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I have been staring at this silver dish of fried chicken for what feels like hours but what really, actually, has been days. Twenty-three days, to be exact, over the course of the three-month Dead Forever run at the all-new, all-American pleasure palace—the Las Vegas Sphere.I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle: stringing strands of plastic Grateful Dead–bear lights; ferrying tie-dyed tapestries, extension cords, and gaffer tape by golf cart; helping VIP-ticket holders smuggle ziplocks filled with vegan sandwiches and granola into the venue. Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.It’s a new way of doing things, one with just enough of our former existence to keep it comfortable and just enough change to keep the road forward exciting—even if the road is now an illusion, stretching out below an AI-generated sky. The Grateful Dead had been famous for its Wall of Sound—about 600 speakers painstakingly assembled by the crew at each venue, then just as painstakingly packed back up for the next stadium or concert hall. The Sphere is a wall of light : a 160,000-square-foot display programmed to transport the audience members, their necks craned upward, as the band plays below, a little dot against the expansive animated horizon.Before that high-tech spectacle can begin, however, a very old, analog tradition must be observed: dinner. Sometime between sound check and the show opener, everyone sits down for a shared meal. The monitor tech and the bassist, the head of security and the lighting director, the man selling merch and the man playing drums—we all shuffle forward holding the same white dinner plates and napkins, arms outstretched, ready to receive whatever food is served, like kids in a cafeteria.The catering options rarely differ. Almost always, there’s a salad bar with every possible variety of Newman’s Own dressing. There are sandwich fixings. There’s a soupy fish dish and a vegan pasta that congeals into the shape of its serving tray, like Jell-O in a mold. At the end of the table, inevitably, a giant chunk of meat waits to be carved.[From the March 2010 issue: Management secrets of the Grateful Dead]Still, I always looked forward to certain venues. For the old hands on the crew, the Shoreline Amphitheatre, in Mountain View, California, was notorious for having been built on top of a landfill—methane from the decomposing trash would seep out of the earth, leading to flaming eruptions when audience members lit a joint. But for me, Shoreline meant soft serve. Old, decrepit, but functional, the machine was hidden in the far-left corner of backstage hospitality. I’d fill a bowl with ribbons of ice cream, topping them off with a downpour of chocolate sprinkles.Here at the Sphere, dinner is fried chicken—again. Every night, chicken is prepared in the same fryer, seasoned with the same spices, and delivered by the same person. It’s placed on an identical white tablecloth with serving utensils angled at matching degrees. This is life in a corporate commune.Staring at the serving platters, I have an idea. I try the fried chicken in a new combination. I take some salsa from the empanada platter on the left, some mac and cheese from the platter on the right. It’s still fried chicken, but it works—something new made from something familiar.I have a memory of a birthday in some Midwest backstage. I think it was my 9th, but it’s hard to say for sure. I had been craving cheesecake for weeks. Out of fear of sending some runner on a wild-goose chase, I told no one. I was perpetually terrified of becoming an inconvenience, a feeling I imagine is pretty common for kids who grow up on the road.There was the glow of a birthday candle, my mother’s hand cupped over an obscured slice of cake. The stagehands sang “Happy Birthday” as I shrank into the couch cushions, embarrassed by the attention. My father played a drumroll on a toaster as my mother handed me the plate. I looked down. The cake was giant and oozing rich frosting and most definitely, 100 percent … chocolate. I smiled and blew out the candle. I made a wish—for cheesecake.Later, both band and crew migrated to catering for dinner. I walked down the row of long plastic tables, wondering if the package of sourdough bread was the one I had opened in Milwaukee the week before, or if it was just an identical one. I imagined an old Grateful Dead road case stuffed to the brim with sandwich materials—mustard and mayonnaise in the stick drawer, a series of plastic-wrapped tomatoes where the drum pads should be, a head of lettuce stuffed inside a cajón. It was possible. We brought just about everything else with us, even the lights and the stage.On one table sat a large plastic bag of Kraft shredded cheese—the Mexican blend, with little cheddar and Monterey Jack worms flattened against the clear casing. I grabbed the package and pushed it under my shirt, then walked back out toward the stage casually, like an expert jewel thief.I collected the chocolate-cake slice and took it underneath the stage to the below-deck depths where the riggers set up hammocks for naps after sound check. I looked around to ensure I was alone, then I removed the cheese from under my shirt and poured all of it onto the cake plate. I tore off the end of the slice, stray cheese falling onto the cold cement floor, and greedily shoved it into my mouth.I chewed my cheesecake proudly, nodding to myself like I was a judge on some fancy cooking show. “9.5!” I announced, my voice echoing in the empty space below the stage. “Half a point off—no whipped cream!”I knew the cake was terrible. It didn’t matter. I loved it. I had made my wish come true.From an