September 12, 2025, 11:34 AM View Comments ()

It’s no secret: The U.S. Democratic Party is struggling. According to a recent poll by Gallup, only 34 percent of Americans view the Democratic Party favorably, the lowest rating since the sentiment was first measured in 1992. Democrats are out of power and, according to their harshest critics, out of ideas.

Into the breach steps Elissa Slotkin. A former CIA analyst and Defense Department official, Slotkin won a tight race to become a senator in Michigan last year, even as Donald Trump won the state in the race for the presidency. Slotkin says she has a war plan to revive the country’s middle class—a pocketbook narrative that she thinks will carry the next election.

I spoke with Slotkin on FP Live on the morning of Sept. 11. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: I’m speaking to you on 9/11. You’ve often called yourself a “9/11 baby.” How did that day shape your career?

Elissa Slotkin: I was starting my second day of graduate school in New York City. I had just moved there four or five days before the towers came down. It completely changed my life. Within days, I knew that I wanted to do something related to national security.

I was recruited by the CIA right out of grad school, and within a year, I was on my first of three tours in Iraq. So, it is absolutely part of the origin story for me as a national security person.

RA: Twenty-four years on, do you think America is safer than it was?

ES: I think the threats have precipitously changed. I remember how 9/11 shook the foreign-policy world, which had largely been a Cold War-trained group. Terrorism and international terrorism really changed the approach.

We’re now in one of those pivotal moments where, frankly, technology and economic warfare are just another battlefield. But we just don’t talk about it like that.

Part of the reason I gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations last week was to say that we are in different times, and we need different approaches, particularly because the American people are on the front lines of this war. Cyberattacks, threats in space, attacks on infrastructure—those kinds of attacks from very far away are playing out against our citizens. We’re not well positioned to help protect them.

RA: In that speech, you framed national security as, first and foremost, an issue of economics. You said that Michiganders aren’t focused on missile attacks or terrorist attacks, and that’s a good thing. “They’re focused on their pocketbooks and their kids.”

Can you expand on how you see economics as a major national security issue today?

ES: As a trained national security person, I feel very firmly that the existential threat to the United States right now is not coming from abroad. It’s the rapid shrinking of the middle class. Here at home, that’s turning people against each other.

If you want to understand the current polarized climate, it’s because people feel like the American dream they believed in isn’t for them. They want to blame someone for that, and they’re willing to get in bed with any politician who will tell them that they will put money back in their pocket.

For this speech, I did town halls across Michigan on the issues of foreign policy and national security. What does the average person feel like is the biggest threat to them? What do they think their government is doing right? What do they think their government is doing wrong?

No matter what we were talking about, it always came back to economic insecurity—people feeling like they can’t save every month, that they can’t give their kids what was given to them, and how much shame that makes them feel. Whether we’re talking about trade or tariffs or anything else. To me, it was overwhelming; the feeling of economic insecurity was dominant.

And it reminded me that national security, no matter what you do with it, is for two things. It’s to preserve the life and livelihood of American citizens and to enrich the United States. We should have a foreign policy that helps support our people back home.

RA: I’m hearing echoes of two things in what you’re saying. One is [former President] Joe Biden’s foreign policy for the middle class. And the other is [President] Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. How is what you’re describing different from those two things?

ES: On President Biden, if you ask the average person how foreign policy in those four years supported or protected them, they might have a hard time explaining that. The intentions and ideas were very good, but it got mired down in conflicts in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza.

There are lots of conflicts around the world, but the job of leaders is to think 20 and 50 years out. To me, the American public just didn’t feel that under Joe Biden.

For President Trump, I think he often has the wrong answer to the right question. Americans feel like their national security and foreign policy isn’t doing enough for them. This is why there was very little protest over all these Department of Government Efficiency cuts to USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] or the State Department. We know they are important, but the average person has no idea what those things do for them. National security people really need to come out of Washington and explain themselves to the American people. The American people aren’t dumb, but they just haven’t been engaged on these issues. And there’s a big trust deficit after things like Iraq and Afghanistan. So, communication is important.

I don’t agree with slashing and burning our entire national security apparatus to the ground. But I do understand the sentiment.

RA: Why did Democrats fall short in the last presidential election? What I’m hearing from you is not that it was a vision problem, but an execution problem, a marketing problem. Is that right?

ES: That’s certainly part of it. But we’re still short on vision. We’re constantly on defense every day with the 10 things that President Trump is doing. He’s flooding the zone, and we’re responding.

If we ever want to win future elections, we can’t just constantly play defense. We have to offer an alternative vision and make people aware of that. We haven’t found our footing.

And communication is a huge part of it. Trump has an uncanny way of dominating the messaging space. He has the complete devotion of other Republicans who will do and repeat anything he says.

Democrats do not organize themselves that way. That’s on us. In the meantime, as a brand-new senator from a swing state, I can at least put some ideas out there, so we have some vision looking forward.

RA: With the shutdown deadline looming, should Democrats help the Republicans fund the government as it is right now, or not?

ES: I voted no back in March. I understood the argument on the other side—if Trump is doing whatever he wants while the government is funded, imagine what he’ll do when it’s not funded. But he’s doing things that contravene the Constitution every day now, and I have real concerns about supporting him in that.

In the meantime, I am a pragmatist. If my Republican colleagues want my vote, they’ve got to talk to me. And that has not happened. I’m willing to have a conversation, because my job is to make sure that there’s something there for my people.

