The Free Press
On Monday, Donald Trump will take the oath of office, and all three branches of government will be controlled by Republicans. The Democratic Party is in the political wilderness—and the question is: Who will lead it back to power? What vision can unite the party once again? And what message can rally voters, especially the disaffected Democrats who voted red for the first time this year?
Over the coming weeks, Peter Savodnik is profiling Democrats from very different places and with very different constituencies to ask those questions. Today: Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I was in Elissa Slotkin’s temporary Senate office in the Hart Senate Office Building, and we were huddled around a secondhand conference table bathed in the glare of the fluorescent overheads. The last rays of the winter sun slanted through the blinds from the other side of the Capitol Rotunda. One of Slotkin’s staffers, young and preternaturally chirpy, handed out miniature bottles of water.
In November, Slotkin, a Democrat and a former CIA analyst, had beaten Republican former congressman Mike Rogers to become Michigan’s next senator by just over 18,000 votes—at the same time that President-elect Donald Trump took Michigan by nearly 80,000.
How did she understand her victory? Slotkin told me she had won because she had “stayed focused on an economic message. Most of my ads were straight to the camera, like, ‘I’m Elissa Slotkin. I want to be your senator, and here’s why,’ ” she said. Another way of saying it might be: Slotkin focused on the normal stuff. The meat-and-potatoes stuff. The stuff voters actually care about.
She was the Democrats’ rare good-news story on election night. As Trump is sworn into office this Monday, the Republican Party, remade in his image, controls not just the White House but both houses of Congress.
The Democratic Party, which turns 200 in 2028 and is the oldest political party in the world, is in shambles. Out of power, yes, but also apparently devoid of purpose. The party of the New Deal and the Great Society, the party that narrowed the gap between the haves and have-nots, is now the party of . . . well, no one can say. And it is entirely unclear who can lead them out of the political wilderness. Will it be the progressive “squad” spearheaded by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York or will it be “normie” centrists like Slotkin?
“I do not know why we exist,” a Democratic fundraiser told me recently. I wondered if Elissa Slotkin did. She gave me 45 minutes.
“Let’s be on Team Normal,” Slotkin, 48, told me, summarizing her recommendation for the party.
It was not normal, she said, to alienate voters. It was not normal to obsess over race and gender.
“Identity politics doesn’t work,” she said. “Woke,” she added, has “become kind of a bad word.”
Also not normal is “the rise of antisemitism on the left,” Slotkin said. “I think the Jewish community, of which I’m a part, was wholly unprepared for that. We’re real prepared for right-wing antisemitism—totally unprepared for left-wing antisemitism, and it threw us onto our heels.”
“I just can’t stand the circular firing squad going on between Democrats right now.” —Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)
She called herself a “radical pragmatist.” The old ways of doing battle with Trump, the old ways of posturing and jousting—they were a dead end. “A lot of Democrats see themselves as opposition,” she said. When I asked if that included her, she said, “No.”
She was, it was important to recall, a great-granddaughter of an immigrant from Russia who had founded a meat-products company that became the sole provider of hot dogs sold at Detroit Tigers games. She knew about negotiating—at least, that was who she came from.
“Some of my most important bills were signed by Donald Trump,” said Slotkin, who was first elected to the House in 2018. (Among those bills was the Real-Time Benefits Act, which gives consumers information about the price of their prescription drugs and became law in late 2020.)
She was sounding a theme that coursed through her entire political career: rising above the partisan fray. In her first, victorious, House campaign, she had recalled being in graduate school when 9/11 happened and being recruited by the CIA, serving in Iraq and then the White House. “In between those tours in Iraq, I’m working for both Republicans and Democrats,” Slotkin said. “I’m working for whoever is the commander in chief.”
Slotkin was all about two things: the working and middle classes. Her state once embodied middle-classness—the auto plant assembly-line workers, the machinists, the mid-level managers, the tool- and diemakers, the inspectors, the technicians. All of them with reliable salaries, benefits, a Pontiac, and, often, a lake house. These people were the backbone of the Democratic Party. The backbone of an America that no longer really exists and Slotkin is trying to rebuild. “Expanding and protecting the middle class” was her “mandate,” she said.
There was, to Slotkin’s mind, approximately zero about any of this that was all that novel. But novel was not the point. The point was steering the Democratic Party back to what it used to be, reclaiming its soul, although that’s not how Slotkin would put it. She viewed her politics as patently straightforward and commonsensical. And winning.
