The unpleasant reality facing the anti-abortion movement is that most Americans don’t actually want to ban abortion.
This explains why the pro-life summer of triumph, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, led to a season of such demoralizing political outcomes. Voters in Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky in November rejected ballot measures to make abortion illegal; just last month, in Wisconsin, voters elected an abortion-rights supporter to the state supreme court.
Yet the movement’s activists don’t seem to care. Thirteen states automatically banned most abortions with trigger laws designed to go into effect when Roe fell; a Texas judge this month stayed the FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, setting in motion what is sure to be a drawn-out legal battle; and some lawmakers are pursuing restrictions on traveling out of state for the procedure—what they call “abortion trafficking.”
Even as the anti-abortion movement lacks a Next Big Objective, a new generation of anti-abortion leaders is ascendant—one that is arguably bolder and more uncompromising than its predecessors. This cohort, still high on the fumes of last summer’s victory, is determined to construct its ideal post-Roe America. And it’s forging ahead—come hell, high water, or public disgust.
The groups this new generation leads “are not afraid to lose short term if they think the long-term gain will be eliminating abortion from the country,” Rachel Rebouché, a family-law professor at Temple University, told me.
One such leader is Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life. After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,“some organizations had to go through this period where they had to reflect and figure out what they were going to do,” she told me. “But nothing changed in our organization—we’d already had that conversation years ago.” Students for Life participants have been calling themselves “the post-Roe generation” since 2019; that’s the year they launched a political-action committee to beef up their state-level presence and begin drafting legislation for a post-Roe society. In 2021, the organization started the Campaign for Abortion-Free Cities to promote what they call “alternatives to abortion” and neighborhood resources for pregnant women.
“What the anti-abortion movement is, who’s leading it, and what it stands for are still being contested,” Mary Ziegler, a UC Davis law professor who has written about abortion for The Atlantic, told me. But organizations such as Students for Life will, in all likelihood, “be the ones running the movement going forward.” To understand the goals of people like Hawkins is, in other words, to peer into the future of America’s anti-abortion project.
The thing about Hawkins is that she’s an optimist—and not a cautious one. So when the draft opinion suggesting that the Supreme Court was about to overrule Roe v. Wade leaked last May, she wasn’t particularly surprised, she told me—she felt vindicated. Other pro-lifers had refused “to let themselves even dare think that a post-Roe America was coming,” Hawkins said. “Of course it was.” She’d always assumed it would happen in her lifetime.
As soon as the draft opinion came out, anti-abortion leaders began to consider their response. Some were worried that taking any kind of victory lap would be inappropriate—that it might scare the justices into moderating or reversing their ultimate decision. Hawkins didn’t care about any of that. “Why would we be guarded? It was important, good news!” she told me. “Folks across the country needed to see this generation celebrating.” Students for Life was one of the first anti-abortion organizations to release a statement praising the draft opinion—while being careful to condemn the leak itself.
Hawkins, who is 37, styles herself as a straight shooter. She doesn’t dress up arguments with religious rhetoric—despite being Catholic herself—and she can be an effective, if sometimes abrasive, debater. Which makes sense, because she came to the pro-life movement through electoral politics. Hawkins knocked on doors for local and state Republican candidates; in college, she worked for the Republican National Committee to reelect President George W. Bush—and, for a year, she worked in his administration. Then, when Students for Life came looking for a new president in 2006, she eagerly accepted.
Hawkins “saw the politics in this in ways a lot of people don’t,” Ziegler told me—and she brought that acumen to the movement. She knew how to lead a grassroots campaign, and how a state legislature functions. Then just 20, she was younger than other pro-life leaders, so she had a better idea of how to engage young people. Hawkins is trying, Ziegler said, “to grow the movement in a way that no one else really ever did.”
The organization’s 14,000 participants campaign for state-level anti-abortion candidates and legislation in their local legislatures. Hawkins, who oversees a staff of 100 paid employees, spends her days traveling to meet with chapter leaders, organizing demonstrations, delivering speeches, and generally doing her best, as she put it to me, “to stir up discussion.” In March, during a visit to Virginia Commonwealth University, protesters shouted over Hawkins when she tried to speak. Demonstrators called her a Nazi and a fascist. Eventually, campus security shut down the event, and police arrested two protesters (who weren’t actually VCU students). Hawkins, who livestreamed the drama, later went on Fox News to offer a full account.
The Students for Life YouTube channel has a 22-minute highlight reel called “Greatest Pro-Choice Takedowns,” in which Hawkins responds to questions from young, often-emotional abortion-rights advocates. As you might expect, the videos feel mean. In each clip showing Hawkins facing off against a different student with a shaky voice, she makes them look silly and ill-informed, a relatively easy thing to do when your opponent is not being paid to perfect her talking points. But these exchanges don’t seem intended to change minds; they’re meant instead to humiliate—and thereby reveal the purported weaknesses in abortion-rights arguments.
Doggedness and moral conviction have always characterized the anti-abortion movement. Activists have sustained their energy for 50 years “by believing that success was possible, even in the absence of clear victories,” Daniel K. Williams, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, told me. Dobbs gave this new generation a taste of victory. Activists like Hawkins are bolder now. Without Roe, they reason, anything is possible.
Students for Life, in particular, is “more abolitionist than prior generations of similar groups,” Rebouché told me. In contrast to other organizations that have pursued incremental progress, the group adopts strategies that are “totalizing and absolute.” Throwing out the rule book, they operate as though they’ve got nothing to lose.
“I admire their persistence; I admire their sacrifices,” Lila Rose, the president of the anti-abortion nonprofit Live Action, says of previous generations of anti-abortion activists. “But we’re playing to win. This isn’t just some nonprofit job.” Rose, who is 34, achieved early prominence in the movement back in 2006 for partnering with the conservative activist James O’Keefe to film undercover exposés at abortion clinics. Live Action doesn’t have the kind of nationwide membership that Students for Life has, but its email list contains more than 1 million contacts, Rose told me, and its social-media following runs into the millions.
Students for Life and Live Action frame their anti-abortion efforts as not just saving babies but empowering women—enabling them to avoid the depression and regret the organizations say can be caused by having an abortion. These aren’t new ideas in themselves, but they’ve been repackaged in a way that mimics the language of a modern social-justice movement appealing to young people. “They’re using phrases like born privilege,” Jennifer Holland, a gender-and-sexuality professor at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “Language that’s hip—in the culture—but that still leads back to this one point of view that maybe you thought was old or conservative.”
Historically, there’s been “a lack of vision” in the movement, Rose said. It was great, she allowed, that the National Right to Life Committee fought so hard in the 2000s to ban what they called “partial-birth abortion” (using a pro-life term not recognized by medical professionals). But, to Rose, pill-induced abortion is just as “anti-human and anti-woman”; a 15-week abortion limit is nothing to celebrate. “I don’t think that we do ourselves any favors as a movement by, like, walking over to the opponent’s side of the field and saying that that’s a victory.”
Hawkins’s master plan to completely eradicate abortion in America begins with passing as many state controls as possible. She calculates that 26 state legislatures contain enough anti-abortion Republicans to be amenable to a strict ban of some sort, and her organization is pushing an “early abortion” model, which means that it drafts and supports legislation restricting abortion either entirely or after six weeks. Hawkins claims credit for pressuring reluctant Republican state leaders in Florida to take up the six-week abortion ban that Governor Ron DeSantis signed late Friday night. Gone are the days of small-ball second-trimester limits, Hawkins says, because most abortions happen before then. “We’re not going to spend a significant amount of resources to pass legislation that’s going to save only 6 percent of children.”
Right now the centerpiece of Students for Life’s campaigning is the effort to ban medication abortion—what Hawkins and her allies call “chemical abortion.” For two years, the group lobbied Republicans in Wyoming to prohibit mifepristone from being sold in pharmacies; the governor signed that measure into law last month. Now it’s setting its sights on the pharmacy chains Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS—which Hawkins singles out as “the nation’s largest abortion vendor.”
On campuses, Students for Life leaders are trying to mobilize young people who might otherwise be ambivalent about the abortion pill; Hawkins says they’ve had luck with the message that mifepristone, when flushed, enters the water system and threatens the health of humans and wildlife. “Young people are aghast to find out that something they care deeply about—the environment—is now conflicting with their views on abortion,” Hawkins told me. Never mind that there is no evidence for these claims. According to Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UC San Francisco, the amount of mifepristone found in drinking water is so small that it might not even be measurable.
“Of all the things we have to worry about with our drinking water,” she told me, “this is not one of them.” Students for Life’s messaging on this, she added, is “a perverse use of science.” The organization is nonetheless backing new laws in several states that would require women prescribed abortion pills to use medical-waste “catch kits” and return them to a health-care provider.
Hawkins is realistic about the fact that her movement’s progress has a ceiling. Some states, especially the liberal strongholds of Illinois and New York, are never going to go for the kinds of laws that she’s pushing for. This is when, she says, her organization will shift its emphasis to the federal government—pushing for a constitutional amendment that would recognize fetal personhood, or for a ruling from the Supreme Court to affirm that the Fourteenth Amendment already does.
Abortion should become “both illegal and unthinkable” in America, Hawkins said. But even when the anti-abortion movement can no longer change hearts and minds, it plans to find a way to change the law anyway. She favors using the law as a tool because, in her view, people tend to derive morality from legality: “Nothing’s going to change their minds until the law changes their minds.” Hawkins envisions a future, 20 years from now, in which university students will discover with abject horror that other states allow the murder of babies in the womb—culturally, she believes, “that’s gonna be massive.” The idea that young people in college would be shocked to learn that different states have different laws on abortion may seem implausible now, but Hawkins is articulating her larger goal—of making abortion unconscionable.
Yet American culture seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The Dobbs ruling, though exciting for anti-abortion activists, was so enraging for abortion-rights supporters that, in some places, they responded by enshrining the right to abortion into state law. These and other political losses suggest that the pro-life movement is already overreaching—and generating a backlash. “It’s breathtaking to see people so motivated and so well funded to push an agenda that is so incredibly unpopular,” Jamie Manson, the president of the abortion-rights organization Catholics for Choice, told me. The months since Dobbs have exposed a fundamental tension between the outcome that abortion-rights opponents want and the one democracy supports.
As it becomes clear that abortion is not always an election winner—that, on occasion, it is even a predictable loser—some Republican legislators have broken from the movement in order to support rape and incest exceptions; others have simply avoided the issue. “Most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters last fall. Hawkins and Rose are happy to criticize those Republicans they see as wishy-washy on abortion. When former President Donald Trump blamed Republicans’ 2022 midterm losses on the extremism of the anti-abortion movement, Rose called it “sniveling cowardice.” But Hawkins and Rose may be underestimating how much more challenging and complex the post-Roe environment is.
“This is much more expensive politics around abortion,” Holland said. “It used to be cheap: You could promise all sorts of things” without penalty, because with Roe intact, such radical measures would never pass.
Does this give Hawkins any pause—the idea that her movement’s aims are so antithetical to what most Americans want? Hawkins said that public opinion doesn’t concern her. The fact that most Americans support abortion access doesn’t make them morally correct, she argued, and neither does it make her own efforts undemocratic. “Do I look upon abolitionists in pre–Civil War America as undemocratic for trying to change people’s minds and prevent the proliferation of owning another human being for your own financial gain? No,” she said.
Hawkins has spent a lot of time thinking about this question. Consider the civil-rights era, she went on. “We had states that stubbornly refused to integrate.” In the end, federal legislation forced them to comply. The implication is that the same sort of national ban should eventually happen for abortion.
Given this goal, we can expect that abortion will be an issue in almost every single election, in almost every single state, for the next many cycles. In some parts of the country, the anti-abortion-rights movement will fail. In others, it will skate along with utter success. Lawmakers will tighten laws, ban pills, and restrict travel. They may even feel audacious enough to venture into the broader realm of reproductive tools—outlawing or restricting IUDs, the morning-after pill, and even in vitro fertilization.
Post-Roe, we can expect these hungry, mobilized activists to seek new conquests. But even as they do, pro-life leaders will have to wonder whether they are guiding their movement toward righteous victory—or humiliating defeat.
Years ago, just after I finished my psychiatry residency, a beloved supervisor called to say she had some bad news. At a routine checkup, she had glanced at her chest X-ray up on the viewing box while waiting for her doctor to come into the room. She was a trauma surgeon before becoming a psychiatrist and had spent years reading chest X-rays, so she knew that the coin-size lesion she saw in her lung was almost certainly cancer, given her long history of smoking.
We had dinner soon after. She was still more than two years away from the end of her life and felt physically fine—vital, even. That’s why I was so surprised when she said she had no desire to spend whatever time she had left on exotic travel or other new adventures. She wanted her husband, her friends, her family, dinner parties, and the great outdoors. “Just more Long Island sunsets. I don’t need Bali,” she told me.
At the end of life, you might expect people to feel regret for all the things they wanted to do and never made time for. But I have yet to know a patient or friend who, facing the blunt fact of their own mortality, had anything close to a bucket list. This squares with some recent research that shows that people tend to prefer familiar experiences more when they are reminded that their days are limited. The people I know even regretted the novelty they’d chased along the way, whether it was recreational-drug use or dating exciting people who they knew weren’t relationship material.
Deathbed pronouncements can have limited applications for the rest of life, but this pattern suggests that novelty is perhaps overrated. Chasing the high of new sensations simply isn’t appealing for many people, and can sometimes even be bad for our health. I suspect that’s because, too often, the pursuit of novelty requires sacrificing the things we already know we love.
It’s a common misconception that people who don’t have a taste for the newest, sexiest experience are dull, incurious, and unimaginative. A 2002 study found that people will switch away from their favorite, habitual choices when they know others are watching in order to avoid being judged as narrow-minded. And yet, Warren Buffett notoriously eats breakfast at the same fast-food restaurant every day and sticks to a strict work schedule. Taylor Swift’s music can be redundant and predictable. Barack Obama is famous for his strict morning exercise regime and daily reading time.
Even when they’re not facing death, many people just don’t seem to like novelty that much. In 2017, a poll by a British soup company found that 77 percent of U.K. workers had consumed the exact same lunch every day for nine months and that one in six people had done so for at least two years. You might think it’s just a matter of convenience or economic exigency (the study didn’t say), but I’m not so sure; wealthy people I know partake in similar behavior, even if they do it at a fancy restaurant. Consider, too, that when people lose a pet, many run out and get a replacement of the same breed with a similar temperament. They repeatedly date people with the same quirks and problems. They return to a favorite vacation spot. They listen to the same musical artists and styles time and again.
Research shows that humans have an intrinsic preference for things and people they are familiar with, something called the mere exposure effect. Several studies have shown that people who listen to unfamiliar songs repeatedly grow fonder of the songs they hear most by the end of the experiment, even if they did not initially like them very much. You don’t even have to be aware that you’re growing used to something for the effect to work.
This tendency toward repetition may seem natural, even lazy, but it runs counter to much of our history. We, along with other animals, evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to novel experiences. Way back in the Paleolithic era, there was a clear survival advantage to being attuned to new situations, which could lead someone to a potential mate or a piece of mastodon, or reveal a deadly threat. Nowadays, though, with every conceivable reward—food, sex, drugs, emotional validation, you name it—either a click, tap, or ChatGPT query away, conventional novelty-seeking has lost much of its adaptive advantage.
As Arthur Brooks has written in The Atlantic, novelty can be fun and exciting. New and unexpected experiences activate the brain’s reward pathway more powerfully than familiar ones, leading to greater dopamine release and a more intense sense of pleasure. But on its own, excitement won’t bring about enduring happiness. Human beings habituate rapidly to what is new. To achieve a lifetime of stimulation, you would have to embark on an endless search for the unfamiliar, which would inevitably lead to disappointment. Worse, the unfettered pursuit of novelty can lead to harm through excessive thrill-seeking—including antisocial behavior such as reckless driving—particularly when the novelty seeker has poor impulse control and a disregard for others.
There’s a better way. Research shows that when novelty-seeking is paired with persistence, people are far more likely to be happy, probably because they are able to achieve something meaningful. You might, for example, take a variety of courses in college or try different summer internships if you’re not yet sure what interests you. When one really clicks, you should explore it in depth; it might even become a lifelong passion. This principle relates to less consequential pleasures, too: If you’re checking out a new neighborhood joint, consider ordering different things during your first few visits, then picking your favorite and sticking with it.
