Joel Thrasymachus Dahl

Enough about the Freedom Caucus. Enough about the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re flamboyant players in our political debate, but they’re extremes: More politicians — and most Americans — occupy the expansive territory in between. That’s where the pivotal races in 2018 are being fought. And if Democrats take back the House, it’s where any legislation with a prayer of getting through Congress will be hammered out.

The story of the 2018 midterms isn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th District, Ben Jealous in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Maryland and a leftist surge. Or, rather, that’s just one narrative, eclipsed by the less cinematic triumphs of less progressive Democrats. They’re by and large winning the primaries in the swing districts that might actually turn from red to blue. They’re the stars of their party’s mission to erect a barricade against the worst of Donald Trump.

Without doubt, Ocasio-Cortez’s ouster of Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary delivered an important message about entrenched politicians disconnected from their constituents. But when she gets to Congress, she won’t be replacing a Republican. She’ll be a new Democrat (and yes, a new kind of Democrat) in a seat that the party already holds and wasn’t going to lose. And she’ll almost surely be outnumbered by Democratic newcomers who waged more moderate campaigns in areas of the country where that’s the safer tack.

“The real story out of these Democratic primaries isn’t left or right — it’s women,” Dave Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me. Additionally, he said, he has been struck by the consequential role of candidates’ biographies, sometimes captured in compelling campaign videos, like Ocasio-Cortez’s, that go viral.

When he looks specifically at the Democratic primary victors in swing districts, he doesn’t see many politicians like Ocasio-Cortez. “They’re mainstream Democratic candidates,” he said. “They’re more running against Republicans and against the tax and health care bills than they are running to reshape the Democratic Party.”

That assessment dovetailed with a status report on the midterms that NPR published on its website last week. “In interviews with more than a dozen Democrats running in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, California, Nebraska and Washington State,” it said, “NPR found that pragmatism is winning out over progressivism in the key races that will decide control of Congress.”

An analysis by Third Way, a think tank in Washington that promotes what it defines as a center-left agenda, showed that pragmatic Democrats were holding sway generally. While only a minority of candidates endorsed by progressive groups like Justice Democrats and Our Revolution had won their primaries, more than three-quarters of those endorsed by the more centrist New Democrat Coalition had.

And most of the winners endorsed by Justice Democrats or Our Revolution prevailed in districts that are considered safely Republican, according to Third Way. They’re probably not bound for Congress.

On the same day that Ocasio-Cortez generated front-page headlines by beating Crowley, much less progressive Democratic newcomers came out on top in crowded primaries in New York districts that are currently represented by Republicans and are high on the party’s red-to-blue wish list. I’m thinking of Max Rose in the 11th and Antonio Delgado in the 19th. Both staked out ground closer to the center than some of their rivals did.

And that doesn’t grab attention. “No one runs to the Mall in Washington with a sign that says, ‘Work Together,’” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, a first-term New Jersey Democrat who wrested his seat from a Republican in 2016. “It’s not what’s talked about on cable TV and tweeted about.” But, he added, it’s where the real action is.

“You have to win in Conor Lamb’s district,” he stressed. When Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat, triumphed in a special election there last March, snatching a seat that had been in Republican hands, he did so with a moderate aura and an opposition to single-payer health care.

The idea that the Democratic Party’s energy and future are concentrated on the left comes partly from the early jockeying in the 2020 presidential race. Potential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand are wagering that progressives will have a significant say in who gets the Democratic nomination and advancing measures like Medicare for All and the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But it’s doubtful that either of those reforms would garner majority support in a House controlled by Democrats, a crucial contingent of whom would be more like Lamb than like Ocasio-Cortez.

“That type of agenda doesn’t sit well outside of the districts of the people who are advocating it,” said Representative Tom Reed, a New York Republican who, along with Gottheimer, leads the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group of 24 Republicans and 24 Democrats who meet weekly to identify areas of bipartisan agreement such as infrastructure investment and improvements to the Affordable Care Act. If the outcome of the midterms is a House with a narrow Democratic or Republican majority — a scenario that currently looks probable — these centrists could wield significant power, and those issues would have more traction than progressives’ favorite causes would.

