The former speaker of the House discussed Silicon Valley Bank, January 6 revisionist history, the coming election, and more in a South by Southwest interview focused on money and greed.
Travis P Ball / Getty for SXSW
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s message at the annual South by Southwest festival could be summarized in three words: Follow the money.
Pelosi uttered that specific phrase—and similar versions of it—several times during her interview with Evan Smith, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, as part of the magazine’s Future of Democracy summit this morning in Austin, Texas.
Pelosi, who represents California’s 11th congressional district, began by discussing the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the anxiety sweeping through not only her home district but the tech and financial industries as a whole. “I don’t think there’s any appetite in this country for bailing out a bank,” she said. “What we would hope to see by tomorrow morning is for some other bank to buy the bank.” She said there were multiple potential buyers, but she couldn’t reveal their names. Pelosi pointed out that former President Donald Trump had authorized the reduction of certain Dodd-Frank protections that had been instituted following the 2008 financial crash: “If they were still in place and the bank had to honor them, this might have been avoided,” she offered. Rather than repeating our recent history and using taxpayer money to rescue the failed institution, Pelosi said the focus should be on protecting depositors and small businesses at risk of closing or not making payroll. “We do not want contagion,” she said.
Pelosi pointed to money—the reckless use and exploitation of it—as the root of virtually every problem facing America and the world today. Whether the potential fallout of a failed bank like SVB or the rise of autocracy around the world, it all comes down to money, money, money, and little else. “Money buying Russian oil is paying for the assault on democracy in Ukraine,” Pelosi said. She accused China of “buying” votes from smaller countries at the United Nations, and said the U.S. must join with the European Union “in using the leverage of this big market to have the playing field be more even.”
Pelosi refused to say Trump’s name even once during her one-hour session, referring to the 45th president instead by “What’s his name” under her breath. Still, she condemned the extremism and anarchy that had overtaken American politics since Trump began his rise nearly eight years ago. Her husband, Paul Pelosi, who was struck in the head with a hammer by a home invader last fall, joined her on today’s trip to Texas, which was unusual, given that he’s still recovering from the attack. “I was the target,” she said. “He paid the price.”
She spoke of the January 6 insurrection with sadness and disgust—anarchists “making poo-poo on the floor of the Capitol”—and acknowledged the rioters’ goal to put a bullet in her head that day. Her successor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, recently gave a trove of January 6 material to Fox News in the name of governmental transparency. Fox’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson, downplayed the severity of the Capitol storming in a broadcast last week. “Something must be wrong with Tucker Carlson,” Pelosi said. “There’s money that runs a lot of it.”
Taking a brief conciliatory note, she said she was hoping “for the best” for McCarthy as he continues his first year as House speaker. “We need to listen, and I hope that Kevin will listen to other than just the very radical, right-wing fringe of his party,” she said, apparently gesturing at Trump and other election deniers. When asked about the prospect of Trump again becoming the GOP nominee in 2024, she was ready with a canned line: “If he is, we impeached him twice, and he’s gonna lose twice.” (Left unsaid was that neither impeachment resulted in Trump’s removal from office.)
As for President Joe Biden, Pelosi called him a “magnificent leader” and said that she “certainly hopes” he will run again. (She joked that he’s younger than she is.) Nevertheless, Pelosi seemed slightly agitated that Biden had yet to formally declare his candidacy, leaving other potential candidates in the Democratic party with few options. “I think it would be efficient for us to have a president seek reelection, and we should be moving on with it when we can. Whatever decision he makes, we’d like to know.”
President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.
Through the early maneuvering, the leading Republican candidates, particularly former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are trying to ignite a procession of culture-war firefights against what DeSantis calls “the woke mind virus.”
With the exception of abortion rights, Biden, by contrast, is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues. Instead Biden is targeting his communication with the public almost exclusively on delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class families, such as lower costs for insulin, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the creation of more manufacturing jobs.
While the leading Republican presidential contenders are effectively asking voters “Who shares your values?” or, in the harshest versions, “Who shares your resentments?,” Biden wants voters to ask “Who is on your side?”
The distinction is not absolute. Trump, DeSantis, and the other Republicans circling the 2024 race argue that Biden’s spending programs have triggered inflation, and insist that lower taxes, budget cuts, and more domestic energy production would spur more growth. And in addition to their unwavering defense of abortion rights, Biden and his aides have also occasionally criticized some of the other Republican cultural initiatives, such as DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation in early grades.
But the difference in emphasis is real, and the contrast illuminates the core of Biden’s vision about how to sustain a national majority for Democrats. He’s betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.
“We need to reforge that identity as the party that gives a damn about people who feel forgotten, who have really tough lives right now,” says the Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who recently released a study of political attitudes in mostly blue-collar, midsize “factory towns” across the Midwest. “That’s the central mission. And that’s why I think Biden is right to be focusing on those economic issues first.”
But other Democrats worry that Biden’s economy-first approach risks allowing Republicans such as DeSantis to define themselves as championing parents while advancing an agenda that civil-rights advocates believe promotes exclusion and bigotry. They also fear that Biden’s reluctance to engage more directly with Republicans over the rollback of rights raging through red states risks dispiriting the core Democratic constituencies, including Black Americans and the LGBTQ community, that face the most direct consequences from restrictions on how teachers and professors can talk about race or bans on gender-affirming care for minors. These Democrats have grown even more uneasy as Biden lately has moved toward Republican positions on immigration (with new restrictions on asylum seekers) and crime (by indicating that he would not block congressional efforts to reverse a reform-oriented overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.)
“Not engaging in culture wars does not mean that Democrats win: It means that we forfeit,” says Terrance Woodbury, chief executive officer and founding partner of HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young and minority voters. The group’s polling, Woodbury told me, shows that “not only do Democratic voters expect Democratic leaders to do more to advance social and racial justice” but that “they will punish Democrats that do not.”
My conversations with Democrats familiar with White House thinking, however, suggest that Biden and those around him don’t share that perspective. In that inner circle, I’m told, the dominant view is that the best way to respond to the culture-war onslaught from Republicans is to engage with it as little as possible. Those around Biden do not believe that the positions Republicans are adopting on questions such as classroom censorship, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and allowing people to carry firearms without a permit, much less restricting or banning abortion, will prove popular with voters beyond the core conservative states.
More fundamentally, Biden’s circle believes that voters don’t want to be subjected to fights about such polarizing cultural issues and would prefer that elected officials focus more on daily economic concerns such as inflation, jobs, and health care. Those around Biden largely share the view expressed by the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who studied public attitudes about key GOP educational proposals in two national surveys last year. “People don’t really want either side of these culture wars to win; they want to just stop having these culture wars,” Molyneux told me. “They really see a lot of this as a diversion.” A national survey released this week by Navigator, a Democratic polling consortium, supports Molyneux’s point: When asked to identify their top priorities in education, far more voters cited reducing gun violence and ensuring that kids learn skills that will help them succeed than picked “preventing them from being exposed to woke ideas about race and gender.”
Biden hasn’t completely sidestepped the culture wars. After mostly avoiding the issue earlier in his presidency, he’s been relentless in his defense of abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. (Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris commemorated what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe with a speech in Tallahassee, Florida, where she targeted DeSantis’s signing of legislation banning abortion there after 15 weeks.) When DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, the White House also criticized him. And most recently in Selma, Alabama, Biden has also issued tough criticisms of the red-state laws erecting new hurdles to voting.
The emphasis was very different in marquee appearances last weekend from Trump and DeSantis. Trump, in his long monologue on Saturday at CPAC, accused Biden of exacerbating inflation and promised to pursue an all-out trade war with China. But those comments came deep into a nearly two-hour speech in which Trump blurred the boundary between calling on his supporters to engage in a culture war and an actual civil war, when he promised to be their “retribution” against elites and “woke tyranny.”
When DeSantis spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles, last Sunday, he delivered more of an economic message, attributing Florida’s robust population growth in part to its low taxes and low spending. But he drew a much more passionate reaction from his audience later when he denounced the “woke mind virus,” recounted his stand during the coronavirus pandemic against “the biomedical security state,” and pledged to “empower parents” against the educational establishment. DeSantis received his only standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender.”
To some extent, the heavy reliance by Trump and DeSantis on these cultural confrontations reflects their belief that GOP primary voters are much more energized now by social rather than economic issues. Yet it also represents the widespread GOP belief that distaste for liberal positions on cultural issues remains an insuperable barrier for Democrats with most working-class voters, including a growing number of Latino men. “Blue-collar voters don’t separate cultural concerns from economic fears,” the GOP strategist Brad Todd, a co-author of The Great Revolt, told me in an email. “They think big global companies are in cahoots with the left on culture, and they don’t put pocketbook concerns ahead of way-of-life concerns.”
Todd thinks Biden’s attempt to define himself mostly around economic rather than cultural commitments represents his desire “to jump in a time machine and go back to the Democratic Party of the ’80s.” Indeed, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, came of age politically in an era when Republicans repeatedly used racially infused “wedge issues” to pry away working-class white voters who had mostly supported Democrats on economic grounds over the previous generation. Some Democrats see Biden’s recent moves to adopt more right-leaning policies on immigration and crime as a resurgence of that era’s widespread Democratic belief that the party needed to neutralize cultural issues, typically by conceding ground to conservative positions.
Like others I spoke with, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, believes that focusing primarily on economic issues makes sense for Biden now, but that he will eventually be forced to address the GOP’s cultural arguments more directly. Sublimating those issues, she argues, isn’t sustainable, because it is “hurting the very people” Democrats now rely on to win and because the Republican cultural arguments, left unaddressed, could prove very persuasive to not only working-class white voters but also Hispanic and even Black men. Ultimately, Fernandez said, Biden and other Democrats must link the two fronts by convincing working-class voters that Republicans are picking cultural fights to distract them from an economic agenda that mostly benefits the rich. “We have to put to bed this idea [that] we can have an economic message that doesn’t address the racial grievance and fear of change that is at the center of all this culture-war stuff,” argued Fernandez, whose group funds candidates and organizations focused on building a multiracial electoral coalition.
The debate among Democrats ultimately comes down to whether Biden is skillfully controlling the electoral battlefield or trying to resurrect a coalition that no longer exists (centered on working-class families) at the expense of dividing or demoralizing the coalition the party actually relies on today (revolving around young people, college-educated white voters, and racial minority voters). Several Democratic strategists told me that one obvious challenge with Biden’s trying to define the election around the question of which party can deliver the best economic results for working-class families is that polls throughout his presidency have found that more Americans would pick the GOP. “People still think that Trump economics was better for them than Biden or Obama economics,” Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters in 2020, told me.
To Lake, that’s an argument for Biden’s strategy of stressing kitchen-table concerns, because she believes the party cannot win unless it narrows the GOP advantage on the economy. But other Democrats believe today’s party is less likely to persuade a national majority that it is better than Republicans for their finances than it is to convince them that the Trump-era GOP constitutes a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. Biden’s response to the Republican initiatives censoring teachers, rolling back abortion access, and threatening LGBTQ rights “simply cannot be ‘more jobs,’” Woodbury said. “If Democrats insist on fighting exclusively on economic terms, every poll in America shows they will lose.”
What were those three “aerial objects” downed following the Chinese spy balloon?
The Atlantic
The question is not whether aliens exist—I’m firmly in the “Hell yeah, they do!” camp—but rather when we’ll have enough hard evidence to end the decades-long debate over said existence.
Nevertheless, it’s not just you; the events of the past week have felt different. Our military’s targeted takedown of multiple aerial objects over North America brought UFOs back to the forefront of our national conversation—enough to elicit a presidential address on the matter this afternoon.
Hollywood has primed us for what to expect from our commander in chief ahead of an interstellar crisis. (Think Bill Pullman’s predawn megaphone pump-up speech before the Independence Day climax, or Morgan Freeman somberly telling his Deep Impact constituents that, yes, the comet is coming, and millions of you are screwed.) Today, sadly, President Joe Biden did not unveil the grand truth about UFOs with clasped hands on the Resolute desk, nor did he march down the dramatic carpeted corridor leading to the East Room for an Osama-bin-Laden-is-dead-style surprise. Like much of the Biden presidency, today’s event had a decidedly un-Hollywood feel to it. In fact, the speech wasn’t in the White House at all but next door, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s sterile and cacophonous South Court Auditorium. It felt less like a triumphant milestone in our shared knowledge of the universe and more like an inoffensive midday presentation at an auto show.
Biden began by explaining that the U.S. and Canadian militaries were still working to recover the debris from the three recently downed somethings. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were,” he said, tantalizingly. “But nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy-balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”
This is when the aliens-are-real crowd’s ears momentarily perked up. A sentence later, they perked back down.
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” Biden said. He rejected the idea that there has been a “sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky” and instead offered that sightings have increased because our radar capabilities have increased. To be sure, he did not say the word aliens.
Indeed, Biden seemed less interested in rallying us for alien warfare and more intent on calming U.S.-China relations. As the speech ended, a reporter asked Biden whether his family’s business relationships overseas have compromised his ability to deal with China. Another yelled that the recent shootdowns have been criticized as an “overreaction.” For a moment, Biden appeared ready to respond, but he decided otherwise.
The raison d’être of his speech today—government transparency—ended up dominating online chatter in the hours that followed, for what conservatives (and some UFO enthusiasts) saw as a glaring lack of it.
And so, the question remains: What were those three “aerial objects” intentionally downed following the Chinese surveillance balloon? If movies have taught us anything, it’s that the government is currently building a massive underground ark where a small percentage of the population can stave off an impending large-scale intergalactic attack, meaning today’s press conference was merely a way of buying more time. If logic has taught us anything, it’s that the truth is more prosaic, and one of the objects in question may belong to a midwestern club of balloon enthusiasts currently missing a balloon.
It was a raucous, interactive, and argumentative State of the Union like no other. And when it was over, President Joe Biden had provided a clear signal of how he plans to contest the 2024 presidential election.
Leaning hard into his populist “Scranton Joe” persona, an energetic and feisty Biden sparred with congressional Republicans heckling him from the audience as he previewed what will likely be key themes of the reelection campaign that he’s expected to announce within months, if not weeks.
Biden’s speech showed him continuing to formulate an economically focused alternative to the cultural backlash that Donald Trump has stressed throughout his political career—and which Trump’s former White House press secretary, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, revived in her bellicose GOP response. Whereas Sanders summoned “normal” Americans to rise up against a “woke mob” allegedly erasing American values and traditions, Biden called for national unity around shared goals, particularly delivering economic benefits to working families.
It’s easy to view those sharply contrasting messages as a preview of the 2024 election. Almost any GOP nominee—but particularly Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the two early front-runners in polls for the nomination—is likely to stress the cultural notes that Sanders hit in hopes of maximizing turnout among the GOP’s core constituencies of older, noncollege, and nonurban white voters and expanding the party’s 2020 beachhead among culturally conservative nonwhite voters, especially Latino men.
Biden’s emphasis on economic concerns reflects his belief that the best way to counter that strategy is to downplay culture-war fights while defining himself primarily around a practical agenda to lift average families.
Well into the speech, Biden delivered an unflinching pledge to veto any GOP effort to ban abortion nationwide (which has no chance of passing the Senate anyway). Near the beginning and end of his remarks, he also pointedly alluded to the threats to American democracy unleashed by Trump and the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The difference in emphasis between Biden and Sanders was unmistakable. Cultural concerns dominated Sanders’s speech. She painted a dark vision of the “radical left’s America,” where “our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race,” “violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear,” and “normal” Americans “are under attack” from a “woke mob” pursuing “a left-wing culture war that we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” Her remarks showed again how the fear of cultural and racial displacement in an America that is inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urbanized remains the most powerful motivator for what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration.”
By contrast, the core of Biden’s speech was his pledge to both create good-paying jobs for working-class families and provide them with tangible economic help, such as by reducing drug prices and fighting surprise airline and hotel fees. As he often has before, Biden called his agenda a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” and stressed how many jobs that do not require college degrees would be created by the troika of major bills passed during his first two years: legislation promoting clean-energy industries, more domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, and infrastructure construction projects nationwide. He delivered repeated populist jabs against big corporations and billionaires paying lower tax rates “than a nurse.”
It was telling that the most extended of the several remarkable back-and-forth exchanges with Republicans came not from abortion or any social issue, but Social Security and Medicare. Echoing the “you lie” cry from a GOP representative during a 2009 Barack Obama speech, several Republicans apparently called out “liar” when Biden noted, correctly, that some Republicans (specifically Senator Rick Scott of Florida whom he did not name) have proposed to sunset all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. What the exchange made clear above all is how comfortable Biden is creating a contrast that Hubert Humphrey would recognize, with Democrats claiming their historical ground of protecting the social safety net.
Polling during the midterm election, and right through the days before last night’s speech, revealed that Biden has not yet convinced most Americans that his economic agenda will benefit them. Most Americans continue to express downbeat views about the economy, and in an ABC/Washington Post national survey released this week, more than three-fifths of Americans said Biden had accomplished not much or nothing at all.
After hosting a focus group of voters who watched last night’s speech, Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a Democratic polling consortium, told me in an email that although their reactions suggested that Biden “was successful in telling a positive story about how the economy has improved over the last two years … the issues of inflation and spending remain deep pain points that he and his administration will have to continue to work on.” Yesterday’s speech showed that Biden similarly believes (rightly or wrongly) that his fate will be decided more by voters’ assessment of his impact on their financial situation than by whether they share his values on the kind of cultural issues Sanders hammered.
