Edward-Isaac Dovere is chief Washington correspondent at Politico.

Standing with some 30,000 people in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the night before the election watching Hillary Clinton speak, exhausted aides were already worrying about what would come next. They expected her to win, of course, but they knew President Clinton was going to get thrashed in the 2018 midterms—the races were tilted in Republicans’ favor, and that’s when they thought the backlash would really hit. Many assumed she’d be a one-term president. They figured she’d get a primary challenge. Some of them had already started gaming out names for who it would be.

“Last night I stood at your doorstep / Trying to figure out what went wrong,” Bruce Springsteen sang quietly to the crowd in what he called “a prayer for post-election.” “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”


What happened the next night shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats. But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years. They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they’ve been worrying about—and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers. In other words, it wasn’t just Donald Trump. Or the Russians. Or James Comey. Or all the problems with how Clinton and her aides ran the campaign. Win or lose, Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead—the result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grass roots and the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win.

“The patient,” says Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, “was clearly already sick.”

As Trump takes over the GOP and starts remaking its new identity as a nationalist, populist party, creating a new political pole in American politics for the first time in generations, all eyes are on the Democrats. How will they confront a suddenly awakened, and galvanized, white majority? What’s to stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? Who’s going to pull a coherent new vision together? Worried liberals are watching with trepidation, fearful that Trump is just the beginning of worse to come, desperate for a comeback strategy that can work.

What’s clear from interviews with several dozen top Democratic politicians and operatives at all levels, however, is that there is no comeback strategy—just a collection of half-formed ideas, all of them challenged by reality. And for whatever scheme they come up with, Democrats don’t even have a flag-carrier. Barack Obama? He doesn’t want the job. Hillary Clinton? Too damaged. Bernie Sanders? Too socialist. Joe Biden? Too tied to Obama. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer? Too Washington. Elizabeth Warren? Maybe. And all of them old, old, old.

The Democrats’ desolation is staggering. But part of the problem is that it’s easy to point to signs that maybe things aren’t so bad. After all, Clinton did beat Trump by 2.8 million votes, Obama’s approval rating is nearly 60 percent, polls show Democrats way ahead of the GOP on many issues and demographics suggest that gap will only grow. But they are stuck in the minority in Congress with no end in sight, have only 16 governors left and face 32 state legislatures fully under GOP control. Their top leaders in the House are all over 70. Their top leaders in the Senate are all over 60. Under Obama, Democrats have lost 1,034 seats at the state and federal level—there’s no bench, no bench for a bench, virtually no one able to speak for the party as a whole.

“The fact that our job should be easier just shows how poorly we’re doing the job,” says Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, an Iraq War veteran seen as one of the party’s rising stars.

What did Democrats get wrong in the 2016 race?

“We arrived at this point through some combination of either outright offending or at least failing to inspire nearly every segment of our party’s base voters.”

—Tim Ryan, U.S. representative, Ohio



“Democrats failed to listen sufficiently to voters, appreciate their discontent with the status quo and articulate how they will fight for working Americans.”

—Gretchen Whitmer, former state senate Democratic leader, Michigan “People and polls were unfairly distracted by unintelligent, racist banter centering on anti-establishment or anti-politically correct views.”

—Shavonda Sumter, state assemblywoman, New Jersey

There are now fewer than 700 days until Election Day 2018, as internal memos circulating among Democratic strategists point out with alarm. They differ in their prescriptions, but all boil down to the same inconvenient truth: If Republicans dominate the 2018 midterms, they will control the Senate (and with it, the Supreme Court) for years, and they will draw district lines in states that will lock in majorities in the House and across state capitals, killing the next generation of Democrats in the crib, setting up the GOP for an even more dominant 2020 and beyond.

Most doubt Democrats have the stamina or the stomach for the kind of cohesive resistance that Republicans perfected over the years. In their guts, they want to say yes to government doing things, and they’re already getting drawn in by promises to work with Trump and the Republican majorities. They’re heading into the next elections with their brains scrambled by Trump’s win, side-eyeing one another over who’s going to sell out the rest, nervous the incoming president will keep outmaneuvering them in the media and throw up more targets than they could ever hope to shoot at—and all of this from an election that was supposed to cement their claim on the future.

