The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by.

Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.

“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.

Trump, another man said, was the only one inhabiting the political center these days. But some expressed concern about how much they were benefiting from the early days of Trump’s second administration, about the potential cost of new tariffs, and about the president’s embrace of “distracting” issues such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico and planning to redevelop Gaza.

“I feel like the administration is going for things that grab headlines, like trans rights, wars, things that people pay attention to, rather than actual inflation and pricing,” one of the men told the group. “So that is part of the negativity of politics that I don’t really enjoy.”

The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.

“We want to understand what are the very specific barriers for these working-class voters when it comes to supporting Democrats,” Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters on the project, told me. “I think we want to have a better answer on: Do we have a message problem? Do we have a messenger problem? Or do we have a reach problem?”

Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor and senior adviser to the Joe Biden White House, said the Democratic Party needs to think beyond the swing voters that were the subject of billions in spending last year and give attention to the people of all races and ethnicities who have firmly shifted away from Democrats to embrace the politics of Trump.

“The first thing you got to do is learn what you can learn, ask what you can ask, and know what you can know,” Landrieu told me last week, before the New Jersey focus group. “When you see it through a number of different lenses, it should help you figure out how you got it wrong.”

Since losing last fall, Democrats have railed against the price of eggs, denounced “President Elon Musk,” and promised to defend the “rule of law.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even led a chant of “We will win” outside the U.S. Treasury building. But there is still little Democratic agreement about the reasons for Trump’s victory or how Democrats can make their way back to power.

The Bridge plan is to launch a series of interviews with party leaders, tracking polls and meetings with voters around the country to try to figure out how best to fix the party after an election that saw Democrats lose the popular vote for the first time since 2004. Former Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Representative Colin Allred of Texas, who lost a bid for Senate last year, have signed up to work with Landrieu on the project.

Several other parts of the Democratic power structure are searching for answers as well. The new chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, has promised his own “postelection review” by the party. “Not an autopsy, because we’re not dead as a party,” he said late last year. The details have not yet been announced.

Third Way, a moderate Democratic group, ran a recent Democratic strategist retreat outside Washington to begin the conversation about how to create a new economic agenda and how to extricate the party from unpopular positions on issues such as transgender athletes and immigration enforcement. Future Forward, the largest Democratic independent spender in the 2024 campaign, has continued to circulate “Doppler memos” to Democratic decision makers, offering them real-time updates about how Americans are digesting Trump’s actions and the most promising avenues for pushing back.

The Bridge effort emerged from a four-day Palm Beach donor retreat this month, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. Top Democratic donors gathered for days of closed-door panels with titles such as “What Went Wrong?,” “What’s Going on With Men?,” “How to Stop Losing the Culture Wars,” and “Sending the Right Message: Reviving the Democratic Brand.” A Saturday-night panel at the conference with Landrieu, Allred, and others laid out how much was still unknown. The title: “It’s All About Listening: How Can We Reconnect With the Voters We Have Lost?”

“I just really believe you have to start from scratch. You have to throw out all of your assumptions,” Landrieu told me. “Whatever happened in the past is the past, and that is the last campaign. Joe Biden isn’t president anymore, and they don’t have Joe Biden as a foil.”

Even though the answers remain unclear, donors came away from the retreat saying they were eager to keep spending. Bridge has planned another donor conference in San Francisco for early next month. “At a time when some Democrats are in retreat, I saw a large group of donors at Democracy Matters in Palm Beach spoiling to re-engage in the fight,” John Driscoll, a health-care executive and an American Bridge donor, said in a statement.

The early after-action autopsy of Bridge’s own spending in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania last year echoed the early findings of other groups: Advertising for Kamala Harris and against Trump had a clear marginal impact where it was targeted, but it was unable to hold back the much greater Trump gains, including significant erosion among longtime Democratic voting blocs. A Bridge analysis conducted by the Democratic data firm BlueLabs of voters in the three states found that Democratic support overall dropped 3.9 percentage points in urban counties, 2.5 points in Hispanic-dominant counties, and 2.1 in Black-dominant counties. At the same time, counties where Trump received 60 percent or more of the vote saw their vote totals rise by about 5 percent.

Landrieu hopes to share early results before this year’s fall elections so that new tactics and messages get a test run before next year’s midterm elections.

After the focus group of white men, Bridge gathered a similar group of eight New Jersey Latino men—Trump-supporting members of the working class who had previously voted for Democrats. One voter said that the Democratic Party has walked away from representing the working class, given rising costs. Another expressed concern about the “woke” rules of Democratic governance. “People were getting hurt for any little comment, so you had to be politically correct for everything,” he said.

