Kamala Harris and the Democrats sold themselves as the party of change, freedom, and not being weird. But many American voters saw them instead as prigs, Stepford wives, morons, and condescending smarty-pants. The Democrats didn’t actually embody all of these shortcomings, separately or simultaneously—it’s difficult to be both smart and dumb, seductive and prudish. I’ve been thinking this past week about how the Democratic Party is seen, and it hit me: The Democratic Party resembles that most American of institutions: the HR department.

Like human resources, the Democrats are a party of norms, procedure, bureaucracy, DEI initiatives, rule following, language policing, and compliance. It is in this way that the Democratic Party feels not so much infuriating and threatening, but just kind of an annoying bummer. In the same way that an HR manager might respond when asked for clarity, Kamala Harris frequently speaks in the lexicon of lawerly avoidance.  

The Democrats banked on the idea that classic mommy-party traits—nurturing, fretting about life’s dangers—would appeal to voters worried about the chaos of Trumpism. Instead, their warnings came across as scolding, while Donald Trump’s wild antics were either embraced by his party as a selling point or dismissed as the harmless by-product of his showmanship. To his followers, Donald J. Trump, CEO, fits a heroic and masculine frame; to his detractors, he is a villain, yet he is always the protagonist.

The cultural space that the HR department occupies, however, carries with it no archetype at all. HR is mainly reactive, and often overly cautious, executing the company’s goals with an extraordinarily low tolerance for risk. At best, this function serves as a careful, mild check on excessive behavior, and at worst, as a fussy and fear-based obstacle that distorts a company’s culture and prevents people from achieving their mission. Trump famously hates to be told what to do; the HR department exists to do just that.

HR departments also have a reputation for being haters of fun. In 2016, the Democrats knew that Trump was seen as the more affable candidate. This wasn’t exactly difficult. Despite her many qualifications, Hillary Clinton had a reputation for being lawyerly, not playful. More recently, a Democratic operative told me that the party had learned its lesson from Clinton’s run, and consciously sought to brand Harris’s latest campaign as joyful. But it’s impossible to convince a skeptic that you’re the party of fun when you’re also the party accused of, and sometimes engaged in, taking beloved things away—gas stoves and cows come to mind—because “it’s good for humanity.”

Michael Scott, Steve Carrell’s character from The Office, once said to Toby Flenderson, the HR representative on the show, “Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.” Michael Scott may be a buffoon, but Toby Flenderson is a killjoy, which is precisely how many voters see the Democrats. They’ve Flendersoned themselves. There is no heroism in HR, just the hemming-in of behavior. The Democrats should want the vote of Michael Scott, and not be satisfied with only the support of rule-following, overachieving Leslie Knope. (And, no, this isn’t about gender: There are plenty of non-Knope, fun-loving, rule-breaking women in the world.)

Democrats will tell you that they are the way they are because they’re trying to help Americans, because they know what’s best. But this was no more convincing to voters than a corporation’s insistence that the HR department exists to help employees. Absolutely no one believes that, of course. HR departments work for the people who hold the power, and they reinforce the company line, whatever that may be. To quote from a headline from the Society for Human Resources Management, “HR Doesn’t Exist to Help Employees.” And in the past few days, you’ve heard echoes of this admission from prominent Democrats, left and center-left alike. The party has turned its back on workers.  

​​Because they are not stupid, workers and voters pick up the whiff of the old okey doke when they are sold policies and procedures they are told are for their own good but are quite obviously most beneficial to those higher up on the org chart. Just as the savvy worker views an intervention from HR with suspicion, any voter who is paying attention will regard a party known for its past class betrayals with great skepticism.   

The average HR professional is likely to be college-educated, younger than the median worker, and wealthier than the average American. She (and usually it’s a she: 73.5 percent of HR professionals are women) is more likely to be Black or Hispanic, which is also true of Democrats. And HR workers are more likely to be Democrats themselves. According to Federal Election Commission filings, political donors listing their profession as human resources made 6,598 donations to Kamala Harris in this election cycle, and only 821 to the Trump campaign.

By means of disclosure, I’ll admit that I have liked every HR person I’ve dealt with in my personal life. They are likable people. They perform a mandated service, which the nonreptilian part of my brain accepts. Occasionally, HR really does serve as a useful resource, helping employees navigate FLSA, ACA, Title VII, FMLA, ADA, and OSHA (all except OSHA being Democratic initiatives). HR is an arm of the corporation, and the depletions of life-force I have suffered in HR dealings cannot be blamed on these representatives personally. I say this as someone who left a job at National Public Radio because I just couldn’t handle filling out my Kronos automated time sheets. I never resented the actual practitioners of HR for being made to implement their mind-numbing training videos, or distributing their jargon-laden rule books, or being the gendarme of liability avoidance. But I don’t want to live under that regime if I don’t have to.

