The Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato, officially unveiled in Miami Wednesday will be the Italian automaker's maker's last purely gasoline-powered supercar. It will also be unlike any Lamborghini supercar before because it's designed to go off-road.

NFL free agent wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. was removed from a Los Angeles-bound American Airlines flight Sunday morning at Miami International Airport after refusing to comply with safety protocol, according to a statement from the Miami-Dade Police Department.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

Typically, when the opening games of the World Cup commence, it is the beginning of summer—a time when I find myself relishing the long hours of sunlight, enjoying enormous platters of barbecue, and wondering how many Popsicles is too many Popsicles for a grown man to eat in a single day. This World Cup, as we know, is different. For the first time in its history, it is not beginning in June; it’s beginning in November. This change is in place because, in the host country of Qatar, holding the World Cup in the summer would be far too hot.

This decision has had far-reaching implications for the players, whose club seasons have been bifurcated in ways they’ve never experienced; for club teams whose seasons have come to a dramatic pause and must figure out what to do for six weeks with their players who are not participating in the World Cup (the vast majority of players in the world). It has also had perhaps unexpected effects on fans, who are watching games in different settings than we are typically accustomed to.

For example, I’m currently back home in New Orleans for the Thanksgiving holiday, and instead of watching games on a summer patio somewhere around Washington, D.C., where I live, I am watching them in my parents’ home surrounded by family, while my two young children have their coloring books, crayons, and apple slices spread across the floor in front of the television.

My son, the older of the two, has recently begun to develop an affinity for soccer and is full of questions. Why does the goalie wear a different color shirt? What does offsides mean? How can someone play for Arsenal and the U.S.A. at the same time?

As we sat down and prepared to watch the U.S. men’s team play Wales in their first World Cup game in more than eight years, my son, who’s 5, looked at the television with a confused face.

“Where is the Wales team?” he turned around and asked.

“They’re right there,” I said, pointing to the men in red belting out their national anthem.

“Those are just regular people,” he said, shaking his head.

It was in that moment that I realized there had been a misunderstanding:

My son was disappointed to realize that the US team was playing a country called Wales and not a large group of whales in what I guess he imagined to be a large soccer-seaworld extravaganza.

— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) November 21, 2022

He felt further aggrieved when he realized that the team was not even nicknamed “the whales,” finding it bizarre and nonsensical that they had a picture of a dragon on their crest and not a whale.

Sharing his sentiment on Twitter invited all sorts of people to share their own homophonous misunderstandings as children.

The novelist Brandon Taylor wrote: “Cut to me as a child in primary school, thinking that Diana was the Princess of Whales and had the power to communicate with sea creatures.”

Cut to me as a child in primary school, thinking that Diana was the Princess of Whales and had the power to communicate with sea creatures.

— Brandon (@blgtylr) November 21, 2022

The former Jeopardy champion Buzzy Cohen shared his own childhood misunderstanding of a trip to Miami:

When I was a kid visiting family in Miami my family would point to a stadium and say “That’s where the dolphins play football” and you can just imagine what my lil brain imagined. https://t.co/5yrmlkRJWR

— Buzzy Cohen (@buzztronics) November 22, 2022

Others shared how their understanding of guerrilla warfare was innocently misguided:

In a macabre moment, 7 year old me felt similar disappointment in 1972 that the guerrillas holding hostages at the Olympics were not in fact gorillas. I also did not understand the gravity of the situation.

— Son of None (@Tybird99) November 21, 2022

There were dozens of examples like this. They brought a smile to my face.

I mention these as well because this sort of moment would not be possible if the tournament were being held during its traditional time of year. It would have been held this past summer, and my son would have been in his pre-K summer camp. Instead, here we are in my parents’ home a few days from Thanksgiving, my son asking questions every 30 seconds to make sense of this game his father loves, his younger sister laid across my lap with a fruit pouch in her mouth as I type this with one hand.