If she’s right, the good news is that Team Normal has a deep bench, many of them, not surprisingly, from Southern states, where Democrats must tack to the center to survive, or swing states Trump carried. The show ponies have huge social media followings and get on the cover of Vanity Fair. The Democrats who actually get things done, those who forge coalitions, dive into all the wonky details, and push bills over the finish line despite all the brand-builders—they’re people like Elissa Slotkin.
Team Normal includes Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and the new North Carolina governor, Josh Stein, Slotkin said. (“I met him last night at the White House Hanukkah party, and I liked him a lot—we hung out.”)
Also wearing the TN jersey are Jared Golden, the congressman from Maine’s reddest, most pro-Trump district; Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, from a similar district in Washington; and Representative Pat Ryan from New York, according to Cheri Bustos, who formerly ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Then there’s Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, newly elected Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, and New York congressman Ritchie Torres, who is weighing a gubernatorial run in 2026.
“There are, all over the Democratic Party, communicators of the first order,” Democratic political guru James Carville told me, adding that Slotkin was “just born to be a senator.” “What drove me crazy the whole cycle”—he said about the recent election—“was we had .350 hitters, and we just couldn’t call them up. It’s one thing if you say, ‘We’re just not that good,’ or, ‘This is the best we can do,’ but that is not remotely the case.”
“If the public associated the party with center-left Democrats like Elissa Slotkin rather than the far left, we would have won the election,” Torres told me.
“We are so D.C.-centric, so coastal-centric,” Bustos, the former DCCC chair, said. She meant the party’s elected leaders and the people who bankroll them—all of whom seem congenitally incapable of speaking to the rest of America.
“If you look at the Democratic leadership and see where they go to do fundraisers, do you think they go to Galena, Illinois?” Bustos asked about her hometown of 3,200. “They’re going to New York City. They’re going to Hollywood.”
The first time I met Slotkin was April 2019, at the Paramount Studios lot in Los Angeles.
She was onstage with fellow freshmen Democratic House members Colin Allred, from Dallas, and Kendra Horn, from Oklahoma City. The three had been flown in by Billy Ray, the screenwriter and director, to take part in a panel discussion about their first six months on the Hill. Ray emceed.
The idea was to connect the politicos with the Hollywood money people—and, just as important, as far as Ray was concerned—educate the Hollywood money people about America.
After the crowd of 200 or so heavily Botoxed, sixty- and seventysomething agents and directors and producers peppered the House members with questions about rising sea levels and suicidal trans kids and Russiagate—then still a thing in Hollywood—Ray turned to the House members. “I said to Colin, to Kendra, to Elissa, ‘Do you ever get those questions in your own district?’ and they all said, ‘No,’ ” he recalled. “I was trying to show our audience that the West LA bubble is not America.”
“Some of my most important bills were signed by Donald Trump.” —Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)
Slotkin explained that, back in Michigan, voters mostly cared about jobs, paying for their kids’ college tuition, and not filing for bankruptcy if they wound up with cancer. She worried that Democrats, then in the early stages of the 2020 presidential primary, weren’t focusing on voters’ tangible, practical concerns.
“I just can’t stand the circular firing squad going on between Democrats right now,” Slotkin told the movie people. “I’m so concerned that, with so many candidates and with so much vitriol that has entered our dialogue with each other, that we’re going to cut these candidates to ribbons and give the other side all the fodder they need, and it’s like walking into a trap.”
Sure enough, at a Democratic presidential debate two months later, all but one of the White House hopefuls vowed to decriminalize illegal border crossings; Elizabeth Warren deployed her first “Latinx,” which is gender-neutral for “Latino”; and Kamala Harris pulled her “That little girl was me” line while skewering Biden over opposing busing policies in the 1970s.
Carville found all of this—the endless pontificating about pronouns or gender-neutral bathrooms or whatever—risible and infuriating. “Democrats have this thing where they always think they’re the next new thing,” he said. “It turns out there’s never anything new.” As always, “it’s the economy, stupid”—as Carville famously put it while advising Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
But that’s not the message Democrats are going with. “If you stopped any American on the street today and said, ‘What does the Democratic Party stand for?’, they would not be able to tell you,” said Ray, who had worked closely with other Hollywood writers, Bustos, and then-Representative Adam Schiff of California to help engineer the Democrats’ 2018 midterm victory.
