An American election is never truly over until the wise men gather to read the entrails and pronounce on the oracular “message” sent by the all-knowing American voter. As the thrill of Tuesday’s anti-Trump wave gives way to arguments about what it meant, national pundits are feuding over scatter plots that purport to scientifically rank the performance of crudely categorised moderates and progressives. For a view from the ground, we turned to Nikil Saval, a former editor of n+1 and longtime DSA member who made the leap from literary radicalism to electoral politics, winning a seat in the Pennsylvania state senate in 2020. This autumn, Saval criss-crossed the state to help Democrats win control of the chamber for the first time in more than 30 years.

You’ve been knocking on doors, campaigning not just for yourself but to flip the Pennsylvania State Senate. What do you think the national news coverage didn’t capture? How did the election feel different on the ground? And did you see voters coming out who hadn’t in the last midterms or in 2024?

I think there was a broad antiwar sentiment in the populace. I believe that people were aware of that at a national level, but I travelled all over Pennsylvania, mostly in the east and southeast but also the northeast, Luzerne County – different parts of Pennsylvania: rural, urban, deindustrialising, but also newer suburbs – and the depth to which people thought the war in Iran, and the bellicose mood in Washington, was a betrayal, was wrong – that was something that I heard multiple times.

And I think it was bound up with the sense of betrayal around massive wealth inequality and corruption. Those two issues were often mentioned alongside one another. And then people just seemed to be in deep trouble. That was the scary part: everyone was struggling profoundly. Even people that seemed to have more stable lives were suffering from a combination of issues. I remember meeting, for example, a South Asian truck driver who was struggling with his health, with the payments for his healthcare and with the cost of diesel, which of course has been driven up by the war in Iran. These are problems we’d heard about before, but now all of those things were compounding. He told me his doctor had actually said, your illness may not be just a cold or flu or what have you. It’s actually deep stress with regard to what’s happening to you economically. But I’d say that there was a broad antiwar mood. And in that sense, people were comparing this to 2006; that was an analogy I heard more than once.

Do you think there was a successful bit of messaging or framing in the campaigns that connected the economy – inflation and the cost of living – with foreign policy?

I think people were very clear that the war was the principal driver of costs. That awareness was broad and broadly felt. Unlike in 2006, when the Iraq War had initially been supported by many elected Democrats, there was a consistent awareness that the Democrats opposed war with Iran and had opposed it more or less since the beginning. And a sense that there was something deeply, deeply wrong about why and how it happened. At the state level, we don’t really have jurisdiction or control over foreign policy, but I think opposition to the war bled into a rejection of Republican dominance and hegemony, which in Pennsylvania has been the case for decades, at least at the state legislative level. The other thing – there was this real sense that it wasn’t just the economy that was out of control, but the course of human history. And that was really embodied in the anti-data-centre, anti-AI sentiment. I think that was, besides the war, the most explosive and ramifying set of concerns that people expressed.

What does that look like in Pennsylvania?

Overwhelmingly, the focus is local: people concentrate on the attempt to build data centres. Or on the proliferation of data centres. But there’s an additional layer in Pennsylvania that is maybe not totally specific to the Commonwealth, though it is nevertheless prominent, which is the history of the state as a fossil-fuel state – and particularly a fracking state.

So, for example, in parts of western or northeastern Pennsylvania where there’s shale and fracking, where you find the construction of natural-gas power plants, or the reactivation of old coal-fired plants that had gone moribund, you found that these projects were connected in people’s minds to the construction of data centres and then the costs associated with them.

I think people felt like this was a new form of fracking, a new form of extraction, and there was a broad rejection of their presence. In addition, there was unhappiness with the way local governments negotiated contracts or deals with data-centre developers, and created non-disclosure agreements around them, so nothing about the situation was very transparent. That was a major point of opposition.

And obviously, it was a way people could object to AI and the concentration of corporate tech power. They didn’t necessarily feel like they were attacking that concentration and the corruption associated with it, but they could at least localise it in the form of attacking a data centre.

As someone who is an intellectual and a writer, but also a political figure now, what’s your picture of the American political economy at this moment? Who are the winners, who are the losers? To borrow Raymond Geuss’s paraphrase of Lenin, ‘Who is doing what to whom?’

I don’t get asked that question as much as I should, or certainly not like that. Not to make it parochial, but the Pennsylvania context is in some ways emblematic; it’s very similar to many other areas of similar societies: it has a dramatically ageing population. There’s the demographics, of course, but partly we’re just not growing very quickly. We’re not attracting new people. A lot of people come to Pennsylvania because it has a relatively forgiving tax structure, and so it ends up being a good place to retire. Historically, the former industries and industrial towns have become places of enormous healthcare infrastructure. Pittsburgh is the locus classicus of this; it’s been studied in that way – there’s a great book about it by Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift.

And there are other versions of that in different places. There’s not a huge amount of economic growth. There’s a significant amount of stagnation. The dynamic regions are largely concentrated around Philadelphia and a few other places. And so the drive to focus on artificial intelligence – the tech industry build-out – has been one of the few sources of growth, unfortunately. I think it’s been hugely speculative, and there are a lot of concerns about what it will do.