Novelty-seeking is most valuable when you use it as a tool to discover the things and people you love—and once you find them, go deep and long with those experiences and relationships. The siren call that tells you there might be a new and better version of what you already have is likely an illusion, driven by your brain’s relentless reward pathway. When in doubt, pick a beloved activity over an unfamiliar one.
This golden rule of novelty may help explain why some people at the end of their life regret having spent so much time exploring new things, even if they once brought fleeting pleasure. Age, too, might partly explain this feeling, because older people tend to be less open to new experiences. But that’s probably not the whole story. My colleagues who treat children and adolescents have mentioned that, in the face of life-threatening diagnoses, even young people prefer the familiar. They do so not only because the familiar is known and safe, but because it is more meaningful to them. After all, things become familiar to us because we choose them repeatedly—and we do that because they are deeply rewarding.
Imagine, just for a moment, that your death is near. What might you miss out on if you put your bucket list on hold? Sure, you won’t make it to Bali or Antarctica. But maybe instead you could fit in one last baseball game with your kids, one last swim in the ocean, one last movie with your beloved, one last Long Island sunset. If you prioritize the activities and people you already love, you won’t reach the end of your life wishing you’d made more time for them.
The pathogen, one of the four main groups of flu viruses targeted by seasonal vaccines, had spent the first part of the year flitting across the Northern Hemisphere, as it typically did. As the seasons turned, scientists were preparing, as they typically did, for the virus to make its annual trek across the equator and seed new outbreaks in the globe’s southern half.
That migration never came to pass. As the new coronavirus spread, pandemic-mitigation measures started to squash flu-transmission rates to record lows. The drop-off was so sharp that several flu lineages may have gone extinct, among them Yamagata, which hasn’t been definitively detected in more than three years despite virologists’ best efforts to root it out.
Yamagata’s disappearance could still be temporary. “Right now, we’re all just kind of holding our breath,” says Adam Lauring, a virologist at the University of Michigan Medical School. The virus might be biding its time in an isolated population, escaping the notice of tests. But the search has stretched on so fruitlessly that some experts are ready to declare it officially done. “It’s been missing for this long,” says Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, a virologist at Hong Kong University. “At this point, I would really think it’s gone.”
If Yamagata remains AWOL indefinitely, its absence would have at least one relatively straightforward consequence: Researchers might no longer need to account for the lineage in annual vaccines. But its vanishing act could have a more head-spinning implication. Flu viruses, which have been plaguing human populations for centuries, are some of the most well-known and well-studied threats to our health. They have prompted the creation of annual shots, potent antivirals, and internationally funded surveillance programs. And yet, scientists still have some basic questions about why they behave as they do—especially about Yamagata and its closest kin.
To be fair, the competition is stiff. Flu B’s are constantly being compared with influenza A viruses—the group that contains every flu subtype that has caused a pandemic in our recent past, including the extraordinarily deadly outbreak of 1918. Seasonal flu epidemics, too, tend to be heavily dominated by flu A’s, especially H3N2 and H1N1, two notably tough-to-target strains that feature prominently in each year’s vaccine. Even H5N1, the flavor of avian influenza that’s been devastating North America’s wildlife, is a member of the pathogen’s A team.
B viruses, meanwhile, don’t have a particularly daunting résumé. “To our knowledge, there has never been a B pandemic,” says John Paget, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research. Only once every seven seasons or so does a B virus dominate. And although A and B viruses sometimes tag-team the winter, causing twin outbreaks spaced out by a few weeks, these seasons often open with a major flu A banger and then close out with a more muted B coda.
The reasons underlying these differences are still pretty murky, though scientists do have some hints. Whereas flu A viruses are known as especially speedy shape-shifters, constantly spawning genetic offshoots that vie to outcompete one another, flu B’s evolve at oddly plodding rates. Their sluggish approach makes it easier for our immune system to recognize the viruses when they reappear, resulting in longer-lasting protection, more effective vaccines, and fewer reinfections than are typical with the A’s. Those molecular differences also seem to drive differences in how and when the viruses spread. The A’s tend to trouble people repeatedly from birth to death, and are great at globe-trotting. But B’s, perhaps because immunity against them is easier to come by, more often concentrate among kids, many of whom have never encountered the viruses before—and who are usually more resilient to respiratory viruses and travel less than adults, keeping outbreaks mostly regional. That might also help explain why B epidemics so frequently lag behind A’s: Slower pathogen evolution facing off with more durable host immunity add up to less rapid B spread, while their A colleagues rush ahead. Our bodies also seem to mount rather fiery defenses against A viruses, steeling them against other infections in the weeks that follow and deepening the disadvantage against any B’s trailing behind. All of that means flu B has a hard time catching humans off guard.
The virus’s host preferences, too, make flu A viruses more dangerous. Those lineages are great at hopscotching among a whole menagerie of species—most infamously, pigs and wild, water-loving birds—sometimes undergoing rapid bursts of evolution as they go. But flu B’s seem to almost exclusively infect humans, igniting only the rare and fast-resolving outbreak in a limited number of other species—a few seals here, a handful of pigs there. Spillovers from wild creatures into humans are the roots of global outbreaks. And so, with its zoonotic bent, “influenza A will always be the main focus” of concern, says Carolien van de Sandt, a virologist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, in Melbourne. Even among some scientists, Yamagata and Victoria register as little more than literal B-list blips.
Plenty of other experts, though, think flu B’s relative obscurity is misguided—perhaps even a bit dangerous. Flu B’s account for roughly a quarter of annual flu cases, many of which lead to hospitalization and death; they seem hardier than their A cousins against certain antiviral drugs. And scientists simply know a lot less about flu B’s: how, precisely, they interact with the immune system; what factors influence their sluggish evolutionary rate; the nuances of their person-to-person spread; their oddball animal-host range. And that lack of intel on what has for decades been a formidable infectious foe creates a risk all on its own.
Flu lineages have dipped into relative obscurity before only to come roaring back. After the end of the H2N2 pandemic of the late 1950s, H1N1 appeared to flame out—only to reemerge nearly two decades later to greet a population full of young people whose immune systems hadn’t glimpsed it before. And as recently as the 1990s, the B lineage Victoria underwent a years-long ebb in most parts of the world, before ricocheting back to prominence in the early 2000s.
As far as researchers can tell, Victoria is alive and well; during the globe’s most recent winter seasons, the lineage appears to have ignited late-arriving outbreaks in several countries, including in South Africa, Malaysia, and various parts of Europe. But based on the viral sequences that researchers have isolated from people sick with flu, Yamagata is still nowhere to be found, says Saverio Caini, a virologist at the cancer research center ISPRO, in Italy.
The lineage was already teetering on a precipice before the pandemic began, van de Sandt told me. Yamagata and Victoria, which splintered apart in the early 1980s, are still closely related enough that they often compete for the same hosts. And just prior to 2020, Victoria, the more diverse and fleet-footed of the two B lineages, had been reliably edging out its cousin, pushing Yamagata’s prevalence down, down, down. That trend, coupled with several years of use of a well-matched Yamagata strain in the seasonal flu vaccine, meant that Yamagata “had already decreased in incidence and circulation,” van de Sandt said. With the odds so steeply stacked, the addition of pandemic mitigations may have been the final factor that snuffed the lineage out.
Recently, a few countries—including China, Pakistan, and Belize—have tentatively reported possible Yamagata infections. But there’s been no conclusive genetic proof, several experts told me. Several parts of the world, including the United States, regularly use flu vaccines containing active flu viruses that can trip the same viral tests that the wild, disease-causing pathogens do. “So the reports could be contaminations,” van de Sandt said. Scientists would need to scour the virus’s genetic sequences to distinguish infection from injection; those data, however, haven’t emerged.
Should the Yamagata dry spell continue, researchers may want to start considering snipping the lineage out of vaccines altogether, perhaps as early as the middle or end of this year. Doing so would punt the world back to the early 2010s, when flu shots were trivalent—designed to protect people against two A viruses, H3N2 and H1N1, plus either Victoria or Yamagata, depending on which lineage researchers forecasted would surge more. (They were often wrong.) Or maybe the space once used for Yamagata could feasibly be filled with another flavor of H3N2, the fastest mutator of the bunch.
But purging Yamagata from the vaccine would be a gamble. If Yamagata is not gone for good, van de Sandt worries that booting it from the vaccine would leave the world vulnerable to a massive and deadly outbreak. Even Dhanasekaran, who is among the researchers who are fairly confident that we’ve seen the last of Yamagata, told me he doesn’t want to rule out the possibility that the virus is cloistering in an immunocompromised person with a chronic infection, and it’s unclear if it could reemerge from such a hiding place. The only thing scientists can do for now is be patient, says Jayna Raghwani, a computational biologist at the University of Oxford. “If we don’t see it in successive seasons for another two to three years, that will be more convincing,” she told me.
If Yamagata’s death knell has actually rung, though, it will have reverberating effects. There’s no telling, for instance, how other flu lineages might be affected by their colleague’s supposed retirement. Perhaps Victoria, which can swap genetic material with Yamagata, will evolve more slowly without its partner. At the same time, Victoria may have an easier time infecting people now that it no longer needs to compete as often for hosts.
If Yamagata has gone to pasture, “there won’t be a ceremony declaring the world Yamagata free,” Lauring told me. And it’s easy, he points out, to forget things we don’t see. But even if Yamagata seems gone for now, the effects of its demise will be significant enough that it can’t be forgotten—not just yet.
The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.
“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”
It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.
Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.
According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.
But he isn’t the only one.
Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.
The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.
“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.
At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.
“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”
It’s one of thedefining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.
And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)
It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.
“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”
The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.
“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”
Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”
Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.
“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”
Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.
Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.
There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.
In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.
There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.
Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.
“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”
She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”
This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.
DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.
“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.
Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.
Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.
Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?
“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”
Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”
In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”
The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.
Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.
Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.
If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”
That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.
“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”
After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.
Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.
Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.
For decades now, gay men have been barred from giving blood. In 2015, what had been a lifetime ban was loosened, such that gay men could be donors if they’d abstained from sex for at least a year. This was later shortened to three months. Last week, the FDA put out a new and more inclusive plan: Sexually active gay and bisexual people would be permitted to donate so long as they have not recently engaged in anal sex with new or multiple partners. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the first Senate-confirmed transgender official in the U.S., issued a statement commending the proposal for “advancing equity.” It “treats everyone the same,” she said, “regardless of gender and sexual orientation.”
As a member of the small but honorable league of gay pathologists, I’m affected by these proposed policy changes more than most Americans. I’m subject to restrictions on giving blood, and I’ve also been responsible for monitoring the complications that can arise from transfusions of infected blood. I am quite concerned about HIV, given that men who have sex with men are at much greater risk of contracting the virus than members of other groups. But it’s not the blood-borne illness that I, as a doctor, fear most. Common bacteria lead to far more transfusion-transmitted infections in the U.S. than any virus does, and most of those produce severe or fatal illness. The risk from viruses is extraordinarily low—there hasn’t been a single reported case of transfusion-associated HIV in the U.S. since 2008—because laboratories now use highly accurate tests to screen all donors and ensure the safety of our blood supply. This testing is so accurate that preventing anyone from donating based on their sexual behavior is no longer logical. Meanwhile, new dictates about anal sex, like older ones explicitly targeting men who have sex with men, still discriminate against the queer community—the FDA is simply struggling to find the most socially acceptable way to pursue a policy that it should have abandoned long ago.
Strict precautions made more sense 30 years ago, when screening didn’t work nearly as well as it does today. Patients with hemophilia, many of whom rely on blood products to live, were prominent, early victims of our inability to keep HIV out of the blood supply. One patient who’d acquired the virus through a transfusion lamented to The New York Times in 1993 that he had already watched an uncle and a cousin die of AIDS. Those days of “shock and denial,” as the Times described it, are thankfully behind us. But for older patients, memories of the crisis in the ’80s and early ’90s linger, and cause significant anxiety. Even people unaware of this historical context may consider the receipt of someone else’s blood disturbing, threatening, or sinful.
As a doctor, I’ve found that patients tend to be more hesitant about getting a blood transfusion than they are about taking a pill. I’ve had them ask for a detailed medical history of the donor, or say they’re willing to take blood only from a close relative. (Typically, neither of these requests can be fulfilled for reasons of privacy and practicality.) Yet the same patients may accept—without question—drugs that carry a risk of serious complication that is thousands of times higher than the risk of receiving infected blood. Even when it comes to blood-borne infections, patients seem to worry less about the greatest danger—bacterial contamination—than they do about the transfer of viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C. I can’t fault anyone for being sick and scared, but the risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion is not just low—it’s essentially nonexistent.
Donors’ feelings matter, too, and the FDA’s policies toward gay and bisexual men who wish to give blood have been unfair for many years. While officials speak in the supposedly objective language of risk and safety, their selective deployment of concern suggests a deeper homophobia. As one scholar put it in The American Journal of Bioethics more than a decade ago, “Discrimination resides not in the risk itself but in the FDA response to the risk.” Many demographic groups are at elevated risk of contracting HIV, yet the agency isn’t continually refining its exclusion criteria for young people or urban dwellers or Black and Hispanic people. Federal policy did prohibit Haitians from donating blood from 1983 to 1991, but activists successfully lobbied for the reversal of this ban with the powerful slogan “The H in HIV stands for human, not Haitian.” Nearly everyone today would find the idea of rejecting blood from one racial group to be morally repugnant. Under its new proposal, which purports to target anal sex instead of homosexuality itself, the FDA effectively persists in rejecting blood from sexual minorities.
The planned update would certainly be an improvement. It comes out of years of advocacy by LGBTQ-rights organizations, and its details are apparently supported by newly conducted government research. Peter Marks, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, cited an unpublished study showing that “a significant fraction” of men who have sex with men would now be able to donate. But the plan is still likely to exclude a large portion of them—even those who wear condoms or regularly test for sexually transmitted infections. An FDA spokesperson told me via email that “additional data are needed to determine what proportion of [men who have sex with men] would be able to donate under the proposed change.”
Research done in France, Canada, and the U.K., where similar policies have since been adopted over the past two years, demonstrates the risk. A French blood-donation study, for instance, estimated that 70 percent of men who have sex with men had more than one recent partner; and when Canadian researchers surveyed queer communities in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, they found that up to 63 percent would not be eligible to donate because they’d recently had anal sex with new or multiple partners. Just 1 percent of previously eligible donors would have been rejected by similar criteria. The U.K. assumed in its calculations that 35 to 50 percent of men who have sex with men would be ineligible under a policy much like the FDA’s, while only 1.4 percent of previous donors would be newly deferred. If the new rule’s net effect is that gay and bisexual men are turned away from blood centers at many times the rate of heterosexual individuals, what else can you call it but discrimination? The U.S. guidance is supposed to ban a lifestyle choice rather than an identity, but the implication is that too many queer men have chosen wrong. The FDA spokesperson told me, “Anal sex with more than one sexual partner has a significantly greater risk of HIV infection when compared to other sexual exposures, including oral sex or penile-vaginal sex.”
If the FDA wants to pry into my sex life, it should have a good reason for doing so. The increasing granularity and intimacy of these policies—specifying numbers of partners, kinds of sex—gives the impression that the stakes are very high: If we don’t keep out the most dangerous donors, the blood supply could be ruined. But donor-screening questions are a crude tool for picking needles from a haystack. The only HIV infections that are likely to get missed by modern testing are those contracted within the previous week or two. This suggests that, at most, a couple thousand individuals—gay and straight—across the entire country are at risk of slipping past our testing defenses at any given time. Of course, very few of them will happen to donate blood right then. No voluntary questionnaire can ever totally exclude this possibility, but patients and doctors already accept other life-threatening transfusion risks that occur at much greater rates than HIV transmission ever could. When I would be on call for monitoring transfusion reactions at a single hospital, the phone would ring a few times every night. Yet blood has been given out tens of millions of times across the country since the last known instance of a transfusion resulting in a case of HIV.
Early data suggest that the overall risk-benefit calculus of receiving blood isn’t likely to change. When eligibility criteria were first relaxed in the U.S. a few years ago, the already tiny rate of HIV-positive donations remained minuscule. Real-world results from other countries that have recently adopted sexual-orientation-neutral policies will become available in the coming years. But modeling studies already support removing any screening question that explicitly or implicitly targets queer men. A 2022 Canadian analysis suggested that removing all questions about men who have sex with men would not result in a significantly higher risk to patients. “Extra behavioral risk questions may not be necessary,” the researchers concluded. If there must be a restriction in place, then one narrowly tailored to the slim risk window of seven to 10 days before donation should be good enough. (The FDA says that its proposed policy “would be expected to reduce the likelihood of donations by individuals with new or recent HIV infection who may be in the window period.”)
