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Tag: recent weeks

  • How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

    How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

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    Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. The post–Trump era had supposedly begun.

    Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.

    Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?

    I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.

    The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.

    My focus groups over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.

    First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.

    Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.

    But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.

    Read: Nikki Haley’s endgame

    “The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”

    And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.

    “We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”

    Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disruptor. In the business world, you bring in a disruptor when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”

    Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”

    “Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.

    Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”

    The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have serious concerns about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exception of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.

    DeSantis called the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley said the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump “on day one.”

    By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “diminished,” “unhinged,” “weak in the knees,” and “incredibly reckless,” but voters saw her raise her hand six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.

    If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”

    Read: Republicans are no longer a political party

    Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.

    In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”

    But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they came to believe that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.

    “I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”

    These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.

    DeSantis’s rise and fall is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging culture-war issues to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump not on steroids.”

    He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”

    But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.

    “I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”

    By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”

    This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.

    Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.

    This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.

    The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.

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    Sarah Longwell

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  • The End Is Coming for Trump’s GOP Rivals

    The End Is Coming for Trump’s GOP Rivals

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    The arctic chill that upended the final weekend of the Iowa Republican caucus provided a fitting end to a contest that has seemed frozen in place for months.

    This caucus has felt unusually lifeless, not only because former President Donald Trump has maintained an imposing and seemingly unshakable lead in the polls. That advantage was confirmed late Saturday night when the Des Moines Register, NBC, and Mediacom Iowa released their highly anticipated final pre-caucus poll showing Trump at 48 percent and, in a distant battle for second place, Nikki Haley at 20 percent and Ron DeSantis at 16 percent.

    The caucus has also lacked energy because Trump’s shrinking field of rivals has never appeared to have the heart for making an all-out case against him. “I think there was actually a decent electorate that had supported Trump in the past but were interested in looking for somebody else,” Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP activist who chaired Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, told me. But neither DeSantis nor Haley, he adds, found a message that dislodged nearly enough of them from the front-runner. “Trump has run as an incumbent, if you will, and dominated the media so skillfully that it took a lot of the energy out of the race,” Gross said.

    In retrospect, the constrictive boundaries for the GOP race were established when the candidates gathered for their first debate last August (without Trump, who has refused to attend any debate). The crucial moment came when Bret Baier, from Fox News Channel, asked the contenders whether they would support Trump as the nominee even if he was convicted of a crime “in a court of law.” All the contenders onstage raised their hand to indicate they would, except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two long shots at the periphery of the race. With that declaration, the candidates effectively placed the question of whether Trump is fit to be president again—the most important issue facing Republicans in 2024—out of bounds.

    That collective failure led to Christie’s withering moral judgment on the field when he quit the race last week: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.” But even in practical political terms, the choice not to directly address Trump’s fitness left his principal rivals scrambling to find an alternative way to contrast with the front-runner.

    Over time, DeSantis has built a coherent critique of Trump, though a very idiosyncratic one. DeSantis runs at Trump from the right, insisting that the man who devised and articulated the “America First” agenda can no longer be trusted to advance it. In his final appearances across Iowa, his CNN debate with Haley last week, and a Fox town hall, DeSantis criticized Trump’s presidential record and 2024 agenda as insufficiently conservative on abortion, LGBTQ rights, federal spending, confronting the bureaucracy, and shutting down the country during the pandemic. He has even accused Trump of failing to deport enough undocumented immigrants and failing to construct enough of his signature border wall.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    On issues where politicians in the center or left charge Trump with extremism, DeSantis inverts the accusation: The problem, he argues, is that Trump wasn’t extreme enough. The moment that best encapsulated DeSantis’s approach came in last week’s CNN debate. At one point, the moderators asked him about the claim from Trump’s lawyer that he cannot be prosecuted for any presidential action—including ordering the assassination of a political rival—unless he was first impeached and convicted. DeSantis insisted the problem was that in office, Trump was too restrained in using unilateral presidential authority. He complained that Trump failed to call in the National Guard over the objections of local officials to squelch civil unrest in the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. When DeSantis visited campaign volunteers last Friday, he indignantly complained “it’s just not true” that he has gone easy on Trump in these final days. “If you watched the debate,” DeSantis told reporters, “I hit on BLM, not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, Fauci, all those things.”

    Perhaps the prospect of impending defeat has concentrated the mind, but DeSantis in his closing trek across Iowa has offered perceptive explanations for why these attacks against Trump have sputtered. One is that Trump stifled the debates by refusing to participate in them. “It’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there,” DeSantis told reporters. “When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.” The other problem, he maintained, was that conservative media like Fox News act as “a praetorian guard” that suppresses criticism of Trump, even from the right.

    Those are compelling observations, but incomplete as an explanation. DeSantis’s larger problem may be that the universe of voters that wants Trumpism but doesn’t think Trump can be relied on to deliver it is much smaller than the Florida governor had hoped. One top Trump adviser told me that the fights Trump engaged in as president make it almost impossible to convince conservatives he’s not really one of them. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has endorsed DeSantis, likewise told me that amid all of Trump’s battles with the left, it’s easier to try to convince evangelical conservatives that the former president can’t win in November than that he has abandoned their causes.

    The analogy I’ve used for DeSantis’s strategy is that Trump is like a Mack truck barreling down the far-right lane of American politics, and that rather than trying to pass in all the space he’s left in the center of the road, DeSantis has tried to squeeze past him on the right shoulder. There’s just not a lot of room there.

    Even so, DeSantis’s complaints about Trump look like a closing argument from Perry Mason compared with the muffled, gauzy case that Haley has presented against him. DeSantis’s choice to run to Trump’s right created a vacuum that Haley, largely through effective performances at the early debates, has filled with the elements of the GOP coalition that have always been most dubious of Trump: moderates, suburbanites, college-educated voters. But that isn’t a coalition nearly big enough to win. And she has walked on eggshells in trying to reach beyond that universe to the Republican voters who are generally favorable toward Trump but began the race possibly open to an alternative—what the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres calls the “maybe Trump” constituency.

    The most notable thing in how Haley talks about Trump is that she almost always avoids value judgments. It’s time for generational change, she will say, or I will be a stronger general-election candidate who will sweep in more Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

    Read: The real reason Republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare

    At last week’s CNN debate, Haley turned up the dial when she that said of course Trump lost the 2020 election; that January 6 was a “terrible day”; and that Trump’s claims of absolute immunity were “ridiculous.” Those pointed comments probably offered a momentary glimpse of what she actually thinks about him. But in the crucial days before the caucus, Haley has reverted to her careful, values-free dissents. At one town hall conducted over telephone late last week, she said the “hard truths” Republicans had to face were that, although “President Trump was the right president at the right time” and “I agree with a lot of his policies,” the fact remained that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Talk about taking off the gloves.

    Jennifer Horn, the former Republican Party chair in New Hampshire who has become a fierce Trump critic, told me, “There’s no moral or ethical judgment against Trump from her. From anyone, really, but we’re talking about her. She says chaos follows him ‘rightly or wrongly.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about chaos. That’s not the issue with Trump. He’s crooked; he’s criminal; he incited an insurrection. That’s the case against Trump. And if his so-called strongest opponent won’t make the case against Trump, why should voters?”

    Gross, the longtime GOP activist, is supporting Haley, but even he is perplexed by her reluctance to articulate a stronger critique of the front-runner. “I don’t know what her argument is,” Gross told me. “I guess it’s: Get rid of the chaos. She’s got to make a strong case about why she’s the alternative, and it’s got to include some element of judgment.”

    The reluctance of DeSantis and Haley to fully confront the former president has created an utterly asymmetrical campaign battlefield because Trump has displayed no hesitation about attacking either of them. The super PAC associated with Trump’s campaign spent months pounding DeSantis on issues including supporting statehood for Puerto Rico and backing cuts in Social Security, and in recent weeks, Trump’s camp has run ads accusing Haley of raising taxes and being weak on immigration. In response, DeSantis and Haley have spent significantly more money attacking each other than criticizing, or even rebutting, Trump. Rob Pyers, an analyst with the nonpartisan California Target Book, has calculated that the principal super PAC supporting Trump has spent $32 million combined in ads against Haley and DeSantis; they have pummeled each other with a combined $38 million in negative ads from the super PACs associated with their campaigns. Meanwhile, the Haley and DeSantis super PACs have spent only a little more than $1 million in ads targeting Trump, who is leading them by as much as 50 points in national polls.

    Haley’s sharpest retort to any of Trump’s attacks has been to say he’s misrepresenting her record. During the CNN debate, Haley metronomically touted a website called DeSantislies.com, but if she has a similar page up about Trump, she hasn’t mentioned it. (Her campaign didn’t respond to a query about whether it plans to establish such a site.)

