This Won’t Be Easy for Democrats
The Atlantic · Mark Leibovich ·
They’re out of the wilderness—for now.
James Talarico talked a lot during his campaign about the so-called wilderness—as in, the electoral wasteland and morale morass that Democrats had been languishing in since President Trump’s reelection, in 2024. In Texas, this felt like something of a permanent condition. Talarico preferred a more sanguine interpretation of wilderness, something I’ve thought about after he became the first Texas Democrat to win a Senate race since 1988. The wilderness, he said from early on in his campaign, could in fact prove a fertile ground for reinvention.
“There is an opportunity to redefine the Democratic Party,” Talarico told me. “And you can’t do that if the brand is super set, or if there’s a strong leader at the top of the party.” This was a little over a year ago, and we were sitting in the lobby bar of an Arlington, Texas, hotel. “The wilderness,” Talarico continued, “is where new ideas and new leaders and new movements come forth.” At the time, I was inclined to dismiss this as a rationalization from another one of those fool’s-gold Democratic hopefuls in Texas. In retrospect, maybe Talarico was onto something.
If nothing else, the Democrats’ midterm rout of Trump and his supine coalition of Republicans would seem to put to rest, at least for now, the long-running discussion of Democrats as a party out of touch, ill-defined, lacking in purpose, and perpetually ambling in this “wilderness.” I admit that I participated in a fair amount in this Democratic-doldrums discourse myself, including in an opus about the party adrift that ran in February, which now feels like a decade ago. I stand by that story. It was true then, and had been for nearly four years, if you start the clock with the 2022 midterms and the disastrous denouement of the Biden years.
Read the full story at The Atlantic · All coverage of this story