As a gay man, I realize that, brief periods of crisis during the coronavirus pandemic aside, no one needs my blood. Only 6.8 percent of men in the U.S. identify as gay or bisexual, so our potential benefit to the overall supply is inherently modest. If we went back to being banned completely, patients would not be harmed. But reversing that ban, both in letter and in spirit, would send a vital message: Our government and health-care system view sexual minorities as more than a disease vector. A policy that uses anal sex as a stand-in for men who have sex with men only further stigmatizes this population by impugning one of its main sources of sexual pleasure. There is no question that nonmonogamous queer men have a greater chance of contracting HIV. But a policy that truly treats everyone the same would accept a tiny amount of risk as the price of working with human beings.
Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?
If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:
“We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”
Oz’s derision of his opponent’s medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Oz’s defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.
A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the party’s disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidates—and voters decisively repudiated them.
But not all of Trump’s picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.
But Oz’s decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.
The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trump’s.
And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasn’t the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.
Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.
But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.
DeSantis’s many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? “Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues!” plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that he’s sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.
A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagan’s warm chuckle, Bill Clinton’s down-home charm, George W. Bush’s smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the same—in part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.
Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewozik’s 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trump’s ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create “the least objectionable program”; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.
It’s an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trump’s material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comey’s intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.
Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the House—barely—but otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.
Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.
All of these factors clearly played a role. But don’t under-weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.
Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination.” The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.
In 2021, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estate’s withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).
Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comic—for instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponent’s adult children during the 2020 campaign.
This is not a “both sides” story. Democratic candidates don’t try to energize their base by “owning the conservatives”; that’s just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and it’s not clear that Democrats even have an obvious “base” the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Party’s many different “bases” with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can be—or seem—rewarding, at least in the short run.
This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trump’s declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantis’s as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Biden’s son Hunter.
In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trump’s project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trump’s first impeachment.
The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve it—so the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.
Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, there’s no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.
Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.
So now the new Twitter—and Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the company’s internal workings—is trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. It’s all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And it’s all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.
There’s talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.
* Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty
This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Party of Trolls.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
During this week’s Monday Night Football game, the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed moments after making a routine defensive play. Hamlin seemed to have suffered a blow to his chest shortly before losing consciousness from cardiac arrest, and his condition is grave. The source of his illness remains unclear. A study of sudden cardiac events in U.S. athletes from 2014 to 2016 found that structural abnormalities of the heart muscle or arteries and faulty electric rhythms were the most common causes; traumatic chest injuries have also been linked to such incidents, in a rare condition called commotio cordis. Still, the availability of these hypotheses did not stop online activists from blaming Hamlin’s health crisis on vaccines.
Anti-vaccine influencers have been fomenting fear about a supposed rise in COVID-shot-induced athletic deaths for a while. Fact-checkers have repeatedlyassessed these claims and found them to be without merit. Jonathan Drezner, a sports-medicine physician who studies sudden deaths in athletes, told media outlets last year that he was “not aware of any COVID-19 vaccine-related athletic death.” The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, which systematically tracks sports-related fatalities, identified 13 medical deaths during football-related activities in 2021 among players participating at all levels of competition, eight of which were caused by cardiac arrest. The same researchers had found 14 medical deaths two years earlier, 10 of which were heart-related. These incidents remain tragic and scarce.
The mRNA shots by Pfizer and Moderna are associated with a very small risk of heart inflammation, called myocarditis, which can lead to cardiac arrest. This risk is most pronounced in teenage boys receiving a second dose of the vaccine, but even in that scenario only about one in 10,000 recipients is affected. (Most professional athletes are in their 20s, not teens, so the risk to them is lower.) Myocarditis is a potentially fatal condition, but the version that occurs after vaccination is much less deadly than the heart inflammation induced by many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. A recent analysis identified only a single death in 104 cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis. In comparison, for every 100 people who get myocarditis from a virus, about 11 will die.
The mere fact that mRNA shots can lead to heart problems has been exploited by conservative commentators and politicians to exaggerate the risks to young people. Last month, per a news release, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised to look into “sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine,” and called for a grand jury to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the vaccine manufacturers. His petition to the Florida Supreme Court justified the investigation by pointing out that “excess mortality from heart attacks rose significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among individuals ages 25 to 44.” Yet the rise in youth heart attacks actually began in 2020, before vaccines were available. That’s because increased cardiac fatalities during the pandemic have mostly been due to the coronavirus itself. Heart-disease deaths in the United States have been observed to rise and fall in near lockstep with waves of COVID deaths, suggesting that most of these cases—97 percent, according to one estimate—are the result of undocumented SARS-CoV-2 infection.
DeSantis’s crusade against vaccines is backed by his surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, who is a staunch opponent of inoculating young people against COVID. (He has encouraged the use of ineffective therapies such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, though.) In October, Ladapo’s department produced an anonymous, non-peer-reviewed analysis suggesting that COVID shots were causing an increase in cardiac fatalities in young men. This report was modeled on a study by the U.K. government, which came to the opposite conclusion about vaccines but did find that COVID infection was associated with a sixfold increase in youth cardiac death. Given the lack of detail provided in the Florida study, it’s hard to know how to reconcile its contradictory result. This week, a group of University of Florida physicians and scientists released a report that strongly criticized the work’s methodology.
The COVID vaccines are among the most widely used medical interventions. More than 13 billion doses have been administered, at least 1 billion of which relied on mRNA technology. In analyzing this trove of real-world data, researchers have occasionally identified potential safety issues. A lack of perfect consistency across their studies is expected, and only confirms that the scientific dialogue about this new technology has been transparent. Scientists know that findings made outside a clinical trial are prone to spurious associations, so they examine how well each analysis has been performed and interpret it in the context of prior research.
Vaccine skeptics prefer to cherry-pick supportive studies while ignoring others that contradict them. Ladapo, for example, has cited a Scandinavian report showing a potential increase in post-vaccine blood clots and heart attacks. Yet the study authors themselves cautioned readers against relying too heavily on their results, because the finding was observed in only some age groups and time periods but not others. Ladapo also failed to mention that similar studies out of the U.K., France, Scotland, and elsewhere had not found a meaningful increase in blood clots or heart attacks with mRNA shots.
A careful recitation of facts can take one only so far in combatting anti-vaccine claims. Activists use ambiguous anecdotes such as Hamlin’s cardiac arrest and the sudden death of the soccer journalist Grant Wahl during last month’s World Cup to make the alleged risks of the shots more visceral. Sports are much less dangerous than SARS-CoV-2, but when unexpected tragedies do occur, they lead to an outpouring of mourning and reflection. Collective trauma can easily give way to collective speculation, and partisans on all sides will be happy to tell us what really happened. Yet convenient scapegoats will not be enough to mend our grief.
Senator Raphael Warnock’s win in yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff capped a commanding show of strength by Democrats in the states that decided the 2020 race for the White House—and will likely pick the winner again in 2024.
With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
Coming even amid widespread discontent over the economy, this year’s Democratic sweep against the Trump-backed candidates underscores the continuing resistance to the former president’s influence. In particular, Warnock’s decisive margins in Atlanta and its suburbs yesterday extended the Democratic dominance of white-collar (and usually racially diverse) metropolitan areas, as varied as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia and the booming hot spots of Phoenix and Madison.
“The huge question after the election of 2020 was whether the suburbs would snap back to the GOP column after Trump was no longer on the ballot,” Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, told me. “What we saw in 2022 was suburbs continuing to trend toward Democrats.”
Apart from perhaps Michigan, none of these states appears entirely out of reach for the GOP in 2024. Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, told me that although suburban voters recoiled against “delusional candidates” who “parroted” Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Republicans “could very well come back and win the suburbs” with “non-delusional candidates.”
Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.
But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)
“You have a large percentage of Americans who are wary of MAGA and have now voted against MAGA three times,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of NDN, a Democratic research and advocacy group, told me. Rosenberg was the most forceful public skeptic of the “red wave” theory. “They are now going to have to take all those people and turn them into Republican voters in 2024. It’s certainly not impossible, but I’d much rather be us than them going into the 2024 election”
In many ways, yesterday’s Georgia result underscored the partisan chasm that has left the country closely divided for at least the past decade. Walker was, by any objective measure, among the weakest general-election candidates for a major office either party has produced in modern memory. Tarred by an endless procession of scandals, prone to nonsensical statements on the campaign trail (as when he mused on the relative merits of vampires and werewolves), and unwilling or unable to articulate positions on many major issues, he nonetheless drew unflagging support from national Republican leaders and held the large majority of the state’s Republican votes.
That Walker came as close as he did to winning underscores the growing parliamentary nature of House and Senate elections, in which fewer voters are casting their ballots based on personal assessments of the two candidates and more are deciding based on which party they want to control the national agenda.
Yet all of that still left Walker, like the other Trump-backed candidates, short in the face of solid margins for Democrats in and around these states’ major population centers. Exit polls showed Democrats posting big advantages among all the demographic groups that tend to congregate in large metropolitan areas: young people, people of color, college-educated voters, secular voters, and LGBTQ adults.
Thriving Cobb and Gwinnett Counties outside Atlanta, with a combined population of 1.7 million people, encapsulate the suburban evolution that has tilted the balance of power. For years, these counties were Republican redoubts: George W. Bush won them by roughly a combined 150,000 votes in the 2004 presidential race, and even as late as the hard-fought 2014 Georgia Senate race, the winning GOP nominee, David Perdue, carried each of them by double-digit margins.
But both counties have grown more diverse. White people now make up only about three-fifths of the population in Cobb and a little more than half in Gwinnett, and nearly half of Cobb adults hold at least a four-year college degree. This has alienated them from a GOP that Trump has reshaped to reflect the cultural priorities and grievances of culturally conservative white voters, particularly those without college degrees or who live outside urban areas. Hillary Clinton narrowly carried both counties in 2016, Biden won just under 60 percent of the vote in each in 2020, and Warnock in November roughly matched Biden’s performance. As of the latest count, Warnock yesterday again carried about three-fifths of the vote in both Cobb and Gwinnett. He also ran up big margins in the suburban counties just south of Atlanta.
The same patterns were evident in the large white-collar suburbs of the other states that Republicans must win back to recapture the White House in 2024. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in crushing her Trump-backed opponent, Tudor Dixon, won a higher share of the vote in Oakland and Kent Counties than she managed in 2018 or than Biden did in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Senator-elect John Fetterman matched Biden in exceeding three-fifths of the vote in both Delaware and Montgomery Counties, outside Philadelphia. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly carried Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, by almost 100,000 votes—more than doubling Biden’s margin in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the county since Harry Truman in 1948. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by 25,000 more votes than he had in 2018, and an analysis of the statewide results showed him improving the most over his first election in the counties with the highest levels of educational attainment.
After this year’s defeats, many analysts in both parties are dubious that Trump can recapture enough (and maybe any) of these five states in 2024. The bigger question facing Republicans is whether another candidate, one who does not have Trump’s personal baggage but who shares most of his culture-war views, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, could perform much better.
Republicans are generally optimistic that DeSantis could regain ground Trump has lost among suburban voters who leaned Republican not too long ago. They point to Georgia Republican Governor Kemp performing better than Walker did in the Atlanta suburbs as evidence that a more mainstream Republican can slice the Democratic advantage in such places. DeSantis, Ayres said, “has got a lot of things he can sell to suburban Republican voters that Trump just can’t sell.”
Almost universally, Democrats believe that Republicans are underestimating how hard it will be to reel back in college-educated suburban voters who have now mobilized against Trump’s vision for America in three consecutive elections, especially in these battleground states. Although DeSantis is less belligerent than Trump, and not associated with the violence and subversion of the January 6 insurrection, so far he has emphasized a similar style of politics focused on conservative grievance against “woke” cultural liberalism. “Ron DeSantis is every bit as MAGA as Donald Trump,” Rosenberg said. “This idea that he is some more moderate version of Trump is just farcical.”
The fact that even a candidate as weak as Walker remained as competitive as he did underscores how difficult it may be for either side to establish a comfortable advantage in these states in 2024. (The exceptions could be Michigan, which even many Republicans agree looks daunting for them, and maybe Pennsylvania, which also tilted blue last month.)
These states provided Democrats with their own warning signs this year. Exit polls last month showed that most voters in these states disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that big majorities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states where the question was asked, did not want him to run again. Democrats also faced a worrying trend of lagging Black turnout in many urban centers this year, though Black voters came out in big numbers in Georgia’s early voting, and activists in the state are confident they will remain highly engaged through 2024. “Our goal was to build a culture of voting, and that’s what we have done in Georgia over the past five years,” Amari Fennoy, the state coordinator for the NAACP Georgia State Conference, told me.
Yet the consistency of the results this year, both demographically and geographically, signal that the re-sorting of the parties in the Trump era has left Democrats with a narrow, but potentially durable, advantage in these five crucial states. That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win them in the 2024 presidential race, but it does suggest an important takeaway from the 2022 election that finally ended last night: As long as voters still perceive Republicans to be operating in Trump’s shadow (much less if they again nominate Trump himself), Democrats will begin with an advantage in the states most likely to pick the next president.
“I think that the coalition that turned out to stop Trump is going to be the starting point for the next presidential race,” Wikler said. “There are new threats and new opportunities, but this was not a one-off coalition that came together for a special occasion and went home.” Georgia, again, made that very clear last night.
Anti-lockdown protests erupted across China following a deadly apartment fire in Xinjiang last week. The country’s zero-COVID policy may have been to blame, as first responders were apparently restricted from accessing the scene. Heavy-handed quarantines and endless testing are causing many harms, including food shortages and widespread unemployment. But they’re also keeping China’s COVID death toll very, very low: A study out in May from Nature Medicine, led by Shanghai researchers, estimated that without these strict measures in place, a massive wave of new Omicron infections could overwhelm critical-care units and leave 1.55 million people dead. As protesters call on the government to loosen up, how do they make sense of this potential trade-off?
Few, if any, of the people in the street are asking for a total rollback of the country’s COVID measures. Global public-health experts and China scholars who have been following the protests either from the ground in China or through contacts overseas told me that the movement lacks a precise set of demands. In general, however, the protesters have expressed a wish for easing restrictions, rather than a to-hell-with-it approach. They may not be opposed to post-exposure quarantine, for example, but they’d like to do it in their homes rather than inside government facilities. And footage of the demonstrations shows that many of the protesters are wearing masks (presumably to protect themselves from the coronavirus) even as they agitate for less aggressive testing programs and greater freedom of movement.
It’s not that people don’t understand the seriousness of COVID, especially in a nation where only two-thirds of those over the age of 80 are fully vaccinated. “People are very much aware of COVID infection, and to some extent, they may even overestimate some of the immediate health risks,” Jeremiah Jenne, a historian and writer based in Beijing, told me. Propaganda circulated by the government has painted other countries as being overrun with deaths from the disease, and China as the only place where people can be safe. But a growing number of citizens, particularly in urban areas and among those who are more internationally aware, are adjusting how they weigh the risks of COVID against the economic hardships and other costs of permanent, draconian restrictions.
The World Cup has helped fuel this change in attitude, China scholars told me. David Moser, a professor at Beijing Capital Normal University who’s been in China for 35 years, pointed to the broadcasts of the matches, which showed crowds of unmasked people in the stands, leading undisturbed lives. Chinese observers “got a sense that other countries are handling this by self-quarantining, by allowing a certain amount of infections, and letting people make their own medical decisions,” he said. Protesters may not expect to venture into stadiums without a mask anytime soon, or travel without restrictions, but they would like to see some steps in that direction. “They’re asking for a plan that provides an effective way to deal with the pandemic and keep people safe,” Jenne said, “not to go to Paris in March.”