The other thematic pillar of Biden’s presidency has been his promise to unify America and work across party lines. But Biden’s speech continued a recalibration of that message that began last fall.
In the midterm campaign, Biden differentiated between “mainstream” Republicans who were willing to reach bipartisan agreements and what he called the “extreme MAGA” forces that represented a radical threat to democracy and individual freedoms. In the State of the Union, he offered a variation on that theme. He began by congratulating the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and stressed how during his first two years as president, “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together” to pass big legislation, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
But as the speech progressed, Biden pivoted from where he thought he could deal with Republicans to where he insisted he would resist them. Biden forcefully called on Republicans to pass a “clean” increase in the nation’s debt ceiling, without any conditions, and pledged to veto any effort to undo the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that reduce drug prices, any legislation imposing a national ban on abortion, and any efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. He touted his commitment to a wide array of priorities, including expanded preschool and an assault-weapons ban, that he knows have no chance of passing a Republican-controlled House.
All of that notably departed from the tone that his two Democratic predecessors struck in their first State of the Union immediately after losing unified control of Congress, as Biden also did this past fall. Both Bill Clinton, in his 1995 State of the Union speech, and Obama, in his 2011 address, were elaborately conciliatory, even contrite, as they addressed the new GOP majorities. Both men drew some lines of contrast, but mostly focused on issues they believed would appeal to Republicans, such as reducing the federal deficit and streamlining government. Although Biden similarly nodded toward more cooperation at the outset of his speech, overall he was much more confrontational.
That was partly because Biden had less to be contrite about: Democrats performed much better in last year’s midterm than they did when Obama and Clinton suffered their first-term reversals. Democrats lost more than 50 House seats in Clinton’s first midterm, and more than 60 in Obama’s, but they surrendered only 10 in Biden’s—and actually gained a Senate seat, in contrast to the substantial Senate losses under his two predecessors. After those losses, both Clinton and Obama felt enormous pressure to signal to voters that they were making a course correction toward the center; Biden last night betrayed no hint that he felt any need to change direction. As Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s White House communications director, recently told me, last November’s results were “quite different” from the “shellacking” that both Obama and Clinton had suffered. “This election cannot be read as a repudiation of Biden and his agenda,” Pfeiffer said.
Equally important, though, the gulf between the parties is even greater than it was under Clinton or Obama, which leaves very few realistic opportunities for Biden to pursue bipartisan agreements with the GOP-controlled House. That distance was vividly demonstrated by the repeated catcalls from Republicans—a display that obliterated any traditional notions of decorum during the State of the Union and underscored the zealotry of the conservative vanguard in the House GOP that McCarthy empowered in order to win the speakership.
Last night, Biden gave voters a spirited preview of his 2024 message and strategy. Sanders and the militant House Republicans simultaneously provided voters with a preview of the alternative they may hear next year. The most revealing measure of the night came not so much in the messages sent by either side, but in the distance between them.
President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that Congress pass a clean debt-ceiling increase, with no conditions attached.
Biden’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans now is rooted in the Obama administration’s experiences in 2011–15 of trying to navigate increases in the debt ceiling through the same political configuration present today: a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. While Biden says he won’t negotiate a budget deal tied to a debt-ceiling increase, then-President Obama did just that in 2011. Those negotiations not only failed but proved so disruptive to financial markets, and so personally scarring, that Obama and his team emerged from the ordeal determined never to repeat it. And when House Republicans came back in 2013 asking for more concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again, Obama declined to negotiate with them; eventually the GOP raised the debt ceiling without conditions.
To understand the choices Obama made about debt-ceiling negotiations, and how they are shaping Biden’s approach today, I spoke with multiple officials from the Obama era: several Cabinet secretaries, as well as top aides from the White House, executive-branch departments, and Capitol Hill. Most chose to speak without attribution to candidly discuss Obama’s deliberations. What’s clear from these conversations is that almost none of the conditions that led Obama to negotiate in 2011 are present today. This helps explain why Biden is rejecting Republican demands, but also why the risk of a cataclysmic default is even greater now than it was then.
When Congress raises the debt ceiling it does not authorize any new spending; it permits the Treasury to pay the debts the U.S. has incurred from earlier fiscal-policy decisions. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to the federal government defaulting, something that has never happened, and which could crater the stock market, spike interest rates, and disrupt payments to the millions of Americans who rely on federal checks.
In some ways, Biden’s staunch refusal to link fiscal negotiations to a debt-ceiling increase is out of character for a politician who spent nearly four decades in the Senate and has prided himself on his ability to reach agreements across party lines. Even now, administration officials make clear that Biden is not precluding negotiations with House Republicans over fiscal policy. What Biden is saying is that he won’t allow Republicans to link fiscal negotiations to the threat of not raising the debt ceiling. That resolve flows directly from the Obama administration’s experiences.
The dynamics that prompted Obama to negotiate with Republicans in 2011 had started coalescing before the GOP won control of the House in the 2010 midterm election. After taking office in 2009, Obama’s first major legislative victory was the passage of a roughly $800 billion stimulus plan to help the economy recover from the 2008 financial collapse. Obama devoted the rest of 2009 to steering the landmark Affordable Care Act through Congress.
After Congress approved those expensive initiatives, Obama faced pressure from not only congressional Republicans but also a core of centrist Senate Democrats (including Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad of North Dakota) to develop some plan for reducing the federal deficit. Under prodding from Conrad, in February 2010 Obama appointed the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission to recommend a deficit-reduction plan. Throughout that year, “there was an awful lot of ‘grand bargain, let’s have a historic compromise’ in the air” in Washington, Jason Furman, the then– deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told me.
Before the House changed hands in December 2010, Obama agreed with congressional Republicans on a major package to extend the tax cuts that had been passed under George W. Bush and to also temporarily reduce payroll taxes. Then, in April 2011, the Obama administration and Representative John Boehner, the new Republican House speaker, settled on a plan to fund the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year.
So when Boehner and other Republicans put forward their demands to tie any debt-ceiling increase to cuts in federal spending, the Obama administration did not initially view the prospect of negotiations with horror, multiple former officials told me. Obama shared the belief that a “grand bargain” to control the long-term debt was a worthwhile goal. Furman said the former president considered it an “exciting opportunity.”
Jack Lew, who served as Obama’s director of the Office of Management of Budget (OMB) during the 2011 confrontation and as Treasury secretary in 2013, told me about another factor that contributed to the Obama administration’s willingness to engage: Negotiations that previous presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had had with Congress about the debt ceiling had not proved that disruptive. Debt-ceiling negotiations “up until 2011 had a different character than after 2011,” said Lew, who served as House Democratic aide in the 1980s and in the OMB for Clinton in the 1990s.
Armed with these convictions, the Obama team didn’t blanch, even when the new speaker went to New York in May 2011 to lay down what became known as the “Boehner Rule”: Republicans would demand one dollar in spending cuts for each dollar increase in the debt limit that they authorized. The two sides launched fiscal negotiations in talks led by Biden for the administration and Representative Eric Cantor for the House GOP.
As these negotiations unfolded, Boehner framed the talks as the Republicans and Obama equally benefiting from the stipulations. But the White House, including Biden, never saw things that way. The White House didn’t view the debt-ceiling increase primarily as a bargaining chip—they viewed it as the eventual legislative vehicle for moving through Congress whatever agreement the fiscal negotiation produced.
Even with that difference, the talks were serious and, for a while, productive. Biden praised Cantor and Cantor reciprocated. But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did.
Over the next few weeks, the speaker and the president, joined by only a few aides, then met for a series of secret negotiations to pursue a “grand bargain” on the deficit. The two men came close to an agreement. But their negotiations ultimately foundered when Obama and Boehner could not agree on the balance between tax increases and spending cuts. Like the Biden-Cantor talks earlier, the Obama-Boehner talks crashed in late July.
Only days before August 2, when the nation would face an unprecedented default, Obama, Biden and the congressional leaders in both parties gathered in the White House for a frantic final weekend of negotiations. The two sides were trying to avoid calamity in an environment of “pure acrimony,” Furman told me. “I think if you look at the photographs that [the White House photographer] Pete Souza took over the course of that weekend, you can look at our faces and you don’t need to hear any words,” Lew said. “If you ask President Obama about the two or three most gut-wrenching moments as president I have no doubt this would be on the list.”
Pete Souza / The White House
Even though the “grand bargain” evaporated, the two sides (with Biden and Mitch McConnell at the center of the negotiations) reached a complex deal over that weekend. In the first stage, Obama got an $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling coupled with $900 billion in spending cuts. The deal linked up to another $1.5 trillion increase in debt to the creation of a congressional “super committee” that would be guaranteed a floor vote on a plan to cut the deficit an equivalent amount. If the committee deadlocked, automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending—what became known as sequestration—would be triggered. Though default was averted, months of these talks had led to a nearly universal recoil among the Obama team. There was no single meeting or moment when the president and his top advisers said, “Never again.” Instead, participants told me that that conclusion emerged organically. “I think the team around Obama really had a bad taste in their mouth after the 2011 episode and they really wanted to change the terms and dynamics of the debate, and that’s why they all embraced the idea that we can’t do this anymore,” Mark Patterson, the chief of staff at the time for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, told me.
The White House frustration deepened in November 2011. The deficit reduction “super committee” was created in July but deadlocked on the same issue that had stymied previous bipartisan negotiation: the unwillingness of enough Republicans to accept tax increases that Democrats considered sufficient to justify big cuts in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That stalemate triggered the severe sequestration reductions in discretionary spending—a squeeze that left Democrats fuming over the domestic cuts and Republicans incensed about the defense reductions.
All of that was the backdrop when House Republicans returned in 2013 with a new set of demands for raising the debt ceiling, which included unraveling Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. This time Obama declined to talk with Republicans. “In 2013, it was a very fresh memory that we got closer than anyone had ever come to defaulting,” Lew, who had by then become Treasury secretary, told me. From Obama on down, he said, there was a very strong sense that “we can’t ever be in [that] position again.”
House Republicans eventually conceded, passing an increase in the debt ceiling without any conditions in October 2013 and again the following year. In October 2015, Boehner, as his final act after announcing his intent to resign from Congress and vacate the speakership, engineered another extension that raised the debt ceiling through the remainder of Obama’s presidency while also loosening the sequestration cuts on both defense and domestic spending. Those three votes represented a sweeping victory for Obama’s new no-conditions approach to the debt ceiling.
Though Biden was among the most enthusiastic proponents of negotiations during Obama’s first term, no former officials recall him dissenting from the general rejection of that approach in Obama’s second. Notably, then–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (who died in 2021) took no chances: As the 2013 debt-ceiling fight approached, he personally told Obama to sideline Biden from any talks, because he considered the vice president too willing to make concessions to his frequent negotiating partner, McConnell.
On every front, most experts consider the environment even less hospitable today than it was during Obama’s presidency for the kind of budget deal that House Republicans are now demanding in order to raise the debt ceiling. Although Obama’s team and many congressional Democrats genuinely believed that a big long-term deficit-reduction plan was both good politics and good economics, Biden, as well as most congressional Democrats today, are much more skeptical of that proposition. And though Republicans could at least formulate specific spending-cut demands back then, they are far less likely to reach consensus today on a meaningful deficit-reduction plan. That’s largely because more of them have come to recognize that their political base, centered on older white voters, is just fine with government spending targeted toward them—particularly Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid and the ACA, which Republicans in the Obama era considered the bull’s-eye for their deficit-reduction plans. Moreover, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has less control over his fractious conference than Boehner did, and McCarthy is even less willing than his predecessor to cross his most conservative membersBut though these factors argue against a big deficit deal, especially one linked to a debt-ceiling increase, Biden must find some way to authorize more debt. He’s already facing calls from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to establish another special deficit-reduction committee.
For now, the White House, while indicating that Biden is open to talking with Republicans about the budget on other tracks, is digging in against linking anything to the debt ceiling. A former Obama official familiar with the Biden team’s strategy told me the White House believes that approach “is a matter of principle.”
Biden and his team have taken from the Obama years the lesson that if they don’t negotiate against the debt limit, a sufficient number of Republicans will eventually back down because the economic consequences of default would be so catastrophic. Biden may expect, for instance, that enough House Republicans will join House Democrats in advancing a “discharge petition” that would allow an increase to pass the House without support from the GOP leadership. Biden may be right in that calculation. But Obama’s no-negotiating posture on the debt ceiling worked mostly because enough congressional Republicans back then were unwilling to plunge over the cliff into default. The White House and financial markets around the world are certain to face many white-knuckled moments before they learn whether that is still true today.
When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.
But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.
Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”
Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”
Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic.“One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.
Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.
Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.
All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.
Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history.“The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.
These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)
Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.
What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.
Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.
The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.
That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.
Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.
Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.
The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.
Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.
What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”
My father was a registered independent for most of my childhood because he resented having to choose. But choosing was not hard for my mother. She was an MSNBC devotee, a liberal Pennsylvania transplant who took her adopted role as an Iowa Democrat seriously. She wanted me to take politics seriously, too.
Which is why, on a freezing January night in 2000, Mom zipped up our coats, buckled 7-year-old me into our white Toyota Previa, and drove us along five miles of gravel to the nearest town: Danville, population 919. It would be my very first Iowa caucus, with New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and Vice President Al Gore vying for the Democratic nomination. Mom thought Bradley had more personality, so she stood, with me at her side, in his corner of the Danville Elementary School gymnasium. When Bradley was considered not “viable,” per caucus rules, Mom walked us over to Gore’s group, and he was soon declared the winner. Mom recounted all of this recently; I remember little from that night, except the outlines of bulky puffer jackets and a general tingliness at being the only kid in a room full of adults doing something that seemed important.
Accuse me of harboring a pro-caucus bias and you’d be right; I love them and I always have. A caucus is like a primary, but not: There’s no secret ballot. You demonstrate your preference for a candidate by physically moving your body to a different chair or another corner of the gym. Only a few states do it this way, and “this way” looks different everywhere.
After that night in 2000, Mom took me with her at each opportunity. Every four or eight years, we held hands and navigated icy sidewalks after dark. We explored student-less school hallways and cozy church luncheon rooms. We stood under basketball hoops and listened to neighbors argue about candidates as though their opinions really mattered, because that night they actually did.
Over the past half century, Iowa’s prominence in politics became part of its identity—something the state was known for besides its acres of corn and millions of hogs. Iowa doesn’t have any major-league teams to root for, or the kind of glittering cities that draw visitors from all corners of the world. But the caucuses helped make Iowa special—and on the national political stage, they made it relevant.
Still, it’s possible to hold two truths in tension. The caucus is part of Iowa’s identity, and deeply rooted in my own, yet the process has never really been fair—not to many Iowans, and not to other Americans. So, even though I felt a sharp pang of sorrow earlier this month when President Joe Biden suggested that my home state should give up its spot on the early-voting roster, I wasn’t surprised. Most Iowans have seen this day coming. Some are more prepared than others.
Thanks to the caucus, I never thought it was strange that I’d met Barack Obama twice before I turned 20. Nothing seemed shocking about Newt Gingrich showing up to speak at the restaurant where my parents have happy hour on Fridays. I was only slightly unsettled to discover that my high-school friend was having a summertime fling with a political reporter I knew from D.C.
For 50 years, these meet-cutes and history-making appearances have been normal, tradition. Iowans heard Howard Dean make the animalistic roar that supposedly ended his campaign. They sheltered in place with Elizabeth Warren during a tornado. They watched Fred Thompson rolling around the state fair in style, and bore witness to John Delaney’s sad ride down the Giant Slide.
Iowa’s prominence in the process dates back to the 1970s, when the caucuses helped put George McGovern, and later Jimmy Carter, on the proverbial map. State law requires that Iowa holds its caucuses eight days before the first primary happens, hence the quadrennial Iowa–New Hampshire pairing. Most people know this by now; it’s the process they don’t get—the appeal of the thing. The magic.
That’s how many Iowans see the caucus: a messy, intimate project that represents politics in its most sublime form—a dose of pure democracy smack-dab in the middle of Iowa’s fields and farms. I’m not sure about all that. But the caucuses are intimate. You discuss electability with your legs wedged beneath a lunch table designed for children. You look your neighbor in the eye and tell him why he’s wrong. On a school night! During one of his first-ever caucuses, my father, sitting at Senator Bernie Sanders’s table, was approached by a neighbor from Hillary Clinton’s. “Didn’t you hear that Sanders was a conscientious objector?” the man asked. Dad replied that he didn’t realize it was a liability for a presidential candidate to have a conscience. I remember thinking that this was a good comeback.
As a sophomore in college, I viewed the caucus as a noble process, probably because I was reading a lot of Hannah Arendt for class. The German philosopher wrote often about the polis—from which politics is derived—and in The Human Condition she defined it as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.” The caucus, I thought. How romantic. But at the time, I was unaware—being young and able-bodied and generally self-absorbed—that caucuses don’t allow all people to act and speak together.
Mailing in your candidate preferences has never been an option in the caucuses. And many Iowans are not free at seven on a weeknight in January or February. That includes people working shift jobs, people working late, people with little kids, people with relatives to take care of, people with disabilities, people who don’t drive at night, people who have important plans, people who are simply out of town. Over the summer, state Democratic officials, in a bid to keep their place, finally did propose an absentee option. The DNC was apparently unimpressed.
