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As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours yesterday, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned. NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up on air while describing how quickly and dramatically the storm had intensified. To most people, a drop in pressure of 50 millibars means nothing; a weatherman understands, as Morales said mid-broadcast, that “this is just horrific.” Florida is still cleaning up from Helene; this storm is spinning much faster, and it’s more compact and organized.

In a way, Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been.

A hurricane forms from multiple variables, and in Milton, the variables have come together to form a nightmare. The storm is gaining considerable energy thanks to high sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, which is far hotter than usual. And that energy translates into higher wind speeds. Milton is also taking up moisture from the very humid atmosphere, which, as a rule, can hold 7 percent more water vapor for every degree-Celsius increase in temperature. Plus, the air is highly unstable and can therefore rise more easily, which allows the hurricane to form and maintain its shape. And thanks to La Niña, there isn’t much wind shear—the wind’s speed and direction are fairly uniform at different elevations—“so the storm can stay nice and vertically stacked,” Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me. “All of that combined is making the storm more efficient at using the energy available.” In other words, the storm very efficiently became a major danger.

That perfect combination—of hot seas, humid air, and little wind shear—is being aided by Milton’s path through the Gulf of Mexico’s western part, which hasn’t seen much major storm activity yet this season. When a storm passes over hot water, it sucks up much of that heat, using it as fuel and lowering the water temperature. But in the western gulf, “nothing else had been there to cool off the water,” Wood told me.  

Milton is also a very compact storm with a highly symmetrical, circular core, Wood said. In contrast, Helene’s core took longer to coalesce, and the storm stayed more spread out. Wind speeds inside Milton picked up by about 90 miles an hour in a single day, intensifying faster than any other storm on record besides Hurricanes Wilma in 2005 and Felix in 2007. Climate scientists have worried for a while now that climate change could produce storms that intensify faster and reach higher peak intensities, given an extra boost by climate change. Milton is doing just that.

Rapid intensification has become more common in recent years. Hurricane Otis, which made landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, last year as a Category 5 intensified from a tropical storm in a single day, confounding forecasters and leaving residents very little time to prepare for a direct hit of that magnitude. Hurricane Idalia, also in 2023, was another example of rapid intensification, as was 2022’s Hurricane Ian. Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist and professor emeritus at MIT, predicted less than a decade ago that hurricanes’ rapid intensification just before landfall was likely to become “increasingly frequent and severe as the globe warms,” and in the past few years, that prediction has borne out in additional modeling studies. It’s a new addition to the canon of climate-change knowledge, so it’s not yet firmly established, but this early research points toward a connection between rising temperatures and these storms’ rapid escalation. Climate change might actually decrease the total number of tropical storms and hurricanes (though the mechanism causing that decrease is still being debated), but the storms that do manage to form will likely be more intense, according to Tom Knutson, a senior scientist at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. His recent research found that more storms may make landfall in the U.S. as Category 4s and 5s by the end of this century. Even if we get fewer storms, they will be worse.

Trying to ride out storms of that size can be deadly. Overnight, Milton downgraded to a Category 4 but grew in size. It could also still reintensify to a Category 5. Florida is now preparing to evacuate potentially more than 6 million people ahead of Milton’s predicted landfall. And the conditions it will collide with on shore have already been worsened by climate change. The Gulf of Mexico has seen twice the global average rate of sea-level rise since 2010, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, and the sea along the Tampa Bay coast is now nearly five inches higher than it was 14 years ago. So when the storm surge floods the coast, salt water will probably travel farther inland, and likely with more force, than it would otherwise.

Milton also looks like a “very wet” storm, Gabriel A. Vecchi, a climate-science professor at Princeton University, told me, and Florida is already sopping wet. The state has been inundated with rain, and more will precede the storm. The ground is already saturated and so is unable to act as a sponge; ordinarily, it would serve as a partial buffer against flooding.

Rainfall is one of the best-understood areas of “attribution science,” the discipline that models how much worse climate change likely made any given weather scenario. And climate change is quite clearly making hurricane rainfall worse. Wehner and two colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put out a provisional analysis that found that, in some places in Georgia and the Carolinas, climate change may have caused as much as 50 percent more rainfall during Hurricane Helene. “Instead of 10 inches, they got 15 in some places. Instead of 20 inches, they got 30,” Wehner told me.

Only after Milton passes will scientists try to account for the ways that climate change made it more horrific than it might otherwise have been—perhaps still a major storm, but not so intense and so fast that it stopped a veteran meteorologist cold. And the world is expected to keep warming dramatically over the coming century; storms such as Milton are a preview of the types that will become more common, Vecchi told me. “We’re having a hard time dealing with storms this wet,” he said. “How are we going to do with storms that are wetter?” Surely those, too, will be shocking. But they should not be surprising: We’ll have known all along that they were coming.

On a rainy Saturday late last month, Mondaire Jones was doing his best to convince a crowd of supporters that his campaign was going great. “We’ve got so much momentum in this race,” Jones said. “It has been an incredible week.”