early age, I could taste a tour route as soon as I saw it. Tracing the list of cities with my index finger, I knew the roads we’d travel and the meals we’d eat. Show nights meant dinner in catering, but even the relentless schedule of a Dead tour had the occasional off night, a chance to escape the venue and seek out old favorites.Madison Square Garden always, without compromise, meant orange chicken and water chestnuts, the fat that falls off the edge of spare ribs, and duck-sauce stains on old merch shirts. Madison Square Garden meant New York, and New York meant Wo Hop.Established in 1938, Wo Hop is, as far as I can tell, the most famous dive in Chinatown. My father first went there in the 1960s, when, as he remembers it, it still had sawdust on the floor. It was known for its midnight clientele—John Belushi, Patti Smith. It’s the hidden gem that everyone thinks they’ve discovered.For our family, Wo Hop represents the frayed tether connecting East Coast to West Coast, our past to our present. Though my parents made their home in California, my lineage, on both sides, comes from New York. My Jewish great-grandfathers lived and worked in the same city while inhabiting entirely different worlds. One opened Ohrbach’s, the Manhattan department store where knockoffs of Parisian couture were sold to eager housewives. Around the same time, somewhere in Brooklyn, another great-grandfather got his cab medallion.The first thing I do when the buses drop us off in New York is start walking. I like to think about my great-grandfathers when I do, imagining what their days looked like and what version of New York they knew.In the summer of 2023, on what was billed as Dead & Company’s final tour, I went for a very long walk, crisscrossing the city. I passed the former site of the Fillmore East, Bill Graham’s famous music hall, which had once been my family’s second home, and where some of the greatest live albums of the ’60s and ’70s—notably, ones by Miles Davis and the Allman Brothers—were recorded. It was now a bank. I gave $5 to a man sitting outside with a long gray beard and a sign that said We all get old but at least I saw Jimi Hendrix.Eventually, as the sun began to set, I found myself at 17 Mott Street—deep in the heart of Chinatown—standing at the steps that lead down to Wo Hop. There’s something about the red tiles that line the walls to its lower entrance, the light from neon signs bouncing across them. The pull of Wo Hop is so strong that I always end up there, even without intending to, like I’m following its siren song across the city. Wo Hop is like a familiar refrain: You know you must return to it a few more times before the song is over.I sat down and gestured to the waiter that I was ready to order. He walked over, pen and pad in hand.“Welcome to Wo Hop,” he said with a smile. “Have you been here before?”On show days, the sushi arrives at 3 p.m., just before sound check. It’s been there all my life, a kaleidoscopic swirl of salmon pinks and opalesque creams, with a slight variance in quality depending on the distance to the ocean. It comes in shiny cellophane wrapping that sticks to the outer edge of the sashimi and twinkles under the harsh fluorescent lights overhead.It’s pure protein, a source of energy smooshed across a six-inch tray. The sushi is in my father’s rider: Assortment of Sashimi upon arrival at 3:00 p.m.(6) Ika(6) Salmon(6) Toro(6) Hamachi(6) Unagi On tour, it’s easy to forget that you need to stop and eat, or to see eating as a mere obstacle to putting on the show. Sometimes, it’s just a question of priorities—waking up in a hotel room and knowing that if you don’t shower now, it’ll be three days on the bus before you get another chance. So you skip the continental breakfast and drink coffee from the machine in your room. You arrive at the venue before catering opens, and by the time it does, you’ve moved on to some task that requires crossing the length of the venue and back. Rider food is insurance, a contractual guarantee that there will be something to keep us going.[Read: How I faked my way to rock stardom]It’s not until week three or four, when we’re near the midpoint of the tour, that the sushi starts to morph into something else. It’s a bizarre turn—we begin to resent the sushi platter, blame it for the monotony of our lives. (“Maddening,” my father likes to say.) But we still go after it every night, tearing off the cellophane and grabbing at the raw fish like black bears at a salmon stream. Sometimes, a funny little fishhook smile appears on my father’s face after the last of the sushi is gone, an acknowledgment that, in his words, “we all got to eat.”There is a specific kind of emotion that comes with the end of a tour. All the decisions that were once in someone else’s hands come raining down as normal everyday life returns. It always hits at the airport after the last show, when suddenly no one’s telling you where to go. You’re in charge, in control of your own schedule, and for the first time in a very long time, you have to decide what you want to eat.After all the moaning about postshow pizza and stale pasta, all the daydreaming about things you’d eat if you were back home, the reality is that those first steps into the world of free will rarely feel anything other than lonely.At the end of the summer, I wander around Harry Reid International Airport, surrounded by the glow of the slot machines, until I see a to-go food counter, walk over, and stare at the menu.“What can I get you?” the person behind the cash register wants to know. My eyes scan across what feels like an endless abyss of options. “Do you have any cheesecake?”This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “One for the Road.”

