Washington — President Trump is hosting a dinner Thursday night at the White House with tech giants and other business and political leaders, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk will not be among those attending.
He said on X, “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”
Invited guests include Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, according to a White House official. The Hill first reported the list of invitees.
Musk earlier this year had a public falling out with Mr. Trump as he left the administration, blasting Mr. Trump and his administration over government spending and the Epstein files. He pledged to begin a new political party, dubbed the “America Party,” although that has yet to come to fruition.
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump predicted that Musk would eventuallly return to the Republican Party.
“I don’t think he has a choice,” Mr. Trump said in an interview this week on “The Scott Jennings Radio Show.” “So what’s he going to do, he’s gonna go with the radical left lunatics? They’re lunatics. I don’t think he has a choice. He’s a man of common sense, he’s a good man.”
The president said of Musk,”He’s a good man. He got off the reservation, incorrectly, and that’s okay, because, you know, it’s just one of those things.” He also characterized the Tesla CEO as “80% super genius, and then 20% he’s got some problems,” and added, “and when he works out the 20%, he’ll be great, but he’s got some difficulty.”
The dinner, expected to take place behind closed doors, is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. First Lady Melania Trump is hosting an AI summit earlier in the day, and some of the dinner attendees are expected to attend.
Mr. Trump has pursued close relationships with tech CEOs, hosting a number of them for White House meetings and even giving them prime access at his inauguration. A number of those CEOs donated to his inauguration fund.
What was the worst moment for the American economy in the past half century? You might think it was the last wheezing months of the 1970s, when oil prices more than doubled, inflation reached double digits, and the U.S. sank into its second recession of the decade. Or the 2008 financial collapse and Great Recession. Or perhaps it was when COVID hit and millions of people abruptly lost their job. All good guesses—and all wrong, if surveys of the American public are to be believed. According to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the most widely cited measure of consumer sentiment, that moment was actually June 2022.
Inflation hit 9 percent that month, and no one knew if it would go higher still. A recession seemed imminent. Objectively, it’s hard to claim that the economy was in worse shape that month than it had been at those other cataclysmic times. But substantial pessimism was nonetheless explicable.
Over the next 18 months, however, the economy improved rapidly, and in nearly every way: Inflation plummeted to near its pre-pandemic level, unemployment reached historic lows, GDP boomed, and wages rose. The turnaround, by most standard economic measures, was unprecedented. Yet the American people continued to give the economy the kind of approval ratings traditionally reserved for used-car salesmen. Last June, the White House launched a campaign to celebrate “Bidenomics”—the administration’s strong job-creation record and big investments in manufacturing and clean energy. The effort flopped so badly that, within months, Democrats were begging the president to abandon it altogether.
More recently, consumer sentiment has improved. After falling for months, it suddenly rebounded in December and January, posting its largest two-month gain in more than 30 years—even though the economy itself barely changed at all. Yet as of this writing, sentiment remains low by historical standards—nothing like the sunny outlook that prevailed before the pandemic.
What’s going on? The question involves the psychology of money—and of politics. Its answer will shape the outcome of the presidential election in November.
The toll of inflation on the American psyche is undoubtedly part of the story. That people hate high inflation is not a novel observation: The Federal Reserve has long been obsessed with preventing another ’70s-style inflationary spiral; its patron saint is Paul Volcker, the former Fed chair who famously broke that spiral by jacking up interest rates, which plunged the economy into a recession. But although experts and political leaders know that inflation matters, the way they understand the phenomenon is very different from how ordinary people experience it—and that alone may explain why sentiment stayed low for so long, and has only now begun to rise.
When economists talk about inflation, they are often referring to an index of prices meant to represent the goods and services a typical household buys in a year. Each item in the index is weighted by how much is spent on it annually. So, for instance, because the average household spends about a third of its income on housing, the price of housing (an amalgam of rents and home prices) determines a third of the inflation rate. But the goods that people spend the most money on tend to be quite different from those that they pay the most attention to. Consumers are reminded of the price of food every time they visit a supermarket or restaurant, and the price of gas is plastered in giant numbers on every street corner. Also, the purchase of these items can’t be postponed. Things like a new couch or flatscreen TV, in contrast, are purchased so rarely that many people don’t even remember how much they paid for one, let alone how much they cost today.
The irony is that consumers spend a lot more, on average, on expensive, big-ticket items than they do on groceries or takeout, which means the prices we pay the most attention to don’t contribute very much to overall inflation numbers. (Less than a tenth of the average consumer’s budget is spent at the supermarket.) Some measures of inflation—“core” and “supercore” inflation among them—exclude food and energy prices altogether. That is reasonable if you’re a Fed official focused on how to set interest rates, because energy and food prices are often extremely sensitive to temporary fluctuations (caused by, say, a drought that hurts grain harvests or an OPEC oil-supply cut). But in practice, these measures overlook the prices that matter most to consumers.
