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A few hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders released a fiery statement saying, in part, that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He concluded that those concerned about democracy need to have some “very serious political discussions.”

The statement drew both praise and pushback from others in his party. But the serious discussions Sanders warned about have indeed begun over the past week. Plenty of blame has been tossed around: Democrats have pointed to the economy, identity politics, Joe Biden, racism, sexism, elitism, Liz Cheney, the war in Gaza, and much more as factors in Trump’s resounding victory. Democrats will surely continue to dissect why voters moved to the right in almost every county, as one early analysis showed. Meanwhile, many Democrats are already sharing their vision for where the party should go next. Some are vowing to fight Trump at the state level, and others are pledging to find common ground with his administration. Those on the party’s left, including Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seem to be using this moment to push the party to embrace more progressive policies that serve the working class.

And the soul-searching about how to change a party overrun by elitism has begun. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, in a long thread on X yesterday, outlined what he saw as the party’s major problems, which included fealty to a higher-income voter base and how the party “skips past the way people are feeling … and straight to uninspiring solutions … that do little to actually upset the status quo of who has power and who doesn’t.” Murphy’s prescriptions included: “Embrace populism. Build a big tent. Be less judgmental.” Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a car-repair-shop owner who won a very tight race against a MAGA Republican in Washington State, said, “We need people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches to run for office.” It’s not that lawyers should not be in Congress, she added, but “we need to change our idea of who is credentialed and capable of holding elected office.”

Other Democrats have blamed ultraprogressive messaging for playing a role in the Democrats’ loss, and suggested that the party needs to move on from that approach. Representative Tom Suozzi, who recently won the seat formerly occupied by George Santos on Long Island, told The New York Times that “the Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left.” Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx, told my colleague Michael Powell that “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” which, Torres argued, “alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’” To move forward, he suggested that Democrats can’t assume they “can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

Messaging isn’t everything, but given the Democrats’ current position in Washington, it will be key in the years ahead: Facing a probable Republican trifecta—the GOP has won back control of the Senate, and is just four winnable districts shy of a majority in the House—that will stymie their ability to effect legislation, much of what Democrats can do in the years to come boils down to their messaging (and may rely on a new generation of messengers). As Representative Dean Phillips—the only elected Democrat who mounted a primary bid to unseat President Biden this year—put it when asked by a Washington Post reporter what the party must do to reinvent itself, “We have good product and terrible packaging and distribution.”

As the Democratic Party starts to identify which lessons to take from last week’s outcome, they’ll be reckoning with the gaps between presidential and downballot results: Many Democratic Senate candidates did well in swing states where Trump won the presidential race, which has prompted questions about whether the Democrats’ problem is more of a top-of-the-ticket one. And, for all the discussion coming from high-profile party members, reform for the Democrats may actually happen in a way that’s more “organic” rather than centrally directed, Michael told me—including momentum originating in local campaigns. “I suspect if there’s a change, it will come bottom-up and in fits and starts,” he added. For example: “Bernie Sanders in 2016 was dismissed by all serious or self-serious political writers and politicians, and nearly changed the face of the party. I suspect in smaller form that’s how change—if it comes about—will emerge.”

Related:

Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity The cumulative toll of Democrats’ delusions

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning. The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity, Helen Lewis argues. Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now.

Today’s News

Trump is expected to announce that Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser and former aide, will serve as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Trump said that Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director and a former Border Patrol agent, will be appointed as his “border czar,” with a focus on maintaining the country’s borders and deporting undocumented immigrants. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York is Trump’s selection to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Her nomination is likely to be confirmed by the incoming Republican-led Senate.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The Democrats never truly addressed the cost-of-living crisis, Annie Lowrey writes. The Wonder Reader: Sleep is a universal human need, but there’s no universal solution to struggling with it, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Lucy Murray Willis / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

To Find Alien Intelligence, Start With the Mountains

By Adam Frank

The Cambrian explosion [is] the most rapid, creative period of evolution in the history of our planet. In the blink of a geologic eye (hundreds of millions of years), all the basic biology needed to sustain complex organisms was worked out, and the paths to all modern life, ranging from periwinkles to people, branched off. Mega sharks hunted in the oceans, pterodactyls took to the skies, and velociraptors terrorized our mouselike mammalian ancestors on land.

What drove this instantaneous, epic change in evolution has been one of the great unsolved problems of evolutionary theory for decades.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

There really is a deep state. Why did Latinos vote for Trump? The Trump-whim economy is here. Trump is handing China a golden opportunity on climate.

Culture Break

Rosalind O'Connor / NBC / Getty

Watch. Saturday Night Live isn’t bothering with civility anymore, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Read (or skip). Lili Anolik’s new book compares the authors and frenemies Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, but its fixation on their rivalry obscures the complicated truth, Lynn Steger Strong writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.

One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Another Bidenland critique takes Harris to task for failing to navigate the backlash against identity politics. Not that Harris ran a “woke” campaign. To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner. But she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.

Biden, allies say, never would have let such attacks stand. He would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports. Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency. But it’s true that Harris avoided the issue, rather than rebutting it, despite the millions of dollars poured into those attack ads. And in the end, those ads very likely implanted the notion that Harris wasn’t the cultural centrist she appeared to be.

A sour irony haunts Biden aides. In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own. Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest. Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor.

Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.

Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.

[Read: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.

But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.

Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:

The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!

The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.

The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”

He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.

[Read: Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign]

Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”

The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)

But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.