    “Calling him a liar right now is her strongest pushback, but I just don’t think GOP voters care about liars,” Horn told me. “If she engaged in a real battle with him for these last days [before New Hampshire], that would be fascinating to see. The fact that she’s not pushing back, the fact that she’s not running the strongest possible campaign as she’s coming down the stretch here, makes me wonder if she is as uncertain of her ability to win as I am.”

    Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to this careful approach to Trump, especially from Haley. A former top aide to one of Trump’s main rivals in the 2016 race told me that “nobody has found a message you can put on TV that makes Republicans like Trump less.” Some other veterans of earlier GOP contests believe that Haley and DeSantis were justified in initially trying to eclipse the other and create a one-on-one race with Trump. And for Haley, there’s also at least some argument for preserving her strongest case against Trump for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where a more moderate electorate may be more receptive than the conservative, heavily evangelical population that usually turns out for the caucus.

    “She has to draw much sharper contrasts,” Gross told me. “And to be fair to her, once she gets out of here, maybe she will. What she strikes me as is incredibly disciplined and calculating. So, I do think you’re going to see modulation.”

    DeSantis has the most to lose in Iowa, because a poor showing will almost certainly end his campaign, even if he tries to insist otherwise for a few weeks. For Haley, the results aren’t as important because whatever happens here, she will have another opportunity to create momentum in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her rising even as DeSantis craters. Still, if Haley is unable or unwilling to deliver a more persuasive argument against Trump, she too will quickly find herself with no realistic hope of overtaking the front-runner, whose lead in national polls of Republican voters continues to grow. That’s one thing common to winter in both Iowa and New Hampshire: It gets dark early.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Big COVID Question for Hospitals This Fall

    The Big COVID Question for Hospitals This Fall

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    Back in the spring, around the end of the COVID-19 public-health emergency, hospitals around the country underwent a change in dress code. The masks that staff had been wearing at work for more than three years vanished, in some places overnight. At UChicago Medicine, where masking policies softened at the end of May, Emily Landon, the executive medical director of infection prevention and control, fielded hate mail from colleagues, some chiding her for waiting too long to lift the requirement, others accusing her of imperiling the immunocompromised. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which did away with masking in April, ahead of many institutions, Tom Talbot, the chief hospital epidemiologist, was inundated with thank-yous. “People were ready; they were tired,” he told me. “They’d been asking for several months before that, ‘Can we not stop?’”

    But across hospitals and policies, infection-prevention experts shared one sentiment: They felt almost certain that the masks would need to return, likely by the end of the calendar year. The big question was exactly when.

    For some hospitals, the answer is now. In recent weeks, as COVID-19 hospitalizations have been rising nationwide, stricter masking requirements have returned to a smattering of hospitals in Massachusetts, California, and New York. But what’s happening around the country is hardly uniform. The coming respiratory-virus season will be the country’s first after the end of the public-health emergency—its first, since the arrival of COVID, without crisis-caliber funding set aside, routine tracking of community spread, and health-care precautions already in place. After years of fighting COVID in concert, hospitals are back to going it alone.

    A return to masking has a clear logic in hospitals. Sick patients come into close contact; medical procedures produce aerosols. “It’s a perfect storm for potential transmission of microbes,” Costi David Sifri, the director of hospital epidemiology at UVA Health, told me. Hospitals are on the front lines of disease response: They, more than nearly any other place, must prioritize protecting society’s vulnerable. And with one more deadly respiratory virus now in winter’s repertoire, precautions should logically increase in lockstep. But “there is no clear answer on how to do this right,” says Cameron Wolfe, an infectious-disease physician at Duke. Americans have already staked out their stances on masks, and now hospitals have to operate within those confines.

    When hospitals moved away from masking this spring, they each did so at their own pace—and settled on very different baselines. Like many other hospitals in Massachusetts, Brigham and Women’s Hospital dropped its mask mandate on May 12, the day the public-health emergency expired; “it was a noticeable difference, just walking around the hospital” that day, Meghan Baker, a hospital epidemiologist for both Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told me. UVA Health, meanwhile, weaned staff off of universal masking over the course of about 10 weeks.

    Most masks at the Brigham are now donned on only a case-by-case basis: when a patient has active respiratory symptoms, say, or when a health-care worker has been recently sick or exposed to the coronavirus. Staff also still mask around the same subset of vulnerable patients that received extra protection before the pandemic, including bone-marrow-transplant patients and others who are highly immunocompromised, says Chanu Rhee, an associate hospital epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. UVA Health, meanwhile, is requiring masks for everyone in the hospital’s highest-risk areas—among them, certain intensive-care units, as well as cancer, transplant, and infusion wards. And although Brigham patients can always request that their providers mask, at UVA, all patients are asked upon admission whether they’d like hospital staff to mask.

    Nearly every expert I spoke with told me they expected that masks would at some point come back. But unlike the early days of the pandemic, “there is basically no guidance from the top now,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said. The CDC still has a webpage with advice on when to mask. Those recommendations are tailored to the general public, though—and don’t advise covering up until COVID hospital admissions go “way high, when the horse has well and truly left the barn,” Landon, at UChicago, told me. “In health care, we need to do something before that”—tamping down transmission prior to wards filling up.

    More specific advice could still emerge from the CDC, or individual state health departments. But going forward, the assumption is that “each hospital is supposed to have its own general plan,” Rhee told me. (I reached out to the CDC repeatedly about whether it might update its infection-prevention-guidance webpage for COVID—last retooled in May—but didn’t receive a response.)

    Which leaves hospitals with one of two possible paths. They could schedule a start to masking season, based on when they estimate cases might rise—or they could react to data as they come in, tying masking policies to transmission bumps. With SARS-CoV-2 still so unpredictable, many hospitals are opting for the latter. That also means defining a true case rise—“what I think everybody is struggling with right now,” Rhee said. There is no universal definition, still, for what constitutes a surge. And with more immunity layered over the population, fewer infections are resulting in severe disease and death—even, to a limited extent, long COVID—making numbers that might have triggered mitigations just a year or two ago now less urgent catalysts.

    Read: The future of long COVID

    Further clouding the forecast is the fact that much of the data that experts once relied on to monitor COVID in the community have faded away. In most parts of the country, COVID cases are no longer regularly tallied; people are either not testing, or testing only at home. Wastewater surveillance and systems that track all influenza-like illnesses could provide some support. But that’s not a whole lot to go on, especially in parts of the country such as Tennessee, where sewage isn’t as closely tracked, Tom Talbot, of Vanderbilt, told me.

    Some hospitals have turned instead to in-house stats. At Duke—which has adopted a mitigation policy that’s very similar to UVA’s—Wolfe has mulled pulling the more-masking lever when respiratory viruses account for 2 to 4 percent of emergency and urgent-care visits; at UVA, Sifri has considered taking action once 1 or 2 percent of employees call out sick, with the aim of staunching sickness and preserving staff. “It really doesn’t take much to have an impact on our ability to maintain operations,” Sifri told me. But “I don’t know if those are the right numbers.” Plus, internal metrics are now tricky for the same reasons they’ve gotten shaky elsewhere, says Xiaoyan Song, the chief infection-control officer at Children’s National Hospital, in Washington, D.C. Screening is no longer routine for patients, skewing positivity stats; even sniffly health-care workers, several experts told me, are now less eager to test and report.

    Read: What COVID hospitalization numbers are missing

    For hospitals that have maintained a more masky baseline, scenarios in which universal masking returns are a little easier to envision and enact. At UChicago Medicine, Landon and her colleagues have developed a color-coded system that begins at teal—masking for high-risk patients, patients who request masked care, and anyone with symptoms, plus masking in high-risk areas—and goes through everyone-mask-up-everywhere red; their team plans to meet weekly to assess the situation, based on a variety of community and internal metrics, and march their masking up or down. Wolfe, of Duke, told me that his hospital “wanted to reserve a little bit of extra masking quite intentionally,” so that any shift back toward stricter standards would feel like less of a shock: Habits are hard to break and then reform.

    Other hospitals that have been living mostly maskless for months, though, have a longer road back to universal masking, and staff members who might not be game for the trek. Should masks need to return at the Brigham or Dana-Farber, for instance, “I suspect the reaction will be mixed,” Baker told me. “So we really are trying to be judicious.” The hospital might try to preserve some maskless zones in offices and waiting rooms, for instance, or lower-risk rooms. And at Children’s National, which has also largely done away with masks, Song plans to follow the local health department’s lead. “Once D.C. Health requires hospitals to reimplement the universal-masking policy,” she told me, “we will be implementing it too.”

