Right around the time that Donald Trump was arriving at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress—the longest such speech, it would turn out, in the history of the presidency—Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator tasked with delivering the Democratic Party’s rebuttal, was telling me all the things she wouldn’t be talking about.
“You’ve gotta say this! You’ve gotta say that!” Slotkin said, mimicking the outside voices that began bombarding her office moments after her selection was announced last week. “I’m not gonna make my speech a Christmas tree of every single issue of the Democratic Party,” the senator added, shaking her head, “because that’s what helped get us in this position in the first place.”
I have known Slotkin since 2018, when she first ran for Congress as an ex-CIA officer attempting to flip a safe Republican seat in southeast Michigan. Having covered her rise in the years since—including embedding with her operation during the 2020 campaign—I knew she possessed fundamental, long-festering concerns about the Democratic Party’s brand. Slotkin feared that, to the extent that Democrats stood for anything in the eyes of the electorate, it was a blur of abstract, ideologically charged activism that was hopelessly detached from kitchen-table concerns.
Last November, even as she won her own race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Slotkin’s worst-case scenario came to pass. Trump reclaimed the White House—this time with wholly subservient Republican majorities in Congress—and Democrats were heading deep into a cold, dark political wilderness. A fight over the future of the party was imminent; when Slotkin, barely six weeks on the job, was chosen to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s prime-time address, it seemed likely that the first shots would soon be fired. This is how I came to be chatting with Slotkin yesterday, in the hours before the biggest moment of her political career.
A week earlier, when she was summoned to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, Slotkin wondered whether she was in trouble. She is one of several freshmen in the Democratic caucus who came over from the House, where intra-party politics are a comparative blood sport, and she thought maybe she’d already ruffled some feathers. If she had, Schumer approved: He wanted Slotkin to speak for the party in prime time. She recalls feeling stunned, then honored, and finally somewhat mortified. “It’s typically thought of,” she told me, “as a cursed speech.” Slotkin asked for the day to think it over before ultimately accepting Schumer’s offer.
Escaping quickly thereafter to her family’s farm in Holly, Michigan, the senator holed up with a few trusted staffers to begin preparations. Two decisions needed to be made: substance and setting. Slotkin had no shortage of metaphor-rich locations from which she could stage the event: her farm, representing everyman roots; nearby Detroit, with its diversity and manufacturing iconography; the Canadian border, to underscore the chaos being unleashed by Trump’s new tariffs. But the senator never truly entertained any of these possibilities. To her, the questions of substance and setting were one and the same. Slotkin wanted to showcase a message that was built to do one thing—win tough elections—and that meant going to a place where she’d done just that.
Driving the main drag of Wyandotte, Michigan (population: 24,057), yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the bait shops and dive bars and white dudes with tattoos on their necks. This place would appear, to the typical Democratic consultant parachuting into its downtown, like a lost cause. One of several manufacturing villages clustered along the Detroit River just south of the city, Wyandotte is the kind of place—working class, culturally conservative, racially homogenous—that has turned new shades of red in the Trump era. And yet, this past November, both Trump and Slotkin won here: Each of the candidates carried seven of the city’s 10 precincts, a rare example of ticket splitting in one of the nation’s premier battleground states.
Slotkin’s formula has never been a secret. Her campaign for Senate last year—essentially a scaled-up version of her three heavily contested and tactically celebrated campaigns for the House—was built around one organizing theme: the middle class. Everything she talks about, be it health-care costs or the January 6 insurrection, comes back to the economic security of everyday Americans. Slotkin argues that the surest way to heal the country—to defuse identitarian struggles, pacify the culture wars, uncoil our hypertense politics—is by restoring the confidence of working families. When people feel assured of their financial welfare and of their children’s future, she insists, they become far less receptive to the type of strongman demagoguery that thrives on scapegoats and feasts on anxiety.
[Anne Applebaum: The Democrats’ patriotic vanguard]
This approach sets Slotkin apart from many of her fellow Democrats, though the difference is better measured by degree than kind. She is quite familiar—as a woman, as a Jew, as the daughter of a woman who came out late in life as a lesbian—with the plight of certain constituencies within her party’s coalition. It’s simply a matter of emphasis: Slotkin sees electoral success as the path to addressing America’s injustices, not the other way around.