Some thinking has started to take shape. Obama is quickly reformatting his post-presidency to have a more political bent than he had planned. Vice President Joe Biden is beginning to structure his own thoughts on mentoring and guiding rising Democrats. (No one seems to be waiting to hear from Clinton.) At the law office of former Attorney General Eric Holder, which is serving as the base for the redistricting reform project he is heading for Obama, they’re getting swarmed with interest and checks. At the Democratic Governors Association, all of a sudden looking like the headquarters of the resistance, they’re sorting through a spike in interested candidates. And everyone from Obama on down is talking about going local, focusing on the kinds of small races and party-building activities Republicans have been dominating for cycle after cycle.

But all that took decades, and Democrats have no time. What are they going to do next? There hasn’t been an American political party in worse shape in living memory. And there may never have been a party less ready to confront it.

“We’re at a space shuttle moment,” says Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who is widely expected to run statewide soon in Georgia. “The most vulnerable time for the space shuttle is when it re-enters the environment, so that when it comes back into the environment it doesn’t blow up. The tiles need to be tight. I’m concerned about the tightness of the tiles on the space shuttle right now. We have to get through this heat.”

***

Problem No. 1: Message

What scares many Democrats about Trump isn’t any particular campaign pledge—his promises to build a wall or keep out Muslims or shut down Obamacare. Those are fights they can wrap their heads around. No, the existential, hair-on-fire threat to the Democratic Party is just how easy it was for Trump to sneak around their flank and rob them of an issue they thought was theirs alone—economic populism—even as they partied at fundraisers in Hollywood and the Hamptons.

It so happens that the most prominent advocate of this view—Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren—is, for the moment, the party’s most plausible standard-bearer in 2020. The mission now, Warren believes, can be summed up in five words: Take back populism from Trump. “The American people know what they want,” she said in an interview, urging an emphasis on economic opportunity. “If Donald Trump and his Republican Party can’t deliver on any of that, then the American people will see that he’s not on their side.”

Why are Democrats lagging at the state and local levels? “We’ve paid an enormous price for letting our local organizations atrophy to a point of near irrelevance.”

—Ruben Gallego, U.S. representative, Arizona “In part, it’s because certain policy ambitions are best achieved on a national level. But that national focus has become myopic.”

—Stacey Abrams, Democratic leader, Georgia House of Representatives “[Republicans] had a 50-state model approach to winning the redistricting battles. We didn’t.”

—Eric Swalwell, U.S. representative, California

Trump has made it easy by stacking his administration with millionaires and billionaires whose confirmation preparations included memorizing the price of milk so they don’t seem out of touch—people like Treasury pick Steven Mnuchin, whose bank once foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman’s house when she made a 27-cent payment error.

“Donald Trump with these appointments is saying squarely to the American people that he lied to them and his promise is worth nothing,” adds Warren. “That’s the point to keep making.”

Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, seen by many as a rising liberal leader of the Senate, makes a slightly different argument. The lesson from Trump’s win, in his eyes, is how sick voters are of the status quo and pragmatism. Murphy is all for saying no to Trump, but he argues that Democrats need to come up with their own proposals, however unrealistic, and say yes—big league. Entitlement reform? Forget it, Murphy says: Now’s the time to talk about expanding Social Security, not shrinking it. “A lot of Democrats laughed at Bernie Sanders when he proposed free college. First of all, that’s not impossible,” Murphy says, but more to the point, “it’s a way to communicate a really important issue in terms that people will understand.”

Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos, a former journalist who has been tapped to help lead House Democrats’ communications efforts, is urging her colleagues to go hyperlocal—a strategy informed by her own success in a bad year for the party. She won by 20 percentage points in a northwest Illinois district that Trump carried by half a point and Obama carried by 17 points in 2012. Bustos wants each member to identify constituents who will be affected by policy shifts under Trump and have district staff promote those people in local media. Tell their stories, she says.

Every path back to power runs through figuring out how to get voters to believe again that the Democratic Party, founded on and forever about a fairer economy, is aware that millions of Americans feel the economy’s been unfair to them and think Democrats have no real plans to do anything about it.

“Trump is talking about the economy of the past, bringing us backward to an economy that doesn’t exist anymore. Rather than going back into the coal mines, we’ve got to show how hardworking people in Appalachia can contribute to the new economy,” says Moulton, who is often talked about as a candidate for statewide office and beyond. “The message has to be: ‘We need you, we want you to be a part of the economy.’ We’re not going to pretend that it’s going to be 1955 again, but there’s a new economy coming and America’s not going to succeed if it’s not responding.”

