This essay is the first installment in a series on the thinkers, upstarts and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party.

For close to a year, Democrats have been locked in debate over their path out of the wilderness. In party retreats and private Slack channels, along with testy exchanges on social media and strategic leaks to reporters, Democratic insiders have wrestled over the mistakes of the Biden administration and the shortcomings of the Harris campaign.

The stakes of those arguments have risen even higher in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, with the White House intensifying its crackdown on dissent, and MAGA leaders declaring holy war against the left.

But an air of denial — and, more recently, panic — has pervaded the discussion about what comes next. It’s easy to say drastic reform is needed, but there’s no agreement on what this should look like. In practice, the party establishment is doing what party establishments always do — counting on the other side to self-destruct so it can squeak back into power while changing as little as possible.

The strategy would be a lot more defensible if Democrats could write off Trumpism as a fever that was bound to break with time. But the evidence of the past few years points in the opposite direction — shrinking populations in blue states, an alarming drop in Democratic voter registration, dire math for retaking the Senate and crushing majorities who say the party is “out of touch.” Worst of all is the ongoing rightward shift in the working class, a challenge that goes beyond winning elections to strike at the heart of what it means to be a Democrat.

A few campaigns have bucked those trends. The problem for Democrats is that the best examples come from candidates running against the Democratic Party.