This dynamic alone goes a long way toward explaining the gap between “the economy” and Americans’ perception of it. Even as core inflation fell below 3 percent over the course of 2023, food prices increased by about 6 percent, twice as fast as they had grown over the previous 20 years. “I think that explains a huge part of the disconnect,” Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, told me. “You won’t convince any consumer that inflation is under control when food prices are rising that fast.”
Consumers say as much when you ask them. In a recent poll commissioned by The Atlantic, respondents were asked what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The price of groceries led the list, and 60 percent of respondents placed it among their top three—more, even, than the share that chose “inflation.” This isn’t exactly a new development. In 2002, Donovan told me, Italian consumers were convinced that prices were soaring by nearly 20 percent even though actual inflation was a stable 2 percent. It turned out that people were basing their estimates on the cost of a cup of espresso, which had abruptly risen as coffee makers rounded their prices up after the introduction of the euro.
What’s more, most people don’t care about the inflation rate so much as they care about prices themselves. If inflation runs at 10 percent for a year, and then suddenly shrinks to 2 percent, the damage of the past year has not been undone. Prices are still dramatically higher than they were. Overall, prices are nearly 20 percent higher now than they were before the pandemic (grocery prices are 25 percent higher). When asked in a survey last fall what improvement in the economy they would most like to see, 64 percent of respondents said “lower prices on goods, services, and gas.”
What about wages? Even adjusted for inflation, they have been rising since June 2022, and recently surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, meaning that the typical American’s paycheck goes further than it did prior to the inflation spike. But wages haven’t increased faster than food prices. And most people think about wage and price increases very differently. A raise tends to feel like something we’ve earned, Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. Then we go to the grocery store, and “it feels like those just rewards are being unfairly taken away.”
If inflation is in fact the main reason the American people have been so down on the economy—and its future—then the story is likely to have a happy ending, and soon. My great-grandmother loved to reminisce about the days when a can of Coke cost a nickel. She didn’t, however, believe that the country was on the verge of economic calamity because she now had to spend a dollar or more for the same beverage. Just as surely as people despise price increases, we also get used to them in the end. A recent analysis by Ryan Cummings and Neale Mahoney, two Stanford economists and former policy advisers in the Biden administration, found that it takes 18 to 24 months for lower inflation to fully show up in consumer sentiment. “People eventually adjust,” Mahoney told me. “They just don’t adjust at the rate that statistical agencies produce inflation data.”
Mahoney and Cummings posted their study on December 4, 2023—18 months after inflation peaked in June 2022. As if on cue, consumer sentiment began surging that month. (Perhaps helping matters, food inflation had finally fallen below 3 percent in November 2023.)
There is another story you can tell about consumer sentiment today, however, one that has less to do with what’s happening in grocery stores and more to do with the peculiarities of tribal identity.
It’s well established that partisans on both sides become more negative about the economy when the other party controls the presidency, but this phenomenon is not symmetrical: In a November analysis, Mahoney and Cummings found that when a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans’ economic outlook declines by more than twice as much as Democrats’ does when the situation is reversed. Consumer-sentiment data from the polling firm Civiqs and the Pew Research Center show that Republicans’ view of the economy has barely budged since hitting an all-time low in the summer of 2022.
Meanwhile, although sentiment among Democrats has recovered to nearly where it stood before inflation began to rise in 2021, it remains well below its level at the end of the Obama administration. It may never return to its previous heights. Over the past decade, the belief that the economy is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful has become central to progressive self-identity. Among Democrats ages 18 to 34, who tend to be more progressive than older Democrats, positive views of capitalism fell from 56 to 40 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to Gallup. Dim views of the broader economic system may be limiting how positively some Democrats feel about the economy, even when one of their own occupies the Oval Office. According to a CNN poll in late January, 63 percent of Democrats ages 45 and older believed that the economy was on the upswing—but only 35 percent of younger Democrats believed the same. To fully embrace the economy’s strength would be to sacrifice part of the modern progressive’s ideological sense of self.
The media may be contributing to economic gloom for people of every political stripe. According to Mahoney, one possible explanation for Republicans’ disproportionate economic negativity when a Democrat is in office is the fact that the news sources many Republicans consume—namely, right-wing media like Fox News—tend to be more brazenly partisan than the sources Democrats consume, which tend to be a balance of mainstream and partisan media. But mainstream media have also gotten more negative about the economy in recent years, regardless of who’s held the presidency. According to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution, from 1988 to 2016, the “sentiment” of economic-news coverage in mainstream newspapers tracked closely with measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market. Then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would have predicted. After Joe Biden took office, the gap widened. Journalists have long focused more on surfacing problems than on highlighting successes—bringing problems to light is an essential part of the job—but the more recent shift could be explained by the same economic pessimism afflicting many young liberals (many newspaper journalists, after all, are liberals themselves). In other words, the media’s negativity could be both a reflection and a source of today’s economic pessimism.
