Democrats will spend the next four years debating why the party suffered a sweeping defeat last week. Maybe it was inflation, or the culture wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that drove voters in every swing state to the Republican presidential nominee. At least one theory, however, can already be put to rest: Elon Musk did not “steal” the election for Donald Trump.

In the weeks and months leading up to the election, Republican officials and operatives architected a second “Stop the Steal” campaign, ready to deploy should their presidential candidate lose. Musk laid much of this groundwork himself, for instance by aggressively promoting the false narrative that the Democrats had brought foreigners into the United States to vote illegally, among other falsehoods. Yet following Trump’s election, it was the left sowing doubts: “#donotconcedekamala” and “Trump cheated” both trended on X. One post on Threads read, “20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own,” and pointed to Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vladimir Putin as likely culprits. “If anyone could fund a massive election fraud scheme it’s Elon musk. He also has motive,” Dean Obeidallah, a progressive radio host, posted to Threads and X on Friday. Such posts have been viewed tens of millions of times.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

There is no evidence to support these claims—but they’re still fundamentally different from the original “Stop the Steal” movement. Democratic leadership, for example, is not repeating these conspiracy theories, nor is there a coordinated attempt to amplify, validate, or act on them. (Obeidallah himself eventually clarified his position, writing on his Substack yesterday that although skepticism is healthy, “there is currently no credible, objective evidence of fraud or any other criminal conduct” suggesting that the outcome was illegitimate.) In fact, the 2024 election was by all accounts extremely secure. There is no evidence that foreign interference affected the results, nor did any domestic conspiracy materially hurt election administration. “Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement on November 6. “We have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.” Top officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, all key battlegrounds, have said the election was safe, free, and fair.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from implying otherwise. Musk, as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and an extremely online enemy of the extremely online left, has become an obvious target. Maybe the world’s richest man hacked the election with his Starlink satellite network; maybe Democratic ballots were systematically not counted; even if the mechanism is unclear, the math isn’t mathing. Even if such suspicions are raised in good faith, they are counterproductive. Musk—who is now close enough to Trump to have joined him on a recent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—is dangerous. His willingness to amplify brazen lies in order to help advance the outcome he wanted was on display for months leading up to the election. But the misinformation about him or any major Republican figure stealing the election obscures and diminishes the actual threat at hand: The authoritarian bent in American media, business, and politics that Musk represents has profoundly warped many Americans’ political discourse, trust in one another, and grip on reality, all without needing to mess with any ballots.

Believing that Musk rigged this November’s outcome has become, at least for some, easier than accepting the truth: Trump, an openly racist and misogynistic candidate who tried to overthrow the government and has said he wants generals like those of the Third Reich, just won the Electoral College and is poised to claim the popular vote in the United States. Yet fantasies about election fraud are dangerous this time around, not because they will actively undermine or mount a physical threat to democracy, but because they blunt, and even willfully ignore, reality. This is Trump’s party now, everyone knows it, pundits should know that everyone knows it, and the GOP still won back control of the Senate and will likely claim a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. As of Friday, Trump had improved his vote margin in more than nine out of every 10 counties with near-complete results, including many progressive strongholds. Fixating on fraud disregards the material factors that brought the nation and its citizens to this choice, and detracts from the daunting work that must be done to recover.

[Read: Voters just didn’t believe in Biden’s economy]

And Elon Musk, “hacking” aside, played a substantial role in Trump’s reelection campaign by spreading and normalizing a wide range of hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories. He has been the spearhead of a growing segment of the ultra-wealthy technocratic class that rapidly coalesced around Trump this year. The far-right rhetoric about voter fraud that Musk has amplified helped trigger a wave of death threats against election officials. He is trying to single-handedly replace objective sources of information and reporting with his white-supremacist social network, degrading America’s information environment to the point that it has become unclear how, exactly, to change anyone’s mind about anything.

It is not surprising that suspicion about the election has cropped up. Conspiracy theories frequently emerge around election time, and they have for decades. These Democrats are not being uniquely, or even especially, whiny or hypocritical. Before Trump decried a “steal” in 2020, Democrats blamed Russian trolls and Facebook in 2016. (In that case, to be clear, U.S. intelligence officials did find evidence of Russian interference—but not evidence that it was what decisively swung the outcome in Trump’s favor.) Four years prior, Trump called Barack Obama’s victory a “total sham,” and in 2008 John McCain’s campaign was reportedly collecting reports of “Election Day irregularities” before his overwhelming defeat. Both times, a poll found that roughly half of Republicans thought the election was stolen. In 2004, some Democrats blamed shenanigans in Ohio for John Kerry’s exit-poll-defying loss, and in 2000 the culprit was then–Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s infamous “hanging chads.”