The other most common criticism of the caucus is that Iowa is too white to make a decision that sets the political tempo for the rest of the country. Iowans would counter that their state proved to be the launching pad for America’s first Black president, but the point is well taken. In 2020, Biden finished fourth in mostly white Iowa, and it took the Black voters of South Carolina to push him to the front of the pack.
Iowa’s critics were vindicated that year, when the caucus became synonymous with chaos. The actual process went relatively smoothly, but a faulty new app and jammed phone lines disrupted the reporting of the results. That year, I’d invited my boyfriend to come to my hometown while I covered the caucuses. I’d wanted him to be charmed by the quaint small-town-ness of it all; instead, I was embarrassed. The entire state was. That was the final straw. This summer, a Democratic National Committee panel required every state to make the case for going early in the primary season. Earlier this month, with Biden’s support, the committee passed a proposal that would reorder which states vote first: South Carolina would start, and Michigan and Georgia would be part of the first five. Iowa was not on the list.
Long-time party activists are suffering varying degrees of disappointment at the news. Some lean more toward acceptance. “We’ve taken our role seriously. I think that it was probably time to move on,”Kurt Meyer, a retiree who’s led caucuses for years in northeast Mitchell County, told me. “As an Iowan who cares about such things, I’m sorry to see it go … but it’s okay.” Then he chuckled: “It’s like an aging ball player saying, It was a good runandI enjoyed those World Series games, but now I’m ready to watch from the comfort of the den with a drink in my hand.”
Others are left with a bitter taste. They have some arguments in their favor, after all: Candidates with no money can travel across Iowa easily and purchase ads cheaply. The caucus process itself allows people to rank their preferences and enables coalition-building among supporters of different candidates. “I don’t think people understood the nuance that was there, and that might be the party’s biggest failure,” Sandy Dockendorff, a longtime caucus leader in the southeast, told me. The result, she said, is that people in flyover country will feel even more neglected than they already do.
“That’s telling a lot of rural folks—a lot of the breadbasket—that we don’t matter,” Dockendorff said. “That’ll be felt for generations.”
Three years ago, I wrote a story about the Iowa Democratic Party’s plan to offer “satellite” caucuses that would let some people with work commitments or disabilities participate remotely. I was critical of the proposal because it wouldn’t solve all of the caucus’s inclusivity problems. After my article ran, a well-known Iowa labor leader emailed me. “I can tell you really dislike Iowa!” he wrote. The note was short, and I was crushed. My chest hurt. Had I betrayed my state with a single, 1,300-word article? But I think I understand how he was feeling. I get it now.
Americans outside the Midwest may soon forget about the Butter Cow. Iowa will take an economic hit if the state doesn’t go first in the Democrats’ nominating process. The restaurants serving tenderloins and chicken lips to eager-to-please politicians won’t make as much; the hotels and bars frequented by the national press corps will suffer. But the real reason these changes will be hard for many Iowans to accept is that a whole lot of pride is tied up in this thing. I hear it when I’m talking on the phone with my parents, and when I’m listening to people like Dockendorff and Meyer reminisce. Caucus advocates claim that Iowans are perfectly suited for the part because they are a particularly discerning people. I don’t think that’s true. But Iowans do take the role seriously—at least the ones who participate.
Iowa Democrats have invested decades of effort into hosting bright-eyed, young campaign staffers from California and Massachusetts in their homes. They’ve given rookie candidates with few resources the space to make a case and a name for themselves. That all of this might soon be ripped away by a faceless group of people in D.C.—who seem to harbor, if not ill will, then at least a light disdain toward Iowa—is hard to swallow. Identity is a tricky thing.
No one is totally sure what happens next. The DNC will vote on the new order in February, and this summer, states will submit plans for the upcoming election. Iowa will have to decide how to play it. If state Democrats agree to move the caucus, in theory that breaks state law; the state attorney general could sue them. Some party leaders seem eager to say “Screw it!”and hold a first-in-the-nation caucus anyway, which could mean that Iowa’s delegates aren’t counted at the national convention. Candidates who campaign for such an unsanctioned event could face repercussions. But whatever happens, after committee members vote and state leaders draw their line in the sand, the Iowa caucus probably won’t look the same.
I don’t get to decide what the best outcome would be, for the state or for the process itself. But for all of my life and 20 years before that, Iowa has enjoyed a very particular feeling—a heady mix of relevance and attention—that has become enmeshed, irrevocably, into Iowans’ sense of their home and themselves. I learned to cherish that feeling as a 7-year-old. Maybe it’s time for other people, in some other state, to feel it, too. It will be hard to let go.
On Friday, December 2, Elizabeth Whelan was at home on Chappaquiddick, off Massachusetts, when she received a text message from a State Department official—a representative from the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—asking when she might be available for a visit. He had news concerning her youngest brother, Paul.
“I thought, Okay, this is either one of those routine check-ins or something’s up and it’s probably not good news,” Elizabeth told me. Five days later, the official (whom she declined to name) arrived at her home. “It turned out to be the latter.”
It has been nearly four years since Russian authorities arrested Paul Whelan in Moscow on charges of espionage. Since then, the 52-year-old Michigan native has been held in a Soviet-era prison, battling poor health while pleading his innocence of a crime that Russia has refused to provide evidence he committed. On that Wednesday evening, the State Department official had not come to tell Elizabeth that her brother was finally on his way home. He had come to tell her that in exchange for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, President Joe Biden had secured the release of Brittney Griner, and that although Biden had pushed for Paul Whelan’s freedom as part of the deal with Russia, only the WNBA star, in just a short time, would be on a plane back to America.
“It’s like you see this tunnel in front of you that has just gotten longer,” Elizabeth said of that moment. “There is still no light at the end of that tunnel. You have no idea where the light is.”
From across the kitchen table, the official answered as many of Elizabeth’s questions as he was able. “There were people at the White House and State Department who were willing to talk to me that evening, you know, to explain further, but I was not up for talking to them,” Elizabeth said. She wanted officials to focus on getting Griner home safely. The next day, after the exchange for Bout on a tarmac in Abu Dhabi, Elizabeth agreed to speak with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “I didn’t want apologies for the situation; I’m looking for plans and actions,” she said of the call.
In announcing Griner’s release, Biden explained that Paul Whelan had not been included because, “sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s.” Elizabeth told me she understood the administration’s position; on Thursday, her family put out a statement saying the White House had “made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home.” But naturally, she was frustrated: Griner’s homecoming marks the second time in fewer than three years that the United States has secured the freedom of an American detained in Russia while leaving Paul Whelan behind. In that time, Elizabeth, a portrait artist by trade who, before her brother’s arrest, had not considered herself especially political, has drained her own bank account to travel to and from Washington, demanding answers from lawmakers and administration officials as to when her brother will be free. But this past week, her frustration was compounded by the fact that Paul’s situation, like so much else in American life today, became intensely politicized, especially among Republicans—many of whom, Elizabeth told me, couldn’t be bothered to take her calls when Donald Trump was in the White House.
“It just really is distressing to me that people can’t do the math and realize that Trump was the president when Paul was arrested—and that he was the president for the next two years,” she said.
Such people would appear to include Trump himself: On Thursday, the former president went on Truth Social to blast the exchange of Bout—the “Merchant of Death,” as the arms dealer is nicknamed—for Griner alone as “an unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” “Why wasn’t former Marine Paul Whelan included in this totally one-sided transaction?” Trump wrote. “He would have been let out for the asking.” At this Elizabeth can’t help but laugh. In all the time her brother was detained while Trump was in office, she said, “I don’t think President Trump ever even said Paul’s name.” (At one point, from inside a glass cage during a court appearance in Moscow, Paul Whelan, a self-professed Trump voter, called on the president to tweet about his case, but Trump never did. Spokespeople for the former president did not answer requests for comment for this article.)
Trump wasn’t the only figure who appeared to take a sudden interest in Paul Whelan following Griner’s release. After years of “begging people” to take notice of him, the Whelans were stunned to find cable news and social media replete with opinions about his plight. Many Republican critics of the Griner-Bout exchange accused Biden of acting under pressure from progressive activists to prioritize the case of a Black, gay woman—an athlete who once protested the national anthem, no less—at the expense of a former Marine. (Griner was detained in February after Russian customs officials found cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage; she was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony outside Moscow on charges of drug smuggling.)
Tucker Carlson built a segment around Griner and Whelan on Thursday evening: “There was only room for one in the lifeboat, and the Marine got left behind,” the Fox News host declared. “Well, why did they make that choice? Well, you should know that Whelan is a Trump voter, and he made the mistake of saying so on social media. He’s paying the price for that now.” In a Newsmax appearance, Representative Troy Nehls of Texas claimed that Trump would’ve had Paul Whelan “home in a week.” Nehls’s colleague Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted: “I bet when Paul Whelan was learning the skills to be a Marine he never thought that his country would have prioritized him more if he had a jump shot.” Donald Trump Jr. weighed in as well. “The Biden Admin was apparently worried that their [diversity, equity, and inclusion] score would go down if they freed an American Marine,” the former president’s son tweeted on Thursday morning.
Biden supporters, in turn, were quick to highlight the unsavory particulars of Paul Whelan’s military career, which culminated in a bad-conduct discharge (one-step less serious than a dishonorable discharge) after he received a court-martial conviction on charges “related to larceny.” Across the internet, Griner’s newfound freedom was crudely recast as a referendum on another man’s soul. And this “broke my heart,” Elizabeth told me. But it was the “armchair quarterbacking” by prominent Republican lawmakers and pundits that made her angry.
For the Whelans, the time between Paul’s arrest and the end of Trump’s presidency was marked largely by hopelessness, confusion, and false starts. According to Elizabeth, after Paul was detained in December 2018, no one from the administration reached out to the family with guidance; by early 2019, only Jon Huntsman, then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, and career officials at the embassy in Moscow had communicated a commitment to securing Paul’s release. Back in Washington, it had essentially been on Elizabeth—who, in her 57 years, had yet to dabble in statecraft—to convince her government to care. Her obstacles, she discovered, were twofold: One, as I wrote in the fall of 2019, Paul Whelan, with his shoddy military record and citizenship in four countries (the U.S., U.K., Ireland, and Canada), was not the quintessential all-American victim. The circumstances of his arrest, moreover—he had been at a hotel in Moscow for an American friend’s wedding when, as the FSB would allege, a Russian citizen handed him a USB drive containing classified information—left many on Capitol Hill wondering if Paul Whelan in fact was a spy. (He and the U.S. government, including the CIA, have consistently denied these charges.)
What quickly became clear, however—both to the Whelans and to Ryan Fayhee, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counterespionage division who had begun representing the family pro bono—was that the “spy question” masked a possibly deeper logic behind the stonewalling. As a senior congressional official told me at the time, the “whole circus with Russia” that had characterized the 45th presidency from the start had caused lawmakers, political appointees, and even career officials “to say, ‘I’ve got enough problems. I don’t want to be out there exposed on this.’”
It was for this reason that Elizabeth decided, in the fall of 2019, to bring on David Urban, a corporate lobbyist who had managed Trump’s successful 2016 campaign in Pennsylvania and counted a number of powerful administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a fellow West Point graduate, as close friends. “Dave was able to shepherd Paul’s name into halls of power that I could never have accessed,” Elizabeth told me. Nevertheless, except for a June 2020 statement denouncing Paul’s conviction, Pompeo rarely referenced Paul publicly, and privately, the Cabinet official “never engaged with us in any way whatsoever,” Elizabeth said. (Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment sent to a press account for his Champion American Values PAC.)
Ultimately, other than Huntsman (who resigned in 2019) and the former national-security adviser John Bolton (whom Trump fired around the same time), Elizabeth said, “we never got a sense that anybody was fired up to get Paul home.” Bolton told CBS this week that Trump had in fact rejected an opportunity to exchange Paul for Bout, “for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor Bout.”
This is not to say that Elizabeth—or her brother—are at all satisfied with where things currently stand. “I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release,” Paul Whelan told CNN on Thursday. “I don’t understand why I’m still sitting here.” And Elizabeth told me she and her family had felt nothing short of “betrayed” by the U.S. government this past spring, when Biden officials had given them “only a few minutes’” advance notice of a prisoner swap for Trevor Reed, another American citizen and former Marine who had been detained in Russia since 2019. She learned the news at the same time as the rest of the country, more or less, with no quiet interval to process that Paul, as his family understood it, had never even been part of the negotiations. “I had a very, very low time after that,” Elizabeth admitted. (A State Department spokesperson said at the time that the government was in “regular contact” with the Whelans and would continue to work on Paul’s case. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article.) “I went to the U.S. government at every level after that and said, ‘Please, don’t do that again. We deserve being called.’ And evidently, this time, there was no question.”
Overall, she feels the current administration’s approach—to Paul, to Russia relations more broadly—has been a change for the better. It was early on in Biden’s term that Blinken, for example, began publicly discussing Paul’s case. And for Elizabeth, Reed’s release served to confirm that the president was taking seriously the cause of American citizens imprisoned in Russia. “We have battled our own government as much as we have battled the Russian government over the years,” she said. “And it has been a relief, more recently, to be doing less battling on the home front and more battling against Russia.” On Thursday, Biden said his administration was “not giving up” in securing Paul’s freedom.
Emotionally, physically, financially: “What does one compare it to?” Elizabeth mused of the past four years. But then there is Paul, of course, the one halfway around the world, behind bars, still waiting. She takes some solace in how, after this week, more Americans than ever seem to know her brother’s name. She just hopes they continue to say it.
Paxlovid is a paradoxlovid. The game-changing antiviral swooped in during the pandemic’s worst winter with the promise of slowing COVID deaths to a trickle. But since it became widely available this spring, death rates have hardly budged.
According to the White House, the problem is not the drug but the fact that too few people are taking it. A recent CDC report found that from April to July, less than one-third of America’s 80-plus-year-olds with COVID ended up taking Paxlovid, even though they had the most to gain from doing so. What gives? Some Americans may be having trouble accessing Paxlovid, but clearly, a significant proportion of patients and doctors are just saying no to antiviral drugs. There are no national statistics on Paxlovid refusal, so I talked with physicians around the country to learn more about their motivations. Who are the anti-Paxxers, and how dangerous is their dogma?
First things first: Paxlovid hesitancy does seem to be political, but that’s not the whole story. As a rule, fewer prescriptions of the drug are given out per capita in red states than in blue ones: Wyoming, for example, appears to be the nation’s leading anti-Paxxer state, with just one course of treatment given out for every 125 residents; in Rhode Island, the most Pax-enthusiastic state, it’s one in 28. (I’m using courses of treatment per capita rather than per COVID case because of the general unreliability of case data these days and differences in testing and reporting practices among states.)
Still, clinicians working in deep-red parts of the country told me that, on this matter at least, their patients are not significantly divided by politics. “Republicans and Democrats both love Paxlovid,” says Jason Bronner, the medical director of primary care at St. Luke’s Medical System, in Idaho. Some 20 to 30 percent of his COVID patients decline to take the drug, he told me, but they don’t appear to be driven by the same polarized attitudes he sees around vaccines. Jessica Kalender-Rich, a geriatrician at the University of Kansas Health System, told me that she still gets occasional requests for ivermectin, and that some of her patients insist that COVID is a hoax. But the ones who outright refuse Paxlovid are not obsessing over microchips or government overreach. Instead, they mostly tell her that they’re worried about treatment side effects and rebound infections of the virus.
Rebound COVID came up again and again when I asked doctors why their patients are hesitant to take Paxlovid. The link between the drug and a return of symptoms after an initial recovery has been the subject of much concern and debate since the spring; just last week, researchers reported in a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed that symptom rebound is more than twice as common among Paxlovid takers than among those who decline it. The fact that so many prominent figures in the federal government—including President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci—have now had rebound certainly doesn’t help inspire confidence. One of Kalender-Rich’s patients specifically cited Fauci’s experience when refusing the drug. (The next day, the patient felt worse and accepted a prescription.)
Rebound may not be dangerous, but you have to admit that it doesn’t sound like a good time. “People will say, ‘I’d rather be really sick for four or five days than just kind of sick for two weeks,’” says Adam Fiterstein, the chief of urgent care at the New York medical network ProHealth. The threat of rebound might be especially scary for geriatric patients and their family, because it means spending more time alone. “For some of these older adults, that isolation time is actually way worse than the virus at this point in the pandemic,” Kalender-Rich said. Paxlovid mouth—a bitter, metallic taste that can last throughout the course of treatment—can also be a concern for the elderly, who may already suffer from lack of appetite or other issues that restrict their eating.
Drug interactions are another source of worry for the anti-Paxxers. Official COVID-treatment guidelines warn that the antiviral may have ill effects when combined with any of more than 100 other medications. Geriatric patients in particular might need to tweak their daily regimens of pills while under treatment with Paxlovid, Kalender-Rich told me. That’s hardly ever a problem medically, she said, but some people are still reluctant to make the change, especially if a previous doctor told them to never, ever skip a dose.