What happens to consumer sentiment in the coming months will depend on how much it is still being dragged down by frustration with higher prices, which will likely dissipate, as opposed to how much it is being limited by a combination of Republican partisanship and Democratic pessimism, which are less likely to change.
Will the place that it finally settles in come November matter to the election? How people say they are feeling about the economy in an election year—alongside more direct measures of economic health, such as GDP growth and disposable income—has in the past been a good predictor of whom voters choose as president; a healthy economy and good sentiment strongly favor the incumbent. Despite all the abnormalities of 2020—a pandemic, national protests, a uniquely polarizing president—economic models that factored in both economic fundamentals and sentiment predicted the result and margin of that year’s presidential election quite accurately (and much more so than polling), according to an analysis by the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck.
It is of course possible that consumer sentiment is becoming a more performative metric than it used to be—a statement about who you are rather than how you really feel—and perhaps less reliable as a result. Still, the story that voters have in their heads about the economy clearly matters. If that story were influenced solely by the prices at the pump and the grocery store or the number of well-paying jobs, then—absent another crisis—we could expect the mood to be buoyant this fall, significantly helping Biden’s prospects for reelection. But the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by everything from the news we read to the political messages we hear to the identities we adopt. And, for better or worse, those stories have yet to be fully written.
If one word could sum up Nikki Haley’s ambivalent challenge to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, that word might be: if.
If as used by New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent supporter in the state, when he concluded his energetic introduction of her at a large rally in Manchester on Friday night. “If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, don’t sit on your couch and not participate in democracy,” Sununu insisted. “You gotta go vote, right?”
In that formulation, if served as more shield than sword. By framing his argument that way, Sununu clearly intended to appeal to the voters who do consider Trump a threat to democracy, but without endorsing that sentiment himself.
That slight hesitation about fully confronting the GOP’s fearsome front-runner has been the consistent attitude of Haley’s campaign. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has shown impressive political skills and steely discipline to outmaneuver a large field of men and emerge as the most viable remaining alternative to Trump. She has displayed fortitude in soldiering on against Trump as a procession of Republican elected officials has endorsed him for the nomination over the past few weeks. And beginning with her speech last Monday night after the Iowa caucus, Haley has turned up the volume on her own criticism of Trump, yoking him to Joe Biden as too old and divisive. “With me, you’ll get no drama, no vendettas, no vengeance,” she told the crowd on Friday night.
But in this possibly decisive week of the GOP race, Haley has made clear that she will go so far and no further in criticizing or challenging Trump, just as Sununu did with his telltale if. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary realistically represents the last chance for Haley to stop, or even slow, the former president’s march to his third consecutive GOP nomination. If Trump wins, especially by a big margin, he will be on a glide path to becoming the nominee. Nothing Haley has done this week reflects the gravity of that moment. “She’s got to swing for the fences, and so far she’s just throwing out bunts,” Mark McKinnon, who served as the chief media adviser to George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, told me.
Many New Hampshire political leaders resistant to Trump fear that Haley has not done nearly enough to generate a surge of turnout among independent voters—known locally as “undeclared voters.” Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP strategist in New Hampshire, says that Haley’s messaging to these undeclared voters has lacked enough urgency to generate the brushfire of excitement she needs among them. “In my opinion, she’s not doing what she needs to do to connect with independent voters,” Dennehy told me. Haley, he believes, should be framing the choice to New Hampshire voters much more starkly, telling them: “It’s the end of the road here; I’m your last chance to stop a Trump-Biden rematch.” Haley fleetingly raised that argument in her remarks following the Iowa caucus, but it has receded as she’s reverted toward her standard stump speech in New Hampshire.
McKinnon and Dennehy know something about New Hampshire presidential campaigns that catch fire among independents. Dennehy was the New Hampshire campaign manager for then–Senator John McCain when he stunned George W. Bush, McKinnon’s candidate, in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush arrived after a big win in the kickoff Iowa caucus and held a commanding lead in national polls. On the day of that New Hampshire primary, I had lunch with McKinnon; Matthew Dowd, the campaign’s voter-targeting guru; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. They were relaxed, confident, and starting to kick around ideas for how they would contest the general election, while I scribbled in a notebook. Then, halfway through the lunch, Rove took a call, abruptly left the table, and never came back. The reason for his sudden summons back to campaign headquarters became apparent a few hours later: McCain that night beat Bush among independent voters by three to one, exit polls found, and won the state overall by nearly 20 percentage points.
In retrospect, McKinnon said, the Bush campaign should have seen what was coming. “McCain was definitely on fire; you could feel it on the ground,” he told me. For months McCain had held lengthy town halls across the state, answering questions for hours and then driving to the next event on the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, taking questions from reporters for hours more. He was provocative, funny, unfiltered, and unafraid of challenging Republican orthodoxy. “He was entirely authentic, entirely accessible; he was campaigning like he was running for governor of New Hampshire, steely, granite-like,” McKinnon recalled.