The World Cup should have never been held in Qatar, to be sure, but if one is to look for an upside, the timing of the tournament does provide a unique opportunity to share moments that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.  

Listen to Clint Smith discuss the complicated feelings he has for soccer on a special episode of Radio Atlantic:

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How many homes must the United States’ expensive coastal cities build to become affordable for middle-class and working-poor families again? Over the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts that question. I expected a straightforward response: If you build X units, you reduce rents by Y percent—which means that Washington, D.C., needs to build Z units to become broadly affordable again.

I did not get such a simple answer. “That’s a difficult question with a lot of moving parts,” Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution told me. “Are we assuming that all of these homes drop out of the sky today?” asked David Garcia, the policy director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, gave me a long response involving land prices, rental affordability, household formation, and building trends.

Still, all agreed that whatever the number is, it’s enormous. “All the numbers we have that address this question are huge. They’re massive,” Garcia said. “And they’re all a massive undercount.”

That strikes me as a problem. No one can say just what it would take to make Brooklyn affordable for workers who don’t have a college degree, render San Francisco accessible to families with kids and elderly couples on fixed incomes, or allow extended-family members in Boston to buy apartments within a few blocks of one another. That means we have no policy vision of how to make our biggest, most productive places affordable for all, and no plan to get there.

[Derek Thompson: The housing market has gone from bad to worse]

This is not just unfair to Americans who want to move to these places. High rents and sale prices in major cities are a policy choice, one that puts gates around many of our most wonderful places and taxes the folks lucky enough to live there. And it is unfair to all of us. A United States with more abundant housing in its big cities would have a more productive, vibrant, and dynamic economy too.

The best evidence for how much housing we need to build lies in the prices that people pay today. Nationwide, the share of renters who are considered “burdened”—spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities—has climbed to 47 percent; one in four renters, or 11 million people, spend more than half their income on shelter. Renters today spend about 10 more percentage points of their earnings more on housing than they did in the 1970s. Meanwhile, rising prices have also forced millions of younger Americans to delay homeownership, making it impossible for many to buy their way onto the property ladder, particularly in California and New York.

People make painful choices: To keep their housing costs in line with their income, millions of families do not live where they want to or in the kinds of homes they want to or with the people they want to. When the mortgage on a townhouse is too costly, families keep renting their run-down apartment. When a third bedroom costs too much, parents give up on having a third kid. This is a public-policy catastrophe too.

The problem is largely, if not exclusively, the result of the country not permitting enough homes where people want them. Although some communities in the interior of the country, especially in the south, have allowed housing construction to keep up with rapid population growth, the superstar metro areas of the northeast and West Coast have not. “The reason California has the affordability problems we have now is because we did not build,” said Garcia, of the Terner Center. “In the 1960s, 1970s, even into the 1980s, we built between 200,000 and 300,000 homes per year. In our most recent economic boom, we were building 100,000 a year.” He added: “That is the start and the end of the story when it comes to California.”

And elsewhere. New York City issued fewer new housing permits in the 2010s than it did in the 2000s or in the 1960s; it has, year after year, created more jobs than homes. Nationally, “household growth and new construction have been essentially coincident for the last seven or eight years,” said Herbert, of Harvard. “Typically, housing construction exceeds household formation by about 20 percent, because we’re always removing housing that has outlived its useful life. We haven’t been doing that for a long time. Just by that very simple measure, we’re not building enough.”

[M. Nolan Gray: The housing revolution is coming]

The answer is to build more. A lot more. Rough estimates of what economists call the “housing gap”—how much the United States would have to build to bring it back in line with historical trends—aren’t difficult to come by:

Looking at the number of American households and the number of vacant housing units, Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored purchaser of mortgage-backed securities, estimates a current supply shortage of 3.8 million units, driven by a 40-year collapse in the construction of homes smaller than 1,400 square feet. The group Up for Growth also arrived at an estimate of 3.8 million, using data on the total demand for housing and the overall supply of habitable, available units. The National Association of Realtors compared the issuance of housing permits with the number of jobs created in 174 different metro areas. It found that only 38 metro regions are permitting enough new homes to keep up with job growth; in more than a dozen areas, including New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Miami, and Chicago, just one new home is getting built for every 20-plus jobs created. The NAR estimates an “underbuilding gap” of as many as 7 million units.