These potential downsides are extra salient for people who don’t fear COVID like they used to. The patients who refuse Paxlovid are the ones who are doing well, Bronner said: “They don’t feel totally sick and are not scared like they were in previous waves.” Hundreds of Americans are still dying daily from COVID, but any given community might have seen only a handful of severe cases and deaths since the spring. Many patients “don’t feel like they need to take a medicine, because their neighbor was fine,” Kalender-Rich said.
Doctors too can be anti-Paxxers. Hans Duvefelt, a primary-care physician in rural Maine, won’t prescribe Paxlovid to his patients. He told me via email that he avoids it on account of rebound risk, side effects, kidney concerns, and drug interactions. “Paxlovid is an inferior choice,” he said, when compared with molnupiravir, another COVID antiviral. To be clear, the data hold that molnupiravir is less effective than Paxlovid at preventing hospitalization and death. Also, a June preprint found that patients treated with molnupiravir rebounded at least as often as those treated with Paxlovid. Duvefelt did not respond to follow-up questions, so I couldn’t ask him about these data.
Other doctors believe in the good Paxlovid can do but still struggle with the decision to prescribe. “This is a much more nuanced risk-benefit discussion than giving somebody amoxicillin for strep throat,” Jeremy Cauwels, the chief physician at Sanford Health in South Dakota, told me. “If you’re looking at that as an ER doctor, who by definition has no follow-up with the patient, it’s very hard to say, ‘I’m going to give you a drug that interacts with lots of medications.’” Persistent uncertainty about exactly how much Paxlovid helps people who are up to date on their COVID shots doesn’t help.
Regardless of what’s causing Paxlovid hesitancy, the exact stakes are difficult to define. Last month, Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response coordinator, told The New York Times that daily deaths from the pandemic could drop by almost 90 percent if every COVID patient over the age of 50 were treated with Paxlovid or monoclonal antibodies. The doctors I spoke with mostly didn’t dispute this; Kalender-Rich said she “would believe a number closer to 75 percent” but agreed with the general sentiment. That said, none of the doctors I spoke with could point me toward any specific cases where one of their patients refused Paxlovid only to end up severely ill or dead. And no one knows how many deaths could be reduced specifically by attacking anti-Paxxer beliefs as opposed to, say, removing barriers to access and encouraging more testing.
Because anti-Paxxerism appears to be less organized and ideological than anti-vaxxerism, some favored strategies to combat the latter—targeting influencers on social media, for example—might not work. The doctors I spoke with said that the best venue for changing minds is the exam room. “It really comes down to a face-to-face conversation” about the risks and benefits of the drug, Cauwels said: “Our patients still trust us enough to have that conversation.”
Pax-hesitant providers, on the other hand, may just need a bit more time to feel convinced that the drug is safe and effective when used correctly; some may be waiting on more data from large, randomized clinical trials. “Across different parts of the country, adoption of new things is always going to be slower,” Kalender-Rich said. That’s not exactly a comforting thought when hundreds of people are still dying every day, but it does suggest, at the very least, that we have something to look forward to.
The last time Republicans won control of the House of Representatives with a Democrat in the White House, the two parties clashed so ferociously that Congress nearly crashed the economy with a first-ever debt default. But with the GOP’s majority-making victory, those bitterly partisan confrontations of the Obama era might seem like halcyon days compared with what’s to come.
Republicans will assume control of the House in January, at a moment of deepening political turmoil. Trust between the parties is lower than it’s been in decades. A would-be assassin assaulted the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. A majority of the GOP’s House conference refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and party leaders have vowed to immediately disband the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol sacking that occurred just hours before that very vote. Republicans will launch their own investigations, into not only the actions of Biden’s administration but also the business and personal life of the president’s surviving son. Politically motivated impeachments of President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet could be inevitable. “There are going to be fulsome investigations, and we will not take anything off the table,” Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the House’s third-ranking Republican, told me before the midterm elections.
Yet Republican leaders will be presiding over a majority sure to be far smaller than they were hoping for or expecting. When I spoke to Stefanik in the run-up to Election Day, she was confident bordering on cocky. “This is going to be a historic red wave, so buckle up, Russell,” she assured me. What transpired in last week’s election was instead barely a trickle. Stunning most pundits as well as Republicans, the race for the House majority was so tight, the vote-counting took a week to make clear the GOP’s slim victory. The Republican margin in the House could be so small as to make it nearly impossible for Kevin McCarthy, who is likely but not guaranteed to become speaker, to govern.
Democrats, meanwhile, will have one last opportunity in the next six weeks to pass legislation, in a lame-duck session of Congress. After that, Biden’s progressive agenda is dead—at least for the next two years. Lacking a majority in the Senate, Republicans will have to strike deals with Biden and the Democrats just to keep the government running, let alone to make their mark on policy. Few lawmakers in either party have much hope for a grand bargain. McCarthy is more of a campaigner than a legislator, with little record of bipartisan dealmaking. He’ll have to corral a caucus that includes many Republicans who are far more loyal to former president Donald Trump than to him; some of them, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, began making demands for more power weeks before the election and are sure to reject any hint of compromise with a president they consider illegitimate. “Governance will be a challenge,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me. “Everything over the next two years will have to be a deal of some bipartisan agreement. Achieving those always creates some frustration on the two wings of the political spectrum, because you can’t have absolute victories.”
Cole, a 20-year House veteran long allied with the Republican leadership, sounded a more optimistic note about the incoming majority. Compared with the Tea Party class of 2010, which helped the GOP capture the House during Barack Obama’s first term, he noted, this batch of newly elected Republicans is more diverse in terms of race, gender, and ideology. Many of them represent districts that Biden won, and more of them have previous legislative experience, which could lead to more pragmatism. “I would hope that we don’t fall into the trap that I would argue the Democrats fell into [under Trump] and turn ourselves into the impeachment caucus,” Cole said.
That might all prove to be wishful thinking. Although Biden struck several significant bipartisan deals during his first two years, most of those were with Senate Republicans, and they passed over the objections of House GOP leaders, including McCarthy. Many House Republicans seem focused on investigating over legislating. The next two years will also play out against the backdrop of the 2024 presidential campaign, and now that Trump is running again, he will likely oppose any agreement that Republicans hammer out with the incumbent. Stefanik evinced little interest in bipartisanship when I spoke with her, insisting that Republicans would dictate the terms of the policy debate. “We’re going to pass good legislation and send it to the president’s desk, and he’s going to have to choose [if] you work with us or not,” she told me.
The first major test for House Republicans may come over the same issue that defined their confrontations with Obama a decade ago: the debt ceiling. McCarthy and other Republicans have already said they will again try to use the required lifting of the nation’s borrowing limit as leverage to force fiscal restraint. Fearing the economic fallout from another round of brinkmanship, Democrats have begun talking about raising the debt ceiling—or eliminating it altogether—in the lame-duck session, before Republicans formally take power. The GOP would surely criticize Democrats for such a move, but many in the party might quietly accept it as a gift. “That,” Cole conceded, “would make it easier.”
As for what Republicans actually want to do with their newly acquired power, Stefanik pointed to the “Commitment to America” agenda that McCarthy unveiled in September. It’s a broad-brush list of priorities that is light on legislative detail. The GOP wants to lower inflation, fight crime, and secure the border. But absent good-faith negotiations with Democrats, any bills they pass won’t become law. An effort to tackle border security, for example, could be an invitation to reengage in talks over a larger immigration-reform package of the kind sought by the two parties for decades. Again, Stefanik wasn’t interested: “You have to secure the border before you even talk about broader visa reforms.”
Such a response could become familiar over the next two years. Republicans are coming to Washington not to legislate or to govern, but to fight. That’s one promise, at least, the new House majority should find easy to fulfill.
The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?
The answer, it turns out, is neither.
As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.
Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024.
1. Democratic turnout is going to boom in the post-Dobbs era.
For 50 years, Republicans raged against the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to an abortion, arguing that the ruling should be struck down and abortion policies should be determined by individual states. When it finally happened—when Politico in early May published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade—I warned the evangelical leader Russell Moore on his podcast that Republicans, and especially conservative Christians, were about to deal with some devastating unintended consequences.
Up until the 2022 election, most voters had engaged with the abortion issue as an every-four-years, very-top-of-the-ticket decision. Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, after all, and only a Supreme Court ruling could fundamentally change abortion policies in the country. (This was essential to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016: Nearly a quarter of his voters said the Supreme Court was their top issue in the election, after he’d promised to appoint “pro-life judges.”) Given that abortion rights were protected by Roe, the voters who identified abortion as their top priority always skewed Republican, and they were primarily mobilized by presidential campaigns and the prospect of Supreme Court vacancies.
We have now entered a different political universe.
More than a quarter of all voters named abortion as their top priority in this election. That number would be astonishing in any cycle, much less in a midterm campaign being waged against a backdrop of historic inflation and a looming recession. (The only issue of greater salience to voters overall—and not by much—was the economy, which 31 percent named as their top priority.) Even more surprising was the gap in partisan enthusiasm: Among the 27 percent of voters who prioritized abortion in this election, 76 percent supported Democratic candidates, according to exit polling, while just 23 percent backed Republicans.
This is a direct result of the Dobbs ruling, which left individual states scrambling to figure out their own abortion regulations. With Republicans pushing a menu of restrictive measures across the nation, Democrats running for office at every level—Congress, state legislature, governor, attorney general—suddenly had ammunition to mobilize a party base that was, until that time, looking complacent. (When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in deep-blue Virginia last year, only 8 percent of voters named abortion as their top priority.) At the same time, Dobbs gave Democrats a tool to reach moderates and independents, particularly suburban women, who’d rejected the Republican Party in 2020 but were beginning to drift back toward the GOP because of concerns about inflation and crime.
Democrats I spoke with throughout the summer and fall were hopeful that the abortion issue would be sufficient to prevent a Republican rout. It did that and much, much more. The Dobbs effect on this election is almost impossible to exaggerate. All five states that featured a ballot referendum on questions of abortion saw the pro-choice side win. (This includes Kentucky and Montana, states that President Joe Biden lost by 26 points and 16 points, respectively.) In those states alone, dozens of Democrats, from the top of the ballot to the bottom, received a potentially race-deciding boost from the abortion referendum. Even in the 45 states where abortion wasn’t literally on the ballot, it was clearly the issue that carried the day for a host of vulnerable Democrats.
By every metric available—turnout, exit polling, individual races, and referendum results—abortion was the dominant motivator for Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, who have historically skipped midterm elections. It was also the dominant motivator for moderates and independents to stick with an unpopular president. The story of this election was that millions of voters who registered dissatisfaction with Biden and his economic policies voted for his party anyway. Why? Because they were more concerned about Republicans’ approach to abortion than Democrats’ approach to inflation.
This is very bad news for the GOP. Democrats now have a blueprint for turning out the vote in a punishing political environment. In each of the two midterm elections under President Barack Obama, Democrats hemorrhaged congressional and state legislative seats because the party lacked a base-turnout mechanism—not to mention a persuasion tactic—to compensate for voters’ concerns over a sluggish economy. Politics is a copycat business. Now that Democrats have found a winning formula, you can expect to see entire field programs, messaging campaigns, microtargeting exercises, and ballot-initiative drives built around abortion access.
A winning issue today is not necessarily a winning issue tomorrow. Abortion rights will rise and fall in terms of resonance, depending on the place, the party in control, and the policies that govern the issue locally. We’ve seen Democrats overplay their hand on abortion in the past, as in 2014, when Republicans flipped a U.S. Senate seat because the Democratic incumbent, Mark Udall, campaigned so myopically on abortion rights that even the liberal Denver Post editorial board ridiculed him as “Senator Uterus.” If Democrats rely too much on the issue—or, maybe the greater temptation, if they use their legislative power to advance abortion policies that are just as unpopular with moderates and independents as some of what Republicans campaigned on this cycle—their advantage could evaporate quickly.
Still, the “Senator Uterus” episode came in the pre-Dobbs era, back when Americans still viewed the Supreme Court as the most immediate arbiter of abortion rights, and local candidates didn’t have nearly the reason (or incentive) to engage with the issue. This is now the post-Dobbs era. Voters who care about abortion are thinking less about Supreme Court justices and more about state legislators. The political advantage, at least for now, belongs to a Democratic Party that just weaponized the issue to turn out its base in a major and unexpected way.
2. Bad candidates are an incurable (and fast-spreading) cancer.
In Michigan, “Prop 3,” the ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution, drove enormous voter participation. Democrats were the clear beneficiary: They won all three statewide campaigns as well as the state’s most competitive congressional races. But Democrats did even more damage at the local level, ambushing Republicans in a number of off-the-radar local contests and winning back control of both state legislative chambers for the first time since 1983.
But if you ask Republicans in the state, Prop 3 wasn’t the biggest contributor to the down-ballot massacre. Instead, they blame the terrible GOP candidates at the top of the ticket.
Whereas Republicans in other states nominated one or perhaps even two far-right candidates to run in marquee statewide races, Michigan Republicans went for the trifecta. Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial nominee, was a political novice who had made extreme statements about abortion and gun control in addition to casting doubts on Trump’s 2020 defeat. Matt DePerno, the nominee for attorney general, was best known for leading a crusade to investigate and overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Kristen Karamo, the nominee for secretary of state, was a like-minded conspiracy theorist who manifestly knew nothing about the way Michigan’s elections are administered, and even less about the other duties of the job she was seeking.
“You just can’t ignore the question of candidate quality,” Jason Roe, who ran Republican Tom Barrett’s campaign against Elissa Slotkin, one of the nation’s premier congressional contests, in Michigan’s Seventh District, told me. “We had a fundraising disadvantage, we had Prop 3 to overcome, but candidate quality—that was our biggest headwind. Tom ran about seven points ahead of the statewide ticket. I’m not sure what else he’s supposed to do.”
The same pattern was visible in different parts of the country. In Pennsylvania, Democrats seized back control of the state House chamber for the first time in more than a decade. How? Two words: Doug Mastriano.
In the campaign to become Pennsylvania’s next governor—what was once expected to be one of the nation’s tightest races—Mastriano, the GOP nominee, proved particularly unpalatable. It wasn’t just Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in that state, who stayed away; most GOP state lawmakers, even those who shared some of Mastriano’s fringe worldview as it pertains to election legitimacy or Christian nationalism, kept their distance.
But it hardly mattered. The smoldering crater left by Mastriano’s implosion (he trailed by nearly 14 points as of yesterday evening) swallowed up Republicans all around him. Not only did Democrats improbably win back control of the state House; they also won all three of the state’s contested congressional races.
Time and again on Tuesday, bad candidates sabotaged both their own chances of victory and also the electoral prospects of their fellow partisans on the ticket. And for most of these bad candidates, a common quality stood out: their views on the legitimacy of our elections.
3. Voters prefer “out of touch” to “out of their mind.”
For Republicans, a central charge against Democrats throughout 2022 has been that Biden and his party are out of touch with ordinary Americans. A distilled version of the argument went like this: Democrats, the party of social and cultural elites, can’t relate to the economic pain being felt by millions of working people.
That message penetrated—to a point.
According to exit polls, 20 percent of voters said inflation has caused their families “severe hardship” over the past year. Among those respondents, 71 percent supported Republicans, and 28 percent supported Democrats. This is broadly consistent with other findings in the exit polling, as well as public-opinion research we saw throughout the summer and fall, showing disapproval of Biden and his stewardship of the economy. This would seem damning for Democrats—that is, until you consider the numbers in reverse and ask the obvious question: Why did three in 10 people who said they’ve experienced “severe hardship” decide to vote for the party that controls Congress and the White House?
The simplest explanation is that although many of these voters think Democrats are out of touch, they also think Republicans are out of their minds. And it seems they prefer the former to the latter.
“This is what I would see in our focus groups all summer, and it makes more sense now in retrospect,” says Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who produced a podcast series this year narrating her sessions with undecided voters. “We would have these swing voters who would say things are going bad: inflation, crime, Biden’s doing a bad job, all of it. And then you say, ‘Okay, Gretchen Whitmer versus Tudor Dixon. Who are you voting for?’ And even though they’re pissed at Whitmer—she hasn’t fixed the roads, she did a bad job with COVID—they were voting for her. Because they all thought Dixon was crazy.”
It was the same thing, Longwell told me, in her focus groups all over the country—but particularly in the Midwest. She said that Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, kept getting the same benefit of the doubt as Whitmer: “They didn’t like a lot of his policies, but they thought Tim Michels”—his Republican challenger—“was an extremist, a Trumplike extremist.” Her conclusion: “A lot of these people wanted to vote for a Republican; they just didn’t want to vote for the individual Republican who was running.”
For many voters, the one position that rendered a candidate unacceptable was the continued crusade against our elections system. In Pennsylvania, for instance, 34 percent of voters supported Democrats despite experiencing “severe hardship,” significantly higher than the national average. The reason: 57 percent of Pennsylvanians said they did not “trust” Mastriano to oversee the state’s elections.
Another strategy Republicans used to portray Democrats as “out of touch” was to focus on rising crime rates in Democratic-governed cities and states. This was an unqualified success: Exit polling, both nationally and in key states, showed that clear majorities of voters believe Republicans are better suited to handle crime. In Michigan, 53 percent of voters said they trusted Dixon to deal with crime, as opposed to just 42 percent for Whitmer. But it barely made a difference in the outcome: Despite trailing by 11 points on that question, Whitmer actually won the race by 11 points. To understand why, consider that 56 percent of Michigan voters characterized Dixon as “too extreme.” Only 38 percent said the same about Whitmer.