    Other mitigations are on the table. Several hospital epidemiologists told me they expected to reimplement some degree of asymptomatic screening for various viruses around the same time they reinstate masks. But measures such as visiting restrictions are a tougher call. Wolfe is reluctant to pull that lever before he absolutely has to: Going through a hospital stay alone is one of the “harder things for patients to endure.”

    A bespoke approach to hospital masking isn’t impractical. COVID waves won’t happen synchronously across communities, and so perhaps neither should policies. But hospitals that lack the resources to keep tabs on viral spread will likely be at a disadvantage, and Popescu told me she worries that “we’re going to see significant transmission” in the very institutions least equipped to handle such influx. Even the best-resourced places may hit stumbling blocks: Many are still reeling from three-plus years of crisis and are dealing with nursing shortages and worker burnout.

    Coordination hasn’t entirely gone away. In North Carolina, Duke is working with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University to shift policies in tandem; in Washington State, several regional health-care organizations have pledged to align their masking policies. And the Veterans Health Administration—where masking remains required in high-risk units—has developed a playbook for augmenting mitigations across its many facilities, which together make up the country’s largest integrated health-care system, says Shereef Elnahal, the undersecretary of Veterans Affairs for health. Still, institutions can struggle to move in sync: Attitudes on masking aren’t exactly universal across health-care providers, even within a hospital.

    The country’s experience with COVID has made hospitals that much more attuned to the impacts of infectious disease. Before the pandemic began, Talbot said, masking was a rarity in his hospital, even around high-risk patients; many employees would go on shifts sick. “We were pretty complacent about influenza,” he told me. “People could come to work and spread it.” Now hospital workers hold themselves to a stricter standard. At the same time, they have become intimately attuned to the drawbacks of constant masking: Some have complained that masks interfere with communication, especially for patients who are young or hard of hearing, or who have a language barrier. “I do think you lose a little bit of that personal bonding,” Talbot said. And prior to the lifting of universal masking at Vanderbilt, he said, some staff were telling him that one out of 10 times they’d ask a patient or family to mask, the exchange would “get antagonistic.”

    Read: The pandemic’s legacy is already clear

    When lifting mandates, many of the hospital epidemiologists I spoke with were careful to message to colleagues that the situation was fluid: “We’re suspending universal masking temporarily,” as Landon put it to her colleagues. Still, she admits that she felt uncomfortable returning to a low-mask norm at all. (When she informally polled nearly two dozen other hospital epidemiologists around the country in the spring, most of them told her that they felt the same.) Health-care settings aren’t meant to look like the rest of the world; they are places where precautions are expected to go above and beyond. COVID’s arrival had cemented masks’ ability to stop respiratory spread in close quarters; removing them felt to Landon like pushing those data aside, and putting the onus on patients—particularly those already less likely to advocate for themselves—to account for their own protection.

    She can still imagine a United States in which a pandemic-era response solidified, as it has in several other countries, into a peacetime norm: where wearing masks would have remained as routine as donning gloves while drawing blood, a tangible symbol of pandemic lessons learned. Instead, many American hospitals will be entering their fourth COVID winter looking a lot like they did in early 2020—when the virus surprised us, when our defenses were down.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Norovirus Is Almost Impossible to Stop

    Norovirus Is Almost Impossible to Stop

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    In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.

    “Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.

    Right now, hordes of people in the Northern Hemisphere are in a similarly crummy situation. In recent weeks, norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”

    Americans could be heading into a rough stretch themselves, Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me, given how closely the U.S.’s epidemiological patterns tend to follow those of the U.K. “It does seem like there’s a burst of activity right now,” says Nihal Altan-Bonnet, a norovirus researcher at the National Institutes of Health. At her own practice, Cameron has been seeing the number of vomiting and diarrhea cases among her patients steadily tick up. (Other pathogens can cause gastrointestinal symptoms as well, but norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)

    To be clear, this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerable—little kids, older adults, the immunocompromised. The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases. In other high-income countries, too, severe outcomes are very rare, though the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.

    Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol. Some have estimated that ingesting as few as 18 infectious units of virus can be enough to sicken someone, “and normally, what’s getting shed is in the billions,” says Megan Baldridge, a virologist and immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis. At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.

    Unlike flu and RSV, two other pathogens that have bounced back to prominence in recent months, norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool. (Despite its “stomach flu” nickname, norovirus is not a flu virus.) But direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection like an Air Wick from hell. And Altan-Bonnet’s team has found that saliva may be an unappreciated reservoir for norovirus, at least in laboratory animals. If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.

    Read: Whatever happened to toilet plumes?

    Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread, says Ibukun Kalu, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Duke University. Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones. One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.

    Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve. To make matters worse, immunity to the virus tends to be short-lived, lasting just a few months even against a genetically identical strain, Baldridge told me.

    Day cares, cruise ships, schools, restaurants, military training camps, prisons, and long-term-care facilities can be common venues for norovirus spread. “I did research with the Navy, and it just goes through like wildfire,” often sickening more than half the people on tightly packed ships, says Robert Frenck, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Households, too, are highly susceptible to spread: Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.

    (A pause for some irony: In spite of norovirus’s infectiousness, scientists did not succeed in culturing it in labs until just a few years ago, after nearly half a century of research. When researchers design challenge trials to, say, test new vaccines, they still need to dose volunteers with norovirus that’s been extracted from patient stool, a gnarly practice that’s been around for more than 50 years.)

    Norovirus spread doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. Some people do get lucky: Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene. Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.

    Read: The stomach-flu mystery

    Rivers and Cameron have both managed to halt the virus in their homes in the past; Cameron may have pulled it off again this week. The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp. Now a couple of days out from the end of their son’s sickness, Cameron and her husband appear to have escaped unscathed.

    Norovirus isn’t new, and this won’t be the last time it hits. In a lot of ways, “this is back to basics,” says Samina Bhumbra, the medical director of infection prevention at Riley Children’s Hospital. After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Outdoor Dining Is Doomed

    Outdoor Dining Is Doomed

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    These days, strolling through downtown New York, where I live, is like picking your way through the aftermath of a party. In many ways, it is exactly that: The limp string lights, trash-strewn puddles, and splintering plywood are all relics of the raucous celebration known as outdoor dining.

    These wooden “streeteries” and the makeshift tables lining sidewalks first popped up during the depths of the pandemic in 2020, when restaurants needed to get diners back in their seats. It was novel, creative, spontaneous—and fun during a time when there wasn’t much fun to be had. For a while, outdoor dining really seemed as though it could outlast the pandemic. Just last October, New York Magazine wrote that it would stick around, “probably permanently.”

    But now someone has switched on the lights and cut the music. Across the country, something about outdoor dining has changed in recent months. With fears about COVID subsiding, people are losing their appetite for eating among the elements. This winter, many streeteries are empty, save for the few COVID-cautious holdouts willing to put up with the cold. Hannah Cutting-Jones, the director of food studies at the University of Oregon, told me that, in Eugene, where she lives,  outdoor dining is “ absolutely not happening” right now. In recent weeks, cities such as New York and Philadelphia have started tearing down unused streeteries. Outdoor dining’s sheen of novelty has faded; what once evoked the grands boulevards of Paris has turned out to be a janky table next to a parked car. Even a pandemic, it turns out, couldn’t overcome the reasons Americans never liked eating outdoors in the first place.

    For a while, the allure of outdoor dining was clear. COVID safety aside, it kept struggling restaurants afloat, boosted some low-income communities, and cultivated joie de vivre in bleak times. At one point, more than 12,700 New York restaurants had taken to the streets, and the city—along with others, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—proposed making dining sheds permanent. But so far, few cities have actually adopted any official rules. At this point, whether they ever will is unclear. Without official sanctions, mounting pressure from outdoor-dining opponents will likely lead to the destruction of existing sheds; already, they keep tweeting disapproving photos at sanitation departments. Part of the issue is that as most Americans’ COVID concerns retreat, the potential downsides have gotten harder to overlook: less parking, more trash, tacky aesthetics, and, oh God, the rats. Many top New York restaurants have voluntarily gotten rid of their sheds this winter.

    The economics of outdoor dining may no longer make sense for restaurants, too. Although it was lauded as a boon to struggling restaurants during the height of the pandemic, the practice may make less sense now that indoor dining is back. For one thing, dining sheds tend to take up parking spaces needed to attract customers, Cutting-Jones said. The fact that most restaurants are chains doesn’t help: “If whatever conglomerate owns Longhorn Steakhouse doesn’t want to invest in outdoor dining, it will not become the norm,” Rebecca Spang, a food historian at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Besides, she added, many restaurants are already short-staffed, even without the extra seats.