This has echoes of how Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992—as a champion of globalization who would make it work better for ordinary Americans—but that was before so many of the factories had closed, before the culture felt different, before the internet made everything more immediate and more immediately infuriating. Yet Obama and his 21st-century Democrats beat back the Clinton restoration in 2008 in large part by running against the incremental, crabwise approach of the ’90s. Bill Clinton was a Southern Democrat who grew up in a world of political constraints, and there aren’t too many of those anymore; what the base wants now is Warren-like progressive passion, without any of the liberal self-loathing they sensed in the Clintons.

Over emails, texts and phone calls, ad hoc networks of younger Democrats have started to form, eager to talk about a new start for the party.

“Part of the work I’m doing right now is recognizing there is nobody left. It’s pulling together my peers,” says Eric Garcetti, a 45-year old Mexican-American Jewish mayor of Los Angeles who is widely assumed to be part of the party’s future in California and potentially beyond. He wanted Clinton to win. But there’s a certain freedom in moving past Clintonism.

“It’s maybe the end of … ‘The era of big government is over,’” he says.

***

Problem No. 2: The Politics of Obstruction

It’s been 10 years since Democrats didn’t control at least one wing of the federal government, and a lot of them, argues Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat elected to the House in 2014, have forgotten what that’s like. Those who do, he says, are all basing their thinking on what they did to George W. Bush or what Mitch McConnell did to Obama. “They’re scared of the unknown. This is a new world for them. And they’re trying to find solace in what they know,” Gallego says.

Gallego points to his time as assistant minority leader in the Arizona legislature under an all GOP-controlled government, where Democrats held the line until splintered Republicans gave in, allowing them to preserve Obama’s Medicaid expansion. For what’s ahead in Washington, he’s pushing a kind of explanatory resistance, refusing any cooperation with Trump—“It’s very dangerous to give this man anything, because anything he does makes him more powerful, and he’s going to use power irresponsibly”—while using every fight as an opportunity to promote what the party stands for instead.

Trump’s pledge to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure is one of those opportunities, Gallego says. His idea: Make Trump release his taxes to show that he won’t personally benefit from any provision in the bill, while using whatever’s in the bill to make concrete and specific cases to voters about why the president and the Congress are hurting them, and why Democrats’ intransigence matters directly in people’s lives.

It sounds reasonable enough, except for one problem: There’s no way Republicans, who control every lever of power in the House, will allow it. And there’s no way the 70-year-old Trump, elected without releasing his taxes and feeling validated by every decision he has made so far, is going to suddenly become a new man once he’s sitting in the Oval Office.



“I worry that our caucus is going to pick way too many things to communicate, way too many things to display outrage about,” says Murphy.



The only mechanism Democrats have to actually shape what happens in Washington is the Senate—with 48 votes that give them an eight-vote margin for error on filibusters and the hope that three Republicans will break away on some votes to join them in the majority. Trump works best with a foil, and they’re determined not to serve themselves up to him as obstructionists.

And here, Democrats have more of a strategy than they are perhaps letting on. In essence, the idea is to focus on issues that drive a wedge through the Republican caucus. On Obamacare, they will step out of the way and let Republicans squirm among themselves. On infrastructure, the plan is to split Republicans between those leery of new spending and those who just want to get along with Trump. Either way, Democrats figure, they win: They could get a bill they support, or send the process into enough of a tailspin that GOP forces devour one another and there won’t be any bill at all. As for Trump, they will just wait him out. “If he comes much closer to where we are, we could work with him,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in an interview, “and that kind of issue unites our caucus and divides theirs.”

Many on the left view Schumer warily, suspicious of his breaks with Obama on Israel and Iran, his close ties to Wall Street and his reputation for cutting deals and hogging the spotlight. The base wants McConnell-style, uncaring and unapologetic obstruction, or at least the old Harry Reid, burn-the-place-down and taunt-the-flames kind of pushback. There’s already a vast library of liberal freak-out think pieces about Schumer’s refrain that he’s not going to say no to bills just because they have Trump’s name on them.

What’s the Democratic Party’s greatest weakness right now? “Our as yet unmet need for a standard-bearer to move us past the disappointments of 2016 and lead the opposition effort during the Trump presidency.”

—Cyrus Habib, lieutenant governor, Washington state “[Democrats] are the true champions of economic empowerment for middle-class Americans and those who aspire to the middle class. … But that wasn’t successfully communicated in this election.”

—Elizabeth Brown, city councilmember, Columbus, Ohio “Our inclination to over-learn some of the lessons from the last election. It would be a mistake to lose sight of what has made us the best party to represent a rapidly evolving nation: our inclusiveness.”