Democrats have spent years trying to convince nonwhite voters that Trump’s racial insensitivity should be a redline. These voters did not try to defend Trump’s racial views or argue that he is not racist. But even in that was a warning for the next iteration of the Democratic Party.

“Whether he is or not, I don’t care,” one voter said. “I vote with my pocket.”

The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts, across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.

Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.

The fires were, at their worst, unfightable. But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time.

Because there will be a next fire. The vegetation—fire fuel—will grow back, fire season will keep lengthening into wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will nurse an errant spark. Fire is part of the ecology in California; a century of suppressing it has only set up modern blazes to be more intense.

The way places such as California prepare for these fires has to change, or more neighborhoods will end up in ruins. Insurance is meant to insulate people from bearing the costs of extraordinary events, but those are becoming ordinary enough that private insurers have been leaving California. The state’s FAIR Plan, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed, and may not be able to cover the claims from these fires alone. If it exercises its power to demand that private insurers help cover the difference, that could send even more fleeing. These are all signs that the state’s magical thinking about fire risk has exhausted itself.

[Read: Are you sure your house is worth that much?]

“California is like a driver that’s had five car accidents,” Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now heads a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford University, told me. The state is at proven risk of catastrophic loss. But because California has spent years trying to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable, those (still high) rates don’t reflect the real risk homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurers rely on reinsurers—insurance companies for insurance companies—who, Wara said, “are supposed to lose one in 100 times … They’re not supposed to lose, like, four times out of 10, which is kind of where we’re on track for in California.”

If a few of those companies stop insuring the insurers, there aren’t necessarily others to step in. The state is trying to stave off a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probability and reinsurance prices into their rates, as of last year. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but the most local insurers are leaving the state, or going belly-up, and insurance in places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because coverage is generally required for anyone seeking a mortgage, soaring rates in California could drive home values down, threatening yet another crisis, this one in real estate. And if existing homeowners can’t get insurance, they’ll be left bearing the cost of catastrophes all on their own, like many in the burn area around Los Angeles are now.

If nothing changes, more people will get sucked into this doom spiral, because California cannot avoid some level of catastrophe. Wind-driven fires like the ones in L.A. throw embers far ahead of themselves, leading to conflagrations that firefighters can’t stop, and the fastest fires are growing faster now. Transferring those risks to insurance will become less and less affordable as the climate warms and more people live in the zone where cities meet wildlands, because the catastrophic risk to homes is high and getting higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, “That actually is not an insurance problem. It’s a risk problem.”

To bring down risk, she wants to see neighborhoods embark on ambitious missions to “harden” homes and the landscape around them, and then see insurance companies account for those efforts. If each homeowner has removed vegetation from the first five feet around their house, if the neighborhood has kept its roads clear and made firebreaks where fire would be likeliest to enter, a place has much less of a chance of burning down, even in major fires. Plenty of communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don’t do this. Watkins imagines a future database in which each parcel of land is inspected for fire-readiness, so that each neighborhood can be profiled for fire safety and insurers can price rates accordingly. Creating this system would take major effort, she knows, but it would motivate collective action: If it meant the difference between your whole neighborhood getting insurance and being uninsured, you would probably clean up your yard and screen your vents.

Watkins herself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco, which Wara’s research has identified as one of the top three places where the worst overnight losses could occur, from an insurance perspective. (Another was Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who got a nonrenewal notice from her insurer last year. Now she’s making her plot as fire-proof as possible, in hopes of coaxing an insurer back. It’s like staging a property for sale, she said: “We’re staging our home for insurability right now.” She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out her mint garden, but so far she’s kept the Japanese maple that came with the house and turns a brilliant red in the fall. Once she has fire-proofed the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire-chief friend over for dinner and ask, How bad is the maple? “And then do what they say,” she told me.

But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins’s risk will still be elevated. And taking these measures can be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who was the fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District until his retirement last month, told me about trying to pass an ordinance that would require homeowners to keep a five-foot perimeter around their house free of flammable material; the public comments were overwhelmingly in opposition, even though these borders are proved to cut a house’s risk of burning down, he said. Residents called it a draconian overreach that would make their home unsightly and bring down property values. He chose that moment to retire. He didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure to act the next time fire arrived.

When communities do act, it can save them. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at UC Merced, studied what happened to Montecito, California—the town of Harry and Meghan, and Oprah—after it decided in the 1990s to take fire prevention seriously. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. But “there’s a lot of really gorgeous landscaping that does not burn,” Kolden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants—think giant agaves—can be close to houses; rock gardens can be beautiful. Palm trees are fine if they’re well-manicured enough that they wouldn’t throw off flaming fronds, as some in L.A. did this week.