    In a sense, outdoor dining was doomed to fail. It always ran counter to the physical makeup of most of the country, as anyone who ate outside during the pandemic inevitably noticed. The most obvious constraint is the weather, which is sometimes pleasant but is more often not. “Who wants to eat on the sidewalk in Phoenix in July?” Spang said.

    The other is the uncomfortable proximity to vehicles. Dining sheds spilled into the streets like patrons after too many drinks. The problem was that U.S. roads were built for cars, not people. This tends not to be true in places renowned for outdoor dining, such as Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which urbanized before cars, Megan Elias, a historian and the director of the gastronomy program at Boston University, told me. At best, this means that outdoor meals in America are typically enjoyed with a side of traffic. At worst, they end in dangerous collisions.

    Cars and bad weather were easier to put up with when eating indoors seemed like a more serious health hazard than breathing in fumes and trembling with cold. It had a certain romance—camaraderie born of discomfort. You have to admit, there was a time when cozying up under a heat lamp with a hot drink was downright charming. But now outdoor dining has gone back to what it always was: something that most Americans would like to avoid in all but the most ideal of conditions. This sort of relapse could lead to fewer opportunities to eat outdoors even when the weather does cooperate.

    But outdoor dining is also affected by more existential issues that have surmounted nearly  three years of COVID life. Eating at restaurants is expensive, and Americans like to get their money’s worth. When safety isn’t a concern, shelling out for a streetside meal may simply not seem worthwhile for most diners. “There’s got to be a point to being outdoors, either because the climate is so beautiful or there’s a view,” Paul Freedman, a Yale history professor specializing in cuisine, told me. For some diners, outdoor seating may feel too casual: Historically, Americans associated eating at restaurants with special occasions, like celebrating a milestone at Delmonico’s, the legendary fine-dining establishment that opened in the 1800s, Cutting-Jones said.

    Eating outdoors, in contrast, was linked to more casual experiences, like having a hot dog at Coney Island. “We have high expectations for what dining out should be like,” she said, noting that American diners are especially fussy about comfort. Even the most opulent COVID cabin may be unable to override these associations. “If the restaurant is going to be fancy and charge $200 a person,” said Freedman, most people can’t escape the feeling of having spent that much for “a picnic on the street.”

    Outdoor dining isn’t disappearing entirely. In the coming years there’s a good chance that more Americans will have the opportunity to eat outside in the nicer months than they did before the pandemic—even if it’s not the widespread practice many had anticipated earlier in the pandemic. Where it continues, it will almost certainly be different: more buttoned-up, less lawless—probably less exciting. Santa Barbara, for example, made dining sheds permanent last year but specified that they must be painted an approved “iron color.” It may also be less popular among restaurant owners: If outdoor-dining regulations are too far-reaching or costly, cautioned Hayrettin Günç, an architect with Global Designing Cities Initiative, that will “create barriers for businesses.”

    For now, outdoor dining is yet another COVID-related convention that hasn’t quite stuck—like avoiding handshakes and universal remote work. As the pandemic subsides, the tendency is to default to the ways things used to be. Doing so is easier, certainly, than coming up with policies to accommodate new habits. In the case of outdoor dining, it’s most comfortable, too. If this continues to be the case, then outdoor dining in the U.S. may return to what it was before the pandemic: dining “al fresco” along the streetlamp-lined terraces of the Venetian Las Vegas, and beneath the verdant canopy of the Rainforest Cafe.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • The Case for Kraken

    The Case for Kraken

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    A new subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly taking over in the U.S.—the most transmissible that has ever been detected. It’s called XBB.1.5, in reference to its status as a hybrid of two prior strains of Omicron, BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. It’s also called “Kraken.”

    Not by everyone, though. The nickname Kraken was ginned up by an informal group of scientists on Twitter and has caught on at some—but only some—major news outlets. As one evolutionary virologist told The Atlantic earlier this week, the name—at first glance, a reference to a folkloric sea monster—“seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people” and serves no substantive purpose for communicating science.

    Yes, Kraken is klickbait. It’s arbitrary, unofficial, and untethered to specific facts of evolution or epidemiology—a desperate play to get attention. And mazel tov for that. We should all rejoice at this stupid name’s arrival. Long live the Kraken! May XBB.1.5 sink into the sea.

    Since Omicron spread around the world in the fall of 2021, we’ve been subject to a stultifying slew of jargon from the health authorities: Miniature waves of new infections keep lapping at our shores, while the names of the Omicron subvariants that produce them slop together in a cryptic muck: XBB.1.5 has overtaken BA.5 in recent weeks, and also BF.7, as well as BQ.1 and BQ.1.1; in China, BA.5.2 is quickly spreading too. One might ask, without a shred of undue panic, how worried we should be—but the naming scheme itself precludes an answer. You don’t even need to ask, it says. You’ll never fully understand.

    This isn’t subtext; it’s explicit. A spokesperson for the World Health Organization told my colleague Jacob Stern that people should be grateful for the arcane pronouncements of our leading international consortia. “The public doesn’t need to distinguish between these Omicron subvariants in order to better understand their risk or the measures they need to take to protect themselves,” he said. “If there is a new variant that requires public communication and discourse, it would be designated a new variant of concern and assigned a new label.” In other words: None of what we’re seeing now is bad enough to merit much attention. You don’t need to make any brand-new precautions, so we don’t need to talk about it.

    The public may not need to draw distinctions. But do those distinctions really need to be obscured? A different set of names, one that isn’t precision-engineered to harpoon people’s interest, wouldn’t have to fool us into feeling false alarm. It’s not as though our habit of assigning common names to storms leads to widespread panic starting every summer. When Hurricane Earl appeared last September, no one rushed into a bunker just because they knew what it was called. Then Ian came a few weeks later, and millions evacuated.

    Granted, Kraken sounds a bit more ominous than Earl. (Of all the labels that could be given to the latest version of a deadly virus, it’s not the best.) But the name is more befuddling than terrifying: a nitwitted reference, somehow, to ferocity, absurdity, and conspiratorial delusion all at once. Even so, a silly name still has the virtue of being a name, while a string of numbers and letters is just an entry in a database. Kraken doesn’t care if you’re afraid of COVID, and it doesn’t mind if you’re indifferent. It only wishes to be understood.

    Isn’t that important? A proper name eases conversation (wherever that might lead), and makes it possible to talk about what matters (and what doesn’t). Just try telling the public that Hurricane Earl will be no big deal but Ian is a mortal threat, if instead of “Earl” and “Ian” you had to say “BA.2.12.1” and “B.1.1.529.” The committee that names our storms is chasing clouds instead of clout; it knows that branding efforts make it easier for everyone to stay informed. We might have done the same for SARS-CoV-2, and handed out simple, easy-to-remember names for all the leading Omicron subvariants. (Through 2021, we used Greek letters to describe each major variant.) If Kraken seems alarmist now, that’s because we’re living in a different, dumber timeline, where public legibility has been forbidden. Why give this subvariant a name, the global health officials ask, when it isn’t really that much worse than any other? But that’s a problem of their own creation. If Kraken seems too gaudy, that’s because every other recent name has been too drab.

    Having useful, catchy names doesn’t mean avoiding all abstraction. Florida residents were glad to know, last fall, which hurricanes were Category 2 and which were Category 5; and it may be just as useful to remind yourself that Kraken is not now, of its own accord, a “variant of concern,” let alone a “variant of high consequence.” Our trust in those distinctions is a product of their formality: A special group of experts has decided which public threats are the most important. The Kraken name, if it continues to spread, could undermine this useful sense of deference—and leave us in an awkward free-for-all where anyone could give a name to any variant at any time.

    For the moment, though, our only recourse is to the numbing nomenclature that is now in place, and to the creaking bureaucracy that delivers it. Any other name for XBB.1.5—any better one than Kraken—would have to come from the WHO, an organization that recently spent five months rebranding monkeypox as “mpox” and that has warned that disease names like “paralytic shellfish poisoning” are unduly stigmatizing to shellfish. Kraken has the crucial benefit of being right in front of us. It’s a stupid name, but it’s a name—and names are good.

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    Daniel Engber

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  • The Obama Nostalgia Show

    The Obama Nostalgia Show

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    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.”

    Read: Do voters care about John Fetterman’s stroke?

    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.”

    Read: Trump returns to rally team MAGA

    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.”

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • Do Voters Care About John Fetterman’s Stroke?

    Do Voters Care About John Fetterman’s Stroke?