Which was why Trump was lapping up votes in the heartland, David Yankovich, a Democratic campaign strategist who advised former senator Doug Jones—the last Democrat elected to statewide office in Alabama, in 2017—told me. “I genuinely worry that the party doesn’t fully understand or have the ability to do what’s necessary to win again without a major structural overhaul,” he said.
Slotkin got that.
To Slotkin, there wasn’t any magic to winning. It was about focusing on the things voters were talking about, which, lo and behold, were the same things Trump was talking about.
“While you can have lots of people who are open-minded about lots of issues, they wanna know that their elected representatives are going to focus on the things that keep them up at night, and I think sometimes, when you stand for everything, people can’t understand your priorities,” she told me.
Nor was it just about pocketbook concerns, Slotkin said. It was the way in which those concerns intersected with the world beyond our shores.
“There’s a Venn diagram of Michigan issues and national security issues, and I try to live as much in that space as possible,” Slotkin said. One of her staffers had just poked his head in the conference room to remind her she had to be somewhere. She was nodding a little faster now.
When she talked about China, say, or the geopolitical importance of American global leadership, she sounded not unlike Elbridge Colby, a China hawk recently nominated as under secretary for defense policy in Trump’s Pentagon.
“I have seen American failures in national security up close,” Slotkin told me. “I could write a book on that. But if the question is, ‘Who do you want to keep leading the world—American leadership or Chinese leadership?’, it’s American leadership every single time.”
She added: “I think we’re in great power competition with China. I’ve never thought of it as a cold war. I don’t think that comparison works, because, I think, what was going on during the Cold War, we had like zero economic integration with the Soviet Union—I mean, to the point where they could collapse, and we had some of our most successful decades.”
Then, Slotkin said: “This is the opposite of where we are with China. We make cars in Michigan, and I’m sorry, anyone who thinks you can make a car right now without something coming from China just hasn’t been around the auto industry for the past 30 years. The trade is hot.”
“If the public associated the party with center-left Democrats like Elissa Slotkin, we would have won the election.” —Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY)
She wanted all Chinese-made “connected vehicles” blocked from entering the U.S. market.
“It’s like an intelligence collection office on wheels,” Slotkin said. “3D mapping, LiDAR”—she meant light detection and ranging, a remote sensing technique that uses lasers to measure distances and create models of the earth’s surface—“geolocation of individual drivers, full-motion video.”
She added: “I asked the secretary of defense, on record, in an Armed Services hearing, like, you know, ‘You do the war planning—wouldn’t it be nice to have live video and LiDAR and 3D mapping of every Chinese city and military base? Wouldn’t you build that into your planning? And don’t you agree that’s a really frightening thing for the Chinese to have on us?’ ”
But Slotkin also wanted to make sure we use “a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.” She was alluding to the incoming administration, the tone, the rhetoric. She worried that the incoming president’s bumptiousness and brashness would hurt the same people he claimed to care so much about.
“I don’t want to do stuff because it’s red meat, but it makes no economic sense,” Slotkin said. “It’s Christmas season. A Tonka truck is, like, 30 bucks. You start putting all these tariffs and retaliatory tariffs”—Trump recently called tariff “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”—“next year it’ll be $45. That doesn’t sound smart to me.”
What Democrats needed now was a strategy—a plan. “You know, in the defense world, you get together, and you hash out the plan,” Slotkin said. “Plan beats no plan almost every time.”
Then, she recalled her first month in the House—exactly six years ago.
“I get to the House orientation, and I start asking someone, ‘Like, okay, we just won, we flipped the House, so what’s the plan?’ ” she said. “The leader of the New Dems”—the moderate wing of the Democratic caucus—“was like, ‘That’s a great question, why don’t you ask that when Nancy Pelosi comes to speak to us?’ ”
When the then-speaker of the House arrived, Slotkin said, “I asked her, naively, in front of a hundred members of Congress, ‘Okay, we just won back the House, and we all talked about infrastructure and the price of healthcare and prescription drugs, so what’s the plan now?’ And she’s like, ‘That is the plan.’ And I said, ‘No, not, like, the themes, not the messages, but, like, the plan—like, which legislation, and when do we do it, and what’s the timeline?’ ”
Slotkin paused.
After a moment, she said: “That woman can get anything passed in the House—tactical genius. But we were just talking past each other, and for me, I’ve never come full circle. I’m still looking for it.”
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