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Vice President Kamala Harris pauses while speaking onstage as she concedes the election, at Howard University on November 6, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images On November 5, Americans elevated a reactionary authoritarian to the presidency — again. After attempting to overturn an election, fomenting an insurrection, becoming a convicted criminal, and baselessly accusing an immigrant community of eating house pets, Donald Trump not only won a second lease on the White House, but he did so with a plurality of the popular vote — while Republicans took control of both congressional chambers.  Liberals may be feeling a sense of déjà vu. But this is not 2017 all over again. It is something worse. Over the past eight years, Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image. In Congress, his intraparty critics have almost all decamped for the private sector or knelt to kiss his ring. In the executive branch, the “adults” are no longer “in the room”: Awed by his own power and unprepared to staff an administration, Trump leaned on many relatively mainstream advisers in his first term. This time around, he and his allies have assembled a cadre of loyalists, some of whom have won cabinet nominations (alongside some more conventional Republicans).  Meanwhile, conservatives have consolidated their grip on the Supreme Court, slashed the Democrats’ advantage with Hispanic voters, and fortified the GOP’s strength with the non-college-educated electorate, realignments that threatened the Democratic Party’s capacity to wield federal power. All this amounts to a catastrophe for anyone who values liberal democracy, egalitarian economic policy, and social equality for all marginalized groups. As someone who has spent the past decade advocating for more expansionary immigration policies, a larger social safety net, criminal justice reform, and decarbonization, it is difficult to see my country embrace a man who evinces contempt for all of those causes. In the face of this calamity, Democrats must develop a clear-eyed understanding of how they got here and chart a plausible path back to the country they want to live in. This newsletter — The Rebuild — aims to aid in that project. In weekly installments, I’ll try to offer some insight into how Democrats lost their national majority, as well as what we — people who care about advancing progressive change — must do to become more effective moving forward. Answering those questions will require Democrats to analyze their predicament with open minds. If we seek ideologically comforting explanations for the party’s problems — rather than empirically sound ones — the coalition will march deeper into the wilderness.  Unfortunately, in the wake of Harris’s loss, virtually every Democratic faction has produced its share of motivated reasoning. In future newsletters, I plan to take issue with some centrists’ analysis of the party’s difficulties. But today, I want to explain why I worry that the left is allowing wishful thinking to cloud its vision of political reality.  Since November 5, some progressives have drawn a sweeping lesson from Donald Trump’s second victory: Harris’s loss proves that Democrats gain little from “moderation” or “centrism” and must “embrace radical policies” in order to compete. I admire many of the writers making this argument. But their confidence in this narrative strikes me as wildly unfounded. It is true that Harris pivoted to the center on border security, crime, and, to a lesser extent, economics. There are plenty of sound arguments — both moral and political — against Democrats moderating on specific issues. Yet it’s hard to see how anyone could be confident that Harris lost because she moderated, much less that her loss proved that moderation is electorally counterproductive as a rule.  To name just a few reasons for doubting those premises: Harris actually did better where both she and Donald Trump held campaign rallies and aired TV advertisements than she did in the rest of the country. Thus, if Harris’s problem was her moderate messaging, it is odd that she won a higher share of the vote in the places that were more exposed to that messaging, despite the fact that such areas were also inundated by pro-Trump ads.  In a September poll from Gallup, 51 percent of voters described Harris as “too liberal,” while just 6 percent deemed her “too conservative.” Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest overperformers in the 2024 election — the down-ballot candidates that ran furthest ahead of Harris with their constituents — were moderates: Jon Tester, Amy Klobuchar, Jared Golden, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Harris had been a liberal senator and took many left-wing positions during the 2020 Democratic primary. She was attacked relentlessly by the Trump campaign on that basis. It’s hard to see how one could determine that it was Harris’s moderate messaging, rather than her progressive background, that was more damaging to her prospects. What we know, however, is that her opponent’s political advisers sought to highlight the latter, not the former.  The Biden-Harris administration was, by many progressives’ own account, the most left-wing White House on domestic policy in generations, and Trump’s team portrayed Harris as an extension of that administration.  Across the wealthy world, parties that presided over inflation have been losing at the ballot box, irrespective of their political leanings, a fact that raises doubts about whether any grand ideological lesson can be drawn from Harris’s defeat. My aim here is not to argue that Democrats must pivot to the center on all issues. I don’t think they should. I do think that the party needs to moderate its image nationally, if only to better compete for Senate control. But I’m still gathering my thoughts on how precisely they should pursue that task and will elaborate on them in future newsletters.   For now, my point is simply that there is little basis for confidence that Harris lost due to excessive moderation, or that Democrats would benefit electorally from becoming broadly more left-wing. The fact that many on the left nevertheless evince such certainty is therefore disconcerting.  Being progressive, in the best sense of that term, means putting the interests of the most vulnerable above one’s own comfort — whether material or ideological. And right now, America’s most disempowered constituencies have a strong interest in Democrats ousting reactionaries from power. If the party substitutes wishful thinking for unblinkered analysis, they will have a harder time accomplishing that task.

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Runners compete in the New York City Marathon in New York on November 3, 2024. | David Dee Delgado/AFP via Getty Images The 2024 New York City Marathon officially broke the world record for marathon finishers, with 55,646 runners from all over the world crossing the finish line earlier this month. It’s a far cry from the race’s humble beginnings: In 1970, just 55 runners completed the race, which then only entailed laps around Central Park.  The record-breaking participation in this month’s run came as no surprise to me, because I have seen the growing popularity of marathon running in my own life: This year, I cheered on six of my friends from the sidelines. And last year, I even ran the race myself.  In the past few years, my circle of 20- and 30-somethings has transitioned away from boozy late nights in favor of early-morning meetups at the track. Suddenly, I have strong opinions on brands of gels and shoes and run belts. I spend my weekends cheering at all sorts of races. Running culture has taken over our lives.  As it turns out, we’re part of a global trend toward marathon participation in recent decades — a phenomenon that’s been helped along further by the pandemic-era running boom. Twenty-somethings like me are a big reason for the jump: 15 percent of NYC Marathon finishers in 2019 were in their 20s. Just four years later, in 2023, they made up 19 percent, according to the Atlantic. At the Los Angeles Marathon those same years, the proportion of 20-something runners grew from 21 percent to 28 percent.  That growth prompted the Atlantic to dub running “the new quarter-life crisis.” And while “crisis” usually connotes some sort of negative spiral, my cohort’s new running obsession could be viewed less as a symptom of all that’s gone awry for our generation and more as a positive rebellion against it.   Why so many young people are taking up distance running Marathons in general are simply becoming more inclusive: Women’s participation was first allowed in the 1970s and has only recently started to achieve something like parity with men’s. There are also more finishers of color.  But for the Gen Z demographic, another key driver is just … the way life is right now.  “A lot of them started running during the pandemic. A lot of them were starting careers at that time, were graduating from college and maybe didn’t have a real graduation, maybe didn’t have these normal adult milestones,” says journalist Maggie Mertens, the author of the book Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women. “They see homeownership and marriage and kids as kind of out of reach — further out of reach than even the millennial generation did.”  