“Nancy Pelosi and those who have to keep the caucus together are very clear on what they can and can’t do,” Third Way’s Lanae Erickson Hatalsky told me. “They’ll primarily be focused on their oversight role and stopping Trump.” Beyond that, she said, there might be an opportunity to pass bills that protect the so-called Dreamers, mandate more transparency in campaign donations and encourage apprenticeship programs in addition to college.

All of that sounds plenty enticing to me, because it’s better than the present. And stopping Trump? That sounds positively dreamy.

Each July 4 for the last 20 years, fire departments from around Long Island have gathered in the village of Stewart Manor for an annual parade and water battle with local residents. For townspeople, it’s an opportunity to bond with first responders and share the day’s patriotic — oh, who are we kidding? It’s a chance to chuck water balloons at people on big trucks!!!

Game on!

It’s a classic shootout: The firefighters have the guns, but the residents have the numbers.

This year, with temperatures in the 80s and humidity levels of approximately 4 million percent, water warriors came out by the hundreds, wielding balloons, hoses, water guns, even buckets. Eighteen local fire departments joined the mayhem.

“It was more hectic than usual,” said Joe Carrotta, 23, who has been photographing the parade since 2014. “Firemen were chucking buckets of water or shooting water cannons straight down at people who ran up to attack them.”

Mr. Carrotta first experienced the parade in 2010, as a high school volunteer in the Garden City Park fire department.

“You’re just getting pelted,” he said of life on his squad’s float, where he joined three years’ worth of battles. “People come with very, very heavy artillery. You’re going into their town, and they’re sitting on their lawns with hoses.” On the other hand, he said, the firefighters also came prepared. “Each float has at least 2,000 water balloons in a cooler,” he said.

After high school, Mr. Carrotta got a camera and forgot about becoming a firefighter. But he kept returning to the fray. He used an underwater camera because anything else would be destroyed by the water, and he welcomed the occasional crossfire. “I want that effect of people shooting at me and hitting me,” he said. “I don’t mind getting wet.”

As this year’s parade progressed, firefighters jumped off the floats or trucks to bring the battle to the townspeople, some brandishing garbage-can lids as shields, others dressed as superheroes. And when it was over, the various departments took aim at one another.

“We get wet but we love it,” said Frederick Powell, the village fire chief, who was participating in his 20th parade, and has volunteered in the department for 41 years. “When I was a kid in this village we never had much going on,” he said. “But this thing? I wish I was a kid out there today.”

Oh, but he was. He was.

The author wrote on the condition of anonymity because of the gang-related threats she and her family face in the United States and in El Salvador.

I came to this country from El Salvador in 2014 seeking safety for myself and my son. Instead, I found myself locked in a family immigration detention center. It’s an experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

When I heard news stories of nearly 3,000 children separated from their parents at the border, my heart broke for them. Now President Trump claims to have ended the separation of families, instead placing parents and their children in family detention — jails like the one my son, who was 6 at the time, and I were in. This is not a solution. It just exchanges one form of trauma for another.

I was forced to flee my country because of violence and threats of violence against me and my family. When I was a teenager, my father and I witnessed a murder by local gang members. In 2005, my father was murdered for having testified. The gangs threatened me as well, but since the murder case got dropped, I was able to continue my life and found a job in law enforcement. However, several years later, they threatened to kill me too. That’s when I decided I had to leave and bring my son and my 16-year-old sister with me. If we had stayed, they could’ve killed us all.

El Salvador has one of the worst murder rates in the world, so I knew the threat was serious. I needed to find a safe place for my sister, my son and myself. Our only option was to flee to a country where we couldn’t be found as easily — the United States. But after we crossed the border, we found no relief. Instead, we were held for two months in a family immigration detention center in Artesia, N.M., run by a for-profit company.

The day-to-day conditions were horrible. The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick.

It was no place for human beings, let alone for families with small children.

When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.

We weren’t allowed to sleep in the same beds as our children, even the youngest ones who wanted to sleep with their mothers to feel safe. Deportations usually happened in the middle of the night, with flashlights pointed in our faces to wake us up.

Most of the officers didn’t speak Spanish, which made it hard to communicate. Things were even worse for the indigenous women among us who spoke only their native languages. Once, officers physically forced an indigenous woman to take a shower while she was menstruating, violating both her privacy and her cultural beliefs. As a woman, witnessing this type of treatment was heartbreaking — and it has stayed with me in the years since.

