how little, in some ways, the conversation had changed. The 2016 session came at the end of the primary season, when Trump had won the Republican nomination by rallying white working-class voters to him and at a time when it was already clear that Clinton, bloodied by her primary fight with Sanders, was having trouble with that same group.

Of course, no one expected Trump’s November upset. But even then the Democrats I talked with were divided over whether to court those voters, or essentially write them off and emphasize instead Clinton’s appeal to the Democratic base of big-city liberals and minority groups. It was a debate, we later learned, that played itself out inside the Clinton campaign too—with the play-to-the-base side beating out those, like former President Billto kick it right to you. When the late, lamented Reince Priebus was—before he was the White House chief of staff, he was chair of the RNC after the 2012 presidential election, and they commissioned, of course, an autopsy of what went wrong. They then felt free to disregard its conclusion. Is an autopsy in order of what went wrong for the Democrats in 2016?

Perez: I think we have a pretty good handle on what has been going on, and I would expand the aperture of your question, Susan. It’s not simply what happened in 2016, but what happened over the last eight years that resulted in the loss of over 900 seats in state legislatures, the movement from 60 Democrats in the Senate to 48, the loss