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    Every second of every day, oxygen-rich blood is coursing through your brain. Your heart pumps it up through your chest and neck, along tinier and tinier arterial tubes, twisting and turning among the grooves and lobes of gray matter until it reaches the brain cells it’s meant to nourish. But this journey can be interrupted. An artery can get clogged—often by a free-floating, gelatinous clot—which halts the flow of blood. The clog will starve your brain’s cells of oxygen. Within moments, your brain’s tissue will start to die.

    This is what happened to John Fetterman in May of this year, when he suffered an ischemic stroke—a type that affects roughly 700,000 people in the United States annually. Five months later, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor says he still struggles to process the words that he hears, and sometimes he can’t quite express what he means. For a regular person, these effects would not be newsworthy. Fetterman, though, is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. This week, NBC News’s Dasha Burns said that Fetterman seemed unable to participate in preinterview small talk conducted without closed captioning, but other recent Fetterman interviewers pushed back, saying he’d done just fine when they spoke with him.

    Clearly, observers cannot agree about the degree of impairment or disability that Fetterman is experiencing. But this much is certain: His health is a legitimate consideration for the voters he is seeking to represent in Congress. And although Fetterman’s critics are framing his stroke as a liability, the Democrat is hoping that his health challenge makes him a more relatable—and therefore more appealing—candidate. The question is what voters should make of it all.

    For most of the summer, Fetterman’s campaign used social media to compensate for the fact that the Democrat was unwell. On Twitter, Fetterman and his team mocked his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, for his many mansions and his ham-handed attempts to seem like an ordinary Pennsylvanian. They scored headline after fawning headline for their snarky social-media strategy. But the candidate himself stayed home, trying to heal.

    John Hendrickson: Don’t patronize Fetterman

    Fetterman sounds a lot more like his old self now than he did in August, when he first returned to the campaign trail. But he still stumbles in his speech. At a rally I attended outside Philadelphia last weekend, he delivered a few applause lines and phrases that were difficult to understand; occasionally, the audience would answer with tentative claps. After the event, Fetterman did not entertain questions from reporters, and seemed unable to respond all that meaningfully to on-the-fly comments from voters; his wife, Gisele, appeared to be the one leading those interactions. But while Fetterman may not be able to do small talk, he is able to participate in interviews where he can use real-time closed-captioning, a live transcription of questions appearing on his laptop. He’ll use the same tool during the upcoming debate against Oz scheduled for October 25.

    That accommodation for someone who’s recently had a stroke is the same sort of allowance that would be made for a Senate candidate who was hearing impaired. Still, it’s reasonable to ask whether Fetterman’s stroke damaged his cognition, his ability to learn and to comprehend language—and how he might function as a senator.

    The campaign says that Fetterman has taken two different cognitive tests and scored “in the normal range” on both. (It has released the results of one of those tests.) But the campaign has declined to release Fetterman’s full health records. “John Fetterman is healthy. He also has an auditory-processing challenge that is still lingering from his stroke in May,” Rebecca Katz, a senior adviser to Fetterman, told me. “The only proof you need to know he can do his job is the fact that he’s doing this campaign right now.”

    Ed Yong: Lost for words

    Still, in the absence of those records, we can only observe and guess. The phrase auditory processing is not really a medical diagnosis, Adam de Havenon, an associate professor of neurology at Yale, told me. Instead, Fetterman’s symptoms seem consistent with aphasia, a common stroke effect in which a person loses their ability to comprehend or express spoken words—sometimes both. That doesn’t necessarily indicate severe brain damage. “It’s very possible to just have trouble understanding spoken language or getting words out without any impact on cognition,” de Havenon said. This would certainly seem consistent with Fetterman’s condition, given that he is able to read and respond to closed captioning. Even if Fetterman does have some cognitive impairment, “I don’t think it would be profound, in terms of what he’s doing on a day-to-day basis,” de Havenon said.

    So why keep his full health records under wraps? Fetterman’s neuropsychological or aphasia test results might suggest that he is more impaired than he seems. Or maybe those records show a complicated picture—one that would be easily misinterpreted by laypeople or intentionally misconstrued by political opponents. Either way, keeping those records a secret isn’t a great look for a candidate who has suffered a serious health setback on the campaign trail.

    Five months after his stroke, Fetterman is still within the poststroke recovery window. Normally, a stroke patient needs about six months for the brain to heal, de Havenon told me, and 12 months for their brain to learn how to compensate for any loss in function. Which means it’s still entirely possible for Fetterman’s apparent aphasia and his neuropsych test results to improve. “I see patients like John very frequently in the emergency department and clinic,” de Havenon said. Otherwise healthy, middle-aged people who have ischemic strokes receive treatment and generally respond quite well—including over the long term.

    America’s laws have long been written, at least in part, by the elderly—the word senator actually comes from the Latin for “old man.” The average age in today’s Senate is 64—in other words, when most people are thinking about retiring, America’s senators are just getting going. But historically, some senators have been barely sentient by the end of their career.

    In his early 90s, the longest-serving senator in history, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was delivering halting speeches on the Senate floor. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, still in office at 100, died a hunched shadow of his former self—although his former self had been an unapologetic segregationist.

    Other senators have had health issues in office that made their jobs next to impossible: Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, who had a serious heart condition, didn’t set foot in the chamber for the last four years of his six-year term, Donald Ritchie, a former Senate historian, told me. Democrats needed California Senator Clair Engle’s vote to break the filibuster on the Civil Rights Act, but he was partially paralyzed and unable to speak because of a brain tumor. “All he could do was put his finger up to his eye,” Ritchie said. “They took that as an aye vote.” In our own time, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is showing signs of age-related impairment: According to recent reporting, she sometimes fails to follow policy conversations or recognize her colleagues.

    David A. Graham: Dianne Feinstein is the future of the Senate

    Several senators have had strokes in office, too, including recently Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. After Illinois Senator Mark Kirk’s stroke in 2012, aides were hesitant to discuss how he’d changed mentally, according to a National Journal profile. He returned to the chamber a year later, but his health may have played a role in his later loss to Tammy Duckworth.

    This is not to compare John Fetterman’s ailment to those of senators past—or to judge the decisions of the lawmakers who have stayed in office past their prime. But the Senate is familiar with disability—brought on by age or any number of other factors. It has and will accommodate it. If Fetterman is elected, Ritchie told me, the secretary of the Senate will help organize the tools he’ll need for a committee hearing or floor speeches. Given how manageable these measures are, the Fetterman campaign could be more transparent about what the Democrat’s everyday life as a senator might look like.

    None of this can be easy for Fetterman. Less than a year ago, he was discussed by voters and journalists alike with something akin to awe: A 6-foot-8-inch man in a hoodie, with a goatee and tattoos, is not your typical political candidate; despite his relatively privileged upbringing, Fetterman was the straight-talking everyman, the guy with the irreverent vibe. Back then, the biggest question surrounding his campaign was whether he’d show up to the Senate in cargo shorts.

    Fetterman may still be all of those things, but now, he is also a man wrestling with an uncooperative brain. And the entire country is watching, making note of his every pause and stammer.

    “We are pulling back the curtain on his recovery,” Katz from Fetterman’s campaign told me, “and having worked in the Senate and seen firsthand how many senators cover up their various challenges, I can tell you that this is refreshing for people. He is being very honest about the challenges he’s facing at this moment.”

    Even if his campaign could have been more forthcoming earlier about his condition, it is true that Fetterman has found a way of talking about it since he returned to the trail in late summer. Near the beginning of his stump speech, he asks: “How many of you have had your own personal health challenges?” And every time, nearly every hand in the audience goes up.

    Last week, I traveled to Bristol to see Fetterman in action. “I’ve had a hemorrhagic stroke, which is worse,” Jeanette Miller from Bristol Township told me with a shrug when I asked her whether Fetterman’s stroke gave her pause. Rob Blatt, a retiree from Feasterville, looked at me blankly when I asked him the same. “I’ve beaten cancer and a whole bunch of other stuff,” he said. “He’s one of us—a working man trying to do the right thing by his family, his community, and his country.”

    Read: Trump returns to rally Team MAGA

    A younger fan, Eric Bruno from Levittown, told me he’d worked with people who’d had strokes. “Outwardly, it takes a while to come back. But inwardly you’re still the same person,” he said, adding, “I trust the people around him.” Again and again I asked Fetterman’s supporters about his stroke, and they all responded the same way: So what? Fetterman’s point—that knowing what it’s like to go through a major health challenge, to live with a disability, and to navigate the thorny thicket of the American health-care system can be assets for a Senate candidate—seemed to land well with his supporters. If our elected leaders are supposed to represent us, the Democrat seems to be asking, shouldn’t they be representative of us?

