The reaction to Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s official Democratic response to President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress this week provides some helpful insight into the major question her party has to answer these days:

Is the Blue Team able to accommodate its new coalition?

Republicans have been and still are going through a good bit of difficulty in becoming the party of both the rich and the working class. Many of the current fights in the GOP about foreign policy and tariffs speak to the split between the haves and the have-lesses on the Republican side. Blue-collar Americans tend to like protectionism and dislike foreign intervention, regardless of which party they are in, while members of the upper-middle class tend to take a more pro-engagement view on trade and foreign affairs.

But in the age of mega-MAGA, there’s no question about whether the priorities of the new working-class voter base of the GOP is having its way. What was the party of the suburbs for most of the 20th century looks a lot more like a party arranged around small-town and rural voters’ demands. Farmers tend to dislike tariffs for obvious reasons, but other than that, the policy priorities for the Republicans seem aligned with their core voters’ on core issues.

But what about the Democrats?

In her response to Trump, Slotkin — the newest Jewish member of the Senate — touted her national security background and her work in the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She heaped praise on Ronald Reagan’s understanding “that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity.” It was an effective message for a woman who just won a Senate race in a state Kamala Harris lost.

But for many Democrats, praising Reagan and talking about one’s work in the post-9/11 CIA doesn’t appeal.

“If parading Liz Cheney around didn’t help Democrats win, maybe praising Ronald Reagan won’t either,” wrote former Michigan state Rep. Abraham Aiyash (D).

Aiyash, who represented a district on the north side of Detroit that included parts of Hamtramck — a little city with a big Arab population — was one of the leaders of the effort to sink Joe Biden in Michigan’s primary because of Biden's support for Israel in its war with Hamas. As Democratic leader in the state House, he won lots of attention as a 30-year-old who combined the hard-left progressivism of Bernie Sanders with the anti-Israel views of so many in Metro Detroit’s large Arab community.

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There’s no case to be made that Aiyash and the Uncommitted movement in Michigan cost Democrats’ the presidency last year. The shift toward Donald Trump from 2020 to 2024 was sharp in Michigan, indeed. But the red-to-blue effect was not as pronounced as it was in other swing states like Nevada and Arizona, where there are not substantial Arab populations of the kind that mobilized in Michigan.

But Uncommitted can certainly be said to have cost Democrats.

As Harris started her brief general-election campaign last year, the Biden administration in which she served had managed to make a complete political hash out of the issue of Israel. Biden and Harris managed to be seen as both insufficiently pro-Isreal by many Jewish voters and moderates but also anti-Palestinian in the eyes of progressives and Arab voters. If Aiyash could say the administration was “fund[ing] a genocide” at the same time that pro-Israel Democrats in Congress were defending the Jewish state amid frequent White House criticism about its tactics in the war, Biden and Harris had managed to lose with both sides of the argument.

By the time Harris was choosing a running mate in August, the problem was front and center. Harris courted and considered Pennsylvania’s very popular and proudly Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro. But in addition to being pro-Israel, he had also denounced the antisemitism that had infected the campus protests at the University of Pennsylvania and other elite schools in the spring of last year. Moderate, popular, and from the most important swing state, Shapiro looked like a lock. When Harris snubbed him, though, we were told it was because she “

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