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Protesters hold pro-LGBTQ signs and flags outside the Supreme Court building. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images It’s hard to imagine a worse time for the Supreme Court to hear United States v. Skrmetti, arguably the most important trans rights case the justices have ever heard. Skrmetti asks whether discrimination against transgender people can violate the Constitution, a question the Court has never answered. A decision against the trans plaintiffs in Skrmetti, moreover, could potentially upend the entire legal framework protecting Americans from gender discrimination of all kinds. A Court with a 6-3 Republican supermajority plans to hear Skrmetti in early December, less than a month after an election in which, according to the Washington Post, GOP campaigns “spent at least $215 million on network ads that paint trans people as a menace to society.” President-elect Donald Trump made anti-trans rhetoric a key part of his campaign, promising, for example, that if elected, he would keep “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.”  That is to say: This case arrives at a moment in which the Republican Party is all in on animus toward transgender people. And, while there are strong legal arguments supporting the pro-trans rights position in Skrmetti, this panel of justices has shown great deference to the general mood of the Republican Party in past decisions, like when they ruled that Trump may use his official presidential powers to commit crimes once he returns to office. If the Court’s Republican majority is determined to reach an anti-trans result, they likely won’t let something as trivial as “the law” discourage them. Still, at least two of the Court’s Republicans have shown unexpected sympathy toward LGBTQ litigants in the past. In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Court ruled that a longstanding ban on sex discrimination in employment prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity — declaring that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” Bostock was authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, who is also a Republican. So, if Roberts and Gorsuch hold to the views they expressed in Bostock, the two of them plus the three Democratic justices should be enough to extend at least some constitutional protection to trans people. What’s at stake in Skrmetti? The specific issue in Skrmetti is a Tennessee law prohibiting trans youth from receiving medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy. About half of states have laws targeting transgender health care, but Tennessee’s is among the strictest. While the Court has never held specifically that discrimination against transgender people violates the Constitution, it has long held that sex discrimination does violate the Constitution, ruling that “all gender-based classifications” are presumptively unconstitutional in United States v. Virginia (1996). Tennessee’s law trips over itself to classify young patients based on their gender. It declares that the law’s purpose is to “encourag[e] minors to appreciate their sex” and to prevent young people from becoming “disdainful of their sex.” The law also denies certain medical treatments to patients based solely on their sex. A patient who was assigned male at birth may have testosterone prescribed by a doctor, but someone assigned female at birth may not have that treatment. Again, the Supreme Court has already said that all gender-based classifications are constitutionally dubious. “All” means “all.” Will that be enough to persuade these justices to strike down Tennessee’s law? The honest answer is, “Who knows?” It’s not like legal texts and Supreme Court precedents play no role in these justices’ decision-making, and they sometimes even hand down a decision like Bostock that cuts strongly against the Republican Party’s policy preferences.  But there are two reasons to be pessimistic about Skrmetti. One is that after the recent election, anti-trans voices within the Court are likely to be emboldened, and pro-trans voices may feel like they have limited political capital. The other is that, while Tennessee’s law clearly discriminates on the basis of sex, the Court has only held that laws that do so should be presumed to be unconstitutional unless — as the Court put it in Virginia — there’s an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for the law. It is possible that this Court will hold that a ban on trans health care meets this bar. What current law says about “sex” discrimination, explained Many of federal law’s core safeguards against sex discrimination emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the ’60s, Congress started to pass laws banning sex discrimination in various venues — Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, prohibits such discrimination in employment. Then, in the 1970s, the Court began to place constitutional limits on the government’s ability to discriminate on the basis of sex. The most significant of these cases, Craig v. Boren (1976), established that any government action that classifies people based on sex is presumptively unconstitutional. Again, in Virginia, the Court stated that “a party seeking to uphold government action based on sex must establish an ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ for the classification.” The federal appeals court that heard Skrmetti attempted to get around Craig and Virginia by pointing to the Supreme Court’s decision in Geduldig v. Aiello (1974). But