    Oz has been closing the gap with Fetterman’s slightly higher poll numbers in recent weeks, but this tightening of the race may owe more to the imminence of the election than to sudden doubts about Fetterman’s health. After weighing their options, Pennsylvanians appear to be sorting themselves into their partisan corners; politically, Pennsylvania is very evenly split. Fetterman’s cognitive ability may ultimately weigh less with Keystone State voters than the simple fact that he is a Democrat, not a Republican.

    “I will admit, it wasn’t the best speech I’ve ever heard,” Bobby Summers, a local IT manager, told me after the Bristol rally. He stood next to his wife, Lara, and their baby son on the grassy lawn where Fetterman had just been. “I don’t need a golden tongue,” Lara cut in. “I just need someone who gets the job done and breaks the tie.”

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • What Democrats Don’t Understand About Ron Johnson

    What Democrats Don’t Understand About Ron Johnson

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    APPLETON, Wisconsin—Senator Ron Johnson was midway through a rambling speech on all that’s wrong with America—his villains included runaway debt, the porous southern border, gender-affirming medical treatment, and FDR’s New Deal—when he paused for a moment of self-reflection.

    “It’s a huge mess,” Johnson said of the country. “I really ought to have the people who introduce me warn audiences: I’m not the most uplifting character.”

    A few people in the not-quite-packed crowd at the FreedomProject Academy, a drab, low-slung private school, chuckled. The 67-year-old Republican, stumping for a third term in the Senate, was speaking at an event that his campaign had not advertised to reporters. It was sponsored by an affiliate of the John Birch Society, the right-wing advocacy group now headquartered a mile down the road in Appleton. When attendees arrived, they found on their chairs a flyer promoting a six-week seminar on the Constitution. Part one? “The Dangers of Democracy.”

    In the audience, several dozen mostly older, white conservatives seemed to share Johnson’s sense of national doom. They nodded along as Johnson assailed journalists (“highly biased” advocates who “lie with impunity”) and teachers (“leftists”), as he accused President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats of “fundamentally destroying this country.” He lamented the “injustice” suffered by people awaiting trial on charges of storming the Capitol on January 6. When Johnson trumpeted his fight on behalf of “the vaccine injured” and his promotion of discredited COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, he received a hearty round of applause.

    Among Senate Republicans up for reelection this fall, Johnson is the Democrats’ top target, and the race is one of several that could determine which party holds a majority next year. Wisconsin is perhaps the nation’s most closely divided state: Fewer than 25,000 votes separated the two major-party candidates in each of the past two presidential elections. But Johnson isn’t racing toward the political center in the campaign’s home stretch, and he might not need to.

    Read: Democrats’ No. 1 target for 2022

    Johnson made a fortune as a plastics executive in nearby Oshkosh before winning his Senate seat in 2010. He reminded the crowd in Appleton that he’d made two promises during that initial campaign: that he would always tell the truth and that, as he put it, “I’ll never vote—and by extension I’ll never conduct myself—with my reelection in mind.” Democrats would vigorously dispute that Johnson has kept his first commitment. They might not contest that he’s kept the second.

    After a rather unremarkable first term in the Senate, Johnson over the past few years has turned into a master of the controversial and the cringeworthy. He’s spent much of the pandemic peddling conspiracy theories about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. He became entangled in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump and later told reporters he had ignored a warning from the FBI that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. Johnson also became involved in the events that led to Trump’s second impeachment: The House Select Committee investigating January 6 revealed that Johnson’s chief of staff had tried to hand then–Vice President Mike Pence a slate of fake electors from Wisconsin. Johnson has downplayed the attack on the Capitol, saying that the riot was not an insurrection and that he would have been concerned had those who stormed the building been “Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters” rather than Trump supporters.

    At the same time, Johnson’s popularity has plunged. A Morning Consult poll published this week found that just 39 percent of Wisconsin voters approved of his performance, giving him the second-lowest home-state rating (behind only Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader) of any senator in the country. The Johnson of 2022 is unrecognizable to some Republicans who championed his first two campaigns and who saw him as a staunch but not extreme conservative, a politician more like Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan than Trump. “There’s no question that the Ron Johnson who ran in 2010 and 2016 was not the conspiracy theorist that you see now,” Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative-radio host in Wisconsin who co-founded The Bulwark, told me. Sykes has many theories about the cause of Johnson’s transformation. But it boils down to a simple conclusion: “Trump broke his brain.”

    Yet if Johnson this year is the Senate’s most electorally vulnerable Republican, he’s also proving to be among its most resilient. He scored a come-from-behind reelection victory after GOP leaders abandoned his campaign in 2016. In the past few weeks, he’s erased a summertime polling deficit to take a slim lead over his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, and give Republicans a better shot at reclaiming the Senate majority. Johnson led 52 percent to 46 percent among likely voters in a survey released yesterday by Marquette University Law School.

    Johnson’s resurgence has frustrated and even confounded Democrats, who worry that a well-funded and vicious crime-focused ad campaign is dragging down their nominee in a pivotal battleground. But they may be underestimating the depth of Johnson’s appeal and misjudging whether his supposedly unpopular stands hurt him as much as they thought.

    Oddly enough, the one topic Johnson didn’t bring up in Appleton was his opponent, Barnes. With help from national Republicans, Johnson is pummeling Barnes on the airwaves, spending millions to convince Wisconsinites that the 35-year-old vying to be the state’s first Black U.S. senator is a criminal-coddling radical. The ads seek to exploit positions on which even some Democrats concede that Barnes is vulnerable; his support for ending cash bail has come under particular scrutiny following a Christmas-parade massacre last year in Waukesha, when a suspect who was out on bail for domestic violence allegedly killed six people and injured dozens more after driving his SUV into a crowd.

    The GOP ads strike many Barnes supporters as clearly racist. One spot from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that calls Barnes a “defund-the-police Democrat” depicts him in front of a wall spray-painted with graffiti alongside two other Democrats of color, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Another uses similar imagery and flashes the words dangerous and different next to Barnes.

    If the barrage is angering Barnes, he’s good at hiding it. Despite his relative youth, he’s been running for office for a decade. When I sat down with him after a speech in Sheboygan, Barnes was effortlessly on message. Johnson’s ads, he told me, were “some of the worst I’ve seen in any election cycle, anywhere.” And he acknowledged that “the unprecedented sums of money” funding them represented the biggest obstacle he faced between now and the election.

    Despite this assessment, however, Barnes seemed relatively unperturbed by their content. He refused to label them racist, as many of his supporters do, and he dismissed the attacks on him as evidence that Johnson had done little in the Senate worth promoting. “Unlike Ron Johnson, I can talk about things that I want to do to actually help people,” Barnes said. “And that’s what people want to hear day to day.”

    Barnes won election as lieutenant governor in 2018 after four years in the state legislature. His bid for the Democratic Senate nomination had been competitive for months, but Barnes ultimately consolidated the party’s support when, one by one, his opponents withdrew and endorsed him days ahead of the August primary. He has close ties to the progressive, labor-oriented Working Families Party, having delivered its response to Trump’s State of the Union address in 2019. Barnes frequently highlights his devotion to unions—“My dad worked third shift” is a constant refrain—as a way to connect with Black workers in and around Milwaukee and to make inroads with more culturally conservative white laborers elsewhere in the state, many of whom backed Trump.

    Barnes’s supporters see him as a once-in-a-generation talent, and he comes across as warm and easygoing on the stump. “Hello, Senator, our future president!” one older woman fawned as she shook his hand before he spoke to a crowded union hall in Sheboygan. “Oh no,” Barnes replied. “This is stressful enough.”

    Although Barnes is running ads attacking Johnson on abortion and economic issues, many of his commercials are much sunnier spots clearly designed to reassure Wisconsin voters that he’s not the “dangerous” radical Republicans are making him out to be. In one he’s pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket, and in another he’s unpacking groceries. “Ron Johnson’s at it again, lying about my taxes,” Barnes says while making himself a PB&J in another ad. The strategy is reminiscent of the campaign that Reverend Raphael Warnock ran in Georgia in 2020, when he relied on cheery ads featuring a beagle, Alvin, to counter nasty GOP attacks aimed at scaring off white suburban voters.

    Democrats I spoke with applauded Barnes’s ads. But as the polls have shifted toward Johnson in recent weeks, they lamented that Johnson’s race-baiting message was succeeding, and worried that Barnes’s campaign of reassurance, although necessary, was insufficient. “Get aggressive. Get dirty like they do,” Fred Hass, a 76-year-old retired union worker, said in Sheboygan when I asked what he wanted to see from Barnes.