Yet Trump’s political foes should be striving to prove that cognitive flexibility, grounded in reality, is possible. Anyone who believes in democracy, registered Democrat or not, should accept the results—and, instead of retroactively fixating on polling and data, focus all their energy on the economic, social, political, and other aspects of people’s lives that caused this outcome, and on how to make those people’s lives better.

The Biden administration passed $3 trillion of legislation aimed at revitalizing the American economy and fostering green, equitable, “middle-out” growth. It sent checks to voters, canceled student-loan debt, made direct deposits to parents, showered the country in tax credits, and financed the construction of roads, transmission lines, and bridges. Kamala Harris ran as Joe Biden’s successor in the midst of what some financial analysts described as the greatest economy ever, characterized by strong wage growth, low unemployment, falling inequality, and world-beating GDP.

Harris’s loss has spurred finger-pointing, soul-searching, and garment-rending. For years, thinkers on the left had urged the White House to not just talk about popular issues but also deliver on them—a concept referred to by wonks as deliverism. The Biden-Harris team embraced the idea, and many staffers believed they’d delivered.

Deliverism is just a long word for one of the most basic tenets of electoral politics, buttressed by decades of studies as well as by common sense: Make voters richer, win more of them. Why, if Biden did that, did the Democrats lose?

[Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose.]

“When the economy does well for most households, and when programs help create security and opportunity for more people to participate in that economy, political rewards follow,” Mark Schmitt of New America wrote the week before the election, when polls showed the contest as close but likely lost for the liberal side. “What I’m looking for in the 2024 election is some indication of whether this feedback loop still works at all, and if not, whether we can ever hope to recreate some connection” between policy and politics.

Democrats may be tempted now to answer in the negative. But there is a strong case to be made that the 2024 election demonstrates that the feedback loop between policy choices and electoral outcomes does in fact endure—even if it is weakening and weirding. The issue is not that deliverism failed. It is that Democrats convinced themselves that they had delivered, without listening to the voters telling them they had not.

If you look at the headline economic statistics, Donald Trump’s broad-based and definitive win makes little sense. The jobless rate has been below 4.5 percent for three years. The inflation rate has been subdued for more than a year. Real wages—meaning wages adjusted for inflation—are climbing for all workers, and particularly the lowest-income workers. Inequality is easing. The stock market is on fire. Productivity is strong, and start-ups are booming. The United States’ GDP growth rate is double that of the European Union.

The Biden administration helped create that economy. With a narrow legislative window, the administration nevertheless passed a gigantic COVID stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan. It sent $1,400 checks to millions of families, provided thousands of dollars to parents to defray child-care costs, and shored up local-government coffers.

Then it passed a trio of heavy-infrastructure bills aimed at reshoring the semiconductor industry, transitioning businesses and homes to green energy, and fixing up transportation infrastructure across the country. Biden staffers talked about the trio as a kind of New Deal Lite. Folks might “one day come to remember this as the Big Deal,” Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary and eternal political hopeful, told The New Yorker this past summer. “Its bigness is the defining factor.”

Yet one could select other defining factors, among them the infrastructure bills’ lack of easy-to-grasp deliverables. I cover economic policy. I would be hard-pressed to explain what constitutes the Big Deal without putting someone to sleep; when I summarize the legislation, I often say “green-energy stuff.” Moreover, many of those deliverables were not instantaneous; today, it is hard, though certainly not impossible, to point to projects that Bidenomics built. “Much of the work we’ve done is already being felt by the American people, but the vast majority of it will be felt over the next ten years,” Biden said on X last week.

The much bigger issue has to do with the Biden-Harris administration’s social policies and the economy it fostered. To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.

But headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.

During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

Government transfers buoyed families early in the Biden administration. But they contributed to inflation, and much of the money went away in the second half of Biden’s term. The food-stamp boost, the extended child tax credit, the big unemployment-insurance payments—each expired. And the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.

Interest rates were a problem too. The mortgage rate more than doubled during the Biden-Harris years, making credit-card balances, car payments, and homes unaffordable. A family purchasing a $400,000 apartment with 20 percent down would pay roughly $2,500 a month today versus $1,800 three years ago.