Xi Chen, a health-policy professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told me that many young people protesting think the risks are much smaller than the ones described in the study from last May, which predicted 1.55 million deaths. “I was circulating the number from that Nature paper to younger friends in my network earlier this year, [and] they don’t buy this idea.” They know that easing off the zero-COVID policy will lead to people dying, but they don’t imagine it would reach that scale. According to Chen, some protesters are asking that public resources be prioritized for helping older adults and other vulnerable people in an attempt to mitigate the harm. The Nature study, for what it’s worth, estimated that if the Chinese government could fill the gaps in vaccination and provide shots for every eligible senior, the death toll from a rampant COVID outbreak would be roughly 600,000, while adding widespread use of antiviral therapies would drive it down much further. (The numbers from that model might not be exactly right, says Albert Ko, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and physician at the Yale School of Public Health, but they’re within the realm of possibility. “Whether it’s 1 million or 1.5 million or 2 million, that’s a huge burden.”)
Whatever the costs, the protesters are convinced that the zero-COVID policy is unsustainable. Public-health experts agree. “The government should address these concerns, because without jobs, people cannot pay for food and medications,” Chen said. In the end, China will need to navigate reopening while attempting to mitigate loss, Ko told me. “This should have been done much earlier.”
After nearly three years of constantly thinking about COVID, it’s alarming how easily I can stop. The truth is, as a healthy, vaxxed-to-the-brim young person who has already had COVID, the pandemic now often feels more like an abstraction than a crisis. My perception of personal risk has dropped in recent months, as has my stamina for precautions. I still care about COVID, but I also eat in crowded cafés and go mask-free at parties.
Heading into the third pandemic winter, things have changed. Most Americans seem to have tuned out COVID. Precautions have virtually disappeared; except for in the deepest-blue cities, wearing a mask is, well, weird. Reported cases are way down since the spring and summer, but perhaps the biggest reason for America’s behavioral let-up is that much of the country sees COVID as a minor nuisance, no more bothersome than a cold or the flu.
And to a certain degree, they’re right: Most healthy, working-age adults who are up-to-date on their vaccinations won’t get severely ill—especially now that antivirals such as Paxlovid are available. Other treatments can help if a patient does get very sick. “People who are vaccinated and relatively healthy who are getting COVID are not getting that sick,” Lisa Lee, an epidemiologist at Virginia Tech, told me. “And so people are thinking, Wow, I’ve had COVID. It wasn’t that bad. I don’t really care anymore.”
Still, there are many reasons to continue caring about COVID. About 300 people are still dying every day; COVID is on track to be the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. for the third year running. The prospect of developing long COVID is real and terrifying, as are mounting concerns about reinfections. But admittedly, these sometimes manifest in my mind as a dull, omnipresent horror, not an urgent affront. Continuing to care about COVID while also loosening up behaviors is an uncomfortable position to be in. Most of the time, I just try to ignore the guilt gnawing at my brain. At this point, when so few people feel that the potential benefit of dodging an infection is worth the inconvenience of precautions, what does it even mean to care about COVID?
In an ideal epidemiological scenario, everyone would willingly deploy the full arsenal of COVID precautions, such as masking and forgoing crowded indoor activities, especially during waves. But that kind of all-out response no longer makes sense. “It’s probably not realistic to expect people to take precautions every time, perpetually, or even every winter or fall, unless there is a particularly concerning reason to do that,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me.
But, now more than ever, we must remember that COVID is not just a personal threat but a community one. For older and immunocompromised people, the risks are still significant. For example, people over 50 account for 93 percent of COVID-related deaths in the U.S., even though they represent just 35.7 percent of the population. As long as the death rate remains as high as it is, caring about COVID should mean orienting precautions to protect them. This idea has been around since the pandemic began, but its prominence faded as Americans put their personal health first. “If you’re otherwise healthy, it’s so easy just to think about yourself,” Lee said. “We have to think very carefully about that other part of infectious disease, which is the part where we can potentially hurt other people.”
Orienting behavior in this way gives low-risk people a way to care about COVID that doesn’t entail constant masking or skipping all indoor activities: They can relax when they know they aren’t going to encounter vulnerable people. Like the productivity adage “work smarter, not harder,” this perspective allows people to take precautions strategically, not always. In practice, all it takes is some foresight. If you don’t live with vulnerable people, make it second nature to ask: Will I be seeing vulnerable people anytime soon? If the answer is no, do whatever you’re comfortable with given your own risk. If you are a healthy 30-something who lives alone, going to a Friendsgiving with other people your age is different from spending Thanksgiving dinner with parents and grandparents.
If you will be seeing someone vulnerable, the most straightforward way to avoid giving them COVID is to avoid getting infected yourself, which means wearing a good mask in public settings and minimizing your interactions with others the week before, in what some experts have called a “mini-quarantine.” Not everyone has that luxury: Parents, for example, have to send their kids to school.
Spontaneous interactions with vulnerable people are trickier to plan for, but they follow the same principle. On a crowded bus, for example, “there’s no question that if you’re close enough to someone who could be hurt by getting COVID and you could have it, then, yeah, a mask is the way to go,” Lee said. Of course, it isn’t always possible to know when someone is high-risk; young people, too, can be medically vulnerable. There’s no clear guidance for those situations, but remaining cautious doesn’t require much effort. “Carry a mask with you,” Lee said. “It’s not a big lift.”
Get boosted—if not for yourself, then for them. Just 11.3 percent of eligible Americans have gotten the latest, bivalent shot, which potentially reduces your chances of getting COVID and passing it along. It also means getting tested, so you know when you’re infectious, and being aware of respiratory symptoms—of any kind. Alongside COVID, the flu and RSV are putting many people in the hospital, especially the very young and the very old. No matter how low your personal risk, if you have symptoms, avoiding transmission is crucial. “A reasonable thing to prioritize is: If you have symptoms, take care to prevent it from spreading,” Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me.
As we move away from a personal approach to COVID, we have an opportunity to expand the idea of what caring looks like. Low-risk people can, and should, take an active role in bolstering the protection of vulnerable people they know. In practical terms, this means ensuring that people in your life who are over 50—especially those over 65—are boosted and have a plan to get Paxlovid if they fall sick, Nuzzo said. “I think our biggest problem right now is that not everybody has enough access to the tools, and that’s a place where people can help.” She noted that she is particularly concerned about older people who struggle to book vaccine appointments online. Caring “doesn’t mean abstaining, per se. It means facilitating. It means enabling and helping people in your community.” This holiday season, caring could mean sitting down at a computer to make Grandma’s booster appointment, or driving her to the drugstore to get it.
If you have lost your motivation to care about COVID, you might find it in the people you love. I didn’t feel a personal need to wear a mask at the concert I attended yesterday, but I did it because I don’t want to accidentally infect my partner’s 94-year-old grandfather when I see him next week. To have this experience of the pandemic is a privilege. Many don’t have the option to stop caring, even for a moment.
Barring another Omicron-esque event, we thankfully won’t ever return to a moment where Americans obsess over COVID en masse. But this virus isn’t going away, so we can’t escape having a population that is split between the high-risk minority and the low-risk majority. Rethinking what it means to care allows for a more nuanced and liveable idea of what responsible behavior looks like. Right now, Nuzzo told me, the language we use to describe one’s position on COVID is “black-and-white, absolutist—you either care or you don’t.” There is space between those extremes. At least for now, it’s the only way to compromise between the world we have and the world we want.
If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.
Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation.
With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law. The practical effect of these proposals would be to require blue states to live under the restrictive social policies that have burned through red states since President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.“I think the days of fealty [to states’ rights] are nearing an end, and we are going to see the national Republicans in Congress adopting maximalist policy approaches,” Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group that advocates for stricter gun control, told me.
None of the proposals to nationalize the red-state social agenda could become law any time soon. Even if Republicans were to win both congressional chambers, they would not have the votes to overcome the inevitable Biden vetoes. Nor would Republicans, even if they controlled both chambers, have any incentive to consider repealing the Senate filibuster to pass this agenda until they know they have a president who would sign the resulting bills into law—something they can’t achieve before the 2024 election.
But if Republicans triumph this week, the next two years could nonetheless become a crucial period in formulating a strategy to nationalize the red-state social-policy revolution. Particularly if Republicans win the House, they seem certain to explore which of these ideas can attract enough support in their caucus to clear the chamber. And the 2024 Republican presidential candidates are also likely to test GOP primary voters’ appetite for writing conservative social priorities into national law. Embracing such initiatives “may prove irresistible for a lot of folks trying to capture” the party’s socially conservative wing, Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me.
It starts with abortion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in September introduced a bill that would ban the procedure nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In the House, 167 Republicans have co-sponsored the “Life Begins at Conception Act,” which many legal analysts say would effectively ban all abortions nationwide.
In elections, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has proposed legislation that would impose for federal elections nationwide many of the voting restrictions that have rapidly diffused across red states, including tougher voter-identification requirements, a ban on both unmonitored drop boxes and the counting of any mail ballots received after Election Day, and a prohibition on same-day and automatic voter registration.
In education, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed to federalize restrictions on how teachers can talk about race by barring any K–12 school that receives federal money from using “critical race theory” in instruction. Several Republicans (including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri) have introduced a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would mandate parental access to school curriculum and library materials nationwide—a step toward building pressure for the kind of book bans spreading through conservative states and school districts. Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director for PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, predicts that these GOP proposals “chipping away” at free speech are likely to expand beyond school settings into other areas affecting the general population, such as public libraries or private companies’ training policies. “This is not something that is likely to stop at the current arena, but to go much more broadly,” she told me.
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, along with several dozen co-sponsors, recently introduced a federal version of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida pushed into law. Johnson’s bill is especially sweeping in its scope. It bars discussion of “sexually-oriented material,” including sexual orientation, with children 10 and younger, not only in educational settings, but in any program funded by the federal government, including through public libraries, hospitals, and national parks.The language is so comprehensive that it might even prevent “any federal law enforcement talking to a kid about a sexual assault or sexual abuse,” David Stacy, the government-affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told me.
Johnson’s bill is only one of several Republican proposals to nationalize red-state actions on LGBTQ issues. During budget debates in both 2021 and 2022, Republican senators offered amendments to establish a nationwide ban on transgender girls participating in school sports. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has introduced a bill (the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act”) that would set felony penalties for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. Cotton, in a variation on the theme, has proposed to allow any minor who receives gender-affirming surgery to sue the doctor for physical or emotional damages for the next 30 years.
Meanwhile, Senator Steve Daines and Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina have introduced legislation requiring every state to accept a concealed-carry gun permit issued in any state—a mechanism for overriding blue-state limits on these permits. When Republicans controlled the House, they passed such a bill in 2017, but the implications of this idea have grown even more stark since then because so many red states have passed laws allowing residents to obtain concealed-carry permits without any background checks or training requirements.
Ambler told me he expects that the NRA and congressional Republicans will eventually seek not only to preempt blue states and city limits on who can carry guns, but also to invalidate their restrictions on where they can do so, such as the New York State law, now facing legal challenge, barring guns from the subway.
Brown, of the conservative EPPC, said it’s difficult to predict which of these proposals will gather the most momentum if Republicans win back one or both chambers. Some congressional Republicans, he said, may still be constrained by traditional GOP arguments favoring federalism. The strongest case for contravening that principle, he said, is in those instances that involve protecting what he calls “fundamental rights.” Graham’s national 15-week abortion ban can be justified on those grounds because “we are talking about, from my perspective, the life of an unborn baby, so having a federal ceiling on when states can’t encroach on protecting that fetus in the womb in the later stage of pregnancy makes a lot of sense to me.”
In practice, though, Brown thinks that congressional Republicans may hesitate about passing a nationwide abortion ban, particularly with no hope of Biden signing it into law. He believes they are more likely to coalesce first around proposals to bar transgender girls from participating in sports and to prohibit gender-affirming surgery for minors, in part because those issues have proved “so galvanizing” for cultural conservatives in red states.
Stacy, from the Human Rights Campaign, said that although Senate Republicans may be less enthusiastic about pursuing legislation restricting transgender rights, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a GOP-controlled Congress advancing those ideas. “It’s hard to know how far a Republican majority in either chamber would go on these issues,” he told me. “But what we’ve seen again and again in the states is that when they can, they have moved in these directions. Even when you take a look at more moderate states, when they have the power to do these things, they move these things forward.” That precedent eventually may apply not just to LGBTQ issues, but to all the red-state initiatives some Republicans want to inscribe into national law.
These approaching federal debates reframe the battle raging across the red states during the past few years as just the first act of what’s likely to become an extended struggle.
This first act has played out largely within the framework of restoring states’ rights and local prerogatives. As I’ve written, the red-state moves on social issues amount to a systematic effort to reverse the “rights revolution” of the past six decades. Over that long period, the Supreme Court, Congress, and a succession of presidents nationalized more rights and reduced states’ leeway to abridge those rights, on issues including civil rights, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.
Now the red states have moved to reverse that long trajectory toward a stronger national floor of rights by setting their own rules on abortion, voting, LGBTQ issues, classroom censorship, and book bans, among other issues. In that cause, they have been crucially abetted by the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, which has struck down or weakened previously nationally guaranteed rights (including abortion and voting access).
But the proliferation of these congressional-Republican proposals to write the red-state rules into federal law suggests that this reassertion of states’ rights was just a way station toward restoring common national standards of civil rights and liberties—only in a much more restrictive and conservative direction. “All of these things have been building for years,” Alvin Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s just that Mr. Trump gave them the idea they can succeed being more [aggressive] in the advocacy of these policies.”
Like many students of the red-state social-policy eruption, Tillery believes that Republicans and social conservatives feel enormous urgency to write their cultural priorities into law before liberal-leaning Millennials and Generation Z become the electorate’s dominant force later this decade. “The future ain’t bright for them looking at young people, so they are acting in a much more muscular and authoritarian way now,” he said.
With Republicans likely to win control of the House, and possibly the Senate, the next two years may become the off-Broadway stage of testing different strategies for imposing the red-state social regime on blue America. The curtain on the main event will rise the next time Republicans hold unified control of the White House and Congress—a day that may seem less a distant possibility if the GOP makes gains as big as those that now seem possible this week.
Have you ever met someone who’s watching their life’s work—their very legacy—fall apart in front of their eyes? I’m talking to two of them right now.
Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox spent the morning juggling plates of chorizo and shouting orders in Spanish toward the kitchen behind them. Now they’re catching their breath in a corner booth at El Portal, the South Phoenix restaurant they’ve run for two decades. They point out the members of their family depicted in a mural on the nearby wall, retracing the mission that brought them to this place and wondering aloud how it all went wrong.
I came to Arizona looking to answer the question of why, over the past few years, so many Hispanics have fled the Democratic Party. This exodus is evident across numerous counties, congressional districts, and battleground states, but the stakes seem highest in Arizona, where Republicans are promoting a slate of extremist candidates and counting on Hispanic voters to help put them in office.
What I found is Earl and Mary Rose, a couple in their mid-70s and the twin bosses of a Phoenix political machine, reckoning with the same awful conclusion I have heard from so many Hispanics, both here and around the country. “The party doesn’t care about us,” Mary Rose tells me. “They pretend to care every two years.”
When Earl and Mary Rose bought El Portal in 1999, in the working-class barrio of Grant Park, they didn’t know much about running a kitchen. Earl had been one of few Hispanic lawmakers in the state legislature; Mary Rose broke barriers twice, as the first Hispanic woman ever elected to the city council and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. But the Wilcoxes envisioned the cramped, dusky dining room of El Portal as more than a place for cheap tacos and tequila; it would be a de facto headquarters for the city’s Hispanic Democrats. There weren’t many of them. But Earl and Mary Rose knew that was about to change.
The Hispanic population was just beginning to boom, and the potential of these voters to tip elections toward Democrats—nationally, but particularly in states like Arizona—was becoming more apparent with every campaign. Hispanics are not a monolith, even if the political class treated them as such. The Wilcoxes wanted to harness the political promise of their community. What they didn’t want was to be taken advantage of. They felt that Democrats were prone to patronizing Hispanics, offering noble rhetoric but never a seat at the table. Earl and Mary Rose decided that the only way to advance their interests was to start organizing, creating a base of power separate from the party’s, making the Hispanic vote so essential that no Democrat could win without it.
The Wilcoxes staged protests, hosted candidate events, ran voter-registration drives, transported voters to the polls. Yet the next two decades brought little but defeat: Two losing battles over comprehensive immigration reform. The signing of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s law codifying racial profiling. Perpetual conflict with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who terrorized Hispanic neighborhoods with “round-ups” and targeted his political opponents. (He once indicted Mary Rose; she and Earl sued him and the county for violating their civil rights, resulting in a $975,000 settlement.) And then there was Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox, top, co-owners of El Portal, bottom, a restaurant in South Phoenix (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Finally, in 2020, a breakthrough: Joe Biden didn’t just win the election, he won Arizona, only the second time since Harry Truman’s administration that a Democrat had carried the state. Given Biden’s winning margin—three-tenths of a percentage point—and the unprecedented turnout of Hispanic voters, there could be no disputing who had delivered Arizona to the president-elect.