—Crisanta Duran, speaker of the House, Colorado State Assembly

Asked about what he’s been telling Trump in their private phone calls, Schumer is coy. “I said, ‘You ran against both the Democratic and Republican establishments—if you do that as president, you could get some things done, but if you just let the hard right capture your presidency, like with the Cabinet appointments,’” Schumer recounts, “‘it could well be a flop.’”

Relentless obstruction could easily be a trap, too. “My worry is that we lose focus. I don’t know what outrage to focus on a daily basis, and I worry that our caucus is going to pick way too many things to communicate, way too many things to display outrage about,” Murphy says, “and in the end, nothing will end up translating.”

***

Problem No. 3: The Midterms

If there’s anyone who can lay claim to having the worst job in Washington, it’s Chris Van Hollen. A freshman senator from Maryland, he has been charged with leading the Democrats’ efforts to retake the Senate in 2018. When Schumer, who is expected to stay central to fundraising and campaign strategy, announced Van Hollen’s role, he somewhat disingenuously described him as “our first choice”—as in first choice who didn’t say no.

Schumer and Van Hollen have a complex calculus ahead of them, driven not only by the need to keep the party base energized against Trump, but also the reality that 10 of their incumbents come from states Trump won and may often align with the president for their own survival. Senate Democrats were facing a terrible 2018 map before Trump, with 25 seats up for grabs, and their prospects have gotten notably worse, with races in already difficult spots like Missouri, North Dakota and West Virginia as the baseline, and potentially new territory opened up in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, after Trump’s wins there. Republicans are defending eight seats, but only one in a state Clinton won.

A good way to make Van Hollen stop short and almost laugh is to ask him about candidate recruitment for next year. Sitting at a conference table in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill, Van Hollen makes abundantly clear that the math he’s thinking about is how to stay as close to the current 48 as he can.

“Our focus,” he says, “will be on supporting our members, so we can hold the blue wall.”

Make it through 2018. Hope for 2020.

Van Hollen, who masterminded Democrats’ pickup of 21 House seats in 2008, only to lose 60 in the 2010 midterm wipeout, is seen as one of the party’s canniest strategists. It’s early days yet, but he and other top Democrats have already been studying the 2016 election returns in detail, searching for clues that can help them staunch the bleeding in 2018. One intriguing thing they’ve found: All those people who voted for both Obama and Trump look like reliable anti-Washington voters primed to boomerang against the GOP now that the other guys are in charge. Incumbents have been told to act as if they’re the mayors of their states. There’s talk of centralizing around a few easy and direct proposals, much shorter than the Republicans’ old Contract with America. Shortly before kicking off his candidacy, Van Hollen, notably, pitched a plan that would take $2,000 off the taxes of anyone earning less than $200,000 per year, reward savings and triple the child care tax credit.

As for those vexing red-state senators, “I don’t think anyone is running toward Trump. They’re running toward the issues that are important to the people in their states,” Van Hollen says. Maybe so. But get used to headlines about Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill going rogue.

If there is hope for the Democratic Party in the short term, it’s in the governors’ mansions they control now—and the ones they hope to control in the near future. Governors like Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee in Washington, Jerry Brown in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York are going to be blocking and tackling in their capitols, pushing state-level legislation on immigration, Medicare, environmental standards and reproductive rights. California Democrats have already hired Holder as a sort of warrior-lawyer, anticipating years of legal battles with Trump’s Washington.

On the other end of the spectrum is Montana Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat who won reelection by 4 percentage points on the same day Trump won his state by more than 20, running on a record of Medicaid expansion, campaign finance reform, equal pay and expanding public education—on top of having issued more vetoes than any Montana governor in history. Instead of raging against Trump and the Republicans in Congress, Bullock wants to ignore them. “We as Democrats need to recognize that there’s no such thing as a national issue,” he says.

What should the Democratic Party’s core message be? “Donald Trump co-opted our core message, which is that voters want their leaders to step up and lead on their bread-and-butter issues. If Trump can’t deliver on his promises, we need to show that progressive economic polices are the pathway forward.”

—Lorena Gonzalez, state assemblywoman, California “We are the party of opportunity and fairness. … Opportunity requires that Americans have a path to the middle class; fairness insists that path be open to all.”

—Mike Johnston, state senator, Colorado “Trump wants to take us back to an economy of the past, which simply doesn’t exist anymore. Democrats have the opportunity to show how all Americans can be a part of the economy of the future, and how we need the diverse talents of all our people to be at our best.”