In the exit polls, perhaps the most provocative question was about society’s changing values relative to gender identity and sexual orientation. Half of all voters—exactly 50 percent—said those values are changing for the worse. Only 26 percent, meanwhile, said those values are changing for the better. (The remaining 24 percent did not have a strong opinion either way.) This is another data point to suggest that Democrats, by championing an ultraprogressive approach to LGBTQ issues, come across as out of touch to many Americans. And yet, even among the voters who expressed alarm over America’s values in this context, 20 percent voted for Democrats. This is a revelation: Given the ferocity of rhetoric in this campaign about drag shows, transgender athletes, and sexualized public-school curricula, one might have predicted virtually zero people would both decry the LGBTQ agenda and vote Democratic. But two in 10 voters—more than enough to tip any close election—did exactly that. Why?
Again, the simplest explanation is probably best: Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right.
That extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our elections system, endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol, cracking jokes and spreading lies about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And all of this extremism, which so many swing voters spurned on Tuesday, is embodied by one person: Donald Trump.
4. Trumpism is toxic to the middle of the electorate.
Here’s the scenario many of us were expecting on Election Day: The president, still the titular head of his party despite a growing chorus of questions about his age and competence, suffers a series of humiliating defeats that reflect the weakness of his personal brand and cast doubt on his ability to lead the party moving forward.
And that’s precisely what happened—to the former president.
If Tuesday felt strange—“the craziest Election Night I’ve ever seen,” as the elections-analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted—it’s because so many races revolved around someone who wasn’t running for anything. The reason that practically every first-term president in modern history has gotten pummeled in the midterms is that the opposition party typically cedes the stage and makes it all about him. The idea is to force the party in power to own everything that’s unsatisfactory about the country—its economic performance, military failures, policy misfires. It’s a time-honored tradition: Make the election a referendum on the new guy in charge.
Until now.
In each of the three states that saw major Democratic victories—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—25 to 30 percent of voters said they had cast their vote in opposition to Trump. To reiterate: This is a quarter of the total electorate, consistently across three of the nation’s most polarized battleground states, acknowledging that they were motivated by the idea of defeating someone who wasn’t on the ballot, and who currently holds no office. It’s easy to see why they succeeded: In these states, as well as nationally, the only thing worse than Biden’s approval rating was Trump’s. In state after state, congressional district after congressional district, voters rejected the Trump-approved candidate, for many of the same reasons they rejected Trump himself two years ago.
Looking to 2024, GOP leaders will attempt to address the missed opportunities of this election. They will, no doubt, redouble their efforts to recruit strong candidates for statewide races; they will prioritize proven winners with mainstream views on abortion and democratic norms and the other issues by which moderates and independents will assess them. Whatever success party officials might find on a case-by-case basis, they will be treating the symptoms and ignoring the sickness. The manifest reality is that Trumpism has become toxic—not just to the Never Trumpers or the RINOs or the members of the Resistance, but to the immense, restless middle of the American electorate.
We’ve long known that Trumpism without Trump doesn’t really sell; the man himself has proved far more compelling, and far more competitive, than any of his MAGA imitators. But what we saw Tuesday wasn’t voters selectively declining certain decaffeinated versions of Trump; it was voters actively (and perhaps universally, pending the result in Arizona’s gubernatorial race) repudiating the core elements of Trump’s political being.
This trouncing, on its own, might have done little to loosen Trump’s chokehold on American conservatism. But because it coincided with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s virtuoso performance—winning reelection by an astonishing 1.5 million votes; carrying by double digits Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points; defeating his Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points statewide—there is reason to believe, for the first time in six and a half years, that the Republican Party does not belong to Donald Trump.
“I’ll tell you why Tuesday was a bad night for Trump: Ron DeSantis now has 100 percent name ID with the Republican base. Every single Republican voter in the country knows who he is now,” says Jeff Roe, who managed Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign and runs the nation’s largest political-consulting firm. “A lot of these people are gonna say, ‘All these other Republicans lost. This is the only guy that can win.’ That’s really bad for Trump. Republicans haven’t had a choice in a long time. Now they have a choice.”
Trump’s intraparty critics have long complained that his brutally effective takeover of the GOP obscures his win-loss record. This is someone, after all, who earned the 2016 nomination by securing a string of plurality victories against a huge and fragmented field; who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million; who gave away the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020; who lost the popular vote to Biden by 7 million and handed over the White House; and who just sabotaged the party’s chances of winning key contests in a number of battleground states.
Earlier this week, Trump pushed back the expected launch of his 2024 presidential campaign. This was done, in part, so that he could appropriate the narrative of a grand Republican victory against Biden and the Democrats. Given his humiliating defeats, and how they’re being juxtaposed against the victories of his emerging young rival from Florida, Trump might want to move the announcement back up before a very different narrative begins to take hold.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me how many COVID shots I’d gotten so far. And for a brief, wonderful moment, I forgot.
“Three,” I told them, before shaking my head. “No, actually, four.” I had no trouble recalling when I’d received my most recent shot (September). But it took me a moment to tabulate all the doses that had preceded it.
By this point in the pandemic, a lot of people must be losing track. “I actually think this is a good thing,” says Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford, and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Now that so many Americans have racked up several shots or infections, she told me, the question is no longer “‘How many doses have you gotten cumulatively?’ It’s ‘Are you up to date for the season?’”
The flip is subtle, but it marks a rethink of the COVID-vaccination paradigm. We’re at a define-the-relationship moment with these shots, when people are trying to commit—to normalize them as a routine part of our lives. At a September ACIP meeting, CDC officials noted that “we are changing the way we are thinking about these vaccines,” and trying to “get on a more regular schedule.” If COVID shots are here for good, then at least we can be rid of the bother of counting them.
Counting doses was more apt early in the vaccine rollout, when it seemed that two jabs (or even one) would be enough to get Americans “fully vaccinated” and out of the danger zone. When more shots followed, they were often advertised with confusing finality: What some initially described as the booster was later retconned as the first booster after a second one was recommended for certain groups. But with immunity against infection more fragile than some hoped, and a virus that quickly shapeshifts out of antibodies’ grasp, those ordinal adjectives have stopped making sense. Until our vaccine tech becomes much more durable or variant-proof, repeat doses will be, for most of us, a fixture of the future—and it won’t do anyone much good to say, “‘I’m on shot 15’ or ‘I’m on shot 16,’” Angela Shen, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.
The numbers certainly matter when they’re small: It will continue to be important for people to count off their first few shots, for instance, especially those without a history of infections. But after that initial set of viral-spike-protein exposures, the total count is moot. In most cases, about threevaccinations or infections—preferably vaccinations, which are both safer and easier to accurately track—should be “enough to fully charge up the immune system’s battery” for the first time, says Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Further COVID shots will help only insofar as they can recharge the battery toward max capacity when it starts to lose its juice. Scheduling a vaccine, then, becomes a matter of “how long it’s been since your last immunity-conferring event,” regardless of how many exposures a body has racked up, says Avnika Amin, a vaccine epidemiologist at Emory University.
People who are immunocompromisedmay need four or more shots to establish that initial immunity charge, and their own (maybe smaller) peak capacity. But ultimately, the threshold effect they experience—a point of “diminishing returns”—is similar, says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington. Given how many vaccinations and infections the U.S. has now logged, the majority of Americans “can be done with counting,” she told me.
If we’re going to shift our focus to timing shots, instead of counting them, we’ll have to schedule our shots smartly. Several prominent figures have already come out and said that yearly doses are a top choice. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, has been pushing that idea sinceearly 2021; Peter Marks, who heads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, has been delivering a similar line for severalmonths. Even President Joe Biden has endorsed the annual approach, noting in a September statement that the debut of the bivalent shot heralded a new phase in COVID vaccination, in which Americans would receive a dose “once a year, each fall.”
That plan is not unreasonable. Shots will have to come with at least some regularity, as variants keep rolling in and immunity against infection ebbs. But re-dose prematurely with a shot with similar ingredients, and the body—still hopped up from the previous dose—may destroy the vaccine before it has much effect, making it about as useful as charging a battery that’s already at 95 percent. SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels drop off steeply in the first six months following a vaccine dose, and then, the rate of drain slows down. It’s as if the immune system goes into “power-saver mode,” Goel told me, which means there might not be a huge difference between revaccinating twice a year or only once. Plus, living out much of the year with lower antibody levels is not as worrisome as it might sound. Although antibodies can be a rather useful proxy for our level of protection, especially against infection, they don’t paint the whole defensive picture: T cells and other fighters tend to stick around for far longer, maintaining safeguards against severe disease. (The immunocompromised and older people may still need more frequent COVID-immunity top-offs.)
The optimal pace for COVID vaccination will also depend on the speed at which the virus spews out variants. A yearly schedule works for influenza, Shen told me, but “we know flu’s cadence.” SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t yet settled down into a predictable, seasonal pattern; its waves aren’t relegated to the chilliest months. The degree to which we, as the coronavirus’s hosts, tamp down transmission also matters quite a bit. Having more virus around puts more pressure on vaccines to perform, especially when there aren’t many other mitigation measures in place. If all this talk of “once a year, each fall” turns out to be another red-herring recommendation, Amin told me, it could undermine any messaging that follows.
All of that said, the autumn regimen may yet stick around because it’s the easiest approach. Flu-shot uptake is far from perfect, but the messaging around it is “simple and clean,” says Rupali Limaye, a behavioral scientist and vaccine-attitudes researcher at Johns Hopkins. After dosing up twice in four weeks as infants, people are asked to get a yearly shot, and that’s it. Compare that with the most convoluted days of COVID vaccination, when people couldn’t dose up without accounting for their age, health status, number of previous doses, vaccine brand, time since last dose, and more. “That’s absolute overload,” Limaye told me. Complicated schedules burn people out—or dissuade them from showing up at all. This fall, when the bivalent shot debuted, a troubling proportion of Americans didn’t even know they were eligible.
Encouraging COVID vaccines at the same, straightforward pace as flu shots would make it easy for people to sign up for both at once, and maybe, eventually, to get them in the same syringe. Vaccines tend to ride one another’s coattails, Shen told me. “In the fall, there’s a bump in other routine vaccines,” she said, because people “are already there for their flu shot.” It would also make a big difference if the COVID-vaccine recipes changed for everyone at the same time, as they do for flu.
If we’re going to pivot from numbering doses to timing them, we might as well take the opportunity to discard the term booster as well. Some people don’t understand what it means, Limaye told me, or they default to a logical question—How many more boosters will I need? Plus, booster may no longer fit the science. “When we start updating formulas, it’s not really a booster anymore,” Amin told me. That’s not how we generally talk about flu shots: I certainly couldn’t tell you how many “boosters” of that vaccine I’ve had. (I don’t know, maybe 14? 15?) Pivoting to a terminology of “seasonal shots” could make COVID vaccination that much more routine.
So, fine, if anyone should ask: I’ve had (count ’em: one, two, three) four doses of the vaccine so far. But more important, I’ve gotten the shot most recently available to me.
Voters will render a midterm verdict on President Joe Biden as they decide whether to keep Democrats in control of Congress. Forgive them if their views about the president’s record so far are a bit complicated.
In less than two years, Biden has chaotically ended the war in Afghanistan while struggling to bring the nation fully out of a two-and-a-half-year pandemic. Domestically, he’s pursued nothing less than a transformation of the American social safety net, with an agenda comprising a dizzying number of progressive policy goals. Biden has accomplished quite a lot of them—perhaps more than most political observers expected with such narrow Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill. Some of his legislative moves, on infrastructure and clean-energy manufacturing, for example, have even been bipartisan victories. But Biden has also failed to achieve many of his most progressive priorities, which have fallen victim to a combination of lockstep GOP opposition and crucial defections in his own party.
Biden’s approval ratings have languished far below 50 percent for more than a year; the end of his presidential honeymoon coincided with the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the prolonged pandemic. Most conservatives, of course, never gave him a chance. Many blame his high-spending policies for exacerbating inflation. The view from Democrats and independent voters is more complex: Will they conclude that Biden’s legislative successes—a record infusion of funds to fight climate change, a major infrastructure bill, action to lower prescription-drug prices, modest gun reform—outweigh his failure to enact promises such as paid family leave, universal pre-K, far-reaching voting-rights legislation, and a ban on assault weapons? In the past few months, Biden has bolstered his progressive record without the help of Congress, unilaterally forgiving student-loan debt for millions and pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession.
The signing of just three enormous bills—the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, and this summer’s climate-and-health spending bill—made Biden’s first two years among the most productive of any president in the past half century. The initial pandemic bill, also known as the American Rescue Plan, was about the size of Barack Obama’s two biggest legislative achievements—his initial economic stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act—combined. The legislation sent $1,400 checks to Americans across the country, nearly doubled the child tax credit, shored up state budget accounts, and funded testing, treatment, and vaccines to fight the pandemic. The politically named Inflation Reduction Act is actually the largest climate bill in U.S. history and allows Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs for the first time.
Beyond those headline bills, Biden more quietly amassed a bevy of smaller legislative wins, often with bipartisan support. A modest gun-safety bill expanded background checks (although not universally), made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking, and provided federal funding for so-called red-flag laws. Congress also passed the CHIPS Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, a long-stalled postal-reform bill, substantial military aid for Ukraine, and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act—all with fairly broad support from both parties. Biden’s executive actions on student-loan forgiveness and pardons for marijuana possession answered a pair of progressive demands.
Perhaps Biden’s biggest legislative disappointment in his first two years was the Senate’s failure to overcome a Republican filibuster of a major voting-rights-and-election-reform bill at the start of the year. (Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona memorably refused to support an exemption to the Senate’s rules to pass the bill.) The shrinking of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda sacrificed another large chunk of the president’s initially transformative progressive vision. Democrats jettisoned plans for a $15 federal minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, free community college, a huge affordable housing initiative, an expansion of Medicare, and an extension of the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit. They also bowed to Sinema’s opposition to reversing tax-rate cuts enacted by former President Donald Trump.
Some of Biden’s plans never stood a chance. The Senate did not make a serious effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform or more aggressive gun-control measures, such as universal background checks or a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Nor did Congress act on restoring the public insurance option left out of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
PHILADELPHIA—Outside the basketball arena at Temple University, a long line of anxious Democrats contemplated their party’s possibly bleak political future, as a brass band played Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
That strange juxtaposition of dread and joy seemed to be the theme of Saturday afternoon’s rally at the Liacouras Center. Democrats were happy to hear a closing campaign message from President Joe Biden, and excited to show their support for Senate candidate John Fetterman, gubernatorial hopeful Josh Shapiro, and the rest of the Democratic slate. They were cautiously hopeful, in their Fetterman gear and Phillies hats. But they also see the present moment as an unusually perilous one—for the future of the party, and for democracy itself. So they were desperate, more than anything, for some last-minute reassurance and inspiration from their one-time party leader.
“Obama has a gift for putting things in perspective, that makes [politics] accessible to just about everybody,” Barbara Pizzutillo, a physical therapist from the Philadelphia suburbs, told me before the rally. “To see the excitement in the crowd is what we need right now.” A Philly native named Kip Williams said he was excited just to be there, near the band. “This line inspires me. I got a real good hope for Tuesday!”
When the 44th president came on stage, the crowd greeted him like a long lost friend—or a favorite teacher who’d returned after a series of varyingly unimpressive substitutes.
“The kind of slash and burn politics that we’re seeing right now, that doesn’t have to be who we are. We can be better,” Barack Obama said, coming on stage after Biden, Shapiro, and Fetterman. “I believe things will be okay,” he assured the audience. “They’ll be okay if we make the effort … not just on Election Day but every day in between.”
Polls have been tightening in recent weeks, especially in Pennsylvania, where the Republican candidate Mehmet Oz is now virtually tied with Fetterman in the race to replace Pat Toomey in the U.S. Senate. In Arizona, Republican Blake Masters is catching up to Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, and in Georgia, apparently no number of abortion-related scandals can keep the anti-abortion Republican Herschel Walker down in his race against the Democrat Raphael Warnock. And nationwide, a majority of Republican candidates on the midterms ballot maintain that Biden didn’t win the election in 2020.
Which is why, three days before Election Day, Democrats have broken out their biggest gun of all. Pennsylvania was the latest stop on a swing-state tour that Obama began only about a week ago in a last-ditch effort to energize voters in Arizona and Wisconsin. Events like these are not meant to persuade undecideds; they’re to reward activists and volunteers, and help turn out the base—the people who will knock on doors and give rides to the polling station on Election Day.
“Like Brad Lidge in 2008,” said Anthony Stevenson, likening the pitcher who helped Stevenson’s hometown Phillies win the World Series to the Democrat who gained the White House that same year. “He’s the closer!”
How effective this rally will be, just 48 hours before Election Day, is hard to know. But the promise of hearing from Obama was enough for voters at Saturday night’s rally. They needed to hear from him, they told me, because they needed to remember what politics used to be like—and, they hoped, could be again.
Biden opened the event, but Obama was the headliner. Right away, the former president was in his element, fluent with the gags and punchlines: “Don’t boo! Vote!” He teased Fetterman for being “just a dude” who wore shorts in the winter. (Fetterman had earlier tweeted how he’d “dressed up (wore pants)” to meet Obama on a previous occasion.) But there were serious moments, too.