It was a tough sell—not only for the dozens of Democrats listening to Jones in Bedford, New York, but also for the many others who have spent millions of dollars to help him defeat a first-term Republican, Representative Mike Lawler, and win back a district he gave up two years ago. The suburbs surrounding New York City have become a central battleground in the fight for Congress, and Jones’s race against Lawler is among the most competitive in the country—one that could determine which party controls the House next year.

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the majority, and New York has four of the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, who are all newly representing districts that Joe Biden carried easily in 2020. Yet the traditionally blue bastion is proving to be rough terrain for Democratic candidates, who must distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City’s recently indicted mayor, Eric Adams.

[Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]

Jones’s curious claim to momentum was based on a poll his campaign released that had him trailing Lawler by four points—not exactly a strong showing in a district that has 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans. As for his incredible week: It began with him apologizing to Hochul for telling a reporter that he didn’t want his state’s governor to be “some, like, little bitch.” Jones said he was not referring to Hochul and told me that his comments were “taken out of context.” (Jones’s prospects did brighten the following week, when it was Lawler’s turn to apologize after The New York Times uncovered photos of the Republican wearing blackface in college as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.)

Democrats are hoping that the enthusiasm Kamala Harris’s campaign has generated will help them reverse the gains Republicans made in New York in 2022. Hochul’s victory that year was so underwhelming—she won by fewer than seven points, a margin that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in his three elections—that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed her performance for costing Democrats the House.

Pelosi’s successor as Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has prioritized the purple districts in his home state as he seeks to become the nation’s first Black speaker. But Democrats’ prospects in New York aren’t looking much better than they did two years ago. Hochul’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and the federal corruption charges against Adams—who runs the city where many of Jones’s would-be constituents work—won’t help. Polls show Harris beating Donald Trump by fewer than 15 points statewide; in 2020, Biden won by 23.

Lawler has hammered Jones on the same issues that helped get him elected two years ago—the high cost of living and the influx of migrants straining local government resources—while appealing to the district’s large Jewish community by championing Israel and criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protesters. He’s supporting Trump for president while vowing to stand up to him—at least more than most Republicans have. (He’s refused, for example, to parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies.) “I’m not going to be bullied by anybody,” Lawler told me.

Key to the Democrats’ strategy against Lawler—as with many Republicans—is abortion. Party strategists believe that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, GOP candidates fared better in blue states such as New York and California because voters there did not see a legitimate threat to abortion rights. Hoping to spur greater turnout, state Democrats have placed a measure on the ballot this year that would further enshrine abortion rights into New York law, and they’re warning that victories by Lawler and other swing-district Republicans could empower the GOP to enact a national ban. “I think people see the threat. They’re taking it much more seriously,” says Jann Mirchandani, the local Democratic chair in Yorktown, a closely divided town in New York’s Hudson Valley. But she wasn’t sure if Lawler could be beaten. “It’s going to be tight.”

Jones’s first stint in Congress was cut short, in part, by an electoral game of musical chairs. Because New York’s population growth had flatlined, the state lost a seat in 2022, two years after his election. In response, a newly vulnerable senior Democrat, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, decided to run in Jones’s district, so the freshman moved to Brooklyn in hopes of holding on to office there. He didn’t make it out of the primary, and then a few months later, Lawler beat Maloney by only about 1,800 votes.

To try to reclaim the seat he once held, Jones is shedding some of his past progressivism. He’s renounced his support for defunding the police and no longer champions Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. His biggest break with the left came in June, when he endorsed George Latimer, the primary opponent of Jones’s former colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the left-wing “Squad,” because of Bowman’s criticism of Israel after October 7. In retaliation, the progressives’ campaign PAC rescinded its endorsement of Jones. When I asked him whether he would try to rejoin the Congressional Progressive Caucus if he won in November—he was a member of the group during his first go-round in the House—he said he didn’t know. But he told me he was planning to join the more moderate and business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Do you still identify as a progressive? I asked. “I am a pragmatic, pro-Israel progressive.”

[Read: Why Jamaal Bowman lost]

Jones’s rift with the left has hurt him in other ways as well. Lawler and Jones are the only candidates actively campaigning in their district, but they won’t be the only people on the November ballot. A relative unknown named Anthony Frascone stunned Democrats by beating out Jones for the nomination of the left-leaning Working Families Party after earning just 287 votes.

Democrats say they were the victims of a dirty trick by the GOP, pointing to two seeming coincidences. Frascone, a former registered Republican, has ties to powerful conservatives in the district, including his longtime lawyer, who serves as a county chair. And, as Gothamist reported, nearly 200 voters registered with the party in conservative Rockland County just days before the deadline. Few residents are eligible to vote in the WFP primary, which typically rubber-stamps the Democratic candidate. So when Frascone got on the ballot at the last minute, the Jones campaign didn’t have many supporters it could even attempt to turn out.