Like McCain, Haley has burrowed into New Hampshire with months of grassroots events. But the similarities stop there. Haley’s town halls are much more structured and controlled; sometimes she doesn’t even take questions from the audience. Her interactions with reporters are limited and often stilted. And she made a choice this week to reject debates by ABC and CNN unless Trump also participated, which forced the sponsors to cancel the sessions. Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to her decision not to appear again with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but more of the people I spoke with believe that by withdrawing, she forfeited the biggest platforms she would have had this week to drive a message to New Hampshire voters. “It’s about pulling as many independents out to vote as you can, and you can’t get to those independents if you don’t go on places like CNN and WMUR,” Dennehy said, referring to the powerful local New Hampshire television station that would have co-hosted one of the debates with ABC.
Haley is pushing a tougher message against Trump than she was before Iowa. When a reporter this weekend asked her what her closing message was to New Hampshire voters, Haley replied, “Americans deserve better than what the options are. You’ve got Biden and Trump both distracted with investigations, both distracted with other things that aren’t about how to make Americans’ lives safer and better.” She says flatly that Trump is lying about her record and that America should not have to choose between two roughly 80-year-old candidates. After Trump at a Friday-night rally confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an extended monologue about the January 6 riot, Haley on Saturday responded by questioning his mental acuity: “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.” And she’s been willing to differentiate from Trump on issues where she can reaffirm positions that were considered conservative in the Ronald Reagan–era GOP. That includes criticizing Trump for running up the federal deficit, not taking a tough enough stand against China, and playing “footsy,” as she termed it, with dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But Haley has muffled her case against Trump by more often refusing to confront him or by even defending him. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash last week about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, Haley implausibly replied, “I haven’t paid attention to his cases.” Last Friday, reporters asked Haley whether she saw racism in Trump’s multiplying jabs at her immigrant ancestry, which included reposting an inaccurate “birther”-like claim that she was ineligible to run because her parents had not been U.S. citizens when she was born. Her response could not have been more tepid: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.”
Haley has also continued to insist that, if elected, she would pardon Trump should he be convicted in any of the cases against him. Hours before the Iowa caucuses last Monday, she told a Fox News anchor that she would vote for Trump over Biden “any day of the week.” She’s closing her New Hampshire campaign with an unusual three-minute ad centered on a testimonial to her compassion and commitment from the mother of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in North Korean captivity; but nowhere does the ad criticize Trump for his coziness with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In Haley’s stump speech to New Hampshire voters, she still declares that chaos “follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly,” as he if is potentially just an innocent bystander to all the firestorms that he ignites with his words and actions. (Haley does Olympic-level contortions to avoid expressing any value judgments about Trump.) On Saturday, she even tempered her criticism of Trump’s confusion the night before when she reassuringly told a Fox interviewer, “I’m not saying that this is a Joe Biden situation.” To truly threaten a front-runner as commanding as Trump, “you’ve just got to throw caution to the wind,” McKinnon said. “And it’s the opposite with Haley: The wind throws caution to her.”
The evidence from Iowa suggests that Haley’s cautious approach has left her with a coalition too narrow to make a strong stand. With Trump bashing her in ads and his stump speech as “liberal” and “weak,” particularly on issues relating to immigration, Haley predictably ran poorly in Iowa among the most conservative voters, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations.
But although she performed better among more moderate elements of the GOP coalition—particularly those with four-year college degrees—she failed to inspire enough of them to come out and vote on a cold night. In Iowa, Haley won her highest share of the vote in the most populous urban and suburban counties. But the total number of votes she won in the big counties was only a fraction of the total that had come out for Marco Rubio, a candidate who appealed to a similar coalition, in the 2016 GOP caucus. Max Rust, a data analyst at The Wall Street Journal, told me in an email that his unpublished analysis found that Iowa turnout fell more compared with 2016 in better educated and more affluent areas than in rural and blue-collar places. “I was really surprised how much Haley underperformed in the suburbs,” David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist, told me.
With Trump holding a steady double-digit lead over her in the New Hampshire tracking polls, Haley faces the prospect of a similar squeeze in Tuesday’s primary. Trump’s ferocious attacks on her from the right leave her with little opportunity to crack his support among staunch conservatives. And her much more carefully nuanced criticism of him leaves her facing long odds of catalyzing the massive turnout among independent voters she’d need to generate any momentum moving forward. The Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 tracking poll released Saturday showed Haley only running even with Trump among undeclared voters, signaling that she’s failing to draw into the primary the large center-left contingent most hostile to the former president. (At the same time, Trump continued to lead her in the survey by two-to-one among Republicans.)