That adds up to a lot of uncertainty. And what helps manage uncertainty if not a four-month, intensive training plan that calls for four to six training runs a week covering hundreds of miles, plus cross-training and stretching? Marathon season is largely over, which means it’s an ideal time to start thinking about whether you want to run one next year. Now, a disclaimer: I grew up a competitive swimmer and a softball player. The pandemic shut down all my favorite workout classes and basically forced me to lace up my running shoes. I’m not an especially fast runner, and I’m not setting out to break any world records. I mainly think of it as a great way to move my body, hang out with my friends, and challenge myself to go a little farther than I could yesterday.  If that sounds like you, read on for advice on what I learned from training as a 20-something, and things to know if you’re hoping to start training, too. Training can be a way to add structure to your life I found that preparing for the New York City Marathon functionally required the spreadsheet-ification of my life: Sunday, long run. Monday, rest. Tuesday, 4 miles. Wednesday, 8 miles. You get it. During the most strenuous, highest-mileage training weeks, I sometimes felt something like despair, but mostly the box-checking helped bring a sense of predictability, even when my work or personal life was up in the air. It also created new milestones where others — home-buying, having a kid — felt out of reach.  I visited the 2024 Chicago Marathon Expo a few weeks ago to find out more for the Today, Explained podcast, and several 20-something runners had similar experiences to share.   “You can have the worst day in the world, but the benefit of that is that you turn around and you’re like, ‘Well, at least I got my miles in,’” Taylor-Nicole Limas, 28, told me.  For some, like Mitchell Rose, 23, training is a way to impose structure on adult life. “It kind of gives me the end-of-the-semester feel, like you’re working towards something, whereas work gets very monotonous. I’m three months into my full-time job now, and I came to the realization like, ‘Oh, this just never ends.’”  Use running to push you to finally make big lifestyle changes The rigor of training mandates shedding bad habits and adopting healthy ones, too. I personally found that I had to add a fourth meal to my day — just to make up for the thousands of calories burned on my training runs. I also gave up alcohol and cut back on late nights in an effort to reduce the likelihood of feeling bad on long runs (which only sometimes worked).  Other runners told me they had to make similar commitments.  “I’m not proud of it, but I used to vape,” Pascale Geday, 26, told me at the expo. “I’m no longer vaping. I feel like it’s made me a better athlete.”  All these little adjustments add up to a much bigger change, says Kevin Masters, a professor of psychology at University of Colorado Denver and a former marathoner himself.  “You really orient your day — which turns into your weeks, which turns into months — around this event,” he told Today, Explained. “That’s kind of an orienting principle for your life.”  Training for a race can also be a way to find community The boom in marathon participation comes amid what the surgeon general is calling a loneliness epidemic, marked by decreased participation in community organizations, faith organizations, and recreational leagues over several decades.  This phenomenon is especially apparent among 20- and 30-somethings, who are becoming known as the “homebody generation.” One recent analysis found that they spend, on average, about two more hours per day at home than previous generations did.  “Where people used to gain some of their purpose and meaning in life and feel affiliated with others,” from community organizations, Masters said, those “aren’t really doing it for the younger folks as much.”  Running just might: Run-club participation is so high that it’s become a meme, and social media abounds with running influencers and content.   “I have started a group chat with a bunch of first-time marathoners,” Limas told me. “I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re all running the marathon. … We’re all women. Why not just, when we’re stressed out, text each other?’ And they’ve all become friends because of this group chat that I started.”  Of course, run clubs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Rose told me that he hadn’t had luck when he tried them out. “I have a long-term girlfriend. I don’t need to go to a run club because they’re usually looking for other things other than a good workout.”    Instead, he said, he prefers to run with just one friend: “Having someone that you can knock on the door and be like, ‘Let’s go for a run right now,’ and they’ll more often than not drop everything and be like, ‘Yeah, let’s go. Like, let’s have a great time together.’ That is another level of our friendship that I don’t think would be there otherwise.”  