The state’s Hispanic population had tripled since 1990, but Republicans had spent those years doubling down on the harsh policing and immigration policies that appealed to their white conservative base. Earl and Mary Rose had spent decades waiting for the GOP’s bill to come due. On Election Night 2020, they toasted to a new era.
And then the strangest thing happened. People started coming into El Portal to vent their frustrations and unload their grievances—against the Democratic Party.
“Our community, we may not be educated at the highest levels, but we have a lot of street smarts. We know when people are bullshitting us,” Earl tells me, motioning to the people sitting around us. “You know what they say to Democrats now? ‘Es pura cábula.’ Bunch of bullshit.”
Over the past few years, Hispanics have begun abandoning the Democratic Party, defying generations of political patterns and causing varying degrees of panic on the left. In the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, they won the Hispanic vote by 40 points nationally. In 2020, Democrats still carried the vote by an estimated 33 points against Trump himself, though the party’s margin against GOP candidates nationwide shrank to 27 points. This summer, numerous polls showed Hispanics splitting in a statistical tie between the two parties. Even if such findings are exaggerated—several recent surveys have shown Democrats reestablishing an advantage among these voters—it’s evident that Republicans are poised next week to win their biggest share of Hispanics in the modern era.
Whether this translates into outright GOP victories is harder to predict, given the party’s continued hemorrhaging of white suburban voters. Indeed, this is what makes the implications of a Hispanic partisan realignment so profound: At a moment when Democrats have begun to dominate the affluent, college-educated vote that for decades formed the cornerstone of the Republican coalition, perhaps the only thing that can keep the GOP competitive is an infusion of support from the very middle- and working-class Hispanics who were, at this moment in history, supposed to deliver the Democrats a foolproof majority.
Given the ferocity of the criticisms Earl relays to me from his patrons—Democrats are insufficiently patriotic; they are elitist in their cultural sensibilities; and they are oblivious to the struggles and priorities of working people—I ask the obvious question: How durable is his party’s hold on the Hispanic vote?
Guests gather for an anniversary party at the American Legion post next door to El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
He thinks for a moment. There’s a professor from Arizona State, he tells me, who comes by often. One recent morning, after overhearing some of Earl’s regulars sounding off on the Democratic Party over breakfast, the professor pulled him aside. He could sense that Earl was anxious, and told him not to worry. Whatever gains the GOP was making were bound to be temporary. Hispanics, the professor told him, would never abandon the Democratic Party.
Earl shakes his head. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he says.
The Democrats’ predicament today is 20 years in the making.
It’s almost hard to remember now, but in 2002, Democrats were deep in the minority. The president, George W. Bush, was immensely popular, and the GOP was about to win strong congressional majorities in the midterms. There was no easy path back to power for Democrats. Salvation arrived in the form of a book, written by the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis, called The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, which analyzed evolving social structures relative to voting behaviors, argued that because America was becoming more educated, more urban, more secular, and more diverse, Democrats were “on the verge of establishing the same kind of ‘lock’ on the electoral college that the Republicans enjoyed in the 1980s.”
On the left, the book was treated as something akin to divine prophecy. Though Teixeira and Judis took pains to avoid having their work reduced to an end-of-white-America analysis, it was inevitable: The book documented how, every election cycle, minorities were increasing as a share of the overall electorate while non-college-educated white voters were decreasing at an even faster clip. A phrase that appeared nowhere in the book—“Demographics are destiny”—became a kind of support-group mantra for progressives whose consolation after Bush’s reelection in 2004 was the assurance of a long game that was already being won.
“It took hold because, let’s face it, this was something Democrats really wanted to hear,” Teixeira, a Democrat himself, told me this summer. “And so, of course, when Obama got elected in 2008, it was viewed as a validation of that analysis—even though Obama’s election was more complicated than that.”
Democrats had won big among nonwhite voters since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. What set apart Barack Obama’s victory wasn’t necessarily his margins—he carried two-thirds of Hispanics, per exit polls, and 95 percent of Blacks—but the mass mobilization of these and other groups that had historically gone underrepresented. Obama assembled “a coalition of the ascendant,” as my colleague Ron Brownstein put it, cornering the demographics—young people, women with college degrees, and minorities, particularly Hispanics—that were emerging as the future of the electorate. By emphasizing these groups, by elevating them and celebrating their inclusion in the party’s coalition, Democrats were portraying themselves as the party of a new America.
When Obama put that same winning coalition back together in 2012, running up the same crushing margins among nonwhite voters, “Demography is destiny” became conventional wisdom, and not just on the left. Two days after Mitt Romney’s defeat, Fox’s Sean Hannity called for comprehensive immigration reform, complete with a path to citizenship, lest Hispanic voters usher Republicans into permanent minority status. The national GOP commissioned an autopsy report focused on repairing the relationship with Hispanics. Senator Lindsey Graham, who led a team of Republicans on a doomed mission to fix the nation’s immigration laws, warned that his party was entering “a demographic death spiral.”
But neither the left nor the right really understood Hispanics, who were motivated by different issues than were Blacks—to the extent that they could be accurately categorized at all. In Florida alone, Cubans are generally more conservative than Colombians, who are generally more conservative than Puerto Ricans; the Mexicans who live across the Southwest have distinct ideological profiles that depend on how long they’ve been in the United States. All the emphasis on nonwhites, and the GOP’s inability to win them, made it hard to see the very different reasons that different blocs had for supporting Democrats—or their different degrees of partisan loyalty.
Josue Gomez, Alejandro Villa, and Brandon Gomez canvas a neighborhood in South Phoenix, encouraging residents to register to vote. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“In my opinion, the Latino vote has always had a swing dimension to it,” says Carlos Odio, a former Obama aide who specialized in Hispanic outreach and in 2019 co-founded the Miami-based firm Equis Labs. “Now, it just so happened to swing the same way over a series of elections. It’s like a coin flip landed on heads, over and over again, for a variety of reasons. But we keep thinking the coin will always land on heads. I think it’s a mistake.”
There are two ironies at work. The first is that it required the presidency of Donald Trump—he of the “I love Hispanics!” caption on a Cinco de Mayo tweet, fork digging into a Trump Tower taco bowl—for some Democrats to question their own dogma. Trump was supposed to be uniquely unacceptable to minorities, and to Hispanics in particular, given his assessment of Mexicans as, among other things, “rapists.” Yet Democrats didn’t see major gains with Hispanics during his four years in office. Instead, their margins shrank.
“In the end, the 2020 election wasn’t won by the ‘ascendant’ nonwhite voters at all,” Teixeira told me. “It was the college-educated white voters who won the election for Biden.”
Hence the second irony: The very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago—the focus on identity and inclusion—is making it more popular with white voters, and less popular with Hispanic voters. (This is what far-right fear merchants like Tucker Carlson fail to grasp: The immigrants demonized by his “Great Replacement” rhetoric are now, in some respects, likelier to vote Republican than the people they are supposedly replacing.)
Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.
Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said, whether his fellow Democrats want to accept it or not. “The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”
The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters. Hispanics are not yet a national force—their numbers are still diluted in the upper Midwest, for instance—but in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.
“We’re in a game of tug-of-war. There are two sides,” Odio told me. “Democrats are going to lose where they let go of the rope.”
I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.
Juan Cuba can still remember the moment he began to worry.
It was 2013, and Democrats were euphoric after Obama’s back-to-back victories. Not only had the president carried Florida in both elections, but he had made a statement in Miami-Dade County, a place crowded with Cuban Americans, who, due to historic distrust of the Democratic Party dating back to John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, have aligned more with the GOP than have other Hispanics. Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.
Campaign volunteers rally primary voters in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
And yet Cuba, who assumed the role of executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party after Obama’s reelection, started seeing red flags. As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.
Crist lost the governor’s race by about 64,000 votes. And although he won Miami-Dade by a sizable margin, turnout lagged relative to both parties’ expectations. “Had we engaged more voters, especially Hispanic voters, we would have won that race,” Cuba said.
When Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination in 2016, Democrats in South Florida stressed to her team the importance of not repeating that mistake. Clinton poured resources into Miami-Dade, running a ground game that located existing voters, registered new ones, and tracked both to make sure they were casting ballots. Cuba’s concerns about the party’s complacency were assuaged. He had a new worry, however. The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.
“I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. He gave people a sense of how the Democratic Party was about social mobility through hard work,” Cuba said. “But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”
It worked, at least initially: Clinton carried Miami-Dade by nearly 30 points against Trump—an unprecedented margin in Florida’s biggest county. But Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.
“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”
María-Elena López has held a variety of positions within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
María-Elena López, who held a variety of positions under Cuba in the county party, saw this shift taking place in real time. She believes that there is no real mystery to it: While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.
“We’re not a political party, we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”
López is a former Republican who, in the mid-1990s, became estranged from the GOP of her youth. She became an avid Democrat during Obama’s first run, got deeply involved with local party politics, and today serves as first vice chair of the county party. She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.
At one point in our conversation, I mentioned to López how the overturning of Roe v. Wade seemed to be muddying forecasts of a Republican romp at the polls in November; how some Democrats, particularly those running in wealthy white suburbs, were gaining momentum in their campaigns by hammering the GOP’s anti-abortion platform. López, who had been quite animated, suddenly lowered her voice.
“You see, that’s a perfect example. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”
To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?” she said, throwing up her arms. “Now we’re inventing language?” (This was but one of the many unsolicited rants I heard against the term Latinx.)
Campaign volunteers surround Maria Dominguez and her children as she votes in the Florida primary. Originally from Nicaragua, Dominguez recently obtained U.S. citizenship; it was her first time voting in the country. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”
Of course, the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combating the right-wing misinformation machine.
When I sat down with Joe Garcia on the narrow, concrete-slabbed patio of a Miami Beach café, the former congressman spoke in fatalistic tones. A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”
Garcia, who was elected alongside Obama in 2012 and represented his native Cuban neighborhoods in western Miami-Dade, said Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.
Former Representative Joe Garcia smokes a cigar outside Pinecrest Bakery in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.
But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”
This episode reflects a broader intellectual arrogance, Garcia said. The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”
Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”
Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label. Moderate Democrats were reluctant to push back. It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.
The name “AOC” came up in dozens of my conversations with Hispanic Democrats around the country, many of whom are struggling to neutralize the socialism charge in their own communities. By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.
Campaign volunteers shout their support for candidates outside the Westchester Regional Library in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”
He also acknowledges, however, that the Democratic base is changing. Progressive policies—around climate, or guns, or even immigration—might poll well with the liberal, college-educated wing of the party. But they might also continue to alienate the working class, including the Hispanic working class, from the Democratic brand. Days before I sat down with Garcia in Miami Beach, a poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed, for the first time in the survey’s history, that “Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters.”
This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.
He shrugged. “That’s how we won last time.”
In Bruno Lozano’s blue pickup truck, the air-conditioning whistling through every vent, we stopped and gazed at the Del Rio International Bridge. It was here, Lozano told me, that in September 2021 tens of thousands of Haitian migrants gathered underneath the bridge and set up camp for several days in extreme heat. Del Rio had dealt with migrant waves before, but nothing like this. The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.
“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.
Bruno Lozano, left, a former mayor of Del Rio, Texas, says his warnings to Democratic leadership about a deteriorating situation at the southwest border went largely unheeded. An abandoned bus in Del Rio, right, where migrants discarded clothing after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Lozano told me he reached out to every Democratic official he could think of, in Texas and beyond, pleading for any help or resources they could offer. When that failed, he asked them to come visit Del Rio, to at least shine a light on what was happening at the border. “They looked the other way,” Lozano said. “They just pretend it’s not happening.”
When he was elected mayor of Del Rio in 2018, Lozano, just 35 years old at the time, fit the profile of a rising star in the Democratic Party. An openly gay Hispanic military veteran, Lozano “checked every box” for the party. Since he had defeated a Republican incumbent just as his county was beginning to turn red, Lozano said, “you would figure Democrats might listen when I’m telling them something is wrong.”
Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis. He told high-ranking party officials in Austin and in Washington—including during a visit to the White House for an LGBTQ pride event—that Hispanics in his community were turning on the Democratic Party, in part because of its indifference to the chaos at the southern border.
He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.
The Ramada is where locals host wedding receptions, where businesspeople and politicians meet for breakfast, and where, on a blazing July afternoon, the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce was holding its monthly luncheon. There was no vacancy at the hotel; rooms were booked for Border Patrol agents who had flooded into the area to reinforce a sector that was being overrun.
“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”
The room buzzed. Forty or so people, local entrepreneurs, most of them Hispanic and many of them lifelong Democrats, exchanged looks of dismay. A few expletives could be heard. Owens wasn’t done.
“In fiscal year 2021, we apprehended nearly 260,000 people in the Del Rio sector. That was more than the previous nine fiscal years combined,” Owens said. “This fiscal year … we are already in excess of 330,000 people apprehended in this sector. Last year was record-breaking; this year, we’ve already shattered it.”
Deputy Jaime Guzman searches for migrants just off the shore of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Part of this can be attributed to the continued enforcement of Title 42, a Covid-era policy that suspended asylum requests and authorized the automatic expulsion of single adult migrants who hailed from certain countries; many of those migrants have been apprehended and expelled more than once, driving the number of crossings higher. Because of the known gaps in America’s immigration policy, Owens said, many migrants in this area follow a trail to where they know Border Patrol will be waiting. Those who are allowed to stay in the U.S.—because they are not subject to expulsion, or because they have no criminal record—are typically processed, then detained or released, with orders to appear at a future court date.
Owens said it’s the migrants who go out of their way not to get caught—he cited data from video monitoring suggesting that roughly 140,000 people have crossed unmolested in this sector in fiscal year 2022—who worry him the most. Those 140,000 who got away combined with the 330,000 apprehensions makes for 470,000 illegal crossings from October through July—in the Del Rio sector alone. “And there are nine sectors along the southwest border,” Owens said.
When he opened the meeting to questions, person after person demanded to know how this could be happening, who was to blame, and what they could do to punish the political actors responsible.
“How do you feel,” Sarita Perales, an administrator from the local hospital, asked, “about the Biden open-border policy?”
Owens fought a smirk. “The administration will tell you that the border’s not open,” he replied, eliciting groans from the audience.
Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office. It’s difficult to examine the policies of his administration—which, according to the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute, “narrowed the scope of immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior” and “adopted something of a new approach to border enforcement”—and dispute the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.
This is exactly what Perales, a mother of four, feared would happen. Born in Mexico, Perales came to the U.S. legally when she was 7 years old and became a naturalized citizen in 2017. Her first opportunity to vote in a presidential election was in 2020, and she felt “so disappointed with my choices.” Perales grew up in Del Rio, a place with deep Democratic roots. She has progressive sensibilities on many social issues. She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.
The fence that separates the United States and Mexico in Val Verde County, left; abandoned backpacks inside a residential home used by migrants while the owner was away, right (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.
“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”
Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. Some progressive Hispanics have bemoaned this, likening it to selfishly slamming shut a door behind you. Perales insisted that she doesn’t feel threatened, economically or otherwise, by new immigrants. She understands the hopeless circumstances that drive so many people from impoverished and conflict-ridden countries to make the journey north. What worries her is the perception of “crossing without consequences.” She wants the U.S. to broadcast a stricter approach to immigration, not just for the sake of the rule of law and for the stability of her community, but also for the well-being of those thinking of coming here.
“They’re being treated so inhumanely,” Perales said of the migrants traveling to America. “But it’s the open-borders policy that is leading to that inhumane treatment.”
Joe Frank Martinez, sheriff of Val Verde County, photographed along the U.S.-Mexico border wall (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Joe Frank Martinez, the sheriff of Val Verde County, told me the same thing when I visited his office in Del Rio. A strong show of deterrence at the border, he said, is the decent thing to do. Not a week went by this summer, Martinez said, that he and his deputies didn’t discover a body of someone who had either drowned in the river or perished in the heat. Shortly before my visit, he told me, they recovered four corpses in the span of three days. (I checked the weather app on my phone. It was 106 degrees outside.)