Until we joined together to demand it, there was no legal assistance available to inform of us our rights or guide us through the asylum process. Many women were deported before seeing a judge because they were pressured by officers to sign deportation papers.

The effect on our children was undeniable.

The younger children were very confused about why they were trapped inside. The stories they acted out when they were playing always recreated the dangerous journey they had just gone through to get here. The characters in their games became coyotes (smugglers who help people cross the border), “la migra” (border patrol agents) and immigration judges. The detention center became their entire world. The ones who were old enough to understand what was happening had trouble coping, and I heard of teenagers who tried to take their own lives.

My son, who is now 10 years old, rarely talks about the experience, so it’s hard to know how deeply it has affected him. But since his father was detained by ICE recently, he is starting to remember — and worry. He constantly asks me whether his father is being treated the way we were treated. I struggle to answer that question, because I remember what we went through.

My teenage sister also suffered in detention. She was already affected by the situation in El Salvador and the death of our father, but being inside the detention center affected her even more. Not being able to feel free and being treated like less than human caused her a deep depression, and to this day, she needs constant psychiatric support.

Other children I know from the detention center are clearly traumatized, afraid of police officers and constantly worried about going back. They remember it for what it was: a prison.

After widespread outrage against the separation of families under his “zero tolerance” policy, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to keep families in immigration detention indefinitely. That’s not a solution, that’s a jail sentence.

Those of us who have been in family detention can’t stay silent knowing that so many more families will have to go through what we went through. The Trump administration should stop prosecuting parents who have only committed a misdemeanor by crossing the border. It should stop putting them and their children behind bars in places that are often run by for-profit prison companies. It doesn’t make sense to cruelly punish migrants seeking asylum for attempting to do what all parents do — protect and keep their children safe. People fleeing dangerous situations should be given an opportunity to find safety in the United States.

My asylum case is still in process and my children and I are just waiting for the final court date. Being granted asylum can’t take away the fear I still have. My mother is still in El Salvador, and I will never be able to go back. At least now, we are in a place where my son is safe and well taken care of. But I’ll never forget those two months in family detention when he was not.

McALLEN, Tex. — The nation’s top border security official said on Monday that his agency has temporarily stopped handing over migrant adults who cross the Mexican border with children to prosecutors, undercutting claims by other administration officials that “zero tolerance” for illegal immigration is still in place.

Kevin K. McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said he had told border agents not to refer families to the Justice Department for prosecution until the two agencies can agree on a policy that would allow parents to be prosecuted without separating them from their children.

Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have enough detention space for families, the immediate impact of the decision will be that many families will be quickly released, with a promise to return for a court date at some point in the future.

The decision by Mr. McAleenan, conveyed to reporters at a detention center here, will effectively revive a “catch and release” approach used during the Obama administration for most families crossing the Mexican border illegally. President Trump has repeatedly railed against “catch and release” and blamed it for helping to invite waves of crime and violence into the United States.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, later echoed Mr. McAleenan, saying that while there has been no official change in the “zero tolerance” policy, the reality is that the government does not have the ability to detain all the families coming across the border illegally.

“We’re not changing the policy. We’re simply out of resources,” Ms. Sanders said. She blamed Democrats in Congress for not changing immigration laws in ways that would keep migrant families out of the country in the first place.

But even as Mr. McAleenan and Ms. Sanders addressed the issue, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to continue enforcing Mr. Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy. Mr. Sessions told more than 1,000 school resource officers in Reno, Nev., that refusing to prosecute adults crossing illegally into the United States would be a disservice to the children they bring with them.

“The president has made this clear, we are going to prosecute those adults who came here illegally,” Mr. Sessions insisted, though he added that the government will “do everything in our power” to comply with the president’s executive order to avoid separating children from their parents.

Mr. Sessions and Mr. Trump have both ratcheted up their hard-line immigration rhetoric while at the same time promising to keep families together. In brief remarks at the White House on Monday, the president repeated his desire for a system that provides less due process for immigrants.

“We want a system where when people come in illegally, they have to go out — a nice simple system that works,” Mr. Trump said, mocking again the idea of hiring more immigration judges. “We want strong borders, and we want no crime.”

But even before Monday’s announcement by Mr. McAleenan, the reality on the ground appeared far less simple. Administration officials said the zero tolerance policy has been enforced in dramatically different ways, depending on whether border communities have the resources to detain and prosecute new waves of immigrants.