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Attendees cheer as Donald Trump speaks on stage during a campaign rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on October 29, 2024. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images Sifting through the wreckage of the 2024 campaign, one thing that can’t be said about the Democrats is that they put too little effort into winning over Latino voters. If you looked closely, it was clear that the national party, the Biden-Harris campaign, and Democratic-allied groups were determined to avoid a repeat of 2020, when Joe Biden’s campaign was widely accused of neglecting Latino voters, starting its outreach too late, and making tone-deaf appeals — all mistakes that allowed Donald Trump to make historic gains with these communities despite Biden ultimately prevailing in the election. This time around, the Biden (and then Harris) campaign were determined to do everything right. They hired and elevated top Latino consultants, strategists, and elected officials. They opened field offices and hired staff in heavily Latino parts of swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania as early as the spring. They reached out to voters on WhatsApp, a private messaging app used as a form of social media by many Latino and immigrant communities; sent surrogates to Spanish-language radio stations; and microtargeted advertising to Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican American voters. Spanish and bilingual ads ran continuously on TV, radio, and online starting in March. And those ads moved beyond an explicit focus on identity, instead talking up policy and accomplishments like Medicare’s cap on insulin prices, the expansion of health care coverage, and job creation during the post-Covid economic recovery. The hope was that this earlier, smarter, more tailored campaign would help reverse a few trends that were obvious for most of 2023 and 2024: that Latino voters were deeply unhappy with the status quo, were not enthusiastic about Biden’s reelection, and were questioning their loyalty to the Democratic Party.  It’s clear now that this strategy was not enough. Though it will take months to get more granular data, county-level results and exit polls do indicate a rightward shift by Latino voters across the country that contributed to Trump’s victory. To be clear, it appears Democrats still won a majority of Latino voters — but the harsh reality for Democrats is that Trump once again managed to improve his standing. That doesn’t mean that Democrats should throw out the playbook for campaigning with Latino voters. Calls for a hard pivot to the right on cultural issues, or outright resignation about a permanent racial realignment — as some of the conventional wisdom floating around since the election suggests — are premature. Republicans simply cannot be sure these gains will stick around without Trump on the ballot. But there are oddly two contradictory takeaways given what we know so far: Democrats can assure themselves that they ran a pretty good campaign to win back Latino voter support. On a deeper level, however, they missed a more fundamental disconnect between the party and the voters, particularly the working class, that a textbook campaign simply couldn’t fix.  Two takeaways from the election There are two distinct points to take away from November 5.  First, campaigning does still matter. The national trend of Trump posting better margins of support in non-battleground states than in swing states applied to Latino voters as well.  Where Democrats campaigned heavily for Latino votes, Kamala Harris saw a smaller drop in support than in places where her campaign did not focus its efforts — meaning that the Harris campaign’s Latino ground game, spending, and organizing shouldn’t be discounted. The second point cuts the other way: There is a much deeper problem with Democrats’ appeal to Latino voters, one that will take time to repair. Nationally, Democrats like Biden and Harris were just not trusted as working-class champions by many Latino voters, who are still overwhelmingly working class and not college educated.  The memories of economic hardship during the pandemic (for which Trump largely escaped blame) and the inflationary period that followed never went away, and weren’t properly addressed by either Biden or Harris during the campaign. Combined with an overriding anti-incumbent mood that permeated electorates globally this year, Democrats were almost certain to do worse with Latino voters. There were some exceptions. Republican Senate candidates, for example, did not do as well as Trump did among Latino voters, and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who won the Arizona Senate race in a state Harris lost, particularly overperformed, winning by two percentage points a state that Trump won by five. But the larger point holds: Democrats lost ground with Latino voters, and analysts point to their inability to appeal to the working class as a culprit. “It starts with the credibility of the message,” Chuck Rocha, a Mexican American strategist who advised Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign and helped with both Biden general election campaigns, told me. “People like to say that Bernie Sanders was this, or that — the thing that made Bernie Sanders great was that he had always said the same thing, so he was credible. People see bullshit now in politicians. They want someone that’s credible whether they like him or hate him.” Rebuilding that credibility will be essential if Democrats are to reverse their fortunes not just with Latino voters, but with a wide swathe of the electorate.  