This is what brought her to a sleepy event space in Wyandotte (the owners, fearing political retaliation, requested that I not reveal the name of the business). It’s also what brought Slotkin to reject all of the suggestions she received about her speech: that she should use it to take up the cause of USAID workers, of undocumented immigrants, of the transgender community, of the environment, of the Education Department, and so on. The problem isn’t with any of these particular causes, she said; the problem is that everyone seemed focused more on the people she might name in her remarks and less on the people who would be at home listening to them.
“There are a lot of people, including in this town, who will never scream on the internet, who will never go to a rally, who will never get involved in partisan politics, but just want their government to run,” Slotkin said. “I’m speaking to them—not to just the hardcore base of the party. And if they wanted someone to speak to the hardcore base of the party, they picked the wrong gal.”
There would be no performative shout-outs, no box-checking patronage. As the envoy for a party that has long operated as a syndicate of identity-based advocacy groups, Slotkin wanted to try something different. Charged with countering 100 minutes of Trump’s trademark fanfaronade, the senator aimed to use the fewest words possible to speak to the largest number of Americans she could. Slotkin would talk, for just 10 minutes, about bringing prices down, holding American values up, and remaining civically engaged.
[David A. Graham: The Democrats’ disjointed rebellion]
None of this would seem a revolutionary approach to rhetoric. Still, it was fraught with risk all the same: Democrats “have been on their heels since the election,” Slotkin told me, and the party faithful have been agitating since January 20 for someone, anyone, to stand up to Trump. The announcement of Slotkin had already been met with grumbling from progressives online; anything short of oratorical firebolts would confirm the complacent, feckless approach of the D.C. governing class.
Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team’s resistance to Trump’s first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags—all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives—Slotkin saw on Tuesday night the opportunity to set a different tone.
Naturally, not everyone was thrilled with what they heard. “Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, capturing some of the criticism online. “Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party, because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.”
[Tom Nichols: Democrats are acting too normal]
I suspect that Slotkin might cringe at being lumped in with “Democrats in general.” In truth, I’ve noticed a certain unease she feels with her partisan identity. She struggles to mask her contempt for far-left organizations; she has little patience for colleagues who, she once told me, run Very Online campaigns in safely blue districts that blind them to the reality of what it takes to earn a ticket split from Republicans.
Watching Tuesday evening as she rehearsed in front of staffers, I noticed that only once did she identify herself as a Democrat—in the final line of the speech. As we spoke a few minutes later, in a cramped corridor just beyond the set, I asked whether that was intentional.
“I think, at least in this part of the world, there’s real skepticism about Democrats. That they’re weak—” she paused, perhaps noticing her usage of the third-person plural.
Slotkin continued: “That we’re too careful … That we’re …” She trailed off.
“Weird?” I asked.
“Weird,” she confirmed. Slotkin rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m just trying to be the opposite of that. You know, my campaign motto was ‘Team Normal.’ And I think that’s still what I’m trying to do. And I think that that represents a bigger part of the country than people actually know.”
The president’s speech would not begin for nearly an hour, but already I could detect a certain angst in Slotkin’s voice. It had nothing to do with her own speech; she had run through it half a dozen times that day, pausing and tinkering and restarting until she knew it was fully cooked. Instead, like a family member preemptively contrite for what their relatives might say or do at the Thanksgiving table, Slotkin betrayed an apprehension about how her fellow Democrats might respond to Trump.
As it turned out, she was right to worry. Between all the awkward and impotent demonstrations—Representative Al Green of Texas angrily waving his cane at the president; some pink-clad lawmakers protesting silently with popsicle-stick signs; others staging a disordered walkout during the speech—verdicts were rendered about the party’s pitiable state before its messenger could even say her piece.
Not that Slotkin paid that verdict much mind. After her speech, the senator and her team were headed down the street to a Teamster bar, and Slotkin told me the highest praise they hoped to hear from the owner and his patrons was: “That sounded pretty normal.”
Perceptions of her party were never going to shift in one night. Slotkin came into Tuesday accepting, if not explicitly addressing, the realities of the brutal two-front war in which she is now a high-profile combatant: opposing Trump’s executive and legislative blitzkrieg while simultaneously battling with other Democrats who have their own visions for returning the party to power.
Slotkin insists that she isn’t “one of the 100 people” preparing to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2028. She was chosen to speak Tuesday night for a more compelling reason: She wins, time after time, in places where other members of her party simply cannot. If they want to model her success at the ballot box, Slotkin told me, they should stop ignoring half the country.
“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” Slotkin said. “If it did, Kamala Harris would be president.”