picker—flee the region for better jobs and possibly friendlier neighbors in the North or West. Her three characters stand in for the approximately 6 million other Black Americans who made similar journeys as part of the mass exodus that would become known as the Great Migration. Wilkerson spent 15 years writing and reporting her book on the subject, and the effort paid off: The New York Times recently ranked it as the second-best book of the 21st century. What makes the book remarkable is less Wilkerson’s sweeping history of the southern exodus (though she handles this deftly) than her granular reporting on her central characters, who each face unexpected hardships in their adopted new homes. The result is a tale about a too-frequently ignored chapter of American history that continues to shape our country’s present.

It seemed like just another sketch, fated to oblivion or niche fandom at best. When “Washington’s Dream” first aired on Saturday Night Live last October, it lacked the timely setup or spirited hijinks that typically go viral on the program. Then-host Nate Bargatze played General George Washington giving a pivotal pep talk to his weary Revolutionary War troops, inviting them closer to the campfire of his vision. “We fight for a country of our own,” he said, “a new nation, where we choose our own laws.” What followed was a lengthy bit about breaking with the metric system, but thanks to Bargatze’s deadpan delivery—typical of the staid disquisitions and slow pacing his stand-up has become famous for—the scene became an instant classic.

Last night, with Bargatze returning to host during the show’s 50th season, SNL reprised the moment. “Washington’s Dream 2” took place during the Founding Father’s famous crossing of the Delaware River and focused not on numbers but on words. “We fight to control our own destiny, to create our own nation, and to do our own thing with the English language,” Bargatze said, wistfully but tonelessly. That “thing” involved several aspects: creating a name for the number 12 (a dozen) but no other numbers; having two possible spellings for donut and Jeff (“the stupid way with the G”); and educating children about these nuances in a process that begins in kindergarten and continues on to the second level, inexplicably called the “first grade.”

At a time when SNL has been slow to build recurring characters among its cast (“Lisa From Temecula” being one of the few examples from recent seasons), Bargatze’s return as Washington feels notable, putting him in company with other hosts who have unexpectedly struck gold, such as Tom Hanks with David S. Pumpkins. But unlike those hits, Bargatze’s Washington doesn’t hinge on a catchphrase or overt physical presence.

The sketch’s success is surprising. What new jokes could there possibly be about the imperial system? Or about the fact that hamburgers are not, in fact, made of ham? These are well-trodden observations, the kind of bottom-shelf one-liners that comics of yore once made entire careers out of. In the hands of another comic or celebrity host, it wouldn’t work nearly as well, but Bargatze’s personably sedate demeanor nodded to the punch lines’ colorless comedy in ways that sharpened the absurdities of the American way. When the sketch briefly reached for commentary through the perspective of a Black soldier (Kenan Thompson) questioning whether Washington’s talk of “all Americans” included enslaved people, Bargatze, with a sense of timing sharply honed through years of stand-up, simply ignored him. Those protracted silences lent a satirical bite to America’s juxtaposition of moral blindness and proud ridiculousness—but without overwhelming the delightful silliness on display.

Some online commentators were puzzled last year when SNL tapped Bargatze to host. The stand-up from Tennessee had a solid following, but he wasn’t nearly as well known as other A-list comics who had served in that role—performers such as Dave Chappelle and Amy Schumer, whose level of fame is on par with the star actors and athletes who headline most episodes. But considering the success of “Washington’s Dream,” it shouldn’t be so surprising that Bargatze found himself being asked back—and during the monumental 50th season, no less. SNL may not always understand what will resonate with audiences at the time a sketch airs, but it certainly knows when and how to milk a smash.

The episode fittingly ended with a group that arguably launched the era of the SNL viral clips and inaugurated the show’s made-for-the-internet digital skits. Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer—two-thirds of the musical-comedy trio Lonely Island—returned with “Sushi Glory Hole,” a rap song imagining the possibilities of a bathroom-stall aperture that feeds you sushi (as distinct from that other glory hole a few doors down).

After the group’s SNL Digital Short “Lazy Sunday” broke out in 2005, the series became a staple, modernizing the short-film format that Albert Brooks originally developed for SNL and finding the show a new kind of afterlife—and relevancy—on the then-nascent streaming site YouTube. After Lonely Island departed SNL, the show continued producing digital shorts, later hiring Please Don’t Destroy, a group whose web-savvy members had built a YouTube following during the pandemic, to become writers. They seem to have followed in the footsteps of Samberg and his crew, albeit with mixed results.

But last night’s episode highlighted what really works on the show—what lasts beyond the topical hits and alumni cameos that dominate the cold opens—and leaned into classics new and old.