For what it’s worth, I wanted Harris to win, and I wanted her to win because I viewed my choice as one between compliance and chaos. But I can relate on some level to those who rejected her. Campaigns are always run aspirationally, but elections are referendums. For so many Americans, the stultifying small-bore, rules-bound persnicketiness of the Democratic Party became a huge turnoff. People don’t want to feel that they are being told what they can or cannot say. They’re sick of a culture of walking on eggshells. The proof is right there in the election results—and what’s a presidential election, really, if not a quadrennial performance review of an entire nation?

The news came four years ago, at the end of a casual phone call. Bill’s family had always thought it was a freak coincidence that his father and grandfather both had ALS. But at the end of a catch-up, Bill’s brother revealed that he had a diagnosis too. The familial trend, it turned out, was linked to a genetic mutation. That meant Bill might also be at risk for the disease.

An ALS specialist ordered Bill a DNA test. While he waited for results, he applied for long-term-care insurance. If he ever developed ALS, Bill told me, he wanted to ensure that the care he would need as his nerve cells died and muscles atrophied wouldn’t strain the family finances. When Bill found out he had the mutation, he shared the news with his insurance agent, who dealt him another blow: “I don’t expect you to be approved,” he remembers her saying.

Bill doesn’t have ALS. He’s a healthy 60-year-old man who spends his weekends building his dream home by hand. A recent study of mutations like his suggests that his genetics increase his chances of developing ALS by about 25 percent, on average. Most ALS cases aren’t genetic at all. And yet, Bill felt like he was being treated as if he was already sick. (Bill asked to be identified by his first name only, because he hasn’t disclosed his situation to his employer and worried about facing blowback at work too.)

What happened to Bill, and to dozens of other people whose experiences have been documented by disease advocates and on social media, is perfectly legal. Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.  

For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted.

When scientists were mapping the immense complexity of the human genome around the turn of the 21st century, many thought that most diseases would eventually be traced to individual genes. Consequently, researchers worried that people might, for example, get fired because of their genetics; around the same time, a federal research lab was sued by its employees for conducting genetic tests for sickle-cell disease on prospective hires without their explicit consent. In 2008, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was signed into law, ensuring that employers couldn’t decide to hire or fire you, and health insurers couldn’t decide whether to issue a policy, based on DNA. But lawmakers carved out a host of exceptions. Insurers offering life, long-term-care, or disability insurance could take DNA into account. Too many high-risk people in an insurance pool, they argued, could raise prices for everyone. Those exceptions are why an insurer was able to deny Bill a long-term-care policy.

[Read: The loopholes in the law prohibiting genetic discrimination]

Cases like Bill’s are exactly what critics of the consumer-genetic-testing industry feared when millions of people began spitting into test tubes. These cases have never been tallied up or well documented. But I found plenty of examples by canvassing disease-advocacy organizations and social-media communities for ALS, breast cancer, and Huntington’s disease. Lisa Schlager, the vice president of public policy at the hereditary-cancer advocacy group FORCE, told me she is collecting accounts of discrimination in life, long-term-care, and disability insurance to assess the extent of the problem; so far, she has about 40. A man Schlager connected me with, whose genetic condition, Lynch syndrome, increases the risk for several cancers, had his life-insurance premium increased and coverage decreased; several other providers denied him a policy altogether. Kelly Kashmer, a 42-year-old South Carolina resident, told me she was denied life insurance in 2013 after learning that she had a harmful version of the BRCA2 gene. One woman I found via Reddit told me she had never tested her own DNA, but showed me documents that demonstrate she was still denied policies—because, she said, her mom had a concerning gene. (Some of the people I spoke with, like Bill, requested not to be identified in order to protect their medical privacy.)

Studies have shown that people seek out additional insurance when they have increased genetic odds of becoming ill or dying. “Life insurers carefully evaluate each applicant’s health, determining premiums and coverage based on life expectancy,” Jan Graeber, a senior health actuary for the American Council of Life Insurers, said in a statement. “This process ensures fairness for both current and future policyholders while supporting the company’s long-term financial stability.” But it also means people might avoid seeking out potentially lifesaving health information. Research has consistently found that concerns about discrimination are one of the most cited reasons that people avoid taking DNA tests.