For a wealthy community such as Montecito, less than $2 million across almost 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. And according to Wara’s research, the state could help fund projects like these at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year—less than Cal Fire’s total fire-suppression budget in 2020, by his calculation—the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting in the most fire-prone areas, and build fuelbreaks in every highly threatened community. That would also cover preventive burns on every acre that needs them, to prevent larger fires later.

Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won’t change the fact that the biggest California fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst conflagrations to arise, and they will, again and again, with greater frequency now. Slowing that trajectory is a matter of global action. But yet here Angelenos are, living at the scale of their homes, their parcels of the Earth. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They’re going to happen, and people will live in their path. Stopping them from happening is impossible. But minimizing the damage they wreak is not.

On Wednesday morning, in Highland Park, Los Angeles, dawn never broke. The morning light that normally streamed into my rental house simply shifted from pitch-black to gradations of orange-brown as smoke from the Eaton Canyon fires billowed over the hills. Outside my window, a woman used the flashlight on her phone while walking her dog. My own dog and I barely made it around the block; the soot-filled air was dry and pungent, and the winds—those relentless winds—smacked us with a combination of dry pine needles, fallen bark, and chunks of ash. Most of my neighbors wore masks as they loaded their cars with shopping bags and suitcases. By the time we got back, all the phones in my house were buzzing with evacuation alerts.

We were a full house: three middle-aged adults, a 6-year-old, and a naughty dog (mine). The night before, after losing power in her home in Altadena, my best friend and my goddaughter went to kill time in classic L.A. style: by driving through their local In-N-Out. Power outages from the Santa Anas are not unusual in L.A., and despite the Palisades Fire raging across town, they were trying to act normal—perhaps the only way to psychically survive in a city prone to fires is to push the constant threat of imminent natural disaster out of your mind. In any case, by the time they got their burgers, the street was illuminated by flames, the night sky hot yellow from Eaton Canyon, just a few blocks away. They drove the 15 minutes to my house, where we immediately lost power too. Her husband hunted down every candle he could get his hands on in a drivable radius.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

In my living room, we texted friends and neighbors, checking on their homes and kids and evacuation plans. Outside, the sound of the wind was terrifying—because of the howling, but also because of the danger it represented, each gust potentially carrying embers this way, taking out homes and businesses and, eventually, in the case of Altadena, most of a community.

Altadena is an unincorporated community of about 40,000 residents nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Having spent a lot of time there, I get the appeal—even something as mundane as putting the trash out, at the right time of day, is a chance to experience majestic levels of beauty. When people think of life in the hills around Los Angeles, they tend to think of millionaires and movie stars—and, for sure, there are some splendid homes and a sprinkling of celebrity residents, such as Mandy Moore, there. But Altadena is racially and economically diverse, and middle-class life remains at its center.

It was founded by two well-off brothers from Iowa in the late 1880s, and workers with jobs in the nearby city of Pasadena moved there. After a long battle against redlining, Black homeowners began arriving in the 1960s. This made Altadena one of the first integrated middle-class communities in Los Angeles, and residents today are particularly proud of this history. (One of those residents was Wilfred Duncan, the first Black fireman in Pasadena.) In 1960, Altadena was 95 percent white; in 2024, it was 46 percent white, and the bulk of the rest of the population was made up of Black and Hispanic residents.

This was partly why, when my best friend and her husband decided to move back to her native California to raise their Black and Latina daughter, they chose Altadena. The other parents they met at their daughter’s school included local business owners, house cleaners, and government employees. They made friends with their neighbors, including an older public-school teacher who’d raised her family across the street. On Tuesday night, her house burned to the ground.

In recent years—and particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when the rise in remote work let people live farther from downtown and West Los Angeles—home prices in Altadena have soared. But newcomers haven’t been house flippers or private-equity firms running Airbnbs; they’ve been families looking to set down roots—like my best friend. A remarkable 78 percent of the households are owner-inhabited; it’s not unusual to meet people who’ve lived in Altadena for decades or even residents whose ties to the town go back a generation or two. That’s part of the strong community atmosphere. Neighbors make cookies for neighbors and invite one another over for drinks. Kids trick-or-treat down the streets in unchaperoned groups, and families have post-parties after the Rose Bowl parade.

The local economy was also exactly that: local. Minus a few fast-food joints and big chain pharmacies, the neighborhood was as close to mom-and-pop as one can find today. For 25 years, kids from Altadena and Pasadena have studied with Sipoo Shelene Hearring at Two Dragons Martial Arts. Locals who met at the Rancho, Altadena’s premiere dive bar, became so close that they were known to spend holidays together. If you were bored, you could take your family to the Bunny Museum and browse more than 30,000 items of collectible rabbit memorabilia.