that decision read Geduldig far too broadly. Briefly, Geduldig concerned a state-run insurance program that provided benefits to some California workers with disabilities, but not to workers whose disabilities arose out of a pregnancy. The Supreme Court rejected the argument that this exclusion for pregnant workers discriminated on the basis of sex, even though the Court wrote that “only women can become pregnant.” Geduldig, it should be noted, is not a particularly beloved decision. Four years after it was handed down, Congress enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which repudiated Geduldig in the workplace and forbade employers from discriminating on the basis of pregnancy. Regardless, Geduldig’s holding was limited. It established that the government may set up public benefit programs that exclude medical procedures “that only one sex can undergo.”  Skrmetti, by contrast, involves medical procedures that both sexes can undergo. Anyone can take puberty blockers, testosterone, or estrogen. It is not physically impossible to administer testosterone to someone assigned female at birth in the same way that it is physically impossible for a person without a uterus to become pregnant. Not all sex discrimination is forbidden Given the Court’s decisions in Craig and Virginia, it should be obvious that Tennessee’s law draws distinctions based on sex and thus can only survive if the state can offer an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for it. Indeed, if the Court were to reject that conclusion, it would do considerable violence to the legal principles governing all gender discrimination cases. Still, even if the Court honors the Craig/Virginia framework, Tennessee’s law could potentially survive if five of the justices deem the state’s arguments for the law sufficiently persuasive.  The briefs in the Skrmetti case paint two very different pictures of why medical professionals treat transgender patients with puberty blockers or hormones. A brief filed by the Biden administration, for example, warns that the absence of these treatments can lead patients with gender dysphoria (the medical term for the distress that can result when someone’s gender identity does not match their sex assigned at birth) to “‘debilitating distress,’ ‘depression,’ ‘substance use,’ ‘self-injurious behaviors,’ and ‘even suicide.’” One survey referenced in the brief found that more than one-third of transgender high school students attempted suicide in the last 12 months. This view, which presents gender-affirming treatments as a way to prevent suicide and alleviate the harms of gender dysphoria, is supported by briefs filed by medical and mental health groups such as the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and the American Medical Association — among other, similar professional organizations. Tennessee’s brief, meanwhile, presents a much more conspiratorial picture. At one point, for example, it claims that a transgender official within the Biden administration pressured the WPATH to issue inappropriately permissive guidelines on trans health care for physicians. At another point, it suggests that a major hospital in Tennessee started providing transgender health care because doing so would “make a lot of money” for the hospital. Do Tennessee’s arguments meet the threshold of an “exceedingly persuasive justification”? It’s worth noting that the trial court which heard Skrmetti, the only court to closely examine the evidence on either side of the case, temporarily blocked Tennessee’s law during an early hearing in this case. Of course, it’s possible that a full trial will reveal that Tennessee’s more conspiratorial view of the facts is correct, but there’s good reason to be skeptical that all of the major professional organizations representing pediatricians, psychologists, trans health providers, and physicians generally are all engaged in a grand conspiracy to make more money by overmedicating transgender children. There’s some chance the Court will hit pause on this case There is some chance that the Court will delay resolution of this case, although probably not for very long. In the lower courts, both the Biden administration and lawyers for a group of transgender plaintiffs argued the pro-trans position. After they lost in the appeals court, both the Justice Department and the private plaintiffs asked the justices to hear their case. Although these two petitions present similar questions, the Court decided only to grant the Justice Department’s request to hear the case — which is why the case is currently called United States v. Skrmetti. Thus far, the Court has taken no action on the private plaintiffs’ petition, which is known as L.W. v. Skrmetti. Ordinarily, the Court’s decision to grant one petition and not the other wouldn’t matter very much. But it is exceedingly likely that the Trump administration will reverse the Justice Department’s position on this case once it takes power in January and formally withdraw its request for the justices to hear this case. That means that if the justices want to hold on to the case past January, they will need to grant the L.W. petition. Realistically, none of these procedural maneuvers are likely to change much. It’s possible that the Court will delay oral arguments until all of this is resolved. But, if the justices want to resolve the issue presented by Skrmetti, there’s no reason why the Court can’t decide this case in its current term (which means a decision is likely in late June), regardless of how the procedural drama shakes out.

