In West Virginia, Richard Ojeda, a former paratrooper running for the House, talks about taxing natural-gas companies to raise teacher pay. In Ohio, another candidate, Aftab Pureval, has challenged his Republican opponent to stop avoiding town halls and debate the tax law. In Kentucky, Amy McGrath became a sensation with a rousing introductory video about how she had overcome sexism to fly military jets. But why was McGrath running for Congress? Because, she explained in the video, Andy Barr, the incumbent, “said he would vote enthusiastically to take health care away from over a quarter-million Kentuckians.”

The political scientist Theda Skocpol is among the sharpest observers of modern American politics, having studied the Obama presidency, the Tea Party reaction and now the Trump resistance. Skocpol and her colleagues are tracking Trump-leaning areas in four swing states, and she too has been struck by the Democrats’ relative unity. “Media pundits and even social scientists want to look for some kind of ideological divide,” she told me. “I just don’t see a huge set of divisions in the Democratic Party. They’re all talking about economic issues.”

Doing so is smart, because it helps Democrats send the most powerful message in politics: I’m on your side — and my opponent isn’t. Americans really are divided on abortion, guns, race and other cultural issues, but they’re remarkably progressive on economics. When Democrats talk about health care, education and jobs, they can focus the white working class on the working-class part of its identity rather than the white part. And Democrats can fire up their base at the same time.

Abrams is a particularly good case study. In the primary, she argued that Democrats should stop chasing conservatives who were lost to the party and instead work to lift progressive turnout. But Abrams’s universal, populist message shows that she hasn’t given up on swing voters. Her message resembles the one that helped Barack Obama win over enough white voters in his 2012 re-election campaign.

None of this means that Abrams will win in November — she’s an underdog — or that the Democrats will take back the House. Trump’s approval numbers, while weak, have risen slightly, and the midterm campaign has a long way to go.

So far, though, the Democrats are defying the clichés about their division and disarray. They’re giving themselves a good chance to win.