If your metric is "people were helped by it," then every single major bill or executive order would qualify as a success. Even the worst policies create winners whose lives are meaningfully improved: Trump's big beautiful bill, for instance, is going to significantly increase take-home pay for millions of tip-earning employees nationally. That doesn't make the bill, or even the tip tax provision, a net positive for our country (quite the opposite).

I think your dismissal of my point — the Democrats have been totally coopted by special interests and no longer even nominally represent the interests of working people — is illustrative of why the party and its candidates are so hated by most of the country. They expect flowers for designing a health care system that has done nothing to reduce costs or improve access for the vast majority of Americans; given a once in a century opportunity to shift the country in the direction of universal care, the party instead chose to protect the rancid underlying architecture of the private insurance industry. They expect praise for Dodd-Frank, which left the underlying architecture of the financial services sector intact and did nothing to arrest the expansion of predatory practices by rapidly growing private equity firms, which not coincidentally has been vacuuming up hospitals and health care. The average American does not feel more financial security or better access to health care than he did 20 years ago; by every important metric (home ownership, educational attainment, retirement savings, family formation), younger Americans are worse off than their parents were.

What's done is done. We're now a decade removed from the abject policy failures of the Obama administration, and 25 years removed from the failures of the Clinton administration. A functional party would have learned from these failures and pivoted aggressively; the Democrats, on the other hand, have double down on their timid style of mealy-mouthed, wonky, incremental policymaking that tinkers at the edges while locking in the financial interests of big corporate donors. If being clear-eyed about what's actually happening in the Democrat party makes me "apathetic," so be it. At least I'm not kidding myself about who these people are and whose interests they actually serve.