My afternoon commute home from work gives me a good forty minutes to listen to liberal talk radio. It's a refreshing end to the day, and the program that's on as I'm driving home is actually called "Driving it Home with Patty Vasquez," on Chicago's WCPT. One of the things I've learned over years of listening to "liberal talk radio," which I first discovered on a Pacifica network station in Houston, is that there's a personality involved in the programming which is missing in most talk stations. The hosts and their guests share their feelings, they don't cover them up or put on the stone face to avoid revealing their feelings.

Well that works for me. As we have gone up and down this political emotional roller coaster, one of the most comforting things to me has been the reflection of some of the exact same feelings of frustration, anger, incredulity, fear, and occasionally hopelessness that has resulted from this country's biggest electoral mistake. So the variety of guests Ms. Vasquez brings to her show tend to be a random sample of various levels of Democratic party politics in the Chicago area, and you get some real honesty from some of them.

The emotional ride that's come along since last November has been reflected multiple times on the show, by the host, as well as most of her guests. I find myself sitting in the car in my driveway long after I've arrived just to hear the end of an interview where someone has said something that just made an instant connection. Her guests have expertise, but they also have personal experience and most of them are in positions where they can look around and give a pretty good analysis and offer some reasonable, and hopeful, solutions.

So where are we, at this point? What conclusions have I drawn from sharing similar emotional reactions to our common political experience?

In spite of the lack of conclusive evidence that Harris lost because she was a woman, or because she didn't have enough time to campaign, or any one of a dozen other excuses, the problem, reflected time and time again by the guests on Vasquez's show over the past year reflects the same problem that has plagued Democrats for decades, and that is the inability to discern the narrative, and then latch on to it and make it the theme of their campaign.

It was affordability, inflation, prices going up and incomes stagnating, that was the theme which kept just enough voters at home to make the difference. Three states, as it turns out, the same three that won it for Biden in 2020--Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, would have made the difference and we've heard, on the level, exactly what it was that kept people at home. Every afternoon, just after 5:00 p.m. , callers and guests give their realistic perspective, and affordability is the theme that works its way to the top.

Confirmation is coming in polling data that is showing a much bigget shift back to the left than the electorate took in 2024. But in those very random conversations with callers and guests every afternoon, the confirmation is clear in that Democratic and anti-Trump politicians are experiencing success by travelling along those themes.