The Democratic Party’s future — if it wants one; the evidence is mixed — should be based on candidates who understand that U.S. politics, when healthy, takes place between the 40-yard lines, contesting the center of the field. People such as the 37-year-old Marine (he served in Afghanistan, and is in the Corps’ Individual Ready Reserve) who now is a Whiggish (his description) congressman.

A substantial portion of his Massachusetts district, including some Boston suburbs, typifies what now is his party’s affluent, educated base — people who have flourished in the knowledge economy that globalization fostered. Another large portion of his district resembles what used to be his party’s base: blue-collar manufacturers.

The district’s largest city, Fall River, in 1880 was the nation’s foremost textile manufacturing powerhouse, with more than half a million spindles. In 2024, for the first time in a century (in 1924, it voted for Massachusetts’s former governor, who was then president, Calvin Coolidge), the battered city voted for the Republican presidential candidate.

In 2020, during the pandemic, when Jake Auchincloss won his first congressional term, he was dismayed by Democratic-run cities that ignored public-health........

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