There are lots of different ways that people think about a technology like that – a technology that threatens to automate or eliminate people’s labour. Overwhelmingly, I think people feel it degrades individual work, or transforms it in particular ways. Obviously some jobs disappear or get replaced, but I think a lot of feeling arises from the fact AI gets inserted into work that you used to do yourself. It can be corrosive in that way: this sense of being de-skilled while on the job.

Is there a sense in which the data centre takes on a totemic significance – as an emblem of deindustrialisation, of a different kind of extractive enterprise, but also of escalating inequality?

Yes. There’s so much that gets concentrated in the data centre. It’s pretty overdetermined in some ways. It ends up representing so much. But I don’t want to suggest that it’s only a way for people to channel their generally anti-AI, anti-corruption energies. I think people really do also hate them specifically. There are specific things that it does and represents.

The other thing, on the other side of it, is that data centres have enormous incentives. They have tax breaks. In Pennsylvania, people perceive the tech industry as the beneficiary of unequal terms, at the moment when their healthcare is getting worse or disappearing altogether. We have hospitals closing at a rapid rate, care at those hospitals deteriorating, and on top of that, access becoming more and more expensive. Just a rapid worsening of the healthcare infrastructure – not just for patients, I think, but also for providers. Doctors are required to do much more, at a much more rapid pace. People I met on the doorstep, in town halls, and in the community were readily drawing those connections.

Is there one thing the national coverage didn’t pick up?

That there is huge popular sentiment around the creation of a single-payer healthcare system. My sense is that the elected officials and candidates – especially national figures – who have been pushing for a single-payer system are associated with the progressive side of the party, and with the left in particular. But I saw huge enthusiasm for it everywhere. It was brought up in many different contexts. There’s something deeply, deeply wrong with the healthcare system. And there’s not a particular preference for keeping one’s existing employer healthcare. I know that comes out in polling, or in coverage – that people get a little skittish when it comes to losing their own private insurance. But mostly people are like, no, that sucks too. So I think there’s a lot of popular sentiment, mass sentiment really, around that particular issue, because it’s getting so much worse so quickly.

In the run-up to this election there were a lot of debates – particularly over the race in Michigan – about how the results might become a verdict on the argument between the left and the moderates within the Democratic Party. How do you see that argument?

One theme that seems to bridge the divide is affordability, which has recently been associated with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York…

I’d say the focus on affordability is very locatable. It was a thing that Mamdani focused on in his mayoral campaign, which was of course media-saturated and widely covered and successful. And then it immediately exploded into the Democratic mainstream – as a real thing, of course, but also as a campaign talking point, something people were able to use to connect with voters in a real way. It seemed like it gave Democrats an identity.

That obviously came from the left; it came from a candidacy on the left. But I think the attempt has always been for socialists, for progressives broadly speaking – for the left – to set the terms of a majority agenda. The nature of socialists in politics is that we believe that we represent a majority, that we can build or fashion a majority. Przeworski talks about this in Capitalism and Social Democracy. That’s always the origin of socialists getting into politics, and so this is an instance of us finding a majoritarian politics.

And yes, it comes from the left, but by achieving broad cultural and social consensus across a much bigger and more ideologically diffuse political party like the Democrats, it has succeeded in some ways – even if, obviously, it’s been watered down in various ways. It’s been used as a talisman, or just a buzzword.

But I think there is a risk it may become a source of internal conflict, because of the nature of the Democratic Party at this moment. We’ll see what the results suggest. They may very much complicate the picture I’m about to paint, because we still don’t know a lot about how we won. We have some ideas, but some of it’s very strange – that we may win in Mississippi, that we have a Senate victory in South Carolina. But like a lot of centre-left parties, the Democrats have been growing wealthier and more metropolitan at the same time that the Democratic Party is probably more uniformly liberal – more left-leaning – than Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party or the party of the 1980s.

Both of those things are complicated: you have a wealthier set of people constituting the core, and they are at the same time ideologically more liberal. There are more people who will say they’re devoted to attacking corporate concentrations of power and wealth inequality, and even taxing the rich, at the same time there just are more rich people who are Democrats. So if affordability also requires, as I think it does, attacking concentrated power and inherited wealth and wealth inequality, and growing the ranks of organised labour, the question is whether that’s going to start to create conflict within the party. That’s really what I think is the truest conflict – it’s class conflict.

How will these results play out in the discourse among Democratic Party elites and commentators? And how does DSA function to mediate – or maybe not mediate – the relationship between the left in America and the Democratic Party?

I think there will be an attempt – I think there already is this attempt – to paint the current Democratic majority as inherently unstable because now there’s a much larger left flank, a fairly confident, self-described socialist left wing of the Democratic Party. That’s a threat from within to this coalition: how can you manage a party that has various people on the right, and then Rashida Tlaib and AOC and Philadelphia’s Chris Rabb on the left? I think that’s just a deliberate attempt to create division. There will obviously be conflicts, and there will be attempts by the left to hold the party to account when it comes to things that we promised to deliver or campaigned on.