Obama dutifully bashed Oz’s “snake oil” peddling and GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s extremist beliefs. And he reminded the audience that the Democrats had been “shellacked” in the 2010 midterms when he was president, and took a drubbing again in 2014. The same would happen this year, he warned—if they didn’t turn up at the polls.
“I understand that democracy might not seem like a top priority right now, especially when you’re worried about paying the bills,” Obama said, echoing Biden’s choice recently to focus message. But “when true democracy goes away, people get hurt. It has real consequences.”
Voters last night seemed to feel the weight of his words. “It used to be that you were just voting on politics and ideology,” Jody Boches, from nearby Abington Township, told me. “Now the integrity of all these institutions and the right to vote and the wellbeing of our democracy” are under threat. When I asked about what it meant to see Obama, Boches gestured to her cell phone and laughed. “My daughter who’s at grad school at UVA has asked me to record him speaking, just so she can remember what it was like to hear him speak.”
Some at the rally expressed a very qualified optimism. The main priority for everyone I spoke to was abortion—coupled with the hope that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade could be what boosts Democratic turnout this year. Mary Halanan, from Doylestown, told me that she could envision a strong bloc of such voters emerging on Tuesday—“people like me,” she said. “I’m hoping I’m the silent majority.”
Others were more nervous about what next week will bring. As once-promising Senate races have tightened, the prospects for the president’s party in the House are grim. Republicans need to pick up only five seats to take a majority; they seem poised to do much better than that. Even if the Democrats keep control of the Senate—at best, a tenuous proposition—the rest of Biden’s term in the White House seems certain to involve a barrage of investigations and impeachment attempts, rather than any effort toward bipartisan legislation.
Again and again, the Democrats I spoke to in the crowd told me how much they missed Obama’s thoughtfulness and compassion. Their longing was all the more poignant for what it seemed to say about what they found missing from the Democratic leadership today: They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
When the rally was over, Rosalin Franklin and Pam Parseghian stood side by side, waiting to cross the street. “We were just talking about how he brings people together,” Parseghian said, with a sigh. “Here he is talking about his wife, talking about the good.” And she reenacted his words: “Believe in science! Believe in the future!”
After Parseghian and Franklin finished explaining how delighted they’d been by Obama’s appearance, I asked whether they felt more confident about their party’s electoral outlook than they had before the rally. Both women paused. “Yes,” Parseghian said eventually. Franklin nodded slowly. “Yeah … still worried. But yeah.”
Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.
Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.
It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.
If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”
By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.
Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.
Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.
These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.
Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.
But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.
That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.
But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.
For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).
Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.
When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.
In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.
Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”
The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.
Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.
Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.
Last week, just a couple of hours into a house-sitting stint in Massachusetts for my cousin and his wife, I received from them a flummoxed text: “Dude,” it read. “We are the only people in masks.” Upon arriving at the airport, and then boarding their flight, they’d been shocked to find themselves virtually alone in wearing masks of any kind. On another trip they’d taken to Hawaii in July, they told me, long after coverings became optional on planes, some 80 percent of people on their flight had been masking up. This time, though? “We are like the odd man out.”
Being outside of the current norm “does not bother us,” my cousin’s wife said in another text, despite stares from some of the other passengers. But the about-face my cousin and his wife identified does mark a new phase of the pandemic, even if it’s one that has long been playing out in fits and starts. Months after the vanishing of most masking mandates, mask wearing has been relegated to a sharply shrinking sector of society. It has become, once again, a peculiar thing to do.
“If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” President Joe Biden declared last month on 60 Minutes. That’s an overstatement, but not by much: According to the COVID States Project, a large-scale national survey on pandemic-mitigation behaviors, the masking rate among Americans bounced between around 50 and 80 percent over the first two years of the pandemic. But since this past winter, it’s been in a slide; the project’s most recent data, collected in September, found that just 29 percent have been wearing masks outside the home. This trend may be long-standing on the population level, but for individuals—and particularly for those who still wear masks, such as my cousin and his wife—it can lead to moments of abrupt self-consciousness. “It feels like it’s something that now needs an explanation,” Fiona Lowenstein, a journalist and COVID long-hauler based in Los Angeles, told me. “It’s like showing up in a weird hat, and you have to explain why you’re wearing it.”
Now that most Americans can access COVID vaccines and treatments that slash the risk of severe disease and death, plenty of people have made informed decisions to relax on masking—and feel totally at ease with their behavior while paying others’ little mind. Some are no longer masking all the time but will do so if it makes others feel more comfortable; others are still navigating new patterns, trying to stay flexible amid fluctuating risk. Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me that she’s now more likely to doff her mask while dining or working out indoors, but that she leaves it on when she travels. And when she does decide to cover up, she said, she’s “definitely felt like more of an outlier.”
For some, like my cousin and his wife, that shift feels slightly jarring. For others, though, it feels more momentous. High-filtration masks are one of the few measures that can reliably tamp down on infection and transmission across populations, and they’re still embraced by many parents of newborns too young for vaccines, by people who are immunocompromised and those who care for them, and by those who want to minimize their risk of developing long COVID, which can’t be staved off by vaccines and treatments alone. Theresa Chapple-McGruder, the public-health director for Oak Park, Illinois, plans to keep her family masking at least until her baby son is old enough to receive his first COVID shots. In the meantime, though, they’ve certainly been feeling the pressure to conform. “People often tell me, ‘It’s okay, you can take your mask off here,’” Chapple-McGruder told me; teachers at the local elementary school have said similar things to her young daughters. Meghan McCoy, a former doctor in New Hampshire who takes immunosuppressive medications for psoriatic arthritis and has ME/CFS, has also been feeling “the pressure to take the mask off,” she told me—at her kid’s Girl Scout troop meetings, during trips to the eye doctor. “You can feel when you’re the only one doing something,” McCoy said. “It’s noticeable.”
For Chapple-McGruder, McCoy, and plenty of others, the gradual decline in masking creates new challenges. For one thing, the rarer the practice, the tougher it is for still-masking individuals to minimize their exposures. “One-way masking is a lot less effective,” says Gabriel San Emeterio, a social worker at Hunter College who is living with HIV and ME/CFS. And the less common masking gets, the more conspicuous it becomes. “If most people met me, they wouldn’t know I was immunocompromised,” McCoy told me. “There’s no big sign on our foreheads that says ‘this person doesn’t have a functioning immune system.’” But now, she said, “masks have kind of become that sign.”
Aparna Nair, a historian and disability scholar at the University of Oklahoma who has epilepsy, told me that she thinks masks are becoming somewhat analogous to wheelchairs, prosthetics, hearing aids, and her own seizure-alert dog, Charlie: visible tools and technologies that invite compassion, but also skepticism, condescension, and invasive questions. During a recent rideshare, she told me, her driver started ranting that her mask was unnecessary and ineffective—just part of a “conspiracy.” His tone was so angry, Nair said, that she began to be afraid. She tried to make him understand her situation: I’ve been chronically ill for three decades; I’d rather not fall sick; better to be safe than sorry. But she said that her driver seemed unswayed and continued to mutter furiously under his breath for the duration of the ride. Situations of that kind—where she has to litigate her right to wear a mask—have been getting more common, Nair told me.
Masking has been weighed down with symbolic meaning since the start of the pandemic, with some calling it a sign of weakness and others a vehicle for state control. Americans have been violently attacked for wearing masks and also for not wearing them. But for a long time, these tensions were set against the backdrop of majority masking nationwide. Local mask mandates were in place, and most scientific experts wore and championed them in public. With many of those infrastructural supports and signals now gone, masking has rapidly become a minority behavior—and people who are still masking told me that that inversion only makes the tension worse.
San Emeterio, who wears a vented respirator when they travel, recently experienced a round of heckling from a group of men at an airport, who started to stare, laugh, and point. Oh my god, look at what he’s wearing, San Emeterio recalls the strangers saying. “They clearly meant for me to hear it,” San Emeterio told me. “It didn’t make me feel great.” Alex Mawdsley, the 14-year-old son of an immunocompromised physician in Chicago, is one of just a handful of kids at his middle school who are still masking up. Since the start of the academic year, he’s been getting flak from several of his classmates “at least once a week,” he told me: “They’re like ‘You’re not gonna get COVID from me’ and ‘Why are you still wearing that? You don’t need it anymore.’”
Alex’s mother, Emily Landon, told me she’s been shaken by the gawks and leers she now receives for masking. Even prior to the pandemic, and before she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and began taking immunosuppressive drugs, she considered herself something of a hygiene stan; she always took care to step back from the sneezy and sniffy, and to wipe down tray tables on planes. “And it was never a big deal,” she said.
It hasn’t helped that the donning of masks has been repeatedly linked to chaos and crisis—and their removal, to triumph. Early messaging about vaccines strongly implied that the casting away of masks could be a kind of post-immunization reward. In February, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky described masks as “the scarlet letter of this pandemic.” Two months later, when the administration lifted its requirements for masking on public transportation, passengers on planes ripped off their coverings mid-flight and cheered.
To reclaim a mask-free version of “normalcy,” then, may seem like reverting to a past that was safer, more peaceful. The past few years “have been mentally and emotionally exhausting,” Linda Tropp, a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. Discarding masks may feel like jettisoning a bad memory, whereas clinging to them reminds people of an experience they desperately want to leave behind. For some members of the maskless majority, feeling like “the normal ones” again could even serve to legitimize insulting, dismissive, or aggressive behavior toward others, says Markus Kemmelmeier, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno.
It’s unclear how the masking discourse might evolve from here. Kemmelmeier told me he’s optimistic that the vitriol will fade as people settle into a new chapter of their coexistence with COVID. Many others, though, aren’t so hopeful, given the way the situation has unfolded thus far. “There’s this feeling of being left behind while everyone else moves on,” Lowenstein, the Los Angeles journalist and long-hauler, told me. Lowenstein and others are now missing out on opportunities, they told me, that others are easily reintegrating back into their lives: social gatherings, doctor’s appointments, trips to visit family they haven’t seen in months or more than a year. “I’d feel like I could go on longer this way,” Lowenstein said, if more of society were in it together.
Americans’ fraught relationship with masks “didn’t have to be like this,” Tropp told me—perhaps if the country had avoided politicizing the practice early on, perhaps if there had been more emphasis on collective acts of good. Other parts of the world, certainly, have weathered shifting masking norms with less strife. A couple of weeks ago, my mother got in touch with me from one such place: Taiwan, where she grew up. Masking was still quite common in public spaces, she told me in a text message, even where it wasn’t mandated. When I asked her why, she seemed almost surprised: Why not?
As an appellate judge, Merrick Garland was known for constructing narrow decisions that achieved consensus without creating extraneous controversy. As a government attorney, he was known for his zealous adherence to the letter of the law. As a person, he is a smaller-than-life figure, a dry conversationalist, studious listener, something close to the opposite of a raconteur. As a driver, his friends say, he is maddeningly slow and almost comically fastidious.
And as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, he is a hyper-prudential institutionalist who would like nothing more than to restore—quietly and deliberately—the Justice Department’s reputation for probity, process, and apolitical dispassion. Which is why it is so difficult for me to imagine him delighting in the choice he now faces: whether to become the first attorney general in American history to indict a former president.
But this is what I believe he is preparing himself to do.
I have been observing Garland closely for months. I’ve talked to his closest friends and most loyal former clerks and deputies. I’ve carefully studied his record. I’ve interviewed Garland himself. And I’ve reached the conclusion that his devotion to procedure, his belief in the rule of law, and in particular his reverence for the duties, responsibilities, and traditions of the U.S. Department of Justice will cause him to make the most monumental decision an attorney general can make.
Let me be absolutely clear: Garland did not tell me he was going to indict Donald Trump. In fact, he did not tip his hand to me in any way—he is far too cautious to signal his intentions to even his closest friends, much less a reporter. Nor did his top aides suggest the announcement of an indictment. When his department says that it doesn’t discuss ongoing cases, it means it—at least in this case.
Before I lay out the reasons I believe I am correct in this assessment, I want to discuss why it is entirely possible I am not. The main reason to disbelieve the argument that Garland is preparing to indict is simple: To bring criminal charges against a former president from an opposing political party would be the ultimate test of a system that aspires to impartiality, and Garland, by disposition, is repelled by drama, and doesn’t believe the department should be subjected to unnecessary stress tests. This unprecedented act would inevitably be used to justify a cycle of reprisals, and risks turning the Justice Department into an instrument of never-ending political warfare.
And an indictment, of course, would merely be the first step—a prelude to a trial unlike any this country has ever seen. The defendant wouldn’t just be an ex-president; in all likelihood, he’d be a candidate actively campaigning to return to the White House. Fairness dictates that the system regard Trump as it does every other defendant. But doing so would lead to the impression that he’s being deliberately hamstrung—and humiliated—by his political rivals.
Garland is surely aware that this essential problem would be evident at the first hearing. If the Justice Department is intent on proving that nobody is above the law, it could impose the same constraints on Trump that it would on any criminal defendant accused of serious crimes, including limiting his travel. Such a restriction would deprive Trump of one of his most important political advantages: his ability to whip up his followers at far-flung rallies.
In any event, once the trial began, Trump would be stuck in court, likely in Florida (if he’s charged in connection with the Mar-a-Lago documents matter) or in Washington, D.C. (if he’s charged for his involvement in the events of January 6). The site of a Washington trial would be the Prettyman Courthouse, on Constitution Avenue, just a short walk from the Capitol. This fact terrified the former prosecutors and other experts I talked with about how the trial might play out. Right-wing politicians, including Trump himself, have intimated violence if he is indicted.
Trump would of course attempt to make the proceedings a carnival of grievance, a venue for broadcasting conspiracy theories about his enemies. The trial could thus supply a climactic flash point for an era of political violence. Like the Capitol on January 6, the courthouse could become a magnet for paramilitaries. With protesters and counterprotesters descending on the same locale, the occasion would tempt street warfare.
The prospect of such a spectacle fills Merrick Garland with dread, his friends say. Indeed, for much of his tenure he’s been attacked by critics who claim he lacks the fortitude to meet the moment, or to take on an adversary like Trump. Members of the House committee charged with examining the events of January 6 have publicly taunted Garland for moving tentatively when compared to their own aggressive and impeccably stage-managed hearings. Representative Adam Schiff has complained, “I think there’s a real desire on the part of the attorney general, for the most part, not to look backward.” Privately, even President Joe Biden has grumbled about the plodding pace of Garland’s investigations.
But I believe, if the evidence of wrongdoing is as convincing as it seems, he is going to indict Trump anyway.
Over the course of my reporting, I came to appreciate that the qualities that strike Garland’s critics as liabilities would make him uniquely suited to overseeing Trump’s prosecution. The fact that he is strangely out of step with the times—that he is one of the few Americans in public life who don’t channel or perform political anger—equips him to craft the strongest, most fair-minded case, a case that a neutral observer would regard as legitimate.
United States v. Donald Trump would be about more than punishing crimes—whether inciting an insurrection, scheming to undermine an election, or absconding with classified documents. An indictment would be a signal to Trump, as well as to would-be imitators, that no one is above the law. This is the principle that has animated Garland’s career, which began as the Justice Department was attempting to reassert its independence, and legitimacy, after the ugly meddling of the Nixon years. If Garland has at times seemed daunted by the historic nature of the moment, that is at least in part because he appreciates how closely his next move will be studied, and the role it will play in heading off—or not—the next catastrophe.
I have also come to see that the Garland of 2022 is not the same man who was sworn into office as attorney general in March of the previous year. At the age of 69, his temperament is firmly fixed, but a year and a half on the job has transformed him.
It was just a few months ago that I saw a different version of the attorney general begin to emerge. While his investigation of January 6 continued at its slow pace, his sparring with Trump over the documents at Mar-a-Lago escalated quickly. The former president is no longer a figure on television, but his adversary in court. Garland approached him with an aggression that suggested he was prepared to do the very thing that critics said he didn’t have the guts to do.
The Merrick Garland who took over the Justice Department may have hoped he could restore its reputation without confronting Trump, or dragging him to a courtroom. But the nation has changed in the intervening months, and so has he.
President Barack Obama’s announcement for his Supreme Court nomination is shown on a TV in an empty Senate Radio TV studio on March 16, 2016, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong / Getty)
Before he became attorney general, Merrick Garland’s life was defined by a job he has never held.
Twice, Barack Obama considered lifting him from the D.C. Circuit onto the Supreme Court, and twice Obama passed him over. After those failed attempts to move beyond the short list, Garland seemed to age out of the possibility, past the point where the actuarial tables suggest that an appointment is a worthwhile investment. Then, in 2016, Antonin Scalia died; Garland got his nomination after all—only to see it scuttled in the Senate by the obstructionist tactics of Mitch McConnell.
When Garland returned to the Court of Appeals after his nomination was blocked, he was greeted with an ovation from his colleagues. No doubt it was heartwarming, but the truth was that he was returning to an old routine after having been taunted with the job of his dreams. It would have only been human for his mind to ponder a fresh start.
In the fall of 2020, with polls showing Joe Biden primed to defeat Donald Trump, friends began asking, Would you ever want to be attorney general?
When Garland’s name showed up on the list of Biden’s potential AGs, it was fair to assume that he hoped the job would nudge the Supreme Court debacle out of the first paragraph of his obituary. But Garland told friends that he wanted to return to the Justice Department, where he’d worked as a young lawyer and first found his sense of professional purpose, to restore an institution that he revered. It had been damaged by a succession of Trump appointees, who carried out the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, distorted the findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation, and allegedly brought cases in order to settle the president’s political scores.
