You know what’s missing from the 2016 presidential election? Issues. You may have heard of them, the things that politicians are elected to turn into legislative form and enact, in between welcoming sports teams to the White House and pardoning the turkey at Thanksgiving.

Issues have been surgically removed from the political bloodstream. A personality-obsessed television media doesn’t care about them and wouldn’t know how to explain them if they did. Data journalism, the hot new trend, is too preoccupied with polls and electoral simulations to bother with the true substance of elections. Hillary Clinton has on occasion tried to reset the focus back on issues—her campaign is a giant policy paper-generation machine—but the political neutron bomb known as Donald Trump has the entire country swinging its head to track who he’s insulted or who’s insulted him.

Meanwhile, partisan liberal media runs down Trump more than it discusses its own candidate. And the liberal punditocracy, newly enamored with political science, has become so certain that presidents cannot achieve their goals in a fractured system with multiple veto points that it has wrung hope out of politics, presuming that public opinion is static. Some have even argued that support for Bernie Sanders was entirely identity-based and had nothing to do with his ideas, to a degree that writes voter intention completely out of the story. The dominant theme of modern American politics, driven by virtually everyone in the media, is cynicism. It’s no surprise that the most cynical candidate America has seen in recent memory can press the advantage.

Democrats do not win elections that resemble attempts to set a Guinness Book World Record for mudslinging. They don’t win when they fail to define a platform or even a point of view. They win when they actually talk about what they want to accomplish in office, and explain why their ideas would be better for the country than their opponents’ ideas.

Democrats in the Senate took a tentative step in that direction on Thursday. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon introduced a resolution calling for a public health insurance option available to every American. This resolution simply says that everyone should have an option to purchase insurance from the government; a legislative vehicle will be introduced next year.