If it was a ploy by Republicans, it worked brilliantly. In a close race, Frascone might siphon enough votes from Jones for Lawler to win. “The combination of the surprise primary and us having a very public fracture with Mondaire created a perfect storm,” Ana María Archila, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told me.

Now the WFP has the awkward task of telling supporters not to vote for its nominee. Meanwhile, state Democrats are suing to get Frascone off the ballot, and the Jones campaign is devoting time and money to ensuring that a ghost candidate won’t cost his party a crucial House seat. A poll released yesterday by Emerson College found Lawler ahead of Jones, 45–44, with Frascone taking three percent of the vote, suggesting that he could play the role of spoiler.

Lawler told me he had nothing to do with Frascone’s candidacy. “He has no ties to me,” he said. “If Mondaire couldn’t win a Working Families Party primary with 500 voters, that’s on him.”

Democrats appear to be in a stronger position in other New York swing districts. Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican, is seen as a slight underdog to retain his seat around Syracuse after Democrats redrew his district in 2022. In a Long Island district that Biden carried by double digits, the Democrat Laura Gillen’s campaign got a boost when The New York Times reported that her opponent, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, had given congressional jobs to both his lover and the daughter of the woman he was cheating on. Farther upstate, in New York’s Nineteenth District, which is currently the most expensive House race in the country, an early-September poll by a Republican-leaning firm found that the GOP incumbent, Representative Marc Molinaro, was three points behind his Democratic challenger, with a larger group of voters undecided.

Elsewhere on Long Island, Representative Tom Suozzi is favored to win again after his special-election victory in February, when he flipped a GOP-held seat by talking tough on the border and assailing Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill at Trump’s behest—a message that Democrats from Harris on down are adopting this fall.

But Suozzi also benefited from his being the only race on the ballot; Democrats bused in canvassers from across the New York metropolitan area to knock on doors for his campaign, and he won by nearly eight points. Now the same organizations that powered Suozzi’s win are trying to convince party activists and volunteers that their local elections are just as important as the one for the White House. “One of those races gets more attention than the other, but it turns out that Kamala Harris is going to need a Democratic Congress,” Jones told the supporters gathered at the event I attended in Bedford.

[Read: What Tom Suozzi’s win means for Democrats]

I met two Democrats there who said they would vote for Jones but not canvass for him. One of them, Joe Simonetti, said he was still “deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed” by Jones’s effort to unseat a Black progressive in Bowman. “I just can’t get out there with full-throated support,” Simonetti, a retired social worker, said. Roger Savitt, a 70-year-old retiree and former Republican, told me that he was hoping to get on a bus to Pennsylvania to volunteer for Harris for a day. Why not knock on doors for Jones too? I asked. Savitt had nothing against Jones, he said, but “I have a less strong view of the congressional race.”

Indeed, part of Jones’s dilemma is that some Democrats in the district have a grudging admiration for Lawler. “Lawler’s done a halfway-decent job,” Rocco Pozzi, a Democratic commissioner in Westchester County, told me. “But we need to get the majority back.” A former political consultant, Lawler is visible both in the community and on cable news, where he tries to position himself as a reasonable voice amid the warring factions in Congress. “You have seen him on Morning Joe, where he never gets asked tough questions,” Jones complained to the Bedford crowd at one point.

As their party embraced Trump, moderate Republicans in blue states have occasionally found a receptive audience among Democrats looking to reward politicians willing to criticize their own party. In Vermont, the Republican Phil Scott has for years been among the nation’s most popular governors. Massachusetts twice elected the moderate Republican Charlie Baker as governor, and in Maine, Senator Susan Collins won reelection in 2020 even as Biden easily carried the state.

Lawler is eyeing that same path to statewide office in New York; if he wins reelection, he told me, he might run for governor against Hochul in 2026. “It’s certainly something I’ll look at,” Lawler said.

Yet despite his image, Lawler is more conservative than the Republicans who have demonstrated cross-party appeal in nearby Democratic strongholds. Although he has vowed to vote against a national abortion ban, he opposes the procedure except in cases of rape or incest and told me he would not vote with Democrats to restore Roe v. Wade. Lawler also said he’d vote against the bipartisan immigration bill that Harris has promised to pass if elected.

Those positions offer openings for Jones, who needs the Democrats that still dominate the district to recognize the importance of his race to the national balance of power. Lawler isn’t making it easy for him. A couple days after Jones’s rally in Bedford, I saw Lawler speak a few miles northwest in Yorktown at a commemoration of the October 7 attacks. The event wasn’t partisan, and Lawler spoke for only a few minutes, but attendees in the largely Jewish audience came away impressed.

Nancy Anton, a 68-year-old retired teacher and artist, said she had “definitely” been planning to vote for Jones before she came, but now she was leaning the other way. She supports Harris for president and wants Jeffries to be speaker, she told me, but she might vote for Lawler anyway. “I’m hoping in these other districts the Democrats win so we retake the House,” Anton said. I asked her if she’d have any regrets come November if a Lawler victory allowed Republicans to retain the majority. “Oh yes,” she replied. “That’s a terrifying thought.”