As Garland prepared to take the job, he often sounded nostalgic for his first stint at DOJ, in the final years of the Carter administration, when he worked as a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Nobody thinks of the late ’70s as the height of idealism, but that’s how Garland remembers the time.
In the aftermath of Watergate, he sat by Civiletti’s side as he continued the work of reforming the Justice Department: writing new rules and procedures to prevent another president from ever abusing the institution. They were preserving the rule of law by bubble-wrapping it in norms, so that it would be thoroughly insulated from political pressure.
This June, I visited Garland in his wood-paneled office, one of the cozier rooms in DOJ’s cavernous building. He wore a navy suit that looked as if it had been purchased at Brooks Brothers in 1985. A tray of coffee with demitasses was laid out on a coffee table, but he sipped from a mug.
As Garland spoke about his approach to his job, he asked an aide to pass him a copy of a tattered blue book that was sitting on a side table, Principles of Federal Prosecution, published during his time with Civiletti. He kept extolling the neutrality of the department, how it should never favor friends or penalize foes, how it should only bring cases that persuade juries and survive appeals. “What I’m saying isn’t novel,” he said. “It’s all in here.”
Thumbing through the document, he seemed briefly distracted. I asked him if he’d had anything to do with its publication. “I helped edit it,” he said, and then wistfully recalled his mentors in the department who oversaw its production. It struck me that Garland isn’t just by-the-book. In some profound sense, he is the book.
This unbending fidelity to rules and norms has often looked impotent in the face of the democratic emergency that is Donald Trump. In his quest to avoid the taint of politics, Garland allowed certain Trump-era policies to remain in place. He ordered the DOJ to continue defending Trump against a defamation lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of raping her. He has permitted the Special Prosecutor John Durham’s investigation of the origins of Russiagate to persist, despite a raft of Democrats clamoring for him to shut it down. (I should note here that Durham mentioned my reporting on Trump and Russia in court filings, and his lawyers asked witnesses about it in his prosecution of a Clinton campaign lawyer, whom a jury acquitted.) Those flash points created an impression of passivity; instead of rushing to confront the legacy of Trumpism, he seemed to be meekly deferring to it.
It is not difficult to see why anti-Trump partisans could grow frustrated with Garland’s obdurate commitment to the traditions of the department when Trump is so intent on trampling them. His faith in them feels antiquated—and detached from the Democratic Party’s broad reconsideration of norms that were once seen as pillars of the American system. Not so long ago, expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court or eliminating the filibuster seemed like subversive thought experiments. Now they are touted as necessities for preserving majoritarian politics.
But the post-Watergate reforms that Garland wants to defend weren’t aimed at abstract threats. They emerged as responses to very real abuse committed within living memory. And they arguably did an effective job at blunting Donald Trump’s desire to turn the Justice Department into his plaything, even if they couldn’t prevent every transgression. Norms held and prevented nightmare scenarios from unfolding.
These norms may not hold the next time, but that doesn’t obviate their ethical power. No matter how much one fears Trump, the prosecution of a former president can’t be undertaken lightly. The expectation that political enemies will be treated fairly is the basis for the legitimacy of the entire legal system. That’s why Garland’s hand-wringing and fussiness matter. Any indictment he brings against Trump will have survived his scrutiny, which means that it will have cleared a high bar.
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick takes a meeting with Amy Jeffries (left), counsel to the DAG, and Merrick Garland (right), principal associate DAG, in her office at the Justice Department, in September 1995. (Bill O’Leary / The Washington Post / Getty)
When Garland talks about how he handles complex, emotionally fraught investigations, there’s a historical antecedent that he likes to cite as his formative experience. On the morning of April 19, 1995, the Department of Justice’s leadership learned that a bomb had destroyed much of a massive federal office building in Oklahoma City, ripping off its facade and killing 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s day-care center.
At the time, Garland held a job known as the PADAG, or the principal associate deputy attorney general. It’s a mystifying title, but one of the most prized offices in the department: It afforded him a seat in the attorney general’s morning meeting and access to DOJ’s most closely held secrets. Garland used his privileged position to ask if he could travel to Oklahoma City to oversee the investigation.
Before Garland left, Attorney General Janet Reno pulled him aside. Of all things, she wanted to talk about O. J. Simpson. The football star’s trial was going to be running on a split screen alongside the Oklahoma City investigation. Everything the public was about to witness in a Los Angeles courtroom would make the justice system look like a tawdry joke. She told Garland that his job was to show how the legal system could be the antithesis of that circus.
“I want you to be meticulous,” she told him. “I don’t want to have any chance of losing a conviction. I want this to be picture perfect, so that the public understands what justice is.”
The bombing case triggered a strong emotional reaction across America, particularly those who feared the emergence of right-wing militias. Although much more straightforward than the chaotic events of January 6, the crime ignited a similarly intense desire to quickly punish the perpetrators. But Garland vowed to Reno that he would take the long way around.
Paying strict attention to procedure came naturally to Garland, even when the FBI seemed inclined to take shortcuts. He ordered agents to obtain warrants and subpoenas from courts even when they weren’t unambiguously necessary. In his quest for immaculate justice, his investigators conducted 28,000 interviews.
These decisions arguably made the prosecution’s case harder and certainly delayed the gratification of a conviction. But they also guarded against humiliating slipups that might have provided the basis for an appeal. In the end, Timothy McVeigh’s attempt to overturn his conviction failed and he was executed in 2001. His co-conspirator Terry Nichols was sentenced to life, a sentence that an Appeals court affirmed.
Garland has taken a similarly meticulous approach to Trump. Rather than starting with the offenses of the president himself, the department has devoted its resources to tediously building cases against every gym teacher and accountant who breached the Capitol on January 6, some 900 indictments in total. The volume of cases has risked overtaxing prosecutors—and pushing back the work of building more-complicated cases against Trump’s inner circle.
But what looks like donkeywork is a necessary step in a formulaic approach, a set of prescribed practices that have their own embedded wisdom. As Garland explains it, the department has no choice but to begin with the most “overt crimes,” and slowly build from there. To start with Trump would have reeked of politics—and it would have been bad practice, forgoing all the witnesses and cellphone data collected by starting at the bottom.
By focusing on Trump, Garland’s critics tend to underestimate the importance of the other arms of the January 6 prosecutions. The Justice Department has made an example of the foot soldiers of the insurrection, and has thus deflated attendance at every subsequent “Stop the Steal” rally. Evidence supplied by the minnows who invaded the Capitol helped the Justice Department indict leaders of the Oath Keepers (Elmer Stewart Rhodes) and Proud Boys (Henry “Enrique” Tarrio) on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most meaningful steps that the government has taken to dismantle the nation’s right-wing paramilitaries. (Both men have pleaded not guilty.)
Based on subpoenas and the witnesses seen exiting the grand jury, the department is clearly moving up the ladder, getting ever closer to Trump’s inner circle and to Trump himself. But there comes a moment when the rule book that Garland reveres ceases to provide such clear guidance. That’s the juncture that allows for prosecutorial discretion. In the case of Donald Trump, the prosecutor is Merrick Garland and discretion would allow him to decide that an indictment is simply not worth the social cost, or that the case is strong but not strong enough. Garland’s critics fret that when confronted with this moment, his penchant for caution will take hold.
Over the course of his career, institutions were good to Merrick Garland—and he was good to institutions. He was a true believer in the American system. That’s why he struggled to come to terms with the reality of Mitch McConnell.
For 293 days after Obama announced his selection to fill Scalia’s seat, Garland was trapped in limbo, waiting for Senate Republicans to provide him a fair hearing. The whole world knew that they never would; Garland remained patient. One of his old teachers from Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe, told me, “What was heartbreaking was to see that the system really wasn’t as good as he hoped it was.”
The human response to McConnell’s brazen tactics was rage. Garland’s wife and daughters certainly channeled that emotion, as did his friends and former clerks. The people around Garland couldn’t contain their fury, but he did. When friends would call to vent, he would try to comfort them, to tamp down their ire. “Don’t feel too sorry for me,” he told them. “I’ve had a great run. Don’t worry.”
Such placidity wasn’t anomalous. He was always the calm one, his friend Jamie Gorelick told me. Ever since college, he had counseled her to not let emotions roil her. Back then, she was enraged that Harvard gave free football tickets to men, not women. After a contentious meeting where she railed against the injustice, he took her aside: “You’re right to be upset, but you shouldn’t be this upset. Over time, this will get fixed.” Gorelick valued his circumspection so highly that she hired him to serve as her deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. Even then, his advice was the same. He encouraged her to put angry letters she wrote in a drawer, until she restored her sense of equilibrium.
This tendency could be described as repression. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had another name for it. He called it the “spiritual discipline against resentment,” a phrase from his theory of political persuasion. He urged victims of injustice to resist the self-defeating instinct to righteously trumpet their own victimhood. That’s not a personal credo for Garland, or anything like it. But with his preternatural self-control and his sense of rectitude, he seems to regard anger, especially on his own behalf, as a dangerous emotion.
This can make him seem out of step with the zeitgeist, which is defined by rage. On January 7, 2021, when Joe Biden unveiled him as his nominee, he seemed strangely detached from the depredations of the previous day, which he referred to only once, as “yesterday’s events in Washington.” He argued that the insurrection showed that “the rule of law is not just some lawyer’s turn of phrase.” Even accounting for Garland’s tendency to overthink his choice of words, his conclusion felt like a massive underreaction.
With the investigation of Trump, the legitimacy of the judicial system is at risk. Of course, the MAGA set will never regard an indictment of their leader as anything other than a sham. But the perceptions of the rest of the country matter too. And it’s important that, if DOJ moves forward with an indictment, the public views it as the product of a scrupulous examination of facts, not the impulse for revenge. Indicting the candidate of the opposing party, if it occurs, should feel reluctant, as if there’s no other choice.
The attorney-general nominee Merrick Garland is sworn in during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 22, 2021. (Al Drago / The New York Times / Redux)
It’s hard not to think of Garland as a character from another time. When I suggested this to him, he protested, jokingly (I think), citing a marker of cool highly significant to males in their 60s. “You know, I was there at the Bruce Springsteen concert in 1974, the one Jon Landau wrote about in his famous column in TheReal Paper.‘I’ve seen the future of rock and roll.’”
When he was on the bench, Garland would occasionally orient new clerks to his idiosyncrasies by playing a song by the band Vampire Weekend which contains the refrain, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” It was amusing because the band was so distant from his range of expected cultural references, and because the strait-laced attorney general would never utter that sentence himself. It was also funny because Garland does care about punctuation, deeply.
Garland likes everything in its place. When, as a judge, he asked his clerks to prepare reading material, they would comb through it with a ruler in hand. The margins needed to be just so, with space for them to draw lines next to matters of import. A single line drawn parallel meant the clerks had material worthy of his attention; a triple line signaled the crux of the argument. When he found methods that worked, he clung to them. He may have been the last American to use WordPerfect.
Garland took office as attorney general with old-fashioned ideas about what was possible. He told his aides that he hoped he might help lower the temperature in the nation. He believed that he could use the department to restore a measure of civility that seemed to slip away during the Trump years.
One of the exhilarations of the new job was the sense of agency it offered. As a judge, he couldn’t pick and choose the matters that came across his desk. The docket was the docket. Now he could get exercised about an article in the morning newspaper, walk into his 9 a.m. meeting with deputies, and then insist that the department do something about it.
Every day, Garland kept encountering stories about appalling instances of harassment, a national epidemic of rudeness and rage. Flight attendants risked physical assault for asking passengers to wear masks. School-board officials received death threats. Police officers were harangued for doing their job.
Garland wanted to make an example of such behavior. The department began to aggressively prosecute illegal threats of violence, seeking stiff penalties for the sake of deterrence. But to his dismay, these efforts proved ineffective. No matter how many cases he brought, the DOJ couldn’t staunch the flood of invective. There was something profoundly wrong with the national culture, a dyspepsia that undermined the possibilities for collective coexistence and healthy democratic practice.
This year, as he came to understand the limitations of the job—all the broken facets of American life that the department is incapable of repairing—he began to appreciate the depths of the nation’s crisis. His public comments began to betray a sense of alarm. In May, he returned to Harvard to deliver a commencement address, issuing a grim report on the health of democracy. The historic metaphor he used to capture the urgency of the moment was the Justice Department’s founding in 1870, when its task was crushing the nascent Ku Klux Klan. Although the speech had grace notes of hope—the rousing calls to service that are de rigueur for the genre—it was hard to avoid its underlying pessimism, his warning that “there may be worse to come.”
At one point during my June visit, I called Garland an “institutionalist,” which I thought was an unobjectionable description of his political temperament. Upon hearing this, he turned to his aides, “I don’t think I’ve ever used the word to describe myself.” If I wanted, they would check, he said. But he was certain he had never uttered it.
I was surprised he would resist the term. I think he wanted me to understand that he is alive to the perils facing democracy—and isn’t naive about what it will take to defeat them. Norms alone are not enough to stop a determined authoritarian. It wasn’t quite a reversal in his thinking; radicalizing Merrick Garland would be impossible. But it was an evolution. His faith in institutions had begun to wobble.
With his optimism bruised, and his heightened sensitivity to the imminent threats to democracy, he’s shown a greater appetite for confrontation. There is no sharper example of this than his willingness to spar with Trump over the sensitive documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Searching the home of a former president is unprecedented. The warrant was executed knowing that Trump would demagogue the event—and that he might even encourage his supporters to respond violently.
With Trump, Garland has lately shown a pugnacity that few had previously associated with him. When Trump began to assail the search of Mar-a-Lago, Garland asked the court to unseal the inventory of seized documents, essentially calling out the ex-president’s lies. Rather than passively watching attacks on FBI agents, whom Trump scurrilously accused of planting evidence, Garland passionately backed the bureau. As Trump’s lawyers have tried to use a sympathetic judge to slow down the department’s investigation, Garland’s lawyers have responded with bluntly dismissive briefs, composed without the least hint of deference. (“Plaintiff again implies that he could have declassified the records before leaving office. As before, however, Plaintiff conspicuously fails to represent, much less show, that he actually took that step.”)
The filings can be read as a serialized narrative, with each installment adding fresh details about Trump’s mishandling of documents and his misleading of investigators. On August 31, the department tucked a photo into a brief, showing classified documents arrayed across a Mar-a-Lago carpet. This was both a faithful cataloging of evidence and sly gamesmanship. Garland permitted the department to release an image sure to implant itself in the public’s mind and define the news cycle. Lawfaredescribed the entirety of that filing as “a show of force.”
In the Mar-a-Lago case, Garland is facing Trump in court for the first time. He arguably dillydallied on his way to the fight. But now that he’s entered it, he’s battling as if the reputation of the DOJ depends on winning it. During our interview, Garland reminded me that he was once a prosecutor himself. The unstated implication was that he knows what it takes to prevail.
There’s a date on the calendar when excessive meticulousness potentially precludes holding Trump to account. On January 20, 2025, Merrick Garland might not have a job. His post could be occupied by an avatar of the hard right. And any plausible Republican president will drop the case against Donald Trump on their first day in office.
The deadline for indicting Trump is actually much sooner than the next Inauguration Day. According to most prosecutors, a judge would give Trump nearly a year to prepare for trial, maybe a bit longer. That’s not special treatment; it’s just how courts schedule big cases.
If Trump is indicted for his role on January 6, he might get even more time than that, given the volume of evidence that the Justice Department would pass along in discovery. And if the evidence includes classified documents, the court will need to sort out how to handle that, another source of delay.
Depending on the charges, a trial itself could take another week—or as long as six months. That means Garland has until the late spring of 2023 to bring an indictment that has a chance of culminating in a jury verdict before the change of administration.
The excruciating conundrum that Garland faces is also a liberating one. He can’t win politically. He will either antagonize the right or disappoint the left. Whatever he decides, he will become deeply unpopular. He will unavoidably damage the reputation of the institution he loves so dearly with a significant portion of the populace.
Faced with so unpalatable a choice, he doesn’t really have one. Because he can’t avoid tearing America further apart, he’ll decide based on the evidence—and on whether that evidence can persuade a jury. As someone who has an almost metaphysical belief in the rule book, he can allow himself to apply his canonical texts.
That’s what he’s tried to emphatically explain over the past months. Every time he’s asked about the former president, he responds, “No one is above the law.” He clearly gets frustrated that his answer fails to satisfy his doubters. I believe that his indictment of Trump will prove that he means it.
ATLANTA—The three dozen young Black men and women who gathered in a church meeting room last Friday night were greeted with a rousing exhortation that had the added benefit of being true.
In welcoming remarks, Bryce Berry, a senior at nearby Morehouse College and the president of the Young Democrats of Georgia club, told the group that none of the party’s national-policy accomplishments of the past two years would have been possible without people like them. “Without young Georgians, young Black Georgians,” Berry said for emphasis, “there would be no Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, no American Rescue Plan … no Inflation Reduction Act, no student-debt relief, and no gun-safety bill.”
It was the sort of thing speakers always say to motivate a crowd at political rallies. But in this case it was historically accurate: Massive turnout and huge margins among young voters, especially young voters of color, were crucial to the twin runoff victories of Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January 2021 that delivered Democrats their unexpected majority in the upper chamber.