—Seth Moulton, U.S. representative, Massachusetts

All this positioning is building up to a heady 2017 and 2018, with governors’ races in nine swingy states where a Republican has been in charge the past eight years. Add in likely pickups in blue New Jersey this year and potentially Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts next year, and Democrats could end up with a slew of new governors.

“You want models? I got models,” says Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, who’s doing another stint as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Think Bullock in Montana, Roy Cooper in North Carolina and John Bel Edwards in Louisiana—Malloy argues that each 2018 race will need a tailored, locally smart strategy. But if there’s one tactic that binds them all together, it’s this: relentless aggression. Malloy blames 2016 on Democrats overestimating voters’ ability to see that they were being lied to by Trump and other Republicans. He has no intention of making the same mistake in 2018.

“We can’t assume anything,” Malloy says. “It’s going to be hand-to-hand combat.”

Some Democrats see a different lesson in 2016, with a takeaway best summed up by a Samuel L. Jackson line from Pulp Fiction: Personality goes a long way. On paper, Trump had none of the characteristics of a successful GOP nominee—a Manhattan billionaire who bragged about cheating on his first wife with the mistress who later became his second divorce, a closet full of skeletons and a history of cozying up to Democrats? But he was able to connect on such a visceral level that none of those liabilities mattered. What he also showed is how irrelevant parties are—before he pulled chunks of the Democratic base away from Clinton, he swallowed the strongest field of up-and-coming Republican leaders in decades, all while throwing conservative dogma in the toilet. Internalize that, Garcetti says, because “there’s no question that the next generation of voters for the next 50 years will be people who don’t wake up thinking about themselves as a Democrat or a Republican.”

Pick your movie analogy: People want more Jay Bulworth, less Tracy Flick. It often took a village of Clinton advisers just to produce one tweet; Trump pulls out his Android smartphone and lets loose. “Do your own social media for crying out loud. That authenticity is important,” New Jersey Senator Cory Booker advises. Democrats aren’t going to turn into Trump clones, dashing off grammatically challenged 140-character tirades at 3 a.m., but their politicians are trying to unlearn how to be politicians.

“Everybody who’s in elected office, who wants a future in this space, whatever you are, be it,” Atlanta’s Reed says. “Anybody can win right now. But I’ll tell you who will definitely lose: a fraud.”

***

Problem No. 4: The Obama Legacy

Several times since the election, between knocks on Clinton for running a low-energy campaign, Obama has compared this moment for Democrats to 2004, when George W. Bush was narrowly reelected, the House stayed Republican, and he and Ken Salazar were the only Democrats newly elected to a Republican-dominated Senate. Two years later, he points out, Democrats swept Congress. Two years after that, he’s the president.

What Obama conveniently leaves out is how significantly gerrymandering, enabled by state-level losses, has since tilted the House map for Republicans, how different that 2006 Senate map looked from what’s ahead, and how at this same point, four years out from Election Day 2008, it was pretty clear that Obama and Clinton and John Edwards and probably Biden and Bill Richardson and all the way down to Dennis Kucinich were going to run for president. Now, no one has any idea who the field will be in 2020, and no one outside Washington knows the names that get talked about in Washington.

“With Barack, we skipped a whole generation,” Biden told me in an interview in his West Wing office just over a week before Trump’s inauguration, when I asked him if he would run in 2020 and what that says about the party’s lack of young leaders. “There’s also been times when it looked like there were a lot of qualified people who were younger, and all of a sudden you turn to the older folks in the party.” He didn’t name any.

Warren might spark a movement, and she could almost certainly count on winning New Hampshire, but she would be 71 and make a lot of Democrats worry she would take the party too far left. Booker can, and likes to assert that he can, tap into an Obama-esque post-racial aspirationalism. Cuomo would have a socially progressive, fiscal centrist record to tout. Many are talking up Kamala Harris, though almost none of them know anything about the new California senator other than that she’s a multi-ethnic woman; few have heard her speak or couldn’t identify a single policy position she holds. Other names get tossed around—Hickenlooper, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

“There isn’t a clear tier-one level of elected officials jumping out right now,” says Mitch Stewart, Obama’s 2012 battleground states director and now a Democratic operative working with some of the up-and-coming talent. “There’s so much more oxygen in the run-up to this next election than there has been previously, that leaders in industry, leaders in nonprofit, leaders in service outside of politics can take a real look at the 2020 race.”

