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.

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........

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