These are challenging days for Democrats ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Their party has yet to land on a clear message or a leading messenger, leaving the president-elect mostly unchallenged,

At the Atlantic, Russell Burman details this reasoning in his new article “Maybe Democrats Didn’t Do So Badly After All ”: Now a clearer picture of the election has emerged, complicating the debate over whether Democrats need to reinvent themselves—and whether voters really abandoned them at all.

With just hours to spare before a midnight deadline and after two days of gridlock in the U.S. House, Democrats have agreed to back a pared-down stopgap spending bill. This happened after Republicans accepted a pared-down version that doesn’t include Donald Trump ’s demand for an immediate increase in the public debt limit.