“There’s always been this ambivalence that emanates from her about Trump,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. Scala, the author of Stormy Weather, a book about the New Hampshire primary, said that he understands that Haley must maneuver carefully, because “ultimately, if you want to win the nomination of this party, you are going to have to win over voters who like Trump.” But, Scala added, “I have to think [her] ambivalence rubs off on voters” and may discourage many of those most critical of Trump from bothering to turn out. (Sununu hasn’t helped that problem by publicly insisting that Haley may be hoping only for a strong second-place finish, and repeatedly declaring that he would vote for Trump if he wins the nomination.)
In my interactions with voters at a few Haley events here, she seems to inspire more respect than enthusiasm. Some are drawn to her contained and cerebral style, and to her message of generational change. “I was thinking if we give her a chance, we will get an opportunity to go in a new direction,” George Jobel, a marketing manager from Concord, told me after Haley’s Manchester rally. But for many others, Haley is simply the last option to register a vote of disapproval about Trump. Dan O’Donnell, a realtor and undeclared voter from Hollis, is planning to cast his ballot for the former South Carolina governor. But he told me that when friends ask him if he’s voting for Haley, “I tell them, ‘No, I’m going to vote against Trump.’” In the latest Suffolk tracking poll, most independent voters backing Haley likewise said that they were motivated primarily to vote against Trump, rather than for her.
In fairness to Haley, it’s not like anyone else this year—or, for that matter, in 2016—cracked the code of beating Trump in a Republican primary. DeSantis tried the opposite of her strategy, by running to Trump’s right and hoping that moderates would eventually consolidate around him if he was the only alternative remaining; that approach has left DeSantis in an even weaker position than Haley, barely surviving in the race. And toppling a front-runner is never easy: Even after McCain’s New Hampshire upset in 2000, he won only a few more states, and Bush recovered to resoundingly win the nomination.
But McCain at least went down swinging, indelibly imprinting a maverick image that allowed him to come back and win the GOP nomination eight years later. In his own way, even DeSantis seems liberated by the prospect of defeat, publicly declaring that Trump cares more about personal loyalty than the good of the country or even the party, and accurately complaining that Fox and other conservative media outlets function as a “Praetorian guard” suppressing criticism of the former president.
Haley, by contrast, still seems here to be weighing every word, as if she expects she will eventually need to defend it from the witness box in some Stalin-esque future MAGA-loyalty trial. If Haley thought she had a better chance to win, maybe she and her allies would dispense with the word if when describing Trump’s potential threat to American democracy. But her reluctance to fully confront Trump probably betrays what she really thinks about the odds that she can wrest control of the party from him this year. In this break-the-glass moment for Trump’s Republican opponents, Haley has made clear she will do no more than tap lightly on the window.
After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.
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During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.
Now, recognizing that red-state voters have been energized by anti-queer demagoguery, he’s not even pretending to be tolerant. “These people are sick; they are deranged,” Trump said during a speech, amid a rant about transgender athletes in June. When the audience cheered at his mention of “transgender insanity,” he marveled, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that.” He pantomimed weak applause. “But you mention transgender, everyone goes crazy.” The rhetoric has become a fixture of his rallies.
Trump is now running on a 10-point “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” Its aim is not simply to interfere with parents’ rights to shape their kids’ health and education in consultation with doctors and teachers; it’s to effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government. Trump will call on Congress to establish a national definition of gender as being strictly binary and immutable from birth. He also wants to use executive action to cease all federal “programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” If enacted, those measures could open the door to all sorts of administrative cruelties—making it impossible, for example, for someone to change their gender on their passport. Low-income trans adults could be blocked from using Medicaid to pay for treatment that doctors have deemed vital to their well-being.
The Biden administration reinstated many of the protections Trump had eliminated, and the judiciary has thus far curbed the most extreme aspects of the conservative anti-trans agenda. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the assertions of Trump’s Justice Department, the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the investigations that Governor Abbott had ordered in Texas. But in a second term, Trump would surely seek to appoint more judges opposed to queer causes. He would also resume his first-term efforts to promote an interpretation of religious freedom that allows for unequal treatment of minorities. In May 2019, his Housing and Urban Development Department proposed a measure that would have permitted federally funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender individuals on the basis of religious freedom. A 2023 Supreme Court decision affirming a Christian graphic designer’s refusal to work with gay couples will invite more attempts to narrow the spaces and services to which queer people are guaranteed access.
The social impact of Trump’s reelection would only further encourage such discrimination. He has long espoused old-fashioned ideas about what it means to look and act male and female. Now the leader of the Republican Party is using his platform to push the notion that people who depart from those ideas deserve punishment. As some Republicans have engaged in queer-bashing rhetoric in recent years—including the libel that queerness is pedophilia by another name—hate crimes motivated by gender identity and sexuality have risen, terrifying a population that was never able to take its safety for granted. Victims of violence have included people who were merely suspected of nonconformity, such as the 59-year-old woman in Indiana who was killed in 2023 by a neighbor who believed her to be “a man acting like a woman.”