The cuts to health care that happened in July were significant, and every single person listening or watching right now is either at risk of losing their health care or having their private, employer-provided insurance go up. Letters will go out this fall about a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in health care costs starting Jan. 1. I don’t know a single person in America who thinks they’re paying too little for health care right now. So if my Republican colleagues want me to vote for their bill when they’re continuing to do all these terrible things, I need some assurances.

RA: I want to talk a bit more about the economy. Given your background—especially at the Pentagon—what should America focus on to compete with China? You’ve also often mentioned China as a threat that Michiganders think about when they think about their own pocketbooks.

ES: Michigan is a manufacturing state. We build things; we grow things. So, Michiganders have seen significant job loss in manufacturing over the last 30 years, and the average American knows that those jobs have largely gone to places like China, because labor is so much cheaper. Even American cars contain a ton of Chinese products, pieces, parts, inputs, et cetera. So, we see it every single day. They have a veto on whether we get the supplies we need.

The big thing that we need to do on industrial policy is accept that our supply chains are part of our national security architecture. It is part of our economic security, and therefore it should be part of our national security strategy, to think differently about those supply chains. That means understanding that certain items that are critical to our economic security should always be made in the United States. I think of [semiconductor] chips, but I also think of pharmaceuticals. It is scary how dependent we are on other countries for our own drugs. To me, that feels like a vulnerability.

Let’s take that industrial policy and think differently about partnerships. Military alliances like NATO are very important, but let’s think creatively about economic alliances. Maybe we put together a NATO-like alliance on lithium, right? A bunch of our partners need lithium, and we don’t have it in our countries. How do we create a common approach, common export controls, and a common response when there’s an attempt at Chinese coercion? We need to expand our definitions of alliances and stop treating industrial policy as a dirty word.

RA: How do Trump’s tariffs—for example, the 50 percent tariff on India—impact the economic alliances that have taken 20, 30 years to build out?

ES: Seeing [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi, and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping together at the military parade in Beijing last week was the clearest example yet of what Trump’s policy is doing with different actors. India is an extremely important trade partner to the United States, and it is stunning how we have approached those tariffs. I hear about this from Indian Michiganders constantly. It feels sloppy and astrategic to treat allies this way.

RA: There’s another big trend in your party: 69 percent of Democrats disapprove of Israel’s war in Gaza. You have a long record of supporting Israel’s policies. How are you thinking about that, especially after Israel launched an attack on Hamas in Qatar, a U.S. ally?

ES: We’re approaching the two-year anniversary of the Hamas attack in Israel, and it’s been two very long and exhausting years. I condemn the use of military attack on Qatar, a Gulf nation and a U.S. partner. That attack happened on an apartment building in a well-heeled neighborhood, 18 miles from Al Udeid Air Force Base, where 10,000 Americans reside. And the Qataris helped defend against Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at those soldiers just a couple of months ago. The Qatar strike does nothing to advance peace—quite the opposite.

Now, Hamas could end this tomorrow. They could do what leaders should do and decide not to let their people suffer because of their choices. They obviously are not actors who care one iota about Palestinians. The [U.S.] president was more vocal than I’ve ever seen him in condemning the actions, saying we had nothing to do with them. You can hear that frustration from President Trump, and I’m hoping that he uses his considerable leverage with Bibi [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] to have a conversation about how we go forward here.

RA: We’ve talked about leverage for years now under two presidencies, so what would you try to do differently?

ES: The U.S. has a lot of leverage with Israel—we just tend to not use it. Any time we have an enduring relationship like that, we try as much as possible to have conversations behind closed doors to mete out our differences privately. That’s why the president’s comments were notable over the past 48 hours, because they were made in public. Beyond the military, intelligence, finance, and aid relationships with Israel, this is an alliance in many ways because people grow up working alongside each other. That can be used to have tough conversations privately, and I expect that is happening right now.

RA: As a range of candidates fight for the future of the Democratic Party, you’ve staked out your tent on the middle path. You’re a moderate; you’ve talked about pragmatic radicalism. [New York City mayoral candidate] Zohran Mamdani has been very successful—he’s a democratic-socialist who is arguing for redistributive policies that are quite different from yours. But he is also focused ultimately on pocketbook issues. How do you think about what messages appeal to Americans? Is there a Democratic Party strategy that is strong enough to combat Trumpism?

ES: It’s not hard to see the underlying message coming out of Mamdani’s primary win. It’s the same thing I hear in Michigan. People are still primarily focused on the cost of living—their inability to save and live the American dream. And secondly, they want a new generation of leadership. They’re willing to take a risk on someone new rather than microwaved leftovers. That is a common theme across the country.

As someone from a swing state, I believe it is important to represent the broadest group of people I can. And to me, that is the cost of living. We had a cost-of-living election in November, when Trump won. Mr. Mamdani had a cost-of-living election and will probably have another one.

Democrats have so many different issues that we care about. And that’s a positive thing. It means we care. But if you don’t have priorities, people don’t know what you stand for. That is what happened last November. This is why my first big speech was on an economic war plan, not on foreign policy. The economic war planned for America is my motivating set of issues because it’s existential to who we are as a multiracial, multiethnic democratic experiment. If people can’t get ahead by playing by the rules, that is deeply destabilizing.

If we ever want to have a consistent foreign policy again, we need to prevent that pendulum from swinging so strongly back home. We need a strong middle class here where people feel their needs are met. And if we’re missing that message, that’s on us.