Like most of the sheriffs in South Texas, Martinez is a Democrat. But definitions are a funny thing down there. Many of the residents have ancestral roots in both old Mexico and present-day Texas; they identify as “Tejanos.” In the same way Tejanos here don’t identify with, say, Mexican Americans in Arizona, Democrats here don’t identify with Democrats just about anywhere else. Martinez is pro-life, pro-gun, and generally conservative in ways that don’t mesh with the modern Democratic Party.
He believes that both parties deserve blame for failing to fix a broken immigration system and “put something in place that can reasonably allow people to make a legal entry.” But, Martinez insisted, this present crisis is one of his own party’s making. “Right now, these migrants feel like they’ve got a standing invitation from this administration to cross the border,” he said.
It wasn’t long ago that Democrats ruled South Texas. Today, Martinez told me, “the Democratic strongholds in Del Rio aren’t real Democratic anymore.” Val Verde County, which Democrats carried by an average of eight points in the previous three presidential elections, went for Trump by 10 points in 2020. The Twenty-third Congressional District, which covers Val Verde, is held by a Republican. Just weeks before I arrived in Del Rio, Mayra Flores, a Mexican-born Republican, flipped the Thirty-fourth District—farther to the east, in the Rio Grande Valley—in a special election. (A Democrat had carried the district by double digits in every election since it was redrawn after the 2010 census.) The GOP is favored to flip the neighboring Fifteenth District next week and represent a majority of Texas’s border districts; less than a decade ago, Democrats controlled every single one.
Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.
In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,” Martinez said, describing the local Hispanic community as ardently pro–law enforcement. Meanwhile, he added, the moderates in his party at the state and national levels aren’t doing enough to push back on the left. Over the past three years, Martinez estimated, he’s given tours of the border to more than 100 members of Congress. “I haven’t had a single Democrat here. Not one,” he said. “And trust me—I’ve invited them.” (Not long after we spoke, Martinez finally welcomed his first congressional Democrat, Darren Soto of Florida, to the border.)
The Rio Grande, left; wet clothing discarded by a migrant on the river’s Del Rio–side bank, right (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
In Lozano’s truck, as we drove on a narrow road that runs parallel to a stretch of border fence—started by the George W. Bush administration, continued under Obama—he was still seething. Progressives exploit the suffering at the southern border to raise money or get booked on television shows, he said, but they won’t actually come see it for themselves. I asked him why.
“Because it’s a romanticized ideology,” Lozano said. “It’s easy for them to romanticize this whole situation. ‘They’re struggling! They need help! They’re coming here for a better life!’ It’s harder for them to come look at bodies of people who died in 107-degree heat. Kids who drowned. Border Patrol agents—who they’re so opposed to—trying to help pregnant mothers. None of this fits their narrative.”
I asked Lozano what he wants Democrats to do about the border crisis. He laughed.
“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border. Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.
“I’m all about the American dream. But this is unsustainable, just totally unsustainable,” Lozano said. “Government is supposed to be about stability. But this party, my party, is inviting all this instability. I’ve had enough.”
Lozano is no longer the mayor of Del Rio. This summer, just a few weeks before I came to town, he served his last day in office. Once a promising young prospect in the Democratic ranks, he quit electoral politics, walking away from a job he loved. Now, he’s thinking about quitting the Democratic Party, too.
Danny Ortega is a legend in local progressive circles and a member of Arizona’s Democratic Party Hall of Fame. As an activist and civil-rights attorney, he has spent decades working in households and neighborhoods where voting is a foreign behavior, and where fear of filling out government forms runs deep, pleading with first- and second-generation Hispanics to get involved with politics. Around the time Obama was first elected, Ortega told me, he sensed a turning point. The GOP’s overt targeting of the Hispanic community—via legislation and law enforcement, rhetoric and rumormongering—helped embolden citizens to finally turn out to vote, and to vote for Democrats. The floodgates had opened. Demography, at last, was going to be destiny.
Until it wasn’t.
“The past few years, our young people have been registering as independents. More than 50 percent of them. We have the data,” Ortega said. “These voters, the future of our community, they are abandoning us. And honestly,” he paused, with a grimace, “I don’t blame them.”
The activist and civil-rights attorney Danny Ortega (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
We sat in Ortega’s first-floor law office in Phoenix, now the nation’s fifth-largest city thanks to a mass influx of immigrants, most of whom are Mexican. Surrounded by framed awards and photos with politicians, Ortega was leaning across his desk, sweating through his Hawaiian shirt, shouting mostly at himself. For too long, Ortega said, Democrats have refused to spend real time and resources in the Hispanic community, checking a box during campaign season but rarely engaging between elections. When Democrats do come calling, he said, they treat Hispanics like children: speaking in paternalistic tones about what’s good and bad for them economically; assuming simple and monolithic views on social issues; pandering shamelessly on immigration and promising sweeping reforms that never materialize.
More and more, Ortega told me, Hispanics are suspicious of his party. They question whether Democrats want to solve a problem like immigration; whether they would rather continue to wield themes of racism and xenophobia to mobilize voters against the GOP; whether moral outrage is simply the means to a political end. In his view, the Democratic Party has a credibility crisis, and it’s not specific to immigration. Ortega said that so many adjacent Democratic causes—voting rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights—are viewed skeptically, particularly by younger Hispanics, who perceive Democrats as manipulative at worst and tone-deaf at best. Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.
“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”
César Chávez hears it all the time. A member of the Arizona House who represents the most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state, Chávez finds himself engaged in a daily struggle to hold the line for the Democratic Party.
“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”
Chávez was born in Mexico. When he was 3 years old, he and his pregnant mother crossed the desert and found their way to Pennsylvania, where his father, who had also immigrated illegally, was working on a mushroom farm. Chávez was raised alongside Amish children and “fell in love with America,” cherishing the traditional values of his community. Because it was Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program that eventually granted his father citizenship—allowing the rest of the family to eventually follow suit—Chávez felt a kinship with the GOP. It wasn’t until his family moved to Phoenix that Chávez experienced real discrimination. He came to feel that the Democratic Party, with its emphasis on inclusion, was the natural home for people like him.
César Chávez represents Arizona’s most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state legislature. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Chávez told me this experience speaks for many of his constituents. The Democratic Party “has always been their safe haven,” he said. But today, he continued, progressives have adopted a “no-holds-barred mentality” on social issues that leaves many Hispanic voters—religious, patriotic, culturally conservative voters—questioning whether they still belong.
“There are individuals in my party who believe these voters are always going to be there for us. They take them for granted,” Chávez said. “That’s why I think this could get a lot worse.”
For all the baggage saddling the state GOP—a proud conspiracy theorist as chair; a trio of prominent election deniers running for statewide office—the party’s consultants and strategists are making real inroads in the Hispanic community. They are hiring Hispanic staffers, spending money on Spanish-language media, investing heavily in grassroots infrastructure. This matches descriptions I heard everywhere else: Republicans can sense that the door is opening, and they are preparing to barrel through it.
“I’m telling you,” Chávez said, “if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to lose a big part of this vote.”
Back at El Portal, Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox’s restaurant in South Phoenix, the warnings are the same. One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.
And then there is Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.
Luis Acosta, a Democratic campaign consultant, says he is “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“People are tired of being taken for granted. Tired of being ignored for two years and then pandered to when it’s election time. Tired of being in the shadows. Just tired,” Acosta says. “There’s no other way to put it. We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”
In the corner booth, Earl and Mary Rose look distressed. Earl tells me this kind of talk has been pervasive in his restaurant and his neighborhood since Biden took office. And now they’re even hearing it at home: Two of Earl’s grandsons voted for Trump in 2020. One of them, Earl says, got hooked by the pandemic-era fights over public-education policy and is now a Tucker Carlson devotee; the other grandson, he says, is “less dogmatic” but exasperated by the left’s fixation on social justice.
Mary Rose confesses to feeling a certain pessimism. She and Earl spent a generation building a community, organizing a vote, working to translate raw Hispanic numbers into real political influence. Yet they are confronting the same harsh realities today, about power and patronage, that they fretted over 23 years ago. Wins and losses are not the measure; Democrats could sweep Arizona’s statewide races against an unpalatable bunch of Republicans this fall, but it won’t quiet the feeling that the Wilcoxes’ dream is slipping away. They have so much of what they wanted—an engaged base, a hard-won 11 electoral votes, a Democrat in the White House—and so little to show for it.
“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”
Ruby Bernal discusses politics over breakfast at El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.
Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.
It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.
If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”
By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.
Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.
Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.
These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.
Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.
But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.
That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.
But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.
For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).
Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.
When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.
In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.
Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”
The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.
Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.
Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.
ATLANTA—The three dozen young Black men and women who gathered in a church meeting room last Friday night were greeted with a rousing exhortation that had the added benefit of being true.
In welcoming remarks, Bryce Berry, a senior at nearby Morehouse College and the president of the Young Democrats of Georgia club, told the group that none of the party’s national-policy accomplishments of the past two years would have been possible without people like them. “Without young Georgians, young Black Georgians,” Berry said for emphasis, “there would be no Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, no American Rescue Plan … no Inflation Reduction Act, no student-debt relief, and no gun-safety bill.”
It was the sort of thing speakers always say to motivate a crowd at political rallies. But in this case it was historically accurate: Massive turnout and huge margins among young voters, especially young voters of color, were crucial to the twin runoff victories of Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January 2021 that delivered Democrats their unexpected majority in the upper chamber.
Young adults have become an essential electoral asset for Democrats—and loom as a potentially decisive factor in determining whether the party can avoid the worst outcomes up and down the ballot this November. In particular, young voters may decide whether Democrats can preserve the fragile hold on the Senate that Georgia provided to them.
A sharp generation gap is among the most consistent findings in public polling across almost every competitive Senate race this year. Here in Georgia, for instance, an array of recent public polls (including surveys by Quinnipiac University, Marist College, Monmouth University, and the University of Georgia) have found Warnock leading the Republican Herschel Walker by as much as two to one among young adults from about 18 to 34 and consistently by a margin of about 10 percentage points among those in early middle age. Polls almost always show Walker at least slightly ahead among those in their later working years, and solidly leading among those 65 and older. (This week’s explosive allegations about Walker—the claim that he allegedly funded an abortion for a girlfriend and the subsequent accusations of domestic violence from his son—seem likely to weaken him, perhaps substantially, with every group, but are unlikely to erase these sharp generational differences.)
These patterns are so common across the competitive states that it’s hard to imagine Democrats maintaining their Senate majority unless young voters like those who gathered at Atlanta’s Allen Temple AME Church turn out in substantial numbers.
Compared with older generations, Millennials and members of Generation Z are more racially diverse, more likely to hold postsecondary degrees, and less likely to identify with any religious tradition. Both cohorts have leaned sharply Democratic since the first Millennials entered the electorate in large numbers in the 2004 election; the party has routinely carried about three-fifths of young adults in recent presidential contests. In 2018, Democrats hit a peak of support among young voters, winning two-thirds of those younger than 30 and three-fifths of those ages 30 to 44, according to estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm.
Millennials and Gen Z are especially crucial to Democratic fortunes across Sun Belt states like Georgia and Arizona. In this region, younger generations are far more racially diverse than the mostly white, older voters who provide the backbone of GOP strength. In Arizona, for instance, Latino voters and other people of color compose almost three-fifths of the population under 30 but less than one-fifth of the population over 65, according to calculations from census data by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro. In Georgia, Black voters and other people of color represent half of eligible voters under 45 but only three in 10 of those over 65. The gap between what I’ve called “the brown and the gray”—the diverse younger and the mostly white older generations—is comparably large in Texas and Nevada and nearly as big in North Carolina, Frey’s data show.
For Democrats, this year’s nightmare scenario of losing both the House and Senate is a repeat of 2010 and 2014, when the GOP midterm sweeps were turbocharged by a catastrophic falloff in turnout among young people from the presidential race two years earlier.
The anemic youth turnout in those off-year elections during Barack Obama’s presidency fueled a widespread perception that Democrats now faced a structural disadvantage in midterms because the electorate in those years was destined to be much older and whiter than in the presidential contest. But the 2018 results upended that assumption: Much more robust turnout among young adults helped power the Democratic gains that allowed them to recapture the House of Representatives. Compared with 2014, youth turnout increased in every state in 2018, more than doubling across the country overall, Circle, a think tank at Tufts University that studies young voters, has calculated. Some of the biggest increases occurred in Sun Belt states where the youth population is the most racially diverse, including Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.
The turnout surge continued into 2020, when exactly half of adults younger than 30 showed up to vote, a big increase from the 39 percent in 2016, Circle concluded. Georgia again ranked among the states with the biggest youth-turnout increase compared with 2016—a key factor in the Democrats’ razor-thin victories there in the presidential race and the two Senate runoffs.
Democrats this year are highly unlikely to win as big a share of youth voters as they did during their 2018 sweep (they didn’t even equal it in 2020). But one of the pivotal questions remaining for the 2022 election is how close Democrats can come to matching the strength with young voters they displayed while Donald Trump was in the White House.
Democrats face some serious headwinds. Never enthusiastic about President Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic primaries, young people have given him lackluster approval ratings throughout his presidency. Generally operating with less of a financial cushion than older voters, young people have also been more affected by the highest inflation in four decades. “The cost of living is going up, but our salaries are not,” Alexia Brookins, a manager at a construction company, told me at the AME event sponsored by the group Millennials of Faith last weekend.
In a mid-September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, just 37 percent of Millennials and Gen Z said that Biden’s actions had strengthened the economy; 55 percent said that he had weakened it. In a late-September Yahoo News/YouGov survey, only about one-fifth of young adults ages 18 to 44 said life was better for people like them since Biden took office (the rest said it was unchanged or worse).
Terrance Woodbury, a partner at HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young voters of color, worries that these verdicts will make it difficult for Democrats to reach the turnout and margins they need among young voters. In polling that HIT recently conducted for the NAACP, he told me, three-fourths of Black adults younger than 50 said their lives had not improved since Biden took office.
Woodbury told me that although the media seem fixated on whether potential Republican gains among men will widen the Black gender gap this year, he expects that the “generational gap” in the African American community will be much wider. “Younger voters are much more likely to say Democrats take Black voters for granted, much less likely to approve of the direction of the country, and much less likely to approve of the performance of Democrats in Congress and the White House,” he told me. “All of that is significantly higher by generation than by gender. I actually do think there is a real risk of Democrats underperforming with young voters, and specifically young voters of color.” Equis Research, a Democratic polling firm that specializes in Latino voters, raised similar warnings about young Hispanic voters in a late-September memo analyzing the upcoming election.
But other factors may help Democrats approach, if not necessarily match, their recent advantages with young voters.
More young adults may vote in 2022 simply because so many of them registered and voted in 2018 and 2020. One reason for that is structural: “There are more young people on the voter rolls because of the [2018 and 2020] elections, which is a huge boost, because it means they are more likely to be contacted by parties and organizations,” and those contacts increase the likelihood of people voting, Abby Kiesa, Circle’s deputy director, told me.
The other key reason is attitudinal: Higher youth turnout may mean that not only is voting becoming a habit for those who have already done it; it is also becoming more expected among the 18-year-olds who age into the electorate every two years (more than 8 million of them since 2020, Circle projects). At the AME event, for instance, Kendeius Mitchell, a disability-claims manager, told me that youth engagement in Georgia is feeding on itself. “Just having it around so much in the conversation now is making people take accountability,” he said.
John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, sees the same trend in the institute’s national surveys. “Voting … could be becoming a part of this new generation and how they think,” he told me.
Also lifting Democratic hopes is the party’s summer succession of policy advances on issues important to young people. Della Volpe said the “No. 1” criticism of Biden among young adults in the Harvard poll was “ineffectiveness.” But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its sweeping provisions to combat climate change, and the president’s decision to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers have provided Democratic organizers and ad makers something they lacked earlier this year: evidence to argue to young adults that their votes did produce change on things they care about. Biden gave organizers another talking point yesterday afternoon, when he announced a sweeping pardon of all people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law.
On the ground in Georgia, Keron Blair, the chief organizing and field officer for the New Georgia Project, a grassroots political organization founded by the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, told me that with the Democrats’ recent successes, “it feels a little bit easier” than in the spring to make the case to young adults that their vote counts.
Looking across the overall record of Democrats since they took power, “people aren’t like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” Blair told me. “But people are clear that some of the wins and the political and economic shifts that we are seeing [are] the result of the [voting] choices that people have made.”