If Trump’s stoking of gender panic proves to be a winning national strategy, everyday deviation from outmoded and rigid norms could invite scorn or worse. And children will grow up in a more repressive and dangerous America than has existed in a long time.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic.”
When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.
Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.
“We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.
This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.
“That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”
But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.
Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”
Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.
That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”
The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.
“What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”
In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).
The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.
There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.
Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”
Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.
Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.
But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.
Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.
But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).
Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.
Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.
The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.
The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”
Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last monthafter the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”
Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.
But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.
Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.
Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”
Kyrsten Sinema knows what everybody says about her. She pretends not to read the press coverage—“I don’t really care”—but she knows. She knows what her colleagues call her behind her back (“egomaniac,” “traitor”). She knows how many articles The New York Times has published about her wardrobe (five). She feels misunderstood, and she would like to explain herself.
We’re sitting across from each other in her “hideaway,” a small, windowless room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building. Every senator gets one of these subterranean, chamber-adjacent bunkers, and most are outfitted with dark, utilitarian furniture. But Sinema’s walls are pale pink, the couches burnt orange, and desert-themed tchotchkes evoking her native Arizona are interspersed among bottles of wine and liquor.
Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”—that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”
“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the She’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”—here she pauses, and then smirks—“ya know, the facts.”
You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.
No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.
Sinema hasn’t given many in-depth interviews since then, but she says she agreed to meet with me because she wants to show that what she’s doing “works.” She thinks that, unfashionable though it may be, her approach to legislating—compromise, centrism, bipartisan consensus-building—is the only way to get anything done in Washington. I was interested in a separate, but related, question: What exactly is she trying to get done? Much of the discussion around Sinema has focused on the puzzle of what she really believes. What does Kyrsten Sinema want?What Does Kyrsten Sinema stand for? The subtext in these headlines is that if you dig deep enough, a secret belief system will be revealed. Is she a progressive opportunistically cosplaying as a centrist? A conservative finally showing her true colors? The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.
I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.
To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”
I ask her to elaborate.
“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day, all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”
Listening to her talk this way about activism, it’s hard not to think about the protesters who have hounded her in recent years. They chase her through airports, yell at her at weddings. In one controversial episode, a group of student protesters at Arizona State University followed her into the bathroom, continuing to film as they hectored her. (The ASU police recommended misdemeanor charges against four students involved.)
I ask Sinema if, as a former activist herself, she could understand where those students were coming from. Would she have done the same thing when she was young?
“Break the law?” she scoffs. “No.”
She doesn’t like civil disobedience, thinks it drives more people away than it attracts. More to the point, Sinema contends, the activists who spend their time noisily berating her in person and online aren’t doing much for the causes they purport to care about. “I am much happier showing a two-year record of incredible achievements that are literally making a difference in people’s lives than sharing my thoughts on Twitter.” She punctuates these last words with the sort of contempt that only someone who’s tweeted more than 17,000 times can feel.
It’s not just the activism she’s discarded; it’s also the left-wing politics. Sinema, who described herself in 2006 as “the most liberal legislator in the state of Arizona,” freely admits that she’s much less progressive than she used to be. While her critics contend that she adjusted her politics to win statewide office in Arizona, she chalks up the evolution to “age and maturity.” She bristles at the idea that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to change their mind. “Imagine a world in which everybody who represented you refused to grow or change or learn if presented with new information,” she tells me. “That’s very dangerous for our democracy. So perhaps what I’m most proud of is that I’m a lifelong learner.”
Still, Sinema insists that people overstate how much she’s changed. Leaving the Democratic Party was, in her telling, a kind of homecoming. “I’m not a joiner,” she says. “It’s not my thing.” She points out that she wasn’t a Democrat when she started in politics. I point out that at the time she was aligned with the Green Party. She demurs.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona attended hearings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon. (Photograph by Natalie Keyssar for The Atlantic)
“I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,” she tells me. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what her position is.’ Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work, before I make a decision.”
I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, “No.”
She says she’s guided by an unchanging set of “values”—she mentions freedom, opportunity, and security—that virtually all Americans share. When it comes to legislating, Sinema sees herself as “practical”—a dealmaker, a problem solver. And if taking every policy question on a case-by-case basis bewilders some in Washington, Sinema says it’s just her nature. Even in her private life, she tells me, she’s prone to slow, painstaking deliberation. I ask for an example.
“It took me eight years to decide what to get for my first tattoo,” she offers.
So what did you decide on? I ask.
“I don’t actually want to share that.”
To illustrate the effectiveness of her legislative approach, she likes to point to the gun-control bill she helped pass last year. It began the day after a man opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 kids. Sinema made a rare comment to the press, telling reporters that she was going to approach her colleagues about potential legislative solutions. From there, she recalls, she went straight to the Senate floor and asked Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “Who should I work with?” He pointed her to Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, both of whom she immediately texted. A few minutes after that, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, texted her asking if she meant what she’d said to the press. “I was like, ‘I’m Kyrsten. I always mean what I say.’”