Democrats never really figured out how to regain Latinos’ trust on the economy In retrospect, the storyline of the Latino electorate was fairly consistent. Poll after preelection poll told the same story: These voters were most concerned about the economy, and they were as likely as white voters to say they either missed the policies and economic conditions of the Trump era, or trusted Trump more than either Biden or Harris to deliver relief. At the heart of this feeling was a disconnect between what voters meant by “the economy” and what many national Democrats, including Biden and Harris, were talking about on the trail. Latino voters, troubled by inflation earlier in the Biden presidency, largely meant “prices should be lower,” while Biden and Harris mostly talked about job creation, slowing inflation, and gradually rising wages. That was true as early as November 2023, when polling from the Democratic research firm Blueprint found that Latino voters cared most about lower prices and least about “creating more jobs” — which was especially problematic because, as Blueprint also found, Latino voters more than any other racial group thought that more employment was Biden’s priority.  Add to this dynamic the fact that it was Latino and Black Americans who experienced uniquely traumatizing financial rollercoasters during the post-Covid period — seeing their wealth and financial prospects rise during the pandemic because of government aid only for rising costs of living to wipe out many of those gains before wages began to grow again — and you can see where the Biden administration’s credibility gap emerged. The Biden economic message was focused on trying to sell a positive economic success story — and there were indeed data and legislation they could point to tell that story. But according to Camille Rivera, a senior advisor for Voto Latino and founder of the Puerto Rican civic organization La Brega y Fuerza, the campaign’s foregrounding of topline indicators — the GDP, the improving consumer price index, the low unemployment rate, and investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, among others — could not sway voters who still saw vivid reminders of peak inflation in the cost of food and household essentials. “We were talking about the economy in macro forms, but people were not feeling it. They were just not feeling it. My father would be like, ‘Hey, did you see this? I just bought these potato chips. There’s like 50 percent air in these potato chips, and the price is higher,’” Rivera said. “We kept saying, ‘But the economy is great. Look at the stock market!’ That to me was many of our flaws.” The “identity force-field” showed cracks Over time, this disconnect may have taken a toll on the overall “party of the work class” brand of the national Democratic Party. And there’s perhaps no better sign of this than in polling specifically focused on one dynamic that tends to bind Latinos to the Democratic Party: the question of which party best “cares for people like you.” It’s that feeling that has tended to root most Latino voters in the Democratic camp, even if these voters don’t necessarily agree with every social position, economic or immigration policy, or cultural value that the party takes on — a kind of “identity force-field,” as Equis, a Democratic research firm focused on Latino voters, calls it.  In the aftermath of the 2022 midterms, Equis found evidence that those feelings were still fairly strong. In those midterms, there were conflicted or swing voters who turned out, and who, because of that warm association with the Democratic Party, pulled the lever for Democratic candidates. There were also Latino voters who ended up voting for Republicans —  but who still harbored warm feelings toward Democrats anyway. Generally, Equis polling found, Democrats were still the party viewed as “better for Hispanics” and which cared “about people like you.” But as Carlos Odio, an Equis co-founder, warned at the time of that report, there was a good chance swing Latino voters could drift in 2024 if “there is a major shift in the issue environment, imbalanced campaigning, or a weakening of identity bonds.” And that seems to be what happened. The signs of weakening identity bonds were there. The Biden campaign fizzled out. And the economy, as well as a rise in the salience of immigration, put national Democrats on the defensive with both Latino voters and the general electorate. By October 2024, after Biden drove down positive perceptions of the party among Latinos prior to his late-July exit, Harris had managed to recover the party’s footing. Her campaign strategy didn’t change tremendously, but polling showed Latino voters returning to the Democratic candidate, albeit not at the same rates that they had voted for Biden in 2020. By the close of the campaign, Harris was viewed as being “better for Hispanics” and “people like you.”  But the Democratic advantage had shrunk from two years before. The force field was weak. And by then, it was too late for the Harris campaign. Democrats now face a challenge: to reassess how they talk about the economy, about class, and about material conditions in a way that can connect with the electorate. There’s a tendency among some in the party — strategists, commentators, and elected officials — to either want to throw out the way they’ve run outreach to Latino voters or to deny that they have a problem at all (and blame “disinformation” or offer counterintuitive data to bolster that thinking). Democratic campaign operations in 2024 were not useless, but if the party is to have a shot in 2028, the work to rebuild credibility with working-class Latinos starts now.