    “I don’t think he has the luxury to spend all his time on reassurance,” David Axelrod, the former top adviser to Barack Obama, told me, referring to Barnes. “He shouldn’t fight with one hand tied behind his back, and I think he almost has to be on offense here.” (When I asked him about this criticism, Barnes defended his decision to focus equally, if not more, on himself. “Your opponent being bad isn’t enough,” he said. “You’ve got to tell people what you stand for.”)

    No politician has succeeded in Wisconsin quite like Obama did, a fact that complicates the question of how much race is a factor in Barnes’s recent slide. Obama’s 14-point victory in 2008—he won by seven points in 2012—remains the largest margin for any presidential candidate in Wisconsin in the past half century. (It’s also unmatched by any contender for Senate or governor in the years since.) Every other presidential contest in this century has been decided by less than a single point. In 2018, the Democrat Tony Evers—with Barnes as his running mate—defeated the Republican Scott Walker’s bid for a third term as governor by fewer than 30,000 votes. With that in mind, the only prediction that both Democratic and GOP operatives are willing to make is that the Johnson-Barnes race will be close. (The Republican bidding to oust Evers, Tim Michels, declared at a recent rally that he’d win in a “Wisconsin landslide,” which he then defined as “probably like three points.”)

    Although Wisconsin has earned its reputation as a 50–50 swing state, it does not habitually elect leaders who hug the political center and historically has embraced ideologues from both the left and right. The home of Robert La Follette and the Progressive Party of the early 20th century soon became the state that twice sent the anti-communist demagogue Joseph McCarthy to the Senate. More recently, as Wisconsin veered left to embrace Obama, it also voted again and again for Walker, who amassed one of the most conservative records of any governor in the country. No state has two senators as ideologically mismatched as Wisconsin’s Johnson and the Democrat Tammy Baldwin, a progressive and the first openly LGBTQ woman elected to Congress. “There’s a little bit of political schizophrenia in Wisconsin,” Sykes said.

    Read: ‘I Am Stunned’: Wisconsin democrats’ improbable victory

    Given the polarized and closely divided electorate, political strategists see a vaningishly small population of swing voters, perhaps 100,000 or 150,000 out of about 3.5 million statewide. Johnson, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, clearly sees his path to victory in turning out the conservative base and disqualifying Barnes in the eyes of that sliver of persuadable voters.

    The hope of Barnes’s campaign in the final stretch—and the biggest threat to Johnson’s—is embodied in a man named Ken.

    Ken lives in a suburb of Green Bay, in an area that shifted, along with much of the state, ever so slightly to the left between Trump’s victory in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020. On the first Saturday in October, a pair of Barnes canvassers were knocking doors as I trailed along. Not many people were answering, and the few who did politely turned them away.

    Then the canvassers approached a group of three middle-aged white men who were enjoying beers on a patio in back of one of the houses on their list. Anyone familiar with the demographic divide in modern politics would have taken one look and assumed they were Trump (and by extension, Johnson) voters. They did not appear eager to talk politics, and after a few curt replies, Nicole Slavin, a sales manager who had experience canvassing, bid them a polite goodbye and began to back away.

    Seeking confirmation of our hunch, I asked which candidate they were supporting, and Ken (he declined to provide his last name) spoke up and said he had already returned his ballot by mail. “The only reason—the only reason—I voted for Evers and Barnes was the abortion decision,” Ken said. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revived an 1849 Wisconsin law banning abortion in most cases, which the GOP-controlled legislature has refused to repeal or modify. “It’s almost like sending women back 50 years, what they’re talking about,” Ken said. A longtime Republican, he told me he voted for Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in the last election. “I don’t care about all the other crap, but that was one thing that really stood out,” he said of the abortion ruling.

    Slavin was pleasantly surprised, but she told me she had met several people in the past few months who cited abortion as the driving factor in their support for Democrats. Conversations like those, and voters like Ken, are giving the party some hope that anger over the Dobbs decision will change the electorate in Wisconsin, much as it turned what was expected to be a close August referendum in Kansas into a landslide win for supporters of abortion rights.

    About an hour before Slavin hit the doors, Barnes had launched a statewide “Ron Against Roe” tour aimed at shifting the focus of his campaign away from Johnson’s attacks on him and back toward friendlier turf. A few days later, Barnes launched a new TV ad hitting Johnson for backing a national ban on abortion and for saying in 2019 that if people don’t like abortion restrictions in their state, they “can move.”

    Johnson has since called for a statewide referendum on abortion, a position he highlighted when Barnes attacked him on the issue during a debate last week. But his 2019 comment was, to Johnson’s critics, just one more example of his lurch out of the political mainstream over the past few years—a shift for which Democrats hope Wisconsinites hold their senator accountable. To them, he is one more Republican who lost his mind in the Trump era. Johnson’s supporters see in him a conservative iconoclast who hasn’t wavered. “Wisconsinites like independent people, and that’s why I think Ron Johnson is going to win,” Representative Glenn Grothman, a Republican who represents Johnson’s home, in Oshkosh, told me. “Anybody who thinks that Ron Johnson has changed is just a partisan reporter.”

    Whether Johnson has changed could ultimately prove less important than whether the events of the past several months, and the abortion decision in particular, have changed Wisconsin voters and what they care about. Johnson has proudly stood against public opinion plenty of times before, with few tangible consequences. The next few weeks will decide whether this year, and this issue, will be different.

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    Russell Berman

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  • The Val Demings Gamble

    The Val Demings Gamble

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    On a hot D.C. Wednesday in the middle of July, an 11-foot statue honoring Mary McLeod Bethune—carved out of marble extracted from the same Tuscan quarry that Michelangelo used for his David—stood draped in a black cloak in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A group of distinguished guests had gathered to honor Bethune, the prominent educator and civil-rights activist who founded a college for Black students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and later served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is now the first Black American to have a state statue in the hall.

    The group, which included several members of Florida’s congressional delegation, smiled as cameras flashed. Two of those present, Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Val Demings, are opponents in the race for Rubio’s Senate seat—a race that could secure the Democrats’ control of the Senate. Together, they tugged at the sheet, revealing the white-marble figure clothed in academic regalia, holding a black rose—which, in life, Bethune viewed as a symbol of diversity.

    One by one, speakers approached a lectern in front of the statue to offer remarks. “I remember as a little girl listening to my mother and my father talk about a Black woman, a woman who looked like us, who started a college,” Demings told those who had gathered in the amphitheater. “As I listened to my parents tell the story, it seemed impossible. But Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune made what seemed impossible possible.”

    Demings hopes to conjure some of Bethune’s magic. The race has for some time been considered a long shot for the 65-year-old former Orlando police chief; to win she’ll need to make what seems impossible possible in a state where the voter rolls have flipped from a more-than-100,000-voter Democratic advantage in 2020 to a Republican lead of nearly the same size in less than two years. And for months the polls reflected that, showing Demings trailing Rubio; but in recent weeks, a new batch of polls has shown Demings pulling into an effective tie, or even a slight lead.

    Read: What Biden owes Black voters

    If the race does break her way, the Democrats will have the convergence of two separate story lines to thank. The first is the story of Val Demings herself: a centrist Black woman with a background in law enforcement—just the profile the party has placed its bets on in recent years. It’s no coincidence, after all, that Demings joined then-Senator Kamala Harris and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who both worked as prosecutors before seeking elected office, on Joe Biden’s shortlist for his running mate two years ago.

    Political moderates could admire her centrism; people of color could identify with her race; women could identify with her gender. Demings has converted that appeal into a fundraising advantage, pulling in millions more in donations than Rubio so far this cycle, and spending more than twice as much as him on television ads.

    And if the national Democratic Party’s unpopularity had been weighing on her fortunes, the events of recent weeks may have buoyed them. In early August, Democrats in Congress passed a mammoth bill on climate change, health care, and taxes. Though the Inflation Reduction Act is by nature full of compromises, as my colleague Robinson Meyer notes, it “will touch every sector of the economy, subsidizing massive new investments in renewable and geothermal energy, as well as nuclear power and carbon capture and removal, and encouraging new clean-energy manufacturing industries to develop in the United States.” Demings has contrasted her own legislative record with that of Rubio, who has one of the worst attendance records in the Senate. With Congress showing that it can actually function, voters might be more receptive to that argument.

    Demings watches the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings in 2019. (Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux)

    Demings likes to say she’s living the American dream. In 1957, when she was born, her family lived in a three-room shack in Mandarin, Florida—a rural part of Duval County, just south of Jacksonville. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother was a housekeeper. A year later, they upgraded to a two-bedroom house, but the roof leaked and for several years it lacked working bathrooms.