Where there is not enough space to detain families with children, such families are already being charged and quickly let go, with a promise to return for later court hearings.

Casa Alitas is a shelter in Tucson, Ariz., that takes in migrant families once American officials have released them into the country as their cases proceed. On Monday, Teresa Cavendish, who runs the shelter, said that government officials appear to be releasing many families into the United States together as a unit, rather than keeping them in detention — even when the families cross at unauthorized border points.

“These current families are very, very lucky,” she said.

Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that America’s birthrate reached a historic low in 2017, falling to 60.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. For a population in the developed world to replace itself, the average woman needs to have around 2.1 children. In the United States, where fertility has been below replacement for about a decade, the average woman now has 1.77.

Several commentators have described the plunge as a mystery, particularly since we’re in a period of economic growth. Some on the right have, absurdly, blamed the shrinking birthrate on abortion, even though abortion rates are also as low as they’ve been since Roe v. Wade was decided. More thoughtful conservatives, like National Review’s David French, speculated that the baby bust could be a sign of the same sort of sweeping despair that has been linked to America’s decreasing life expectancy.

I have another theory. Perhaps the United States is becoming more like the rest of the industrialized world, where declining birthrates are correlated with a lack of support for working mothers.

Outside the United States, the pattern is pretty clear. Developed countries that prioritize gender equality — including Sweden, Norway and France — have higher fertility rates than those that don’t. The world’s lowest fertility rates are in countries that are economically developed but socially conservative, where women have professional opportunities but must shoulder most of the burdens of domestic life. (With its progressive reputation and low birthrate, Germany might seem, on the surface, like an exception, but the country has a tradition of stigmatizing mothers who work outside the home.)

Most women seem to want both jobs and children, and when they’re forced to choose, some will forgo parenthood, or have only one child. In a 2000 paper, the Australian demographer Peter McDonald theorized that if women have educational and employment opportunities nearly equal to those of men, “but these opportunities are severely curtailed by having children, then, on average, women will restrict the number of children that they have to an extent which leaves fertility at a precariously low, long-term level.”

Livia Oláh, a demographer at Stockholm University, has studied how gender equality affects choices about having children at the family level. She found that in Sweden, women were more likely to have a second child if their male partner took paternity leave with their first child, a proxy for his willingness to share the work of parenting. In Hungary, she told me, couples that shared housework equally had a higher probability of having a second kid. Women “want structures and policies that make it possible for them to combine family life — housework and child care — with career,” she said.

This correlation between feminist social policy and higher fertility is widely recognized throughout the world; as David Willetts, a former Tory minister in the United Kingdom, once put it, “feminism is the new natalism.” The link is one reason that Japan, where the fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, has undertaken “womenomics,” a broad — if only mildly successful — government initiative to promote gender equality.

In the past, the major exception to the rule about pro-women policies and higher fertility was the United States. The American government does next to nothing for working parents, yet fertility rates, after reaching a low of around 1.7 children per woman in 1976, rose over the next 30 years, even as Europe’s fertility fell. There were several reasons for this, including substantial levels of Hispanic immigration, a high teen birthrate, and, some speculated, America’s exceptional religiosity.

Since then, however, the teen birthrate in the United States has fallen to an all-time low, Americans have become less religious, Hispanic immigration has slowed, and Hispanic fertility rates have declined. At the same time, pressures on working parents have only grown. In 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that more mothers were staying at home with their kids than at any time in the last two decades, an increase researchers ascribed in part to the rising cost of child care.

Right now, America’s fertility rate is still pretty high compared to most European countries; it’s lower than France or Sweden but roughly in line with other countries in Scandinavia. If my theory is right, though, it will keep falling unless America invests in paid family leave and subsidized, high-quality child care, while birthrates in France and Scandinavia remain stable.

Some liberals might wonder why we should worry about birthrates at all. Anxiety about demographic decline has a bad odor; historically it’s been a preoccupation of people panicked by changing gender roles and the waning racial advantage of particular groups. But if a shrinking number of workers must support a growing elderly population, even our threadbare social safety net will be strained. An obvious solution is increased immigration, but declining native-born populations tend to react to large influxes of immigrants with terrifying xenophobic backlashes.

