Sometimes, a one-vote margin seems like a landslide.

That’s how the 215-214 margin of victory in the House for the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” should have felt to many Democrats. From the moment of the bill’s introduction, Democrats seemed unable to find their footing, resorting to calling it by less flattering names but not rallying the nation against it.

In fact, the Democrats couldn't seem to figure out quite who they were trying to rally.

If American democracy is to have a viable future, the Democratic Party needs to get its act together — and do it quickly. Its performance in the debate about President Trump’s signature legislation was not a hopeful sign.

As the Senate begins its consideration of the bill, Democrats will say, to borrow from one commentator, that it will lead to “the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.” Think of what New Deal Democrats, and their hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have done with such a bill.

They would have denounced it over and over again as the work of the “plutocrats” or "princes of property." They would have been speaking to a solidly working-class base.

That was then. But now the Democrats have themselves become, at least in part, the party of “plutocrats” and “princes of property.” As political scientist Sam Zacher

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