But DSA – obviously the electoral side of DSA, which is not all of it; there are people in the organisation who are more sceptical of it – helps organise that conflict. It helps organise those distinctions. And at least for me, the socialist tradition fundamentally leaves no one behind. Once there’s governing power, you want to deliver for more people, you want to organise larger and larger majorities – not just elected officials, but of people. Honestly, absent DSA, there might be much more disaffection, much more conflict, or even simply more apathy towards this electoral success. Many of us worked very hard for it.

And there are examples on the other side of the party, on the right. Again, not to focus on Michigan, but obviously Haley Stevens is an example. But there are other, less high-profile examples of people in the Democratic mainstream – Third Way, let’s say, or organisations like that – who are much more hostile to elements of Democratic success, even to the extent of sabotaging it or at least attempting to.

It’s often been observed that in the Obama years, Democrats neglected the statehouses while Republicans built from the ground up. Left candidates like you have focused on state seats. Is that a lesson the left learned from the Tea Party, or one it’s trying to teach the Democratic Party?

I would love to attribute that success to the left, but I’d be exaggerating to some degree. I think that lesson has been more broadly learned since the Obama years.

There are other institutional actors. One is an organisation called the States Project, which organises donors and funders to fuel collective state legislative races. They played a big role in Pennsylvania. I think they also have done in Michigan and Minnesota and other places where we have just recently regained, or achieved for the first time, Democratic trifectas.

There’s been a broad effort to do that, because so much anti-democratic – small-d democratic – work was being done in state legislatures, undermining elections. And then for the left, in some instances these are races that we can organise to win. I don’t want to say its totally opportunistic, but it’s harder – obviously we’ve won some congressional races recently – it’s harder to win on that scale. There’s work you can do closer to the ground in some of these state legislative races, if you are representing these districts, maybe you can’t do at a congressional level.

Can you identify the coalition that might gather against this new Democratic wave? Where will the centres of political and economic reaction be in the next few years?

That’s a great question. I will admit, in the throes of celebration, I haven’t grappled with it fully, because right now we feel pretty good. But it’s obviously worth preparing for. Even in a local context, we expect a broad anti-democratic push in the Republican Party – a willingness to undermine elections, to make governance difficult, to redraw maps in particular ways. Obviously, in this election, some of those efforts failed or were not fully successful.

But I think the anxiety that the left, or Democrats, will overreach, or fail on some of our bigger welfare-state initiatives, will be one of the biggest sources of vulnerability. There is a strong desire – maybe not in the next two years, but in the next four, let’s say – to begin the process of creating a national single-payer healthcare system. Again, I think states will largely lead this effort in the absence of presidential control. But if we don’t do some of those things, if we don’t actually change the trajectory of people’s lives, it won’t be a very durable realignment.

Because there is this sense – I don’t know if it’s been articulated precisely, or if voters articulate it to themselves this way – that, yes, we gave you this chance. You said over and over that we’re at the brink of fascism, that they’re creating a major crisis of affordability, and that if we give you a chance things can be done differently.

So if we don’t reliably create the conditions under which the trajectory of people’s lives changes – if, for example, AI and big tech companies, or corporate landlords, all these enemies, move to work more closely with Democrats, and reshape the ambitions people have for government – then I think that will undermine this result.

I wonder if something that gets lost in the argument between the left and the moderates is a comfort level with political antagonism. Hakeem Jeffries said last night that this isn’t a victory for the Democrats, it’s a victory for all of America. There’s this unease with politics as a zone of conflict, whether that’s class conflict or cultural conflict.

I certainly feel that people respond to the recognition that there are conflicts. If you fail to identify enemies – rhetorically, at least, let alone in policy or politics – people don’t understand that. People recognise that there’s someone screwing someone else. So if you’re not able to engage in that form of mutual recognition, if you’re obfuscating who the enemies are, that’s perceived by people as disingenuous – because it is.

Last question. For a long time you were on my side of this conversation, as the editor of a magazine. What do you know about politics now that you didn’t know ten years ago?

Oh God. I’d say that being in this role is a great pretext for meeting masses of people, and so if you like people, which I do, it’s extraordinary. But it is relentless. It has this relentless near-termism: you’re constantly moving from one thing to another, literally in your schedule. So there’s rarely time to stop and look around and think on a long-term horizon.

In one sense, I know how to operate in a context that is much more about immediate conflicts or challenges – one or two years, or maybe five, down the line. It’s just: what is in my interest, or our interest, to solve or deal with? When you’re thinking in terms of what matters to a magazine like Equator or n+1, I don’t know that those should be the questions you’re asking. I don’t know that those are the right questions. So you end up asking different questions.

I do think the thing that translates across both is this. As an editor, there were many things I didn’t know. So I found people who did know them, or could write about them or think about them. That was great. And then I learned those things because I had to think them through with writers. You have to do that in this job, too. I know some things better than others. I know housing policy better than I did, and more than many people, but certainly not as much as actual housing attorneys or advocates, or people deep in the realms of housing finance. So I have to go to them and find them and think through these issues with them. It rewards curiosity in that way.