And so conversations tip to the likes of Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, Tom Steyer, Tom Hanks. There’s always the George Clooney fantasy. Meryl Streep wasn’t even done with her Trump-bashing speech at the Golden Globes before that idea started going around, at least informally.

In the meantime, Democrats face a dangerous period in which it’s not clear who is calling the shots. Obama and Biden have both rethought their retirement plans to help shape the next generation of Democrats—Obama focused more on rebuilding party infrastructure, cultivating the grass roots and potentially meeting with presidential candidates as 2020 gets closer; Biden more engaged with nurturing talented up-and-comers. But both are determined to sit out day-to-day politics, people close to them say, though Trump could easily goad either or both of them back into the fray.



“What I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn’t able to do during midterms,” Obama said. “I didn’t crack the code on that.”



Many Democrats want Obama now to be the field marshal on the campaign trail and the architect of the revival, if only out of penance for the eight years of Democratic decimation on his watch—a record that culminated in his sharing a limo from the White House to the Inauguration with a man once thought to be the most unelectable major-party nominee in generations.

“You’re right,” Obama said at his good-riddance-to-2016 news conference when I asked him about those critiques. “What I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn’t able to do during midterms. It’s not that we didn’t put in time and effort into it. I spent time and effort into it, but the coalition I put together didn’t always turn out to be transferable.” Obama blamed some of the losses on the inherent pushback to one party being in power, some to “deep-standing traditional challenges for Democrats, like during off-year elections, the electorate is older and we do better with a younger electorate.”

“I didn’t crack the code on that,” Obama acknowledged, “and if other people have ideas about how to do that even better, I’m all for it.”

***

Problem No. 5: Trump

You could park Trump Force One in the gap between Democrats’ capabilities and their ambitions. They’re eager to crush Trump not just for the sake of stopping the changes he’s pursuing—they want to embarrass him personally, and they look at 2020 as a chance to pretend that he was never really elected, that America didn’t put him in the same seat as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

They are petrified that everyone will keep underestimating Trump and will be busy fighting over basic values while the president and his Republican majority roll over them and roll back most of what they fought for during the past eight years. Elections are usually won on pocketbook issues; nobody really knows how it would work to run on abstract concepts like freedom of the press or transparency—but many Democrats are tempted to turn their opposition to Trump into a crusade to save America itself.

“We’ve never had to have a conversation about reselling democracy,” says Murphy. “Liberals scoffed at his talk of jailing journalists and throwing out major portions of the Constitution, because we just sort of assumed that everybody’s on board with this thing called American democracy.”

“The conversations that I’m having in the cloakroom, in texts and on the phone, reflect a caucus that is not about politics right now,” agrees Booker. “This is a crisis moment in America.”

There is no time for any of it: no time to debate what the party should focus on, no time to recruit candidates, no time to identify new leaders, no time to rebuild Democrats’ core of operations, no time to unpack everything that went wrong in the 2016 campaign, no time to build a legislative strategy, no time to wrap their heads around how much change is coming to America and American politics.

After decades of neglect, there’s nothing else, either.

“The Democratic Party now is left literally at zero—zero dollars in the bank, zero infrastructure as the Clinton campaign closes up shop,” wrote Democratic National Committee consultant Donnie Fowler in a post-mortem ordered by outgoing interim chair Donna Brazile, “and, most importantly, zero majority control in Washington and in 33 of the states.”

On the other hand, Trump could be the Democrats’ salvation. He’s already deeply unpopular, and midterms tend to go badly for the party in the White House. It’s tempting for Democrats to think all they need to do is wait for their adversaries to defeat themselves. Or that some reporter will finally discover the Holy Grail of Donald Trump scoops—the story that will take him, and the GOP, down. Or that Republicans will continue to overreach and get eaten by a Trump tweet the way they did the very first day of this Congress with the attempt to scrap the Office of Congressional Ethics. Or that the savior candidate will come from nowhere and rescue the party by sheer force of personality—another Obama.

“Elections are only as bad as the next one,” Garcetti says, “when suddenly the impossible becomes possible.”

Whatever the truth of that statement, the next two and four years are going to be all about Trump. Anson Kaye, one of Clinton’s top media consultants, has been spending the weeks since the election giving a presentation on what happened and what he thinks has to happen now. It ends like this: “Trump is a radical. / Which makes him an opportunity. / Values first. / Stand up (for the little guy/against bullies/in the line of fire) / Talk like a normal person. / Protect the right to vote. / Treat 2018 like a national election. / Target governors and state legislators.”

Then on the final slide: “Be clear-eyed about the America we live in.”