Young adults have become an essential electoral asset for Democrats—and loom as a potentially decisive factor in determining whether the party can avoid the worst outcomes up and down the ballot this November. In particular, young voters may decide whether Democrats can preserve the fragile hold on the Senate that Georgia provided to them.
A sharp generation gap is among the most consistent findings in public polling across almost every competitive Senate race this year. Here in Georgia, for instance, an array of recent public polls (including surveys by Quinnipiac University, Marist College, Monmouth University, and the University of Georgia) have found Warnock leading the Republican Herschel Walker by as much as two to one among young adults from about 18 to 34 and consistently by a margin of about 10 percentage points among those in early middle age. Polls almost always show Walker at least slightly ahead among those in their later working years, and solidly leading among those 65 and older. (This week’s explosive allegations about Walker—the claim that he allegedly funded an abortion for a girlfriend and the subsequent accusations of domestic violence from his son—seem likely to weaken him, perhaps substantially, with every group, but are unlikely to erase these sharp generational differences.)
These patterns are so common across the competitive states that it’s hard to imagine Democrats maintaining their Senate majority unless young voters like those who gathered at Atlanta’s Allen Temple AME Church turn out in substantial numbers.
Compared with older generations, Millennials and members of Generation Z are more racially diverse, more likely to hold postsecondary degrees, and less likely to identify with any religious tradition. Both cohorts have leaned sharply Democratic since the first Millennials entered the electorate in large numbers in the 2004 election; the party has routinely carried about three-fifths of young adults in recent presidential contests. In 2018, Democrats hit a peak of support among young voters, winning two-thirds of those younger than 30 and three-fifths of those ages 30 to 44, according to estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm.
Millennials and Gen Z are especially crucial to Democratic fortunes across Sun Belt states like Georgia and Arizona. In this region, younger generations are far more racially diverse than the mostly white, older voters who provide the backbone of GOP strength. In Arizona, for instance, Latino voters and other people of color compose almost three-fifths of the population under 30 but less than one-fifth of the population over 65, according to calculations from census data by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro. In Georgia, Black voters and other people of color represent half of eligible voters under 45 but only three in 10 of those over 65. The gap between what I’ve called “the brown and the gray”—the diverse younger and the mostly white older generations—is comparably large in Texas and Nevada and nearly as big in North Carolina, Frey’s data show.
For Democrats, this year’s nightmare scenario of losing both the House and Senate is a repeat of 2010 and 2014, when the GOP midterm sweeps were turbocharged by a catastrophic falloff in turnout among young people from the presidential race two years earlier.
The anemic youth turnout in those off-year elections during Barack Obama’s presidency fueled a widespread perception that Democrats now faced a structural disadvantage in midterms because the electorate in those years was destined to be much older and whiter than in the presidential contest. But the 2018 results upended that assumption: Much more robust turnout among young adults helped power the Democratic gains that allowed them to recapture the House of Representatives. Compared with 2014, youth turnout increased in every state in 2018, more than doubling across the country overall, Circle, a think tank at Tufts University that studies young voters, has calculated. Some of the biggest increases occurred in Sun Belt states where the youth population is the most racially diverse, including Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.
The turnout surge continued into 2020, when exactly half of adults younger than 30 showed up to vote, a big increase from the 39 percent in 2016, Circle concluded. Georgia again ranked among the states with the biggest youth-turnout increase compared with 2016—a key factor in the Democrats’ razor-thin victories there in the presidential race and the two Senate runoffs.
Democrats this year are highly unlikely to win as big a share of youth voters as they did during their 2018 sweep (they didn’t even equal it in 2020). But one of the pivotal questions remaining for the 2022 election is how close Democrats can come to matching the strength with young voters they displayed while Donald Trump was in the White House.
Democrats face some serious headwinds. Never enthusiastic about President Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic primaries, young people have given him lackluster approval ratings throughout his presidency. Generally operating with less of a financial cushion than older voters, young people have also been more affected by the highest inflation in four decades. “The cost of living is going up, but our salaries are not,” Alexia Brookins, a manager at a construction company, told me at the AME event sponsored by the group Millennials of Faith last weekend.
In a mid-September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, just 37 percent of Millennials and Gen Z said that Biden’s actions had strengthened the economy; 55 percent said that he had weakened it. In a late-September Yahoo News/YouGov survey, only about one-fifth of young adults ages 18 to 44 said life was better for people like them since Biden took office (the rest said it was unchanged or worse).
Terrance Woodbury, a partner at HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young voters of color, worries that these verdicts will make it difficult for Democrats to reach the turnout and margins they need among young voters. In polling that HIT recently conducted for the NAACP, he told me, three-fourths of Black adults younger than 50 said their lives had not improved since Biden took office.
Woodbury told me that although the media seem fixated on whether potential Republican gains among men will widen the Black gender gap this year, he expects that the “generational gap” in the African American community will be much wider. “Younger voters are much more likely to say Democrats take Black voters for granted, much less likely to approve of the direction of the country, and much less likely to approve of the performance of Democrats in Congress and the White House,” he told me. “All of that is significantly higher by generation than by gender. I actually do think there is a real risk of Democrats underperforming with young voters, and specifically young voters of color.” Equis Research, a Democratic polling firm that specializes in Latino voters, raised similar warnings about young Hispanic voters in a late-September memo analyzing the upcoming election.
But other factors may help Democrats approach, if not necessarily match, their recent advantages with young voters.
More young adults may vote in 2022 simply because so many of them registered and voted in 2018 and 2020. One reason for that is structural: “There are more young people on the voter rolls because of the [2018 and 2020] elections, which is a huge boost, because it means they are more likely to be contacted by parties and organizations,” and those contacts increase the likelihood of people voting, Abby Kiesa, Circle’s deputy director, told me.
The other key reason is attitudinal: Higher youth turnout may mean that not only is voting becoming a habit for those who have already done it; it is also becoming more expected among the 18-year-olds who age into the electorate every two years (more than 8 million of them since 2020, Circle projects). At the AME event, for instance, Kendeius Mitchell, a disability-claims manager, told me that youth engagement in Georgia is feeding on itself. “Just having it around so much in the conversation now is making people take accountability,” he said.
John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, sees the same trend in the institute’s national surveys. “Voting … could be becoming a part of this new generation and how they think,” he told me.
Also lifting Democratic hopes is the party’s summer succession of policy advances on issues important to young people. Della Volpe said the “No. 1” criticism of Biden among young adults in the Harvard poll was “ineffectiveness.” But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its sweeping provisions to combat climate change, and the president’s decision to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers have provided Democratic organizers and ad makers something they lacked earlier this year: evidence to argue to young adults that their votes did produce change on things they care about. Biden gave organizers another talking point yesterday afternoon, when he announced a sweeping pardon of all people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law.
On the ground in Georgia, Keron Blair, the chief organizing and field officer for the New Georgia Project, a grassroots political organization founded by the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, told me that with the Democrats’ recent successes, “it feels a little bit easier” than in the spring to make the case to young adults that their vote counts.
Looking across the overall record of Democrats since they took power, “people aren’t like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” Blair told me. “But people are clear that some of the wins and the political and economic shifts that we are seeing [are] the result of the [voting] choices that people have made.”
Also working for Democrats is the gulf in values between most young voters and the Trump-era Republican Party. Fully 70 percent of adults younger than 30, for instance, said in a Pew Research Center poll this summer that abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, by far the most of any age group. That places them in sharp opposition to a GOP that is intensifying talk of passing a national ban on abortion if it wins control of Congress. “If we maintain that [recent] surge among young voters and voters of color,” Woodbury said, “they are voting against the crazy on the other side.”
Although different public surveys have sent different signals about youth engagement, the latest IOP youth survey, which is considered a benchmark in the field, found that as many young people said they “definitely” intend to vote this fall as did in 2018.
That prospect points toward an incremental but inexorable power shift. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Gen Z roughly equaled Baby Boomers and their elders as a share of eligible voters. By 2024, the younger generations will establish a clear advantage. As their numbers grow, so does their capacity to influence the national direction. There’s no guarantee they will exercise that inherent power next month by turning out to vote in large numbers. But more young people appear to be recognizing how much their choices can matter. Berry, the young Georgia activist, told me that his message to his friends is centered on understanding the strength in numbers that they are accumulating: “I really impress on folks, ‘Look at what happened because of you. You understood the moment in 2020; now you have to understand the moment in 2022.’”
A few months ago, I got food poisoning. The sequence of events that led to my downfall began with a carton of discounted grocery-store sushi purchased and consumed on a Thursday, which led to me waking up a little queasy on a Friday, which devolved into a 12-hour stretch of me vomiting and holding myself in a fetal position, until my legs ached from dehydration. On Saturday the smell of my partner cooking breakfast still made me gag; I sipped water, napped fitfully, and nibbled little golf balls of white rice.
But Sunday, glorious Sunday, I awoke to a marvelous lack of pain and fatigue. The brain fog was gone. My skin felt plump with fluids. Enthralled by recovery, I found myself behaving with uncharacteristic serenity. When I dropped and broke a ceramic bowl while unloading the dishwasher, I didn’t curse and freak out. Instead, I swept up the shards with cheer. I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff. I was my normal self again, and it felt sublime.
Yet as I relished in my newfound bliss, a foreboding thought gnawed at me: I knew that as the hours passed and the specter of illness retreated, my fresh perspective, too, would fade. So much of my exuberance was defined by absence, the lifting of the burden of aches and puking. It would only be a matter of time until normal felt normal again, and I’d be back to worrying about all the petty minutiae I always worry about.
People have different baselines of health, and some might be more or less appreciative of whatever condition they’re in. Even so, humans have long lamented the ephemeral joy of relief. The feeling manifests in all kinds of circumstances: meeting a deadline, passing a test, finishing a marathon. And it can be especially acute in matters of wellness. “Health is not valued, till sickness comes,” wrote the 17th-century British scholar Thomas Fuller. Or as the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer bemoaned: “Just as we do not feel the health of our entire body but only the small place where the shoe pinches, so too we do not think of the totality of our well-functioning affairs, but of some insignificant trifle that annoys us.”
So many of us, in other words, are very bad at appreciating good health when we’re fortunate enough to have it. And anyone experiencing this transcendent gratitude is unlikely to hold on to it for long. Indeed, by Monday morning, the afterglow of recovery had worn off; I was engrossed in emails and work again, unaware that just 60 hours prior I could barely sit upright in bed, let alone at my desk. This troubled me. Am I cursed to be like this forever? Or is there anything I can do to change?
To some extent, I’m sad to report, the answer might well be no. While certainly some people can have experiences of major illness or injury that change their entire outlook on life, the tendency to revert to forgetfulness seems to run pretty deep in the human psyche. We have limited attentional resources, the UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons told me, so in the interest of survival, our brain tends not to waste them focusing on systems that are working well. Instead, our mind evolved to identify threats and problems. Psychologists call this negativity bias: We direct our attention more to what’s wrong than what’s right. If your body’s in check, your brain seems to reason, better to stress about the project that’s overdue or the conflict with your friend than sit around feeling like everything’s fine.
A second psychological phenomenon that might work against any enduring joy in recovery from illness is hedonic adaptation, the notion that after positive or negative life events we, basically, get used to our new circumstances and return to a baseline level of subjective well-being. Hedonic adaptation has been used to explain why, in the long term, people who won the lottery were no happier than those who didn’t; and why romantic partners lose passion, excitement, and appreciation for each other over time.
Arguably, adaptation need not be seen as any great tragedy. For health, in particular, there’s an element of practicality in the human capacity to exist without fussy attentiveness. This is how we’re supposed to operate. “If our body isn’t causing us problems, it doesn’t actually pay to walk around being grateful all the time. You should be using your mental energy on other things,” Amie Gordon, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, told me. If we had to sense our clothes on our bodies all day, for example, we’d constantly be distracted, she said. (This is actually a symptom of certain chronic disorders, like fibromyalgia—Lauren Zalewski, a writer who was diagnosed with both fibromyalgia and lupus 22 years ago, told me that it makes her skin sensitive to the touch, as if she constantly has the flu.)
All that said, there are real costs to taking health for granted. For one, it can make you less healthy, if as a result you don’t take care of yourself. For another, maintaining some level of appreciation is a good way to avoid becoming an entitled jerk. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, there has been “this language around how the ‘only’ people dying are ‘old people’ or people with pre-existing conditions,” as if these deaths were more acceptable, Emily Taylor, a vice president for the Long-COVID Alliance, a group that advocates for research into post-viral illnesses, told me. Acknowledging that our own health is tenuous—and that certainly, many of us are going to get old—could counter this kind of callousness and encourage people to treat the elderly and those with chronic conditions or disabilities with more respect and kindness, Taylor argued.
In my view, there’s something to be gained on an individual level, too. In recent years I’ve seen friends and loved ones deal with life-altering injuries and diagnoses. I know that one’s circumstances can turn on a phone call or a moment of inattention. To be healthy, to have basic needs met—to have life be so “normal” that it’s even a little boring—is a luxury. While I am living in those blessedly unremarkable times, I don’t want my fortune to escape my notice. When things are good, I want to know how good I’ve got it.
What I want, really, is to hold on to a sense of gratitude. In the field of psychology, gratitude can be something of a loaded term. Over the past decade or so, articles, podcast episodes, self-help books, research papers, celebrities, and wellness influencers alike have all extolled the benefits of being thankful. (Oprah famously kept a gratitude journal for more than a decade.) At times, gratitude’s popularity has been to its own detriment: The modern-day gratitude movement has been criticized for overstating its potential benefits and pushing a Western, wealthy, and privileged perspective that can seem to ignore the realities of extreme suffering or systemic injustices. It’s also annoying to constantly be told that you should really be more thankful for stuff.
But part of the reason gratitude has become such a popular concept is due to bountiful research that does point to genuine emotional upsides. Feeling grateful has been associated with better life satisfaction, an increased sense of well-being, and a greater ability to form and maintain relationships, among other benefits. (The research on gratitude’s effects on physical health is inconclusive.) For me, though, the pull is less scientific and more commonsense anyway: Learning to genuinely appreciate day-to-day boons like having good health, or food in the fridge, seems like being able to tap into a renewable source of contentment. It’s always so easy to find stress in life. Let me remember the things to smile about, too.
One way to make the most of gratitude may be to reframe how people tend to think of it. A popular misconception, Emmons told me over email, is that gratitude is a positive emotion that results from something good happening to us. (This might also be part of the reason it can be hard to appreciate conditions like health that for many people remain stable day after day.) Gratitude is an emotion, but it can also be a disposition, something researchers call “trait gratitude.” Some people are more predisposed to feeling thankful than others, by virtue of factors like genetics and personality. But Emmons says this kind of “undentable thankfulness” can also be learned, by developing habits that contribute to more of a persistent, ambient awareness, rather than a conditional reaction to ever-changing circumstances.
What does this look like, practically speaking? “I don’t know that we can, with every breath we have every moment, feel grateful that we’re breathing. That’s a pretty tall order,” says Gordon. “But that’s not to say that you don’t build in a moment for it at some point in your day.” If you’re recovering from a cold, for example, you can practice pausing whenever you’re walking out the door to appreciate that your nose isn’t stuffy before just barreling on with life. Another tactic, from Emmons, is to reflect upon your worst moments, such as times you’ve been ill. “Our minds think in terms of counterfactuals,” he said, which are comparisons between the way things are and how they might have been. “When we remember how difficult life used to be and how far we have come, we set up an explicit contrast in our mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.”
You can also think of gratitude as an action, Emmons has written. This hews closer to the historical notion of gratitude, which as far back as the Roman days was associated with ideas like duty and reciprocity—when someone does something kind for us, we’re expected to return the favor, whether that’s thanking them, paying them back, or paying it forward. In that sense, being grateful for your body probably means doing your best to care for it (and, probably, refraining from risky behaviors like rolling the dice on discounted grocery-store sushi).
In 2015, Lauren Zalewski, the writer with fibromyalgia, founded an online community that supports people living with chronic pain by helping them to cultivate a grateful mindset. She tells me that before her diagnosis, she took her health for granted and “beat her body up.” Now, she eats vegan, takes supplements, does yoga, stretches, sleeps more, and gets sun regularly—these are the small things she has personally found helpful for managing her constant pain. “So while I am a chronically ill person,” she muses, “I consider myself pretty healthy.”
Looking back on my food-poisoning incident, I think I was primed to ruminate more deeply than usual on the topics of sickness and health. In the past two and a half years, I’ve watched COVID-19 show that anyone can get ill, perhaps seriously so. Now, as the head of the World Health Organization tells us that “the end is in sight” for the pandemic (and President Joe Biden controversially declares the pandemic over), it’s tempting to imagine that humanity is on the brink of waking up the morning after a hellish sickness.
It’s probably delusional to hope that even a global pandemic could prompt some kind of long-term collective mental shift about the impermanence of health, and of life. I didn’t become a radically different person after recovering from puking my guts out a few months ago either. But maybe the simple act of remembering the health we still have in the pandemic’s wake can make a small difference in how we go forward—if not as a society, then at least as individuals. I’m sure I’ll never fully override my tendency to take my body for granted until it’s too late. But for now, each day, I still get the golden opportunity to try. And I’d like to take it.