None of this, obviously, is a reason to pressure women into having more kids than they want. (Even if it weren’t immoral, it would be counterproductive, given the link, in developed countries, between higher birthrates and women’s rights.) But survey data shows that women actually desire more kids than they’re having. As Lyman Stone wrote in The New York Times, the “gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years.”

Our culture is failing to support women in creating the lives they want, and that failure threatens the future. One lesson of cratering fertility rates is that in the modern world, patriarchy is maladaptive.

Things were already looking bad when, several people told me, Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne. It was just after 9 p.m. on election night and she was having her hair and makeup done in the family’s suite at the Peninsula hotel. She stopped to pour what someone said was Veuve Clicquot into everyone’s glasses, figuring that in a couple of hours Donald Trump’s run of early victories in red states (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama) would end and the map would turn back in her mom’s favor.

Three hours later, the Rust Belt was awash in red, and somebody had to tell Hillary Clinton.

Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager, told his boss she was going to lose. She didn’t seem all that surprised.

“I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. “They were never going to let me be president.”

In July 2013, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, put me on the “Hillary beat” ahead of the 2016 election. It was 649 days before Mrs. Clinton would announce she was running for president again, 1,226 days before she would lose to Mr. Trump.

Every major life decision in my 20s and 30s — when to get married, where to buy an apartment, whether to freeze my eggs until after the election — had revolved around a single looming question: What about Hillary Clinton?

I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.

They were the vast-right wing conspiracy. They were the patriarchy that could never let an ambitious former first lady finally shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” They were the people of Wisconsin and James Comey. They were white suburban women who would rather vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault than a woman who seemed an affront to who they were.

And yes, they were political reporters (“big egos and no brains,” she called us) hounding her about her emails and transfixed by the spectacle of the first reality TV show candidate.

It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.

And the strange thing is, Oct. 7, 2016, started just like any other day.

The Times newsroom had been quiet that afternoon. Then, around 4 p.m., I heard “Oh, my God,” and “Oh, God,” and “Jesus Christ” float from cubicle to cubicle until my largely agnostic colleagues sounded like a Sunday church choir. The Washington Post had published video of the Republican nominee for president bragging about sexually assaulting women.

I stared into my screen, as frozen as the paused image of Mr. Trump and Billy Bush stepping off the bus, the unknowing actress in the fuchsia halter dress waiting to greet them.

I was still in this haze at 4:32 p.m. when WikiLeaks tweeted a link to emails from the Gmail account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, including excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street firms.

Mrs. Clinton’s refusal to release the speeches had been such a cause célèbre in the Democratic primary that I regularly saw protesters holding signs that said, “I’d rather be at home reading your Goldman Sachs speeches.” Now the juicy parts of this most sought-after trove of documents had landed in our laps.

But it wasn’t a scoop. It was more like a bank heist.

Editors and reporters huddled to discuss how to handle the emails. Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there — and of importance to voters — it was The Times’s job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan. I chose the byline.

In December, after the election, my colleagues in Washington wrote a Pulitzer-winning article about how the Russians had pulled off the perfect hack. I was on the F train on my way to the newsroom when I read it. I had no new assignment yet and still existed in a kind of postelection fog that took months to lift. I must’ve read this line 15 times: “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”

The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.

A few weeks before Election Day, I was stuck in my cubicle poring over John Podesta’s emails. I wanted to be on the road. “I just feel like the election isn’t happening in my cubicle,” I said. “But it’s over,” an editor replied, reminding me that the Times’s Upshot election model gave Mrs. Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning. The ominous “they” who would keep the glass ceiling intact didn’t look that powerful then.

Until the last day on the road, though, it never really felt like a winning campaign. Not that I thought Mr. Trump would win. I believed in the data. Yet I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that no matter how many people I’d met in black churches and union halls and high school gyms around the country who told Hillary Clinton their problems, no matter how many women chanted, “Deal me in!” in unison, she wouldn’t win.

I looked around at a get-out-the-vote rally in Akron, Ohio. It was just over a month until Election Day. Dozens of empty chairs sat in the press area. Extension cords dangled unused off folding tables. Cherry pickers set up to give photographers an aerial shot sat idle.