Indeed, the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.

Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?

A better economy might not have delivered the gains that Democrats once could have relied on. Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.

But I would not assume that we are in a post-material world just yet. “You got to tell people in plain, simple, straightforward language what it is you’re doing to help,” Biden said after passing his sweeping COVID rescue bill. “You have to be able to tell a story, tell the story of what you’re about to do and why it matters, because it’s going to make a difference in the lives of millions of people and in very concrete, specific ways.”

The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.

No wonder voters decided to see what Donald Trump might deliver.

Democrats in mourning over Donald Trump’s victory can comfort themselves with the fact that, if the United States follows the pattern of other democracies that elect wannabe strongmen, their party should have a very good chance to win back the White House in 2028. The same cannot be said for the United States Senate.

With very few votes left to count in last week’s election, the Republican Party appears to have flipped four Senate seats—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Montana—giving it a presumptive 53–47 majority. On the surface, that outcome may not seem dramatic, and in fact represents a fine performance for Democrats. The party had no realistic pickup opportunities this election cycle. Meanwhile, it had to defend three seats in red states and five seats in swing states. Democratic incumbents lost all the red-state races, but won four of the five purple-state contests: in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all states that voted for Trump.

The real problem for Democrats is that the 2024 map was only slightly harsher than usual. Going forward, every Senate election is going to be brutal. The institution is so skewed in favor of the current Republican coalition that Democrats need at least a few red-state seats to win consistent majorities. Now they have none.

The partisan divide of the 50 states is not an immutable fact of nature, but here’s how things look for the foreseeable future: 24 states are solidly red; 17 are solidly blue. Over the past three presidential cycles, only six states have swung back and forth: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Throw in New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Minnesota—where Trump or Kamala Harris won by about four points or less—and America has nine purple states in total, representing 18 Senate seats. To hold the chamber, Republicans need to win just two of those seats if they control the presidency, and three if they don’t. Democrats need to sweep almost all of them. They must pitch perfect game after perfect game to have a shot at even the narrowest majorities.

And even a perfect game will not be enough in the 2026 midterms. That year’s map features just two realistic pickup opportunities: Maine and North Carolina. Democrats, meanwhile, will need to defend seats in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Unless they pull off a major upset, they can at most cut the GOP majority to 51. In that best-case scenario, they will then need to flip either North Carolina or Wisconsin in 2028 without losing seats in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, or New Hampshire. Barring any unexpected deaths or retirements, Democrats can afford to lose only one swing-seat race over the next four years to have a shot at 50 senators.

[Rogé Karma: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

Anything short of that means that, even if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, that president will be immediately hamstrung. Even a narrow GOP majority will make it impossible for, say, President Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer to pass liberal legislation. They would instead, from the moment they’re sworn in, have to contend with congressional investigations, government shutdowns, and debt-ceiling hostage negotiations.

Their troubles would hardly end there. A GOP Senate majority would slow-walk or even block a Democratic president’s Cabinet nominations and personnel appointments. An administration without administrators would be unable to issue new regulations and rules. Whatever policies the administration did manage to make would then be tied up by an ever more hostile judiciary. Without control of the Senate, Democratic presidents will struggle to get nominees confirmed at even the district and circuit levels. They can forget about the Supreme Court.

Democrats have been aware of their Senate problem for years. That’s why, during the first Trump term, many liberals urged the party to prioritize scrapping the filibuster and making Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states as soon as it had the opportunity. But the opportunity never truly arrived, because the Democrats’ brief trifecta under Joe Biden depended on moderate senators, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to entertain any such hardball tactics. Addressing the Democrats’ Senate problem legislatively would appear to require a more substantial Democratic Senate majority, which is precisely the issue.

And so, if they are to expand their options in the Senate, Democrats will have to find some way to broaden their appeal in the states where voters seem to have irrevocably abandoned them. That is not a new idea, and it is not an idea that anyone has yet figured out how to implement. But it is the only option. If Democrats don’t figure out how to compete in more states, Trump and his allies won’t need to dismantle the free press, imprison their enemies, or overturn election results to ensure perpetual GOP dominance. The basic math of the Senate will do that for them.

Back in Little League, I used to think I was a pretty good baseball player. I hit a bunch of home runs and thought I could play in the majors—until about seventh grade. That’s when I stepped to the plate against a pitcher from Warren Jr. High School who could throw a curveball.