“The next morning, four of us senators sat right here and had our first meeting,” she tells me. “Twenty-eight days later, we had a bill.”
It was the first gun-control bill to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, and getting the deal done wasn’t easy. But Sinema says she followed a few lessons she’d learned from past negotiations. The first was to ignore the reporters who were camped out in the hallways. “We would come out of the meeting, and they would be like little vultures outside the door asking what just happened,” she recalls. “Why on earth would I tell anyone what just happened in the meeting when I’m trying to nail down some of the most difficult elements of an agreement?”
Her allergy to the Capitol Hill press corps—which she tells me is generally obsessed with covering “the petty and the hysterical”—was not shared by all of her colleagues. “There are some folks who really enjoy talking to the press so they can tell them what they think or whatever. I’m not that interested in telling people what I think.”
Another principle she followed was to prioritize dealing directly with her colleagues in person. She’d found that many bipartisan negotiations get bogged down early on with a process termed “trading paper,” wherein senators’ staffs exchange proposals and counterproposals until they agree on legislative language—or, more often, reach an impasse. “When I first got here, I was like, What are you doing?” She says disagreements can be resolved much more quickly by getting her colleagues in a room and refusing to leave until they’ve figured it out.
This is why when progressives criticize her as flaky, dilettantish, or out of her depth, it strikes her as fundamentally gendered. More than any other line of attack, this seems to really bother her. She points to Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who said in 2021 that Sinema lacked “the basic competence” to be in Congress.
“I mean, when there are … elected officials who say ‘She’s in over her head,’ or ‘She’s not substantive,’ or ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about’—that is, um, absurd,” she tells me, her tone sharpening. “Because I know every detail of every piece of legislation. And it’s okay if others don’t. They weren’t in the room when we were writing it.” She added that Khanna “doesn’t know me, and I don’t know him. The term colleague is to be loosely applied there.” (Asked for comment, Khanna told me that he’d criticized Sinema during the debate over the Build Back Better bill “because she was unwilling to explain her position and engage with the press, her colleagues, and the public.”)
The result of all the laborious gun-control negotiations was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law last June. The law expanded background checks for gun buyers under 21, enhanced mental-health services in schools, and provided funding for states to implement “red-flag laws,” which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals deemed dangerous. Critics on the left dismissed the law as a half measure. But to Sinema, the fact that she and her colleagues made any progress on such an intractable issue was validation for her method of operating.
Patient, painful bipartisan dealmaking, she tells me, is “the only approach that works. Because the other approaches make a lot of noise but don’t get anything done.”
I ask her what other approaches she’s thinking of.
“I don’t know,” Sinema says with a shrug. “Yelling?”
Members of her former party would argue that there was another option for enacting their policy vision—eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation in the Senate, to start passing bills with simple majorities—but Sinema ensured that was impossible. She makes no apologies for voting to preserve the filibuster last year. In fact, she tells me, she would reinstate it for judicial nominees. She believes that the Democrats who want to be able to pass sweeping legislation with narrow majorities have forgotten that one day Republicans will be in control again. “When people are in power, they think they’ll never lose power.”
Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument—that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.
One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.
Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.
She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”
As millions of Americans returned to their jobs this week after the Thanksgiving holiday, several of the elected leaders of Cochise County, Arizona, opted not to do theirs.
The board of supervisors in this sparsely populated southeastern chunk of the state refuses to certify the county’s midterm-election results. Of course, nothing actually went wrong in Cochise County’s election. Instead, on Monday, the two Republican members of the Cochise County board outvoted its single Democrat to delay certification of the election, missing the deadline. By refusing to complete the process, these two officials chose instead to make a kind of generalized protest against imagined election fraud in Arizona. Their action could mean that Cochise County voters won’t have their ballots counted in the state’s final results.
Nullifying the votes of some 47,000 people for no reason is certainly a choice—and a nihilistic one at that. These two board members are engaging in a strategy of bottom-up election obstruction, apparently to clog the gears of democracy with enough sand to spread distrust throughout the entire system. Nationally, the Cochise County supervisors’ strategy may prove inconsequential, at least for now. But it’s a perfect illustration of the state of American democracy—and could be a test run of much greater consequence for 2024.
Even though prominent election deniers lost big in the November polls, in both Arizona and elsewhere, the election-denial movement is still alive, and even thriving, at the state and local level around the country. The “Stop the Steal” blueprint that Donald Trump drew up is there for anyone to follow, in the next presidential cycle and quite possibly beyond.
