Adam Gray, a Democrat, represents California’s 13th District in the House of Representatives.
My 2024 congressional race was the closest in America, decided by 187 votes out of more than 200,000. The same group of voters who elected me also went for Donald Trump, making our district one of only a handful in the nation to collectively split their ticket between a Republican for president and a Democrat for Congress.
Maybe that’s why the party interviewed me for its post-election “autopsy.” Regardless, I’m not sure everybody actually wants to hear what I think. The postmortem they released in May — focused on political strategy and polling failures — missed the point. Deeper issues are at work here, issues of priorities and connection.
California’s Central Valley, my lifelong home, is a working-class region shaped by agriculture, water scarcity, shared values and the everyday economics of building a middle-class life. One lesson Democrats could learn here is that Washington increasingly struggles to connect politics to how ordinary Americans experience their lives.
You don’t need me to tell you that life in modern America is expensive and exhausting. Costs rise. Waits lengthen. Paperwork multiplies. People seem to spend more time on hold with health care providers, insurers, utilities and other bureaucracies than they do with their families.
Politics should be aimed at making all that easier.
Democrats used to understand this. Ours was the party that built dams, paved highways, chartered universities, unveiled parks and sent men to the moon. Government did not exist simply to referee competing interests. It existed to solve problems and help build the future. That instinct feels distant today.
Housing offers a clear example. Too many young, working families cannot afford to buy a home — not because America has forgotten how to build houses, but because we have made building them slower, harder and dramatically more expensive through overlapping zoning rules, lawsuits, permit delays, financing barriers and bureaucratic red tape.
These families do not experience the housing shortage as an abstract policy debate. They feel it through delayed milestones, shrinking choices and the growing fear that a good life is slipping out of reach. We in government have to take the lead in finding concrete solutions.
Those same lessons apply beyond housing. If we want cleaner and cheaper energy, we have to invest in it. If we want better roads, dams and trains, we have to build them. My party talks a good game about ambitious goals. But the work required to bring those dreams to life is often left undone.
Our challenge is not only governing; it is also connecting. Like most Americans, people in the Central Valley do not spend their time thinking about ideological debates or arguments unfolding on social media. They don’t measure their country’s success with debate points or legislative scorecards. They think about work, family, faith, recreation, rising bills and how to create decent lives for their children.
And they need a helping hand in getting things done, not a lecture about how to do them. Too little of today’s political language makes a connection, and too much of it feels like correction. Coalition building looks less like democratic inclusion and more like cultural gatekeeping.
Democrats historically succeeded not by narrowing the definition of who belongs inside the coalition, but by building broad, messy, imperfect coalitions large enough to govern a diverse country.
My neighbors, my friends, my relatives, my constituents are hunters and environmentalists, union workers and entrepreneurs, pickup drivers and owners of electric vehicles. Sometimes they are several of those things at once. That complexity is not a weakness to manage. That is America.
That is what Washington still misses about districts like mine.
Citizens don’t want politics to dominate every corner of their lives. They want affordable homes, functioning institutions, opportunities for their children, time with family and something to look forward to on the weekend. Politics can and should help make those things possible.
Which is another way of saying that Democrats should skip the postmortems and work on improving everyday life. And, along the way, maybe make America fun again.
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