    In the sixth grade, Demings helped integrate Loretta Elementary School, which she used to ride past to get to the Black elementary school 15 miles away. Shortly after enrolling, Demings was chosen to serve on the school patrol. She loved it. “You had to have good citizenship and good grades—and I was selected. I had my little orange belt, and I just fell in love,” she told me in July. “It was such an honor to be selected, because it was a big deal.”

    Read: Has America given up on the dream of racial integration?

    As soon as she was old enough to get a real job, she did: first washing dishes at a retirement home, and later working fast-food gigs. After high school, she went off to Florida State University to study criminology, with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. “My dad used to say, ‘You’re a pretty good talker. You need to make some money talking,’ and he thought being a lawyer was a pretty cool thing,” she said. But scraping her way through college meant she needed a job—not law school—after graduation. “I was broke broke,” she quipped. So she moved back to Jacksonville, where she became a social worker with the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. But she soon grew disillusioned, doubting how much good she’d ever be able to do with so little power.

    “I had this 10-year-old boy on my caseload,” Demings said. “He started having some problems, exhibiting behavior that made him really a threat to himself.” She went to her supervisor to see if she could get a psychological evaluation for him, but was told it would be roughly three weeks before a referral could be made; the panel that made those decisions met only once a month.

    Demings was shocked. “This kid would be dead by then,” she recalled telling her boss. So she went around her supervisor to the juvenile judge—waiting outside his chambers until she was able to plead his case. To Demings’s relief, the judge granted an emergency order. She saw it as a small victory in a tough system, until it backfired: Demings was reprimanded by her supervisor for subverting their structure. She felt deflated by the experience, and began to think about what she wanted to do next.

    In 1983, Demings got word that the Orlando Police Department was recruiting at Edward Waters College, the historically Black college in Jacksonville, and she figured that she would go down to speak with someone. That ultimately led to a 27-year career at the department, where Demings worked her way through its ranks: patrol officer, juvenile-crime detective, community-relations officer, public-information officer, hostage negotiator, then supervisor of the patrol, investigations, and airport units. (Some aspects of her career were less deliberate: She always told herself that she’d never date a fellow officer—then she ended up marrying one.)

    As a police captain, she developed a reputation as a tough-on-crime enforcer on everything from traffic violations to violent infractions. “The message has to be clear for the violators: There are no deals,” she said in 2005 after a string of dangerous-driving incidents.

    But that approach, which continued after she was promoted to deputy chief, drew criticism from members of the Black community in the city. She was lambasted after an Orlando Sentinel story examined the department’s overuse of tasers and aggressive traffic stops and she told the paper that her officers were “kicking butt” in the historically Black neighborhood of Parramore. “If that [vehicle or pedestrian] stop results in something greater and leads to drugs or drug paraphernalia, I call that good police work,” she said at the time.

    Still, by late 2007, her policing record, and a succession of departures, led to her being selected as Orlando’s chief of police. She was the first woman and second Black person—after her husband, Jerry, who left that role in 2002 to become the county’s public-safety director—to lead the department.

    From the start, she took an aggressive approach to the job. “We will be courteous to law-abiding citizens but relentless in our efforts to disrupt violent criminals who have no respect for the police, citizens or their property,” she wrote in a New Year’s Day Orlando Sentinel op-ed in 2008. Later that year, Jerry won his race for county sheriff, making the duo the first Black husband and wife to serve as sheriff and chief of police in the same county at the same time.

    Demings often cites the fact that under her leadership, Orlando experienced a 40 percent drop in violent crime. But a string of excessive-force complaints—including a 2010 incident in which an officer broke an 84-year-old man’s neck by flipping him upside down—revealed some of the clear dangers of the aggressive policing tactics that were employed during her tenure. “Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to break old men’s necks for no reason,” John Kurtz, the founder of the blog Orlando CopWatch, said at the time. Demings initially defended the officer’s actions in the incident, but eventually modified the department’s use of the technique that led to the octogenarian’s fractured vertebrae. In 2011, after 27 years with the department, Demings stepped down and set her sights on a new challenge.

    Elected office wasn’t something Demings had initially been interested in. But as she was about to retire, Mayor Buddy Dyer called her to let her know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thought she would be a good candidate to run for the House seat that represented Orlando. “I just burst out laughing,” she told me. “And the mayor’s like, ‘Chief, are you okay?’” She thought he must have been joking. “You know your police chief. I’m a little rough around the edges,” she recalls telling him. “And I don’t know if I’d make a good politician.” Still, she met with Representative Steve Israel, who was the committee chair at the time—and ultimately decided that running for Congress was a logical next step.

    She lost her first campaign and suspended another run for mayor two years later. But her defeats only raised her public profile. By 2016, court-ordered redistricting meant that the Tenth District was significantly more Democratic than it had been when she first ran for office—which meant that her biggest hurdle would be her primary opponent. She won 57 percent of the vote in a four-person primary—and received 15,000 more votes than her nearest competitor. She then won in the general election by nearly 100,000 votes.

    Thirty-three years after Demings had packed everything she owned in the trunk of her Oldsmobile Firenza and headed to Orlando for her new job with the police department, she would be taking her tough-on-crime bona fides to Washington.

    Across two terms, Demings has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of bills that have become law—though a divided Congress means she does not have a signature piece of legislation to hang her hat on. But her most significant moment came when, in January 2020, she served as an impeachment manager during the first Senate trial of then-President Donald Trump. Though the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump—voting along party lines except for the sole defection of Senator Mitt Romney—Demings’s prominence continued to grow. She was profiled by The Washington Post, NPR, and other national outlets. “Was it worth it? Every day it has been worth it,” she said of the trial after its conclusion. “Just like when I was a law enforcement officer, when I saw someone breaking the law, I did not stop and think about, well, my goodness, what will the judge do? … I did my job to stop that threat and then go to court and plead my case.”

    After that, she landed on Biden’s shortlist for vice president—evidence of both her meteoric rise and the Democratic Party’s relentless search for its next phenom who can capture the national imagination the way Barack Obama did.

    Val Demings
    Demings makes phone calls to constituents from the Pinellas County Democratic headquarters in Florida. (Octavio Jones / Getty)

    “Florida, vota por la jefa de la policía, no por el politiquero,” Demings’s first Spanish-language ad, aired in June, said. Vote for the chief of police, not the politician. Demings is trying to define herself for voters she hopes will form her coalition—particularly the Latino voters who have been tilting Republican in recent years She’s on the defensive: The Rubio campaign has tried to pin the Democratic Party’s most left-wing sensibilities on her.

    In a campaign ad of his own, Rubio touts his endorsement from Florida’s Fraternal Order of Police and 55 sheriffs, and suggests that Demings supported the “Defund the Police” movement—or, at the very least, did not reject it fiercely enough. “Senator Rubio has not only tried not to defund the police; he’s defended the police,” Al Palacio, the Miami Dade public-schools Fraternal Order of Police president, says in the ad. “And we’re here to defend him.” Rubio’s campaign believes that this is a winning issue; an October 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 47 percent of Americans want to see more spending on police, compared with 15 percent who would like to see budgets reduced.

    Demings dismissed the ad out of hand, responding with a brief statement: “I am the police. This is ridiculous.”

    Brian Klaas: Focus on who police are, not what they do

    Though Florida has not seen the same jumps in crime rates as some other parts of the country over the past two years, the race has focused on policing and crime issues. The irony is, were she running as a Republican, Demings would be seen as emblematic of the tough-on-crime policies some voters say they want.

    But because she’s running in a state that is turning redder and redder, Demings has to strike the right balance of being the police enforcer she’s always been while appearing open to reform, and being unrelentingly liberal on issues such as access to abortion while emphasizing her Christian faith so as not to isolate Catholic voters. And she has to highlight her identity—her family’s economic status growing up and, perhaps most important, her race—while not making it the central plank of her campaign. Over the past several years, Florida Republicans have passed laws that limit discussions of identity in classrooms and other public spaces—a bit of a contrast with the political campaign Demings has run, explaining to voters how being a Black woman has shaped her life and informed her policy preferences.

    That’s been a difficult sell: How do you convince voters that you’ll be a senator who can get stuff done if the Democrats can manage to keep their Senate majority, when the Democrats had—at least in the public’s view—gotten so little done? But with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the party’s chances look different now, and maybe, just maybe, Demings will be the beneficiary. If Demings pulls off an upset, it will be not solely because she’s a Black woman, but because the Democrats finally figured out how to rack up some wins in D.C. And what could be a greater crowd-pleaser than that?

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    Adam Harris

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