ANNALS OF POLITICS - ONLY CONNECT

Across the country, Democrats are transforming their identity to retain the working class.

- NICHOLAS LEMANN

I've been spending time lately travelling to closely contested political 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.

One morning in late August, I went to an American Legion post in Manchester, New Hampshire, to watch Senator Maggie Hassan campaign. Hassan, who previously served as governor of New Hampshire, is running for her second term in the Senate. In 2016, she defeated the incumbent, Kelly Ayotte, a relatively moderate Republican, by only a thousand and seventeen votes, so naturally, she was on every list of endangered Senate Democrats as this election season began. This year, she has a much weaker opponent: a retired Army brigadier general named Donald Bolduc, who has never run for office before and who, in one of his first television ads, looked right into the camera and said, "I didn't spend my life defending this country to let a bunch of liberal, socialist pansies squander it away." But Hassan is taking nothing for granted.