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Singers Post Malone and Morgan Wallen performing at the 57th Annual CMA Music Awards on November 8, 2023 | Frank Micelotta/Disney via Getty Images Earlier this year, conservatives on social media claimed an unlikely new icon. It wasn’t a podcaster with questionable views or a libertarian businessman selling a course or any particular ideology. It was actress Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria star and the recent lead of the rom-com Anyone But You.  Following her hosting gig on Saturday Night Live in March, two conservative outlets published columns heralding Sweeney as a return to conventional beauty standards of the ’90s and early 2000s — or as, Bridget Phetasy for the Spectator put it, “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.” Both pieces postulate that, by wearing low-cut dresses and playing up her sexuality, Sweeney was inviting men to gawk at her, therefore raising a middle finger to “woke culture” and the Me Too movement.  Sweeney hasn’t publicly aligned herself with the right in any way. (Her family’s politics, though, were the subject of controversy in 2022, which may have something to do with the right’s eager embrace of her.) Rather, her ascension as a throwback-y, hyper-feminine sex symbol has given conservatives the rare mainstream Gen Z figure on whom to project their values. For those paying close attention, the past year was rife with springboards for the conservative message. In the hindsight following Trump’s reelection, it seems the zeitgeist of 2024 was a foreshadowing of his return to office and something forecasters might have considered a little more seriously. “Bro country” singers became the artists de jour, going head-to-head with female pop singers on the charts and, in many cases, outperforming them. The buzziest new reality shows were about Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and Mormon TikTokers. Conservative films from smaller distributors, like the biopic Reagan and Daily Wire documentary Am I Racist?, made millions at the box office. Nominally apolitical podcasters and streamers, from Joe Rogan to the Nelk Boys, hosted presidential candidates and took on an increasingly political valence.  It’s a sharp turn from the liberal-coded pop culture of the Obama years and the sort of trends that took off in response to Trump’s first presidency — comic-book movies with a progressive edge like Wonder Woman and Black Panther, social commentary films like Get Out and Promising Young Woman, not to mention the explosion of drag culture.  Joel Penney, an associate professor at Montclair State University, says the overall conservative feel of pop culture at the moment is, in many ways, a response to the Me Too movement and the notion by its detractors that “masculinity is in crisis.” At the same time that we’re seeing Sweeney receive praise for representing “traditional” femininity, the All-American straight white “bro” is getting renewed cultural attention.  “There’s been a lot of this trying to restore these strong male role models in pop culture, whether it’s Tom Cruise in the Top Gun remake or these ‘bro’ podcasters and country singers,” Penney says.  2024 was all about the straight white bro  We can see this happening most visibly in mainstream music. It’s not just that country music — a Southern genre with a past and present of conservative politics — has emerged in the mainstream over the past two years — with much controversy. It’s that this class of musicians — Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Jelly Roll, Luke Combs, Shaboozey, and the newly rustic Post Malone — are glaringly male. Shaboozey’s unprecedented achievements in an overwhelmingly white genre add a refreshing element to this conversation. Beyoncé also released a successful country album this year that features Shaboozey and an array of Black female country artists. Cowboy Carter’s lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em,” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, a shorter amount of time than Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, and Shaboozey’s No.1 songs this year. Nor was she recognized by the country establishment, getting completely shut out of the CMAs. Overall, it seems like country fans and the average young person, who’s listening to more country music these days, are still more eager to hear dudes croon about beer. Outside of the charts, these country singers have also become mainstream personalities and subjects of celebrity gossip. In the span of roughly a year, Bryan went from a little-known alternative country crooner posting videos on YouTube to a celebrity whose personal relationships are being analyzed by TikTok users and explained in the pages of People. Jelly Roll and his wife, influencer and popular podcast host Bunnie XO, have also become a recognizable celebrity couple, while Morgan Wallen’s dating life and public antics have become Page Six fodder.  Elsewhere in pop culture, figures seemingly designated for a more male, conservative audience have gone mainstream. First, there was the viral video of a woman from Tennessee being asked about oral sex outside of a bar — a very bro-y Girls Gone Wild-inspired genre that’s emerged on TikTok — and offering a memorable onomatopoeia. There’s also the viral Florida-based father-and-son duo A.J. and Big Justice, who do food reviews at Costco. With the exception of Big Justice’s sister and mother — who’s literally referred to as the “Mother of Big Justice” in videos — this expanded universe of “Costco Guys” is made of white men and boys from Florida and New Jersey rating foods in a cartoonishly macho manner.   @a.j.befumo We Bring The BOOM! ? Part 2‼️ #song #father #son #family #fun #bigjustice #boom ? @Rj Pasin ? @CameraManKyle ♬ original sound – A.J. & Big Justice They’re not explicitly expressing MAGA as a value, but they’re trafficking in spaces that have been less visible in recent years: rural and suburban enclaves, featuring white, heterosexual, male, and even “bro-y” talent that was out of vogue in recent history.  One can assume that the current MAGA-coded fabric of mainstream culture correlates with a generation of young people who identify as more conservative than their parents, although Penney says the relationship between pop culture and politics is a two-way street. While the media can reflect growing opinions and interests of the moment, it can also be used to shape it.  “Pop culture doesn’t just emerge out of nowhere,” says Penney, who wrote the book Pop Culture, Politics, and the News. “We’re seeing attempts to shape the culture that are increasingly coming from the conservative media ecosystem.” Conservatives carved out a space for themselves at the movies  In March, Ben Shapiro’s media company The Daily Wire released its first theatrical movie, the “satirical” documentary Am I Racist?, which earned $4.5 million its opening weekend. Currently, it’s the highest-grossing documentary of the year along with a handful of other conservative nonfiction films including the Catholic documentary Jesus Thirsts: The Story of the Eucharist, the Dinesh D’Souza-directed Vindicating Trump, and the creationist movie The Ark and The Darkness all making the top 10 list. 2024 saw other movies from conservative studios and right-wing producers make notable financial gains. Despite overwhelmingly negative reviews, the Ronald Reagan biopic, Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, broke into the Top 5 at the box office when it premiered in August, doing particularly well with older, white, and Southern audiences. This summer, the Christian media company Angel Studios also released the pro-adoption movie Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trout, marketed by Daily Wire+. While it made significantly less money than its 2023 predecessor Sound of Freedom, which had a vocal fanbase of QAnon supporters, its nearly $12 million worldwide earnings are still a massive accomplishment for a small Christian film with no movie stars attached.  While the performance of these movies has not bred the same immediate concern of something like Sound of Freedom, it does provide a potential incentive for major studios to start courting a movie-going crowd that’s felt alienated by mainstream Hollywood. Warner Bros has yet to produce its own Sound of Freedom, but we’ve seen hints that Hollywood is interested in movies that at least appeal to white, Southern, and conservative audiences. American nostalgia bait came to the fore in the summer blockbuster Twisters. The Oklahoma-set film with a star-studded, country-infused soundtrack did particularly well in Southern cities and theater chains in middle America, outperforming initial estimations. While it’s probably most accurate to describe the film as decidedly apolitical with some patriotic markers, it does see the white, blond savior (played by Glen Powell) emasculate the movie’s other male main character, Latino storm chaser Javi (Anthony Ramos). Powell happened to produce another piece of Americana, Blue Angels, a look at the US Navy’s flight demo squadron, and the fourth highest-grossing documentary of 2024. He also co-starred in Anyone But You with Sweeney, a film released at the end of 2023 that crossed the $200 million mark in early 2024. Penney says that corporations will try new strategies and pander to different audiences, as they’ve done with Marvel and Disney’s diversity pushes in recent years, based on what they think will benefit them financially. They’re not really thinking about political impact.  “That was very much the reality of capitalism at work,” says Penney. “[Disney] was trying new strategies, not because they were really, truly convinced that they were going to save the world through expanding diversity, but they were getting a sense that that’s what the audience wanted. It was a response to Me Too and Black Lives Matter and things that actually resonated with our culture to a degree.”  This pendulum swing from the sort of diversity-focused art that dominated pop culture during the Obama years to what we’re seeing now is hardly unprecedented. Specifically in music, country’s popularity as a genre has historically corresponded with a push in right-wing politics, from the jingoist anthems following 9/11 to “Okie from Muskogee” during the Nixon years. Pop culture has also seen movies with conservative and/or religious themes, from American Sniper and The Passion of the Christ, break the box office. If this current moment tells us anything, it’s that we’re stuck in an ouroboros of shifting political values and corporate interests.  Suffice to say, it’s not a question of whether we’ve been here before but whether we’re paying attention to what these signals all mean. With an honest look at our media landscape, were the results of the election truly that surprising? 

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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.

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