What, in the age of Donald J. Trump, should a Democrat be? It didn’t take long, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, for Democratic officials to descend into a desperate and often acrimonious argument about the future of the party. Did it still rest with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt—those factory workers and retail employees who used to form the core of the Democratic Party but have watched the American dream fall victim to globalization and automation? Would it be comprised of a diverse, urban coalition clustered around cosmopolitan, white-collar cities? And might it be possible—doubtful, perhaps, but possible—that both could be true?

With this fall’s midterm elections fast approaching, the Democratic Party has yet to resolve its internal conflicts or develop a coherent long-term vision. But it has identified a potential path back to power in the immediate term. In order to regain control of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party must flip 23 Republican-held seats. To do so, it has identified 104 GOP-held districts as targets, the biggest number in more than a decade. It is zeroing in, especially, on Republican-held districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump: suburban areas near Miami, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and, especially, Los Angeles, where affluent, well-educated white populations have been joined in recent decades by an influx of immigrants. If Trump’s success in Rust Belt states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania symbolized the Democratic Party’s growing rift with white, working-class Americans, his poor showing in the suburbs has presented an opportunity for Democrats to make inroads in places that, for decades, have been thought of as inexorably conservative. “The battleground is not urban America or rural America, it’s suburban America,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Politico last year. Brian Fallon, a Democratic consultant who worked as a top Clinton aide, said that the path to a Democrat-led House “runs through the Panera Breads of America.”

The question that no one seems quite able to answer, however, is what kind of Democrat can win the Panera demographic. Last June, when Jon Ossoff failed to capture the suburban Atlanta district vacated by Republican Tom Price—in what became the most expensive House race in U.S. history—some in the party argued that Ossoff, with his lack of interest in single-payer health care and taxing the rich, had alienated potential Democratic voters by being too moderate. To win, they asserted, Democratic candidates should tack further to the left, in the mode of Bernie Sanders. In March, however, following Conor Lamb’s narrow victory in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points, pundits argued that Lamb’s careful, centrist positions helped win him the race—and that Democrats shouldn’t write off more conservative Americans as a lost cause just yet.

Going forward, there is no better place to witness the Democratic Party’s strategies play out—and no place where the stakes are higher—than Orange County, California. Wedged along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, Orange County is home to more than three million people, living in a maze of communities ranging from surfer towns to exurbs. Orange County doesn’t offer a sense of place so much as a sense of placelessness, and if it weren’t for the consistently balmy weather, much of it, with its six-lane freeways and big-box stores and strip malls and, yes, Panera Breads, could just as soon be in Illinois or Texas. The county’s orange groves are long gone; if you are in Anaheim, say, and find yourself craving an orange, you drive to Ralphs and buy one. When, on a recent visit, I asked a lifelong resident to take me on a tour, he brought me past his childhood home in a quiet neighborhood of low-slung ranch houses, a 7-Eleven, and a large shopping center.

For decades, Orange County—the birthplace of Richard Nixon, the Crystal Cathedral, and the “Real Housewives” reality-TV franchise—was one of the country’s proudest Republican strongholds. In 2016, though, Clinton beat Trump there by a nine-point margin, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the county since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term.