Two years after winning her first race for Congress, Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who ran to serve Michigan’s 8th Congressional District as a practical “Midwestern Democrat,”.
Her husband, Dave, piled a table high with dishes of Indian food; a group of Slotkin’s campaign colleagues were coming for a celebratory meal after securing her a second term in the House of Representatives. Smell of victory.
There was, suddenly, all the more reason for celebration: Hours earlier, every major news outlet had called the presidential race for Joe Biden, ending an 84-hour check that had America stressing over the results.
This should have been a time to party—or at least to exhale, to look on the bright side after a long, dark campaign. But Slotkin is not built that way. The same intellect that kept her on advantage during three tours in Iraq, endlessly observing threats—old and new, real and perceived—portrays her approach to politics.
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She cannot stop “thinking strategically” about what can come. Not when she had so many questions and so few answers.
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Was Donald Trump going to admit defeat and allow for a calm transition of power? Would the Democratic Party, which had secured the presidency but experienced dramatic losses down-ballot, split along rising ideological fault lines? Were Americans, who had been told on the authority of the White House that the election was illegitimate, confronting a crisis of faith in their democracy?
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She watched friends in Congress lose their jobs as a wave of undetected voters swarmed the ballot box. She had listened to moderates accuse the party’s left-wing of poisoning the Democratic brand and watched progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounce the centrists as old and outdated in their approach.
After thinking for a few days about this, Slotkin said she wasn’t just interested in improving scores with the liberal left. She was determined on making her case that Trump, one of the most divisive and controversial politicians in American history, had revealed a weakness in her party that could lead to its downfall.
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“It’s not just that he eats cheeseburgers at a big celebratory dinner. It’s not just that he does things that the common man can kind of appreciate. And it’s not even because he uses a kind of simplistic language—he doesn’t use complicated, wonky language, the way a lot of Democrats do,” Slotkin said.
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“We sometimes make people feel like they aren’t conscientious enough. They aren’t thoughtful enough. They aren’t ‘woke’ enough. They aren’t smart enough or educated enough to just understand what’s good for them. … It’s talking down to people. It’s alienating them. And there’s just certain voters who feel so distant from the political process—it’s not their life, it’s not their world. They hate it. They don’t like all that politics stuff. Trump speaks to them, because he includes them.”
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