Also working for Democrats is the gulf in values between most young voters and the Trump-era Republican Party. Fully 70 percent of adults younger than 30, for instance, said in a Pew Research Center poll this summer that abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, by far the most of any age group. That places them in sharp opposition to a GOP that is intensifying talk of passing a national ban on abortion if it wins control of Congress. “If we maintain that [recent] surge among young voters and voters of color,” Woodbury said, “they are voting against the crazy on the other side.”
Although different public surveys have sent different signals about youth engagement, the latest IOP youth survey, which is considered a benchmark in the field, found that as many young people said they “definitely” intend to vote this fall as did in 2018.
That prospect points toward an incremental but inexorable power shift. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Gen Z roughly equaled Baby Boomers and their elders as a share of eligible voters. By 2024, the younger generations will establish a clear advantage. As their numbers grow, so does their capacity to influence the national direction. There’s no guarantee they will exercise that inherent power next month by turning out to vote in large numbers. But more young people appear to be recognizing how much their choices can matter. Berry, the young Georgia activist, told me that his message to his friends is centered on understanding the strength in numbers that they are accumulating: “I really impress on folks, ‘Look at what happened because of you. You understood the moment in 2020; now you have to understand the moment in 2022.’”
This fall, unlike the one before it, and the one before that, America looks almost like its old self. Schools and universities are in session; malls, airports, and gyms are bustling with the pre-holiday rush; handwashing is passé, handshakes are back, and strangers are packed together on public transport, nary a mask to be seen. On its surface, the country seems ready to enjoy what some might say is our first post-pandemic winter.
Americans are certainly acting as if the crisis has abated, and so in that way, at least, you could argue that it has. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” President Joe Biden told60 Minutes in September, after proclaiming the pandemic “over.” Almost no emergency protections against the virus are left standing; we’re dismantling the few that are. At the same time, COVID is undeniably, as Biden says, “a problem.” Each passing day still brings hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations; untold numbers of people continue to deal with long COVID, as more join them. In several parts of the country, health-care systems are struggling to stay afloat. Local public-health departments, underfunded and understaffed, are hanging by a thread. And a double surge of COVID and flu may finally be brewing.
So we can call this winter “post-pandemic” if we want. But given the policy failures and institutional dysfunctions that have accumulated over the past three years, it won’t be anything like a pre-pandemic winter, either. The more we resist that reality, the worse it will become. If we treat this winter as normal, it will be anything but.
By now, we’ve grown acquainted with the variables that dictate how a season with SARS-CoV-2 will go. In our first COVID winter, the vaccines had only just begun their trickle out into the public, while most Americans hadn’t yet been infected by the virus. In our second COVID winter, the country’s collective immunity was higher, but Omicron sneaked past some of those defenses. On the cusp of our third COVID winter, it may seem that SARS-CoV-2 has few plot twists left to toss us.
But the way in which we respond to COVID could still sprinkle in some chaos. During those first two winters, at least a few virus-mitigating policies and precautions remained in place—nearly all of which have since come down, lowering the hurdles the virus must clear, at a time when America’s health infrastructure is facing new and serious threats.
The nation is still fighting to contain a months-long monkeypox outbreak; polio continues to plague unvaccinated sectors of New York. A riot of respiratory viruses, too, may spread as temperatures cool and people flock indoors. Rates of RSV are rising; flu returned early in the season from a nearly three-year sabbatical to clobber Australia, boding poorly for us in the north. Should flu show up here ahead of schedule, Americans, too, could be pummeled as we were around the start of 2018, “one of the worst seasons in the recent past,” says Srinivasan Venkatramanan, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Virginia and a member of the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub.
The consequences of this infectious churn are already starting to play out. In Jackson, Mississippi, health workers are watching SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses tear through children “like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” says Charlotte Hobbs, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Flu season has yet to go into full swing, and Hobbs is already experiencing one of the roughest stretches she’s had in her nearly two decades of practicing. Some kids are being slammed with one virus after the other, their sicknesses separated by just a couple of weeks—an especially dangerous prospect for the very youngest among them, few of whom have received COVID shots.
The toll of doctor visits missed during the pandemic has ballooned as well. Left untreated, many people’s chronic conditions have worsened, and some specialists’ schedules remain booked out for months. Add to this the cases of long COVID that pile on with each passing surge of infections, and there are “more sick people than there used to be, period,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. That’s with COVID case counts at a relative low, amid a massive undercount. Even if a new, antibody-dodging variant doesn’t come banging on the nation’s door, “the models predict an increase in infections,” Venkatramanan told me. (In parts of Europe, hospitalizations are already making a foreboding climb.)
And where the demand for care increases, supply does not always follow suit. Health workers continue to evacuate their posts. Some have taken early retirement, worried that COVID could exacerbate their chronic conditions, or vice versa; others have sought employment with better hours and pay, or left the profession entirely to salvage their mental health. A wave of illness this winter will pare down forces further, especially as the CDC backs off its recommendations for health-care workers to mask. At UAB Hospital, in Birmingham, Alabama, “we’ve struggled to have enough people to work,” says Sarah Nafziger, an emergency physician and the medical director for employee health. “And once we get them here, we have a hard time getting them to stay.”
Clinical-laboratory staff at Deaconess Hospital, in Indiana, who are responsible for testing patient samples, are feeling similar strain, says April Abbott, the institution’s microbiology director. Abbott’s team has spent most of the past month below usual minimum-staffing levels, and has had to cut some duties and services to compensate, even after calling in reinforcements from other, already shorthanded parts of the lab. “We’re already at this threshold of barely making it,” Abbott told me. Symptoms of burnout have surged as well, while health workers continue to clock long hours, sometimes amid verbal abuse, physical attacks, and death threats. Infrastructure is especially fragile in America’s rural regions, which have suffered hospital closures and an especially large exodus of health workers. In Madison County, Montana, where real-estate values have risen, “the average nurse cannot afford a house,” says Margaret Bortko, a nurse practitioner and the region’s health officer and medical director. When help and facilities aren’t available, the outcome is straightforward, says Janice Probst, a rural-health researcher at the University of South Carolina: “You will have more deaths.”
In health departments, too, the workforce is threadbare. As local leaders tackle multiple infectious diseases at once, “it’s becoming a zero-sum game,” says Maria Sundaram, an epidemiologist at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. “With limited resources, do they go to monkeypox? To polio? To COVID-19? To influenza? We have to choose.” Mati Hlatshwayo Davis, the director of health in St. Louis, told me that her department has shrunk to a quarter of the size it was five years ago. “I have staff doing the jobs of three to five people,” she said. “We are in absolute crisis.” Staff have left to take positions as Amazon drivers, who “make so much more per hour.” Looking across her state, Hlatshwayo Davis keeps watching health directors “resign, resign, resign.” Despite all that she has poured into her job, or perhaps because of it, “I can’t guarantee I won’t be one of those losses too.”
This winter is unlikely to be an encore of the pandemic’s worst days. Thanks to the growing roster of tools we now have to combat the coronavirus—among them, effective vaccines and antivirals—infected people are less often getting seriously sick; even long COVID seems to beat least a bitscarcer among people who are up-to-date on their shots. But considering how well our shots and treatments work, the plateau of suffering at which we’ve arrived is bizarrely, unacceptably high. More than a year has passed since the daily COVID death toll was around 200; nearly twice that number—roughly three times the daily toll during a moderate flu season—now seems to be a norm.
Part of the problem remains the nation’s failed approach to vaccines, says Avnika Amin, a vaccine epidemiologist at Emory University: The government has repeatedly championed shots as a “be-all and end-all” strategy, while failing to rally sufficient uptake. Boosting is one of the few anti-COVID measures still promoted, yet the U.S. remains among the least-vaccinated high-income countries; interest in every dose that’s followed the primary series has been paltry at best. Even with the allure of the newly reformulated COVID shot, “I’m not really getting a good sense that people are busting down the doors,” says Michael Dulitz, a health worker in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Nor can vaccines hold the line against the virus alone. Even if everyone got every shot they were eligible for, Amin told me, “it wouldn’t make COVID go away.”
The ongoing dry-up of emergency funds has also made the many tools of disease prevention and monitoring more difficult to access. Free at-home tests are no longer being shipped out en masse; asymptomatic testing is becoming less available; and vaccines and treatments are shifting to the private sector, putting them out of reach for many who live in poor regions or who are uninsured and can least afford to fall ill.
It doesn’t help, either, that the country’s level of preparedness lays out as a patchwork. People who vaccinate and mask tend to cluster, Amin told me, which means that not all American experiences of winter will be the same. Less prominent, less privileged parts of the country will quietly bear the brunt of outbreaks. “The biggest worry is the burden becoming unnoticed,” Venkatramanan told me. Without data, policies can’t change; the nation can’t react. “It’s like flying without altitude or speed sensors. You’re looking out the window and trying to guess.”
There’s an alternative winter the country might envision—one unencumbered by the policy backslides the U.S. has made in recent months, and one in which Americans acknowledge that COVID remains not just “a problem” but a crisis worth responding to.
In that version of reality, far more people would be up-to-date on their vaccines. The most vulnerable in society would be the most protected. Ventilation systems would hum in buildings across the country. Workers would have access to ample sick leave. Health-care systems would have excesses of protective gear, and local health departments wouldn’t want for funds. Masks would come out in times of high transmission, especially in schools, pharmacies, government buildings, and essential businesses; free tests, boosters, and treatments would be available to all. No one would be asked to return to work while sick—not just with COVID but with any transmissible disease. SARS-CoV-2 infections would not disappear, but they would remain at more manageable levels; cases of flu and other cold-weather sicknesses that travel through the air would follow suit. Surveillance systems would whir in every state and territory, ready to detect the next threat. Leaders might even set policies that choreograph, rather than simply capitulate to, how Americans behave.
We won’t be getting that winter this year, or likely any year soon. Many policies have already reverted to their 2019 status quo; by other metrics, the nation’s well-being even seems to have regressed. Life expectancyin the U.S.hasfallen, especially among Native Americans and Alaskan Natives. Institutions of health are beleaguered; community-outreach efforts have been pruned.
The pandemic has also prompted a deterioration of trust in several mainstays of public health. In many parts of the country, there’s worry that the vaccine hesitancy around COVID has “spread its tentacles into other diseases,” Hobbs told me, keeping parents from bringing their kids in for flu shots and other routine vaccines. Mississippi, once known for its stellarrate of immunizing children, now consistently ranks among those with the fewest young people vaccinated against COVID. “The one thing we do well is vaccinate children,” Hobbs said. That the coronavirus has reversed the trend “has astounded me.” In Montana, sweeping political changes, including legislation that bans employers from requiring vaccines of any kind, have made health-care settings less safe. Fewer than half of Madison County’s residents have received even their primary series of COVID shots, and “now a nurse can turn down the Hepatitis B series,” Bortko told me. Health workers, too, feel more imperiled than before. Since the start of the pandemic, Bortko’s own patients of 30 years, “who trusted me with their lives,” have pivoted to “yelling at us about vaccination concerns and mask mandates and quarantining and their freedoms,” she told me. “We have become public enemy No. 1.”
At the same time, many people with chronic and debilitating conditions are more vulnerable than they were before the pandemic began. The policies that protected them during the pandemic’s height are gone—and yet SARS-CoV-2 is still here, adding to the dangers they face. The losses have been written off, Bortko told me: Cases of long COVID in Madison County have been dismissed as products of “risk factors” that don’t apply to others; deaths, too, have been met with a shrug of “Oh, they were old; they were unhealthy.” If, this winter, COVID sickens or kills more people who are older, more people who are immunocompromised, more people of color, more essential and low-income workers, more people in rural communities, “there will be no press coverage,” Hlatshwayo Davis said. Americans already expect that members of these groups will die.
It’s not too late to change course. The winter’s path has not been set: Many Americans are still signing up for fall flu and COVID shots; we may luck out on the viral evolution front, too, and still be dealing largely with members of the Omicron clan for the next few months. But neither immunity nor a slowdown in variant emergence is a guarantee. What we can count on is the malleability of human behavior—what will help set the trajectory of this winter, and others to come. The U.S. botched the pandemic’s beginning, and its middle. That doesn’t mean we have to bungle its end, whenever that truly, finally arrives.
On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.
Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65to85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never ill enoughto need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.
Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue. For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is not psychosomatic, and involves real changes to the structure and chemistry of the brain. It is not a mood disorder: “If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.
And despite its nebulous name, brain fog is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. At its core, Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything involving concentration, multitasking, and planning—that is, almost everything important—becomes absurdly arduous. “It raises what are unconscious processes for healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me.
For example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.
Memory suffers, too, but in a different way from degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s. The memories are there, but with executive function malfunctioning, the brain neither chooses the important things to store nor retrieves that information efficiently. Davis, who is part of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, can remember facts from scientific papers, but not events. When she thinks of her loved ones, or her old life, they feel distant. “Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore,” she said. “It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.”
Most people with brain fog are not so severely affected, and gradually improve with time. But even when people recover enough to work, they can struggle with minds that are less nimble than before. “We’re used to driving a sports car, and now we are left with a jalopy,” Vázquez said. In some professions, a jalopy won’t cut it. “I’ve had surgeons who can’t go back to surgery, because they need their executive function,” Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a rehabilitation specialist at UT Health San Antonio, told me.
Robertson, meanwhile, was studying theoretical physics in college when she first got sick, and her fog occluded a career path that was once brightly lit. “I used to sparkle, like I could pull these things together and start to see how the universe works,” she told me. “I’ve never been able to access that sensation again, and I miss it, every day, like an ache.” That loss of identity was as disruptive as the physical aspects of the disease, which “I always thought I could deal with … if I could just think properly,” Robertson said. “This is the thing that’s destabilized me most.”
Robertson predicted that the pandemic would trigger a wave of cognitive impairment in March 2020. Her brain fog began two decades earlier, likely with a different viral illness, but she developed the same executive-function impairments that long-haulers experience, which then worsened when she got COVID last year. That specific constellation of problems also befalls many people living with HIV, epileptics after seizures, cancer patients experiencing so-called chemo brain, and people with several complex chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia. It’s part of the diagnostic criteria for myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS—a condition that Davis and many other long-haulers now have. Brain fog existed well before COVID, affecting many people whose conditions were stigmatized, dismissed, or neglected. “For all of those years, people just treated it like it’s not worth researching,” Robertson told me. “So many of us were told, Oh, it’s just a bit of a depression.”
Several clinicians I spoke with argued that the term brain fog makes the condition sound like a temporary inconvenience and deprives patients of the legitimacy that more medicalized language like cognitive impairment would bestow. But Aparna Nair, a historian of disability at the University of Oklahoma, noted that disability communities have used the term for decades, and there are many other reasons behind brain fog’s dismissal beyond terminology. (A surfeit of syllables didn’t stop fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis from being trivialized.)
For example, Hellmuth noted that in her field of cognitive neurology, “virtually all the infrastructure and teaching” centers on degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which rogue proteins afflict elderly brains. Few researchers know that viruses can cause cognitive disorders in younger people, so few study their effects. “As a result, no one learns about it in medical school,” Hellmuth said. And because “there’s not a lot of humility in medicine, people end up blaming patients instead of looking for answers,” she said.
People with brain fog also excel at hiding it: None of the long-haulers I’ve interviewed sounded cognitively impaired. But at times when her speech is obviously sluggish, “nobody except my husband and mother see me,” Robertson said. The stigma that long-haulers experience also motivates them to present as normal in social situations or doctor appointments, which compounds the mistaken sense that they’re less impaired than they claim—and can be debilitatingly draining. “They’ll do what is asked of them when you’re testing them, and your results will say they were normal,” David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai, told me. “It’s only if you check in on them two days later that you’ll see you’ve wrecked them for a week.”
“We also don’t have the right tools for measuring brain fog,” Putrino said. Doctors often use the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which was designed to uncover extreme mental problems in elderly people with dementia, and “isn’t validated for anyone under age 55,” Hellmuth told me. Even a person with severe brain fog can ace it. More sophisticated tests exist, but they still compare people with the population average rather than their previous baseline. “A high-functioning person with a decline in their abilities who falls within the normal range is told they don’t have a problem,” Hellmuth said.