Every single one of those businesses burned to the ground this week. One local official told NPR that “probably half of our small businesses are gone.” Five of Altadena’s public schools suffered substantial damage, as did a couple of private schools, a senior center, a public golf course, a country club, several houses of worship, and a yet-to-be determined number of homes and apartment complexes. So far, more than 5,000 structures have been reported as lost.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

An unofficial Google Doc tracking the destruction has been going around, and the pace at which it was being populated on Wednesday was terrifying. Each new address correlated to a person you knew or a business that made you love where you lived. On Facebook, a woman was looking for an older man named Willie who lived near a particular intersection. “I don’t know his last name,” she wrote. ”I speak to him on my daily walks. I’d like to make sure he’s alright.” Neighbors were texting one another videos of block after block of devastation.

So many people are in the same situation as my friend: evacuated and unsure whether their house will still hold. Ten hours after she and her family arrived at my house, they learned they’d have to flee again, when my neighborhood was evacuated too.

I’d always judged people who, faced with a natural disaster, chose to stay in place. But experiencing the situation firsthand, I understood. We were a ragtag group. Who would take us in? But how could we split up? For almost an hour, we stared at one another, paralyzed. Eventually, we heard from a generous friend in Palm Springs who had room for us. Into the cars we went.

But others did stay, or have dared to venture back. They hose off the lawns of the absent to keep the floating embers from catching, offer to break into homes at risk and grab personal photos or other belongings, and take pictures of the damage that’s left behind.

As we drove past the halo of black smoke over L.A., we saw tractor-trailers turned sideways by the wind. Text messages continued flooding in, announcing home losses and relocation plans. Most hope these moves will be temporary, but, depending on insurance payouts and school closures, they might wind up being permanent. “We hope to see you all again one day,” a father wrote to my friends’ dad group. His family was heading up north to stay with relatives and knew that they might not be able to return. Some kids leaving town with no return date in sight FaceTimed classmates to say goodbye. Still other children don’t yet understand what’s happened to the place they call home.

All of Los Angeles, regardless of socioeconomic class, is sharing in one deep, traumatic loss. Schools, cultural institutions, the businesses that make hometowns feel like home—so many have burned. But there’s a secondary sadness hovering over middle-class Altadena, and certainly over anyone on the margins of poverty. Altadena will build itself back. But how? And for whom?

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

On the Altadena Facebook group, residents are attempting to guide one another through FEMA applications and encouraging everyone to file their insurance claims quickly. But in one-on-one conversations, no one is naive. Everyone anticipates pushback from insurance companies, and payments that will be a fraction of what their homes were worth or would cost them to rebuild. Will the teachers whose homes burned down still be able to afford to live there? What about the firemen? Where will all these people go in a region that is already plagued by a shortage of affordable housing?

Even if one isn’t familiar with Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism, most Americans are, by now, well versed in its hallmarks. A natural disaster occurs, locals are forced to evacuate, and small businesses close. Their returns are delayed sometimes indefinitely by failures to restore infrastructure such as schools and electricity quickly enough. They might be stymied by red tape and bureaucracy. Needing stability for their family, they are forced to build a life elsewhere, to stop “waiting” to go home. In their place, developers and private equity swoop in, reshaping these areas for the rich and ultrarich.

This happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Superstorm Sandy in the coastal areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Los Angeles’s economy is already in a precarious state, with a housing crisis and a glut of workers in the TV and film industry. I can easily imagine that, without government intervention and intentional counterplanning, something similar will happen here. Surviving financially in Los Angeles was already challenging; how many families can manage not to just get by, but to completely rebuild their lives?

When my best friend moved here, I was immensely depressed to lose her from my life in Brooklyn. But in the subsequent two years, I’ve visited many times, sometimes for weeks-long stints. I’d come to love it here so much, I’d call it Brooklyn West: It had that same neighborly generosity and quirky moxy that had gotten squeezed out of my hometown, one Blank Street Coffee and luxury high-rise at a time. It’s painful to imagine that Altadena could now, in this moment of speculative opportunity, suffer the same fate.

Accusations of local-government incompetence are flying around this week, nearly as forceful as the winds. But the local government has work to do now. Federal aid is crucial, but so is getting schools reopened quickly, and expediting the rebuilding of established small businesses. Altadena needs not vultures seeking to maximize profit, but creative developers who can protect and expand the kind of community Altadena was.

When they are done with mourning, I know the residents will do their part.

*Sources: Library of Congress; Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty; Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty; Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty