From my perspective, the challenge for Democrats is less about moving to the left or moving to the center, than it is about being more vocal and coherent about the party’s economic world view and being more aggressive in championing reforms to make politics work better. Democrats don’t suffer from being too far to the left, they suffer from being too embarrassed about their own party platform. There is relatively unanimity within the party about a number of key issues, such as raising the minimum wage, the need for well-funded infrastructure programs, providing job training and better child care, supporting educational opportunities and more. The pieces are all there. The problem has been that Democratic candidates often hesitate to put these ideas front and center, always fearing that they will be somehow smeared as too far to the left even though the public supports many of these positions. While Republicans embrace their core agenda with relish, Democrats run away from it.

The widespread public rejection of the draconian Medicaid cuts that Republicans have been pushing on Capitol Hill should be a reminder to the party that there is something to the government programs they stand for. In a fascinating piece in The New York Times, Lee Drutman found that the divisions about economic policy are not that deep within the party. The real tension between the Clinton and Sanders “factions” centers on how much they distrust institutions. The Sanders wing doesn’t think much of the political process. A winning Democratic candidate thus needs to combine a robust economic platform with a vision for government reform. The two can be a powerful combination. We should also remember that Clinton won a huge percentage of the popular vote, so the notion that the party can’t attract voters is not clear to me.

On the Republican side, coming back from a one-term presidency wouldn’t be so easy. Republicans will own the Trump presidency and a skillful Democrat will take advantage of this. Many of the possible candidates you mention, Paul Ryan and Ben Sasse, for instance, are far to the right. A look at the kinds of policies that they propose could make it difficult for them to really win a broad coalition. While Trump didn’t seem to know the details of any of the health-care bills, Ryan, for instance, has been the architect of an agenda that makes steep cuts in programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Republicans also need to understand that the forces which produced a victory for Donald Trump are deep rooted. Trump is a culmination of many of the changes that have been taking place within the party over the past decade, not merely an anomaly. Unless moderate Republicans wake up to this fact, the party won’t move in a different direction. For all the talk about a working-class rebellion against the Democrats in states like Wisconsin, much more important to his victory was a conservative media universe (a chattering class, as you might call it) that has fostered the kind of public discourse Trump thrives on, as well as intense partisan loyalty which lead Republican voters to push for more extreme candidates and a notable shift in the party’s ideological world view on issues like immigration and climate change. Trump took many of his ideas right out of the playbook that was written by Tea Party Republicans on Capitol Hill. All of these forces will still make it difficult for the Jeb Bush’s of the world to succeed. The next Republican candidate might not be Trump, but it could easily be a cleaned-up version of him and I am not sure this is a successful recipe for the GOP in a world that is becoming more ethnically diverse, more educated, and more socially liberal than it has been in a long time.