I had to remind myself that there was a time, during the Harkin Steak Fry, the political event of the year for Democrats, in the fall of 2014, before Mrs. Clinton was even a candidate and while Mr. Trump was still a reality TV star, when she had been the media’s obsession. Two hundred reporters had stampeded across the lawn for a glimpse of the most irresistible, dramatic story of what Salon called the “horribly dull political year to come.”

The first woman with a real shot at the presidency, then able to capture the world’s attention with a single flip of sirloin, hardly registered by the time voting approached.

I always figured that this was just how Hillary Clinton would win. It was the painful logic always at work for her: She was expected to project the iron of a commander in chief, the warmth of a best girlfriend and the charisma of a drinking buddy. And if she had somehow done all of that, there would still be some essential quality she lacked, in many people’s minds, because we simply had no template for a female president. The long-suffering feminist heroine would make history not in a festooned lovefest but in a dreary, mechanical slog.

By late fall, the traveling press — called “the Girls on the Bus” since on any given day, of our cohort of about 20 regular reporters, as many as 18 of us were women — were calling it Hillary’s Death March to Victory.

She went through the motions. “Hello [insert swing-state city here]!”

She did a whole riff on making lists. “I have a plan for just about everything,” she said. “You know, maybe this is a woman thing. We make lists, right? I love making lists. And then I love crossing things off!”

If I had to identify a single unifying force behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it was her obvious desire to get the whole thing over with. “This election is 10 days away,” she said at a rally in Des Moines. “Eleven, but we’re more than halfway through today.”

When I started covering Mrs. Clinton in 2007 for The Wall Street Journal, she’d been a hands-on senator constantly in touch with her upstate constituents. But by her second campaign, she seemed like Rip Van Winkle, awake again after her stint as secretary of state to find a vastly different country. She’d missed the rise of the Tea Party. She’d missed the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rage over health care and bank bailouts and the 1 percent.

And in early 2015, when her advisers told her that people no longer wanted to be called middle class — a data point that seemed a fundamental shift in the American psyche and as clear a sign as any that there was something stirring in this election — Hillary Clinton saw only a linguistic challenge.

Her consultants contemplated what to call this curious specimen of 121 million Americans who were technically middle class. Everyday Americans! It even sounded like Walmart’s Everyday Low Prices.

“Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion,” Mrs. Clinton repeated this corporate catchphrase for several months until her campaign tested 84 possible replacement slogans.

It didn’t take long before we’d turned Everydays into a proper noun. When the traveling press needed to get past the barricades to talk to voters, it was “C’mon, my editors need me to quote some Everydays.” Or when a line of women snaked around outside an event in North Charleston, S.C., we’d ask the campaign, “What’s the crowd count on the Everydays who couldn’t get inside?”

Even the Brooklyn campaign headquarters weren’t immune. When Chelsea Clinton requested a private plane to fly to an event, Mr. Podesta shrugged. “She’s not an Everyday American,” he said.

Now we have an administration with hardly an everyday American in it. We are all living through the chaos of the Trump presidency, and Robert Mueller continues to dig into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Hillary Clinton has settled into a surreal life of speaking at women’s conferences. I’ve started to see the “they” she spoke about on election night differently.

They were Facebook algorithms and data breaches. They were Fake News drummed up by Vladimir Putin’s digital army. They were shadowy hackers who stole her campaign chairman’s emails hoping to weaken our democracy with Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipe. And they were The Times and me and all the other journalists who covered those stolen emails.

Of course, these outside forces wouldn’t have mattered or weighed so heavily on me, on the country, had Hillary Clinton, her campaign and her longtime aides — the same box of broken toys who’d enabled all of her worst instincts since the 1990s — not let the election get so close in the first place. The Russians, after all, didn’t hack into her calendar and delete the Wisconsin rallies.

I never told anyone this, but one time when I’d been visiting the Brooklyn campaign headquarters I found an iPhone in the women’s restroom. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to belong to Mr. Podesta’s assistant because when I picked it up, a flood of calendar alerts for him popped up. I placed it on the sink counter, went into the stall, came out and washed my hands. I left the phone sitting there, worried that if I turned it in, even touched it again, aides would think I had snooped. This seemed a violation that would at best get my invitation to the headquarters rescinded and at worst get me booted off the beat for unethical behavior.

I can’t explain why, in the heat of breaking news, I thought covering John Podesta’s hacked emails was any different.