The governing impulse of “heterodoxy” is a healthy skepticism of mass movements, overly broad claims meant to signal virtue, and rigid ideological positions. This orientation, within a segment of the center-left and center-right on the political spectrum, has proved a necessary check on the internet-stimulated, herd-like consensus so many others have adopted in recent years. During the summer of 2020 and the twin calamities of the death of George Floyd and the coronavirus pandemic, I was drawn to a heterodoxy that was conservative in its preservation of liberalism’s greatest achievements: tolerance of diverse perspectives and freedom of expression. It felt refreshingly unaligned, distinct from right-wing reactionary backlash, and like a genuine disavowal of dogma. Donald Trump and all he stands for, I thought, was clearly incompatible with such thinking.

But in the four years since, as Trump and his movement have strengthened their assault on our democracy, I have begun to wonder if this mindset that refuses, by definition, to pick sides contains a fatal flaw.

No single orthodoxy provides adequate solutions to every problem; no ideological team deserves your total allegiance. And yet, this election cycle has repeatedly shown that a reflex to be independent, to reject gatekeeping, to punch at “elites”—or, more simply, representatives of the status quo—can also leave people numb to existential threats that reasonable-consensus positions were developed to oppose. Our values can be turned against us. When heterodoxy is raised above all other priorities, it risks collapsing in on itself.

Until recently, within the heterodox slice of the cultural spectrum, opposition to Trump was the obvious response to his singularly reckless and destabilizing political presence. The number of self-described centrist “Never Trumpers”—starting with Trump’s current running mate, who once compared him in this magazine to “cultural heroin”—were legion. But as the race tightened in recent months, I’ve been struck by a palpable shift in attitude among many liberal and centrist voices—a slackening of vigilance, and a softening on Trump.

This is not to be confused with the 180-degree pivot of prominent MAGA converts such as Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Ackman, as well as writers and journalists such as Naomi Wolf—erstwhile Democrats who’ve become outright Trump fans. What I observed this past summer, as Joe Biden’s campaign self-immolated and Kamala Harris seized the nomination, was a more general exhaustion among many heterodox thinkers, and a disinclination to support the alternative to Trump that was now on offer. Harris, many agree, is not an ideal candidate. But given the enormous stakes, I wanted to understand how anyone not already ensorcelled by the cult of MAGA could hesitate to support her.

[Kurt Andersen: Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character]

I reached out to two of the most thoughtful heterodox commentators I know in an earnest attempt to take this ambivalence seriously. Kmele Foster and Coleman Hughes are both podcasters with significant followings. Both are “Black,” though Hughes is an ardent advocate for colorblindness (he wrote a book this year called The End of Race Politics) and Foster (like me) rejects racial categories. They represent, in my view, the steel-man version of heterodox perspectives, and neither, they confirmed to me this week, is planning to vote.

Hughes told me, when we spoke in September, that he sees Trump’s behavior around January 6, 2021, as “disqualifying.” Yet he listed two reasons he couldn’t bring himself to support Harris. The first had to do with a growing sense that the Trump threat had simply been exaggerated. “If I really felt that Trump was going to end American democracy or run for a third term if he wins, or start a nuclear war, I would vote for Kamala in a heartbeat,” he said. And indeed, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, because he found Trump’s rhetoric so alarming. “He spoke loosely about putting Muslims on a registry. He spoke loosely about using nukes,” he recalled. “I would’ve voted for basically Bugs Bunny over him.”

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.”

[Read: An ethicist reads ]The Art of the Deal

In 2020, Hughes voted for Biden, whom he viewed as a moderate liberal and a politician with a record of reaching across the aisle. This is not at all how he perceives Harris, whom he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and “deeply destructive to the long-term flourishing of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

Foster is an entrepreneur (he’s founded telecommunications and media companies) and a libertarian who seldom, if ever, feels represented by a mainstream politician, though he insists that he could vote for a more moderate Democrat. Foster is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and how, “when they become a part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a university campus or within the federal government, [they] can actually become weirdly totalitarian,” he told me. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has “a profound capacity for the abuse of power.” He pointed, among other examples, to “gender issues,” the movement to defund the police, and the criminal prosecutions of Trump, which, he said, have “a political taint” to them.

[Read: If Trump is guilty, does it matter if the prosecution was political?]

People who are concerned about Trump “deranging institutions” should have a similar concern about Democrats, Foster said. He brought up the idea floated by some prominent voices on the left of packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more justices in order to dilute the conservative majority, which he believes shows an alarming disregard for norms that goes unnoticed because “there’s a greater sophistication on the part of Democrats that makes it a lot less obvious that some of the things that they’re trying to do are bad.”

He sees scant evidence of Harris speaking out against or countering such trends. On this point, it is hard to disagree with him. Harris has said precious little about what, if anything, she would do to distinguish herself not just from the Biden administration, but also from the iteration of herself who briefly and unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 2019. Last month, she could not articulate to Anderson Cooper a single concrete mistake she has made in her capacity as a leader, even as most of the country knows that she covered for a president in cognitive decline.

Many of the concerns Hughes and Foster raise are compelling. And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems beside the point—as though we are debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of the life rafts as our proverbial ship is sinking. Both Hughes and Foster were signatories on the Harper’s letter of 2020, a bipartisan statement against creeping illiberalism. (I was one of the writers of the letter.) It has frequently been misrepresented by its critics as an anti-woke document, but it began with an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, “who represents a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the letter’s other writers, noted recently in The New York Review of Books, this election is not ultimately about change or policy, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we cannot manage that, with whatever flawed custodian we have been provided, we may look back on these nuanced policy discussions as an extravagant luxury that we squandered.