I’ve been spending time lately travelling to closely contested political territories, watching endangered Democrats campaign. If you live in deep-blue America, as I do, this can feel surreal. The issues my neighbors talk about on the street, usually in a tone of crisis-level alarm—the ill health of American democracy, the fragility of the planet, the pervasiveness of social injustice—and the issues the candidates I watched talk about on the campaign trail have only one point of intersection: the threat to abortion rights. The candidates talk less about fighting climate change, more about lowering your federal taxes through solar credits; less about the January 6th insurrection, more about the many reasonable Republicans they enjoy working with; less about the Biden Administration’s passage of historic legislation, more about insulin price caps. And they combine this with a tough, unsentimental way of practicing politics that includes trying like hell to draw far-right opponents.

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One reason for all this ferment is that the Democrats’ progressive wing is far more empowered and active today than it was when Obama took office, so it is a more significant source of pressure on the Administration. “There’s a generation in Democratic policy circles who, like me, experienced the foreclosure crisis up close and personal,” Sarah Miller, who was working in the Department of the Treasury during the crisis, and has since founded an organization called the American Economic Liberties Project, told me. “We watched the solutions that were put in place fail to alleviate suffering. We are reflecting on the mistakes of that era and beginning to embed what we learned in Democratic policy.” Trump’s election, as Miller put it, “blew open the door to our critique.”

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