His first pitch appeared to be coming straight for my head. I hit the dirt and then peeked up just in time to see the ball break perfectly over the plate. Humbling! The umpire called it a strike, a bunch of Warren players laughed at me, and I would eventually go on to become one of those writers who uses too many sports analogies.

Embarrassing as that was, the decisiveness of my defeat dealt a fast end to my delusional diamond dreams. I never learned to hit a curveball but did take a tidy lesson from the experience: When life offers clarity, take the gift.

Democrats should take the gift.

If nothing else, the party’s electoral battering last week should provide a clarity that Democrats clearly lacked before. They were shocked by the results. I knew a bunch who were indeed predicting a rout, but with Kamala Harris doing the routing. “This could be glorious,” a Democratic operative friend said to me last weekend after the now-ingloriously wrong Des Moines Register poll that showed Harris leading Trump by three points in deep-red Iowa was released. Trump wound up winning the state by 13 points.

At minimum, the prevailing sentiment was that the election would be very close. Pundit consensus seemed to place the race at the cliché junction of “razor-thin” and “wafer-thin” (personally I thought it would be “paper-thin,” but then, I was an outlier). The contest, many predicted, might take many days to call. Election lawyers swarmed battleground states. I don’t recall speaking with more than one or two Democrats in the final weeks who foresaw the ultimate beatdown the party suffered.

Then came the knee-buckling curveball that electorates have a knack for throwing.

“We at least have some precision here with this result,” Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me. “There’s really no ambiguity in what voters said, at least at the presidential level.” This can save time and focus the collective mind on the larger problems that confront Democrats.

No one is debating whether it would have helped if, say, Bad Bunny had endorsed Harris sooner. In other words, last week’s drubbing was not conducive to small-bore second-guessing; no use dwelling in the margins when the margins are, in fact, so conclusive.

This was not the case after the defeat that Democrats suffered at Trump’s hand eight years ago. That election was much closer. It lent itself to strategic quibbling (“if only Hillary Clinton had spent more time in Wisconsin”), numeric hypotheticals (“if only X number of votes in X number of states had swung the other way”), and systemic laments (damn Electoral College). All of this amounted to the political equivalent of In any other ballpark, that’s a home run.

And it distracted from—even muddled—whatever lessons that loss could have provided.

Partly as a result, Democrats engaged in no real reckoning after 2016. Essentially they became a party that defined itself in opposition to Trump, just as Republicans have been defined in submission to him. This probably made sense for Democrats in the short term. Trump’s presidency, his post-presidency, and the lame knockoffs that he inspired gave Democrats plenty of material to work with. They enjoyed good midterm results (2018, 2022) and picked Joe Biden as a winning stopgap candidate in 2020.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Biden never got the “stopgap” memo. The obstinate octogenarian insisted on running again until it was way too late for someone else to enter, putting Harris and her party in a terrible position.

Bewildered Democrats are casting blame, and Biden seems to be catching the most. But the recriminations will subside soon enough, and the faster Democrats can embrace the clarity of this moment, the better.

“This has more of a feel of wiping the slate clean,” Pete Giangreco, a Democratic campaign strategist, told me. “Sure, you can maybe argue whether Josh Shapiro as the running mate could have helped with Pennsylvania, but who cares? It wouldn’t have mattered. It makes it easier to focus on what matters.”

Dingell says that what matters most—and what the 2024 results expose—is that working-class voters, across racial lines, are put off by the Democratic Party. This should be apparent not just from the defeats of last Tuesday but also the successes. She mentioned two of her Democratic House colleagues who have been elected and reelected in treacherous swing districts: Jared Golden of Maine, who holds a slight edge (about 700 votes) in one of the few races in the country that has yet to be called, and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who appears to have narrowly retained her rural Washington State district, and who has criticized national Democratic leaders for their inattention to working-class voter concerns.

“I think we just need to go out and learn and listen for a while,” Dingell told me.

First, listen to the results: They were not close. Trump won all seven battleground states and the popular vote; made big gains with Black and Hispanic voters, as well as with young people; and even polled 52 percent of white women. Republicans took the Senate and kept the House.

As it turned out, Democrats were much closer to delusion than the reality that voters would impose. So, by all means, digest the postmortems, posit the theories, and engage in the various “conversations we need to have” that Democrats and pundits keep prescribing. Better yet, skip those.

“Here’s what we know: We don’t know anything,” Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show on Election Night. “We’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know shit.”

There is a simple humility in that, something to sit with back in the dugout.