For some genetically linked diseases, such as ALS and Huntington’s disease, knowing you have a harmful mutation does not enable you to prevent the potential onset of disease. Sometimes, though, knowing about a mutation can decrease odds of severe illness or death. BRCA mutations, for example, give someone as much as an 85 percent chance of developing breast cancer, but evidence shows that testing women for the mutations has helped reduce the rate of cancer deaths by encouraging screenings and prophylactic surgeries that could catch or prevent disease. Kashmer told me that her first screening after she discovered her BRCA2 mutation revealed that she already had breast cancer; had she not sought a genetic test, she may have gotten a policy, but would have been a much worse bet for the insurer. She’s now been cancer-free for 11 years, but she said she hasn’t bothered to apply for a policy again.

[Read: Remember that DNA you gave 23andMe?]

Even employers, which must adhere to GINA, might soon be able to hire or fire based on certain genetic risk factors. Laura Hercher, a genetic counselor and director of research at the Sarah Lawrence College Human Genetics Program, told me that some researchers are now arguing that having two copies of the APOE4 mutation, which gives people about a 60 percent chance of developing Alzheimer’s, is equivalent to a Stage Zero of the disease. If having a gene is considered equivalent to a diagnosis, do GINA’s protections still apply? The Affordable Care Act prevents health insurers from discriminating based on preexisting conditions, but not employers and other types of insurers. (The ACA may change dramatically under the coming Trump presidency anyway.) And the Americans With Disabilities Act might not apply to the gray area between what might be viewed as an early manifestation of a disease and the stage when it’s considered a disability. FORCE and other advocacy groups—including the ALS Association and the Michael J. Fox Foundation—as well as members of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, are working in a few states to pass laws that close gaps left by GINA, as Florida did in 2020, but so far they have been mostly unsuccessful.

Genetic testing has only just become common enough in the U.S. that insurers might bother asking about it, Hercher said. Recently, groups like Schlager’s have been hearing more and more anecdotes. “People are so worried about genetic discrimination that they are failing to sign up for research studies or declining medically recommended care because of the concerns of what could happen to their insurance,” Anya Prince, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, told me. Carolyn Applegate, a genetic counselor in Maryland, told me that when patients come to her worried about a hereditary disease, she typically advises them to line up all the extra coverage they might need first—then hand over their DNA to a lab.

So far, these unintended consequences of genetic testing seem to be manifesting for people with risk for rare diseases linked to single genes, which, combined, affect about 6 percent of the global population, according to one estimate. But the leading killers—heart disease, diabetes, and the like—are influenced by a yet unknown number of genes, along with lifestyle and environmental factors, such as diet, stress, and air quality. Researchers have tried to make sense of this complex interplay of genes through polygenic risk scores, which use statistical modeling to predict that someone has, say, a slightly elevated chance of developing Alzeheimer’s. Many experts think these scores have limited predictive power, but “in the future, genetic tests will be even more predictive and even more helpful and even more out there,” Prince said. Already, if you look deep enough, almost everyone’s genome registers some risk.

[Read: What happens when you’re convinced you have bad genes]

In aggregate, such information can be valuable to companies, Nicholas Papageorge, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Insurers want to sell policies at as high a price as possible while also reducing their exposure; knowing even a little bit more about someone’s odds of one day developing a debilitating or deadly disease might help one company win out over the competition. As long as the predictions embedded in polygenic risk scores come true at least a small percentage of the time, they could help insurers make more targeted decisions about who to cover and what to charge them. As we learn more about what genes mean for everyone’s health, insurance companies could use that information to dictate coverage for ever more people.

Bill still doesn’t know whether he will ever develop ALS. The average age of onset is 40 to 60, but many people don’t show symptoms until well into their 70s. Without long-term-care insurance, Bill might not be able to afford full-time nursing care if he someday needs it. People who do develop ALS become unable to walk or talk or chew as the disease progresses. “Moving people to the bathroom, changing the sheets, changing the bedpans,” Bill said—“I dread the thought of burdening my wife with all of those things.”

Cases like Bill’s could soon become more common. Because scientists’ understanding of the human genome is still evolving, no one can predict all of the potential consequences of decoding it. As more information is mined from the genome, interest in its secrets is sure to grow beyond risk-averse insurers. If consumer-facing DNA-testing companies such as 23andMe change their long-standing privacy policies, go bankrupt, or are sold to unscrupulous buyers, more companies could have access to individuals’ genetic risk profiles too. (23andMe told me that it does not share customer data with insurance companies and its CEO has said she is not currently open to third-party acquisition offers.) Papageorge told me he could imagine, say, scammers targeting people at risk for Alzheimer’s, just as they often target older people who may fall for a ploy out of confusion. All of us have glitches somewhere in our genome—the question is who will take advantage of that information.