Before the midterms, election experts had their eyes fixed on Arizona, and in particular on Cochise County, 200 miles southeast of Phoenix. There, in the home of the Dragoon Mountains and the old frontier boomtown of Tombstone, suspicion of voting machines runs deep—so much so that county officials were demanding a full hand recount of the votes before the election had even happened. (Although all Arizona postelection audits require a small hand-counted sample, a full hand count of the votes would be illegal and, experts say, extremely prone to error.) In the end, the Arizona Supreme Court had to prevent Cochise County officials from doing it.
Ultimately, Election Day went smoothly in Cochise, and Republicans cleaned house in the county’s results: The GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters defeated their Democratic opponents there by 18 and 11 points respectively, even though both lost overall. Still, county GOP leaders wouldn’t take yes for an answer, and they weren’t finished sowing chaos.
One of the Republican supervisors acknowledged in an interview that delaying the county’s election certification was in fact intended as a protest over the election—not in Cochise, but in Maricopa County, where Republicans claim, without evidence, that machine errors disenfranchised thousands of voters. In other words, the play here is to use local political control in one county to cast doubt on another’s larger and more politically important election—to taint the entire process by contaminating a small piece of it.
As I reported at the time, Maricopa County did have some technical problems on Election Day. Dozens of tabulation-machine printers weren’t working, despite those machines having been previously tested for accuracy. But voters weren’t turned away from polling sites. Instead, their ballots were dropped in an auxiliary box and taken to the county’s central tabulation center, to be counted along with millions of other ballots. If anyone was disenfranchising Arizonans, it was the state’s GOP leaders demanding that voters not put their ballot in the auxiliary box.
But all of that is truly beside the point. Certification is not just a formality; the process enables officials to review an election for wrongdoing. Which sometimes happens! Back in 2018, the North Carolina state election board refused to certify the results of a House race, because Republican campaign operatives had engaged in illegal ballot harvesting and tampering.
But nothing like that went down in Cochise or Maricopa Counties this year. Instead, local GOP officials are choosing to invalidate the votes of their own neighbors in order to express their displeasure with an election outcome. It’s childish. It’s wrong. It seems very illegal. And it’s probably not going to work. On Monday, Secretary of State (and now Governor-elect) Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit against the board, tweeting that Cochise County “had a statutory duty to certify the results of the 2022 General Election by today.” The judge will hear the suit later today, and may offer a decision as early as this afternoon.
The most likely outcome is that the judge forces the board to certify the election. “Stop the Steal” zealots have tried the Cochise move before, after all. Earlier this year, commissioners in heavily Republican Otero County, New Mexico, decided not to certify their party primary-election results. That didn’t fly at the state supreme court, which ruled that the commissioners had to do their jobs. (Commissioner Couy Griffin notably still voted no, announcing that his vote was “based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”) But if the court doesn’t force Cochise officials to change their ways, the secretary of state’s office could, in theory, tally the rest of Arizona’s votes without the county’s included. The irony is that, in a purely electoral sense, this would be great news for Democrats, potentially flipping a U.S. House seat from red to blue.
Something that became very clear in 2020 is that America’s election system relies not on spelled-out rules and regulations, but on human beings acting honestly. Before 2016, the certification process was not used as a weapon to fight back against a disappointing result. “That’s not how healthy democracies function,” Tammy Patrick, the program CEO for the election center at the National Association of Election Officials, told me. And American democracy is only as healthy as its weakest link.
What happens next in Cochise County may have little significant effect on the rest of the country. But Cochise serves as a reminder that the election-fraud myth persists. And in places where its believers have unchecked power, they will do their utmost to flex it.
The hope was that, after major midterm losses and continued rebukes from the courts, the election-denial movement would peter out—that Stop the Steal types might simply grow tired of failing. But if Trump is a viable candidate for president in 2024, you can expect him to sing from the same songbook he used in 2016 and 2020. Other candidates will amplify those lies, too, if they can benefit from doing so. Whether election denialism will survive independently of Trump is hard to anticipate. But Republicans “have seen that while it may not be the way to gain office, it is certainly the way to drive donations and fundraising and elevate your stature in the party,” Patrick said.
Cochise is a useful stress test for America’s electoral system “in terms of demonstrating the continued dangers to our democracy”—and what can be done about them, Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, told me. Congress should pass reforms to the Electoral Count Act, Hasen said. States can also try to prevent what’s happening in Cochise County from recurring in 2024. Colorado passed legislation this year clarifying its rules about certification. But state leaders are similarly well positioned to make the waters of democracy muddier. In 2021, Arizona Republicans tried and failed to pass legislation that would allow the state legislature to reject the results of an election it didn’t support. An upcoming Supreme Court decision on the authority of state legislatures in administering elections will be incredibly consequential to any future election-subversion efforts.
Over the past six years, millions of people in this country have been encouraged by political leaders on the right to see themselves as the real Americans—the nation’s true rulers—who are in danger of being cheated out of their political inheritance by voter fraud on the left. They’ve been trained to respond to electoral losses with deflection, conspiracy, and dishonesty. They don’t need Trump around to keep doing that.