This pattern exists for many long-COVID symptoms: Doctors order inappropriate or overly simplistic tests, whose negative results are used to discredit patients’ genuine symptoms. It doesn’t help that brain fog (and long COVID more generally) disproportionately affects women, who have a long history of being labeled as emotional or hysterical by the medical establishment. But every patient with brain fog “tells me the exact same story of executive-function symptoms,” Hellmuth said. “If people were making this up, the clinical narrative wouldn’t be the same.”
Earlier this year, a team of British researchers rendered the invisible nature of brain fog in the stark black-and-white imagery of MRI scans. Gwenaëlle Douaud at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analyzed data from the UK Biobank study, which had regularly scanned the brains of hundreds of volunteers for years prior to the pandemic. When some of those volunteers caught COVID, the team could compare their after scans to the before ones. They found that even mild infections can slightly shrink the brain and reduce the thickness of its neuron-rich gray matter. At their worst, these changes were comparable to a decade of aging. They were especially pronounced in areas such as the parahippocampal gyrus, which is important for encoding and retrieving memories, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is important for executive function. They were still apparent in people who hadn’t been hospitalized. And they were accompanied by cognitive problems.
Although SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID, can enter and infect the central nervous system, it doesn’t do so efficiently, persistently, or frequently, Michelle Monje, a neuro-oncologist at Stanford, told me. Instead, she thinks that in most cases the virus harms the brain without directly infecting it. She and her colleagues recently showed that when mice experience mild bouts of COVID, inflammatory chemicals can travel from the lungs to the brain, where they disrupt cells called microglia. Normally, microglia act as groundskeepers, supporting neurons by pruning unnecessary connections and cleaning unwanted debris. When inflamed, their efforts become overenthusiastic and destructive. In their presence, the hippocampus—a region crucial for memory—produces fewer fresh neurons, while many existing neurons lose their insulating coats, so electric signals now course along these cells more slowly. These are the same changes that Monje sees in cancer patients with “chemo fog.” And although she and her team did their COVID experiments in mice, they found high levels of the same inflammatory chemicals in long-haulers with brain fog.
Monje suspects that neuro-inflammation is “probably the most common way” that COVID results in brain fog, but that there are likely many such routes. COVID could possibly trigger autoimmune problems in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the nervous system, or reactivate dormant viruses such as Epstein-Barr virus, which has been linked to conditions including ME/CFS and multiple sclerosis. By damaging blood vessels and filling them with small clots, COVID also throttles the brain’s blood supply, depriving this most energetically demanding of organs of oxygen and fuel. This oxygen shortfall isn’t stark enough to kill neurons or send people to an ICU, but “the brain isn’t getting what it needs to fire on all cylinders,” Putrino told me. (The severe oxygen deprivation that forces some people with COVID into critical care causes different cognitive problems than what most long-haulers experience.)
None of these explanations is set in stone, but they can collectively make sense of brain fog’s features. A lack of oxygen would affect sophisticated and energy-dependent cognitive tasks first, which explains why executive function and language “are the first ones to go,” Putrino said. Without insulating coats, neurons work more slowly, which explains why many long-haulers feel that their processing speed is shot: “You’re losing the thing that facilitates fast neural connection between brain regions,” Monje said. These problems can be exacerbated or mitigated by factors such as sleep and rest, which explains why many people with brain fog have good days and bad days. And although other respiratory viruses can wreak inflammatory havoc on the brain, SARS-CoV-2 does so more potentlythan, say, influenza, which explains both why people such as Robertson developed brain fog long before the current pandemic and why the symptom is especially prominent among COVID long-haulers.
Perhaps the most important implication of this emerging science is that brain fog is “potentially reversible,” Monje said. If the symptom was the work of a persistent brain infection, or the mass death of neurons following severe oxygen starvation, it would be hard to undo. But neuroinflammation isn’t destiny. Cancer researchers, for example, have developed drugs that can calm berserk microglia in mice and restore their cognitive abilities; some are being tested in early clinical trials. “I’m hopeful that we’ll find the same to be true in COVID,” she said.
Biomedical advances might take years to arrive, but long-haulers need help with brain fog now. Absent cures, most approaches to treatment are about helping people manage their symptoms. Sounder sleep, healthy eating, and other generic lifestyle changes can make the condition more tolerable. Breathing and relaxation techniques can help people through bad flare-ups; speech therapy can help those with problems finding words. Some over-the-counter medications such as antihistamines can ease inflammatory symptoms, while stimulants can boost lagging concentration.
“Some people spontaneously recover back to baseline,” Hellmuth told me, “but two and a half years on, a lot of patients I see are no better.” And between these extremes lies perhaps the largest group of long-haulers—those whose brain fog has improved but not vanished, and who can “maintain a relatively normal life, but only after making serious accommodations,” Putrino said. Long recovery periods and a slew of lifehacks make regular living possible, but more slowly and at higher cost.
Kristen Tjaden can read again, albeit for short bursts followed by long rests, but hasn’t returned to work. Angela Meriquez Vázquez can work but can’t multitask or process meetings in real time. Julia Moore Vogel, who helps lead a large biomedical research program, can muster enough executive function for her job, but “almost everything else in my life I’ve cut out to make room for that,” she told me. “I only leave the house or socialize once a week.” And she rarely talks about these problems openly because “in my field, your brain is your currency,” she said. “I know my value in many people’s eyes will be diminished by knowing that I have these cognitive challenges.”
Patients struggle to make peace with how much they’ve changed and the stigma associated with it, regardless of where they end up. Their desperation to return to normal can be dangerous, especially when combined with cultural norms around pressing on through challenges and post-exertional malaise—severe crashes in which all symptoms worsen after even minor physical or mental exertion. Many long-haulers try to push themselves back to work and instead “push themselves into a crash,” Robertson told me. When she tried to force her way to normalcy, she became mostly housebound for a year, needing full-time care. Even now, if she tries to concentrate in the middle of a bad day, “I end up with a physical reaction of exhaustion and pain, like I’ve run a marathon,” she said.
Post-exertional malaise is so common among long-haulers that “exercise as a treatment is inappropriate for people with long COVID,” Putrino said. Even brain-training games—which have questionable value but are often mentioned as potential treatments for brain fog—must be very carefully rationed because mental exertion is physical exertion. People with ME/CFS learned this lesson the hard way, and fought hard to get exercise therapy, once commonly prescribed for the condition, to be removed from official guidance in the U.S. and U.K. They’ve also learned the value of pacing—carefully sensing and managing their energy levels to avoid crashes.
Vogel does this with a wearable that tracks her heart rate, sleep, activity, and stress as a proxy for her energy levels; if they feel low, she forces herself to rest—cognitively as well as physically. Checking social media or responding to emails do not count. In those moments, “you have to accept that you have this medical crisis and the best thing you can do is literally nothing,” she said. When stuck in a fog, sometimes the only option is to stand still.
A core conservative critique of President Joe Biden’s executive action on student-debt forgiveness is that the plan requires blue-collar Americans to subsidize privileged children idly contemplating gender studies or critical race theory at fancy private colleges.
That idea, articulated by Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others, aims to portray the GOP as the party of working Americans and Democrats as the champions of the smug, well-educated elite. But it fundamentally misrepresents who’s attending college now, where they are enrolled, and the reasons so many young people are graduating with unsustainable debt.
Many factors have contributed to the explosion in student debt, but one dynamic is almost always overlooked: the erosion of the commitment to affordable public higher education as an engine for upward mobility that benefits the entire community.
Contrary to the stereotype conjured by critics, the number of debtors from public colleges today (about 22 million) exceeds the number from private and for-profit colleges combined (about 21 million), according to federal data. One reason so many of those students from public schools are in debt is that they have graduated in an era when states have shifted more of the burden for funding higher education from taxpayers to students—precisely as more of those students are minorities reared in families on the short side of the nation’s enormous racial wealth gap.
Biden’s plan, despite its imperfections, recognizes that this massive cost shift is crushing too many young people as they enter adulthood. It is also a belated reaffirmation that society benefits from helping more young people obtain degrees that will allow them to reach the middle class.
Public colleges and universities are the principal arena in which the debt and affordability crisis will be won or lost because—again, contrary to popular perception—the majority of postsecondary students (about four in five) attend public, not private, institutions.
When Baby Boomers were in college, few seemed to question whether society benefited from helping more young people earn their diploma at an affordable price. States provided public colleges enough taxpayer dollars to keep tuition to a minimum. In the 1963–64 academic year, around the time the first Boomers stepped onto campuses, the average annual tuition for four-year public colleges was $243, according to federal statistics. Tuition at those public schools was still only about $500 to $600 a year by the time most of the last Baby Boomers had started college, in the mid-1970s. (Adjusting for inflation, prices grew at a modest rate while Boomers matriculated, rising only from about $2,100 in constant 2021 dollars when the first ones started to about $2,600 when the last ones did.) The renowned University of California and City University of New York systems didn’t even charge any tuition until the mid-’70s.
Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, told me that the generous mid-century funding for public higher education drew on the legacy of the GI Bill after World War II and the post-Sputnik investments in education and research, each of which had broad political support. “The attitude was ‘We should invest in young people,’” he said. “It was just an ethic.” Also important, he noted: “The young people they were thinking about were young white kids primarily.”
But for racially diverse Millennials and Generation Z students, the experience has been quite different. By 1999, the year the first Millennials entered campuses, the average annual cost for a four-year public college or university, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, had doubled since the mid-’70s to more than $5,200. By the time the last Millennials (generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) entered college in the 2014 academic year, the cost had soared by another 80 percent to roughly $9,500 a year. So far, the average annual tuition cost has stayed at about that elevated level as the first members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2014) have started their studies.
As these numbers show, tuition at four-year public universities increased more than three times as fast while Millennials attended than it did over the span when most Baby Boomers did. The failure of colleges to control their costs explains part of this disparity. But it’s also a political decision at the state level. “The trend of having students and their families pay more for their college today is absolutely linked to the state disinvestment in higher education,” Michele Siqueiros, the president of the California-based Campaign for College Opportunity, told me.
Public colleges and universities relied on tuition and fees for only about one-fifth of their total educational revenue in 1980, the first year for which these figures are available, with state tax dollars providing most of the rest. Today the share funded by tuition has more than doubled, according to analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Even that figure is somewhat misleading, because it includes community colleges, which don’t rely as much on tuition. In four-year public colleges and universities, tuition now provides a 52 percent majority of all educational revenues nationwide. Even with some recent increases in state contributions, 31 states now rely on tuition for a majority of four-year public-college revenues, the executives’ association found.
Even as those costs have increased, Pell Grants, the principal form of federal aid for low-income students, have failed to keep pace. In 2000, Pell Grants covered 99 percent of the average costs of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges, according to research by the College Board. Today, the grants fund only 60 percent of those costs—and only half that much of the total bill when room and board are added on.
This historic shift in funding has occurred as college campuses have grown more racially diverse. As recently as the late 1990s, white kids still constituted 70 percent of all high-school graduates, according to the federal National Center for Education Statistics. But NCES estimates that students of color became a majority of high-school graduates for the first time in the school year that ended this June. Their share of future graduates will rise to nearly three-fifths by the end of this decade, the NCES forecasts. That stream of future high-school grads will further diversify the overall student body in postsecondary institutions—especially in public colleges and universities, where kids of color already constitute a slight majority of those attending, according to figures provided to me by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. (Most private-college students, especially on the campuses considered most elite, are still white.)
The inevitable result of less taxpayer help has been more debt for public-school graduates. Even in the ’90s, only about one-third of public-college graduates finished with debt, federal figures show. But today a daunting 55 percent of public-college graduates leave with debt, not much less than the share of students who finish with debt at private schools (somewhere around 60 percent, depending on the data source). What’s more, the average undergraduate debt held by students from public colleges isn’t much less than that held by those who attended private campuses. In effect, as USC’s Myers noted, because states generally are prohibited from borrowing to fund higher education (or anything else) by their constitutions, “they pushed the borrowing onto the individual families.”
This shift has hurt families of all types, but it’s been especially difficult for the growing number of Black and Latino postsecondary students. Those families have far less wealth than white families to draw on to fund college. That increases pressure on kids of color to borrow—and to support other family members after they graduate, reducing their capacity to pay down their debts. To compound the problem, as the Georgetown Center has repeatedly documented, Black and Latino students are heavily tracked into the least selective two- and four-year public colleges, which have the smallest budgets and produce the weakest outcomes, both in terms of graduation rates and future earnings. White kids, the center calculates, still constitute three-fifths of the total student body at the better-funded, more exclusive “flagship” public universities, with Black and Latino students together representing only one-fifth. “The money is going to where the affluent and preponderantly white students are, and the money is not going to where the minority and less advantaged students are, which exacerbates the dropout crisis,” Anthony Carnevale, the center’s director, told me.
The Republican attacks on Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan are aimed at convincing the GOP base of older white voters, especially those without a college education, that diverse younger Americans constitute a threat to them. Yet compared with the taxpayer investments in the first decades after World War II (in everything from education to housing to roads) that helped so many of those Baby Boomers live better lives than their parents, Biden’s plan represents only a modest effort.Older generations of college students didn’t have as much debt not because they were more individually virtuous but because they benefited from a collective social investment in their education. Many of those arguing against debt forgiveness, Siqueiros told me, seem to be conveniently forgetting all of the ways the government provided “benefits to Baby Boomers.”
The irony is that it’s in Boomers’ self-interest to reduce the debt burden on younger students. As they age into retirement, Boomers are relying on younger generations to bear the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security and Medicare. I’ve called these two giant cohorts the brown and the gray, and though our politics doesn’t often acknowledge it, there is no financial security for the gray without more economic opportunity for the brown.
The debt-forgiveness program, which White House officials pointedly insisted to me was a “onetime” deal, is only the first of many steps needed to equip those younger generations to succeed. The college-debt crisis will simply repeat itself if Washington and the states don’t pursue other policies to undo the burden shift toward students—such as the free-community-college program, more generous Pell Grants, and crackdown on predatory for-profit colleges that Biden has proposed.
It’s reasonable to question whether Biden’s debt plan could have been targeted more precisely or tweaked in myriad different ways. But the plan got one very big thing right: All Americans will benefit if our society provides today’s diverse younger generations with anything approaching the investments we made in the Baby Boomers more than half a century ago.
For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.
Today, calls for relief were answered when President Joe Biden announced that his administration would be canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for those with federal debt, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. As long as a borrower makes less than $125,000 a year, or makes less than $250,000 alongside a spouse, they would be eligible for cancellation. The president will also extend the current loan-repayment pause—originally enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020 as a pandemic-relief measure—until December 31.
The debt relief—which by one estimate could cost a total of $300 billion—is a massive benefit for Americans who have struggled to repay loans they accrued attending college, whether they completed a degree or not. But equally as important as addressing the damage that student loans have caused is ensuring that Americans aren’t saddled with overwhelming debt again. And the underlying issue of college affordability can be addressed only if America once again views higher education as a public good. Belatedly canceling some student debt is what a country does when it refuses to support students up front.
According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled. “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.
When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.
Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.
The shift flies in the face of the Framers’ view of higher education, though. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” George Washington, an early proponent of the idea of a national university, said in his first address before Congress, in 1790. “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and others believed that colleges might be a place where Americans could build a national identity—a place where they could, for lack of better words, become good citizens.
In that spirit, the federal government provided massive investments in the nation’s colleges, albeit inequitably—through the Morrill Act, which formed the backbone of state higher-education systems as we know them; the GI Bill; and the Pell Grant program—which directly subsidize students’ expenses. But in the past half century, radical investments in higher-education access have dried up. Now a political divide has opened up: Conservative lawmakers—whose voters are more likely not to have attended college—have grown not only suspicious of but in some cases openly hostile toward the enterprise.
Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats believe that the government should subsidize college education. “We want our young people to realize that they can have a good future,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in April. “One of the best, very best, top-of-the-list ways to do it is by canceling student debt.” He wanted the president to be ambitious and called for giving borrowers $50,000 in relief—“even going higher after that.” A month into his administration, though, Biden shot down the idea of $50,000, to the chagrin of relief advocates. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and Wisdom Cole argued today. “It hardly achieves anything—only making a mere dent in the problem.”
The administration is coupling its announcement with a redesign of payment plans that allows borrowers to cap their monthly loan payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income. But the basic problem remains: Young Americans of modest means can no longer afford to attend their state university by getting a part-time job and taking out a small loan. For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree. Biden’s plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.
