For a few days last week, Amy McGrath was unavoidable on Twitter as her two-minute debut ad, the first of an underdog campaign for Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District seat, went viral. All of the cinematic boxes were checked: professional lighting, polished editing, a score that could make Aaron Sorkin cry. McGrath, a former Marine pilot, walks toward the camera wearing a bomber jacket, a fighter jet behind her, and explains how, as a teenager, she wrote her congressman asking why she couldn’t fight for her country. “When I was 13, my congressman told me I couldn’t fly in combat,” McGrath says. “He said Congress thought women ought to be protected and not allowed to serve in combat. I never got a letter back from my senator, Mitch McConnell.” McGrath went on to become the first woman to fly an F/A-18 in combat.

It’s a resonant message in the Trump era. Not every woman who goes to the polls can relate to dreaming of being a fighter pilot, but many can surely recognize when men are trying to dictate their fates. Lived experience counts for a lot, hence McGrath didn’t need to try all that hard to include gender in an expression of her political identity. The personal is the political, and vice versa. Both are wrapped, unapologetically, in the red, white, and blue. McGrath—whose video has racked up well over 1 million views in the week since it was posted—is the latest in a suddenly ubiquitous genre as the Democratic Party ramps up efforts to recruit veterans. It’s a shrewd play for a party that finds itself, perhaps unexpectedly, in the position of national security scold. And it’s one that allows the party to elide, if momentarily, a vexing debate on the left over whether race and gender politics are an obstacle, rather than the cornerstone, of the coalition-building they must do to retake Congress.

Party leadership seems to want a divorce from identity politics. Or a trial separation, at least. On July 24, they unveiled “A Better Deal,” a new package of economic reforms which they believe will empower working-class voters. Several members of Congress, including minority leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, staged a launch event in a predominantly white Northern Virginia district that Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock won by fewer than six points last November. It was red, but perhaps not so red that they felt it couldn’t become blue. In the latest quixotic move from the party that can’t seem to get out of its own way, the Democrats were clearly there to chase Trump voters. To entice them, for the time being at least, they weren’t talking about L.G.B.T.Q. rights, immigration, or police reform. “The focus starts on economic issues,” Schumer told reporters. “That’s where the American people are hurting. That’s what we most felt was missing in the past in the last several elections.”

It’s easy enough to see why Schumer thinks this is a good idea. Trump is bleeding support, even among his supposedly ironclad base of Rust Belt voters, and Democrats see an opening. But that doesn’t mean that these folks are ready to vote Democratic, especially if all they can offer is a whitewashed retread of D.N.C. talking points. Even if the party aims to only focus on “economic issues,” it’s difficult to see how the “Better Deal” helps them. The branding is awful, for one. They tried to evoke Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” but one-day-only sales have superior slogans. Worse, the platform is vague and cautious. Raising wages, lowering the cost of living, and modernizing the economy are not difficult to agree with. But the same ideas were presented with much more specificity in 2016, featured in the platforms of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. And both found they could not win the primary without placing those issues in the context of identity. It was particularly notable that Clinton’s campaign issued direct challenges to white voters to get more involved in the fight against white supremacy. Planned Parenthood made its first-ever presidential endorsement in its 100 years, thanks to Clinton’s strong support of reproductive freedoms. Sanders, after an initial scuffle with Black Lives Matter, recalibrated his message to include a focus on criminal justice reform.