These numbers draw on data such as vacancy rates, household-formation trends, and building trends. But none of the estimates capture what I’ve come to think of as the affordability gap: the difference between the housing we have and the housing we would need in order to ensure that working-class people could once again live in our big coastal cities for a reasonable cost. Freddie Mac does not purport that building 3.8 million units would make New York accessible to big middle-class families and end homelessess in San Francisco. The National Association of Realtors is not contemplating whether janitors can walk to work in Boston.

Would filling the housing gap as measured by Freddie Mac or the NAR make a dent in costs? Absolutely, housing experts said. Studies show that when builders construct units in a given place, it reduces rents and sale prices in nearby blocks, as well as in nearby neighborhoods; conversely, restricting construction drives prices up. But such calculations do not scale up readily: Knowing that a 10 percent increase in the housing stock in a given place depresses rents by 1 percent within 500 feet does not mean that San Francisco’s increasing its housing stock by 500 percent would force rents down by 50 percent.  

As a general point, “it’s really hard to imagine the most expensive cities becoming significantly cheaper,” Schuetz told me. For one thing, creating new units would cause an increase in household formation: Young workers could opt for studios rather than shared apartments; multigenerational households could break apart. For another thing, high-income, high-cost cities have so much pent-up demand that any one city would have trouble becoming much more affordable on its own. If San Francisco built thousands of units, new parents would stay in the city rather than decamp for the East Bay. Newcomers would move in from around the region and across the world.

[Annie Lowrey: Four years among the NIMBYs]

The rate at which a city adds new units would matter too, Garcia pointed out. Conjuring 10,000 housing units into existence overnight in Boston, which currently has about 300,000 of them, would cause prices to plummet. Building them over a decade might slow the arc of rent prices without ever causing them to fall. The kind of housing getting built matters as well. If New York were to approve the construction of thousands of single-room-occupancy units—dorms, pretty much—that would depress prices for single people and childless families without immediately affecting prices for parents.

Experts also noted that building more market-rate units would help wealthy families before it would help middle-class and poor families. “Saturating the market with more supply would naturally take the pressure off of landlords who keep raising rents,” says Stephanie Klasky-Gamer, the president of LA Family Housing, a homelessness-prevention nonprofit in Los Angeles. “But we’ll never target our most vulnerable renters if we only build 500,000 market-rate units.”

In one recent survey, just 30 to 40 percent of American adults said they believed that increasing the housing stock would slash prices and rents; that belief—often described as “supply skepticism”—in turn dampened their enthusiasm for new construction. Such mistrust is rooted in a confluence of events that countless city dwellers have seen with their own eyes: The laundromat closes. The soulless five-over-one condo building goes up. Black families leave and white couples flood in. And all the while, rents surge, making real-estate development look like an engine of gentrification rather than an engine of affordability.

But that displacement happens only because building dense housing is illegal in many rich neighborhoods, and because cities build so little of it overall. “If you want to build enough to really help low-income people, you’re talking about doing a lot of building,” Rick Jacobus, an expert on inclusionary housing and the principal of Street Level Urban Impact Advisors, told me.

As it turns out, two economists had, in a way, answered my question. Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago wanted to know how much GDP and productivity the United States gives up by throttling the housing supply in its biggest cities. In a blockbuster 2019 paper, they found that if New York, San Jose, and San Francisco—just those three cities—had the permitting standards of Atlanta or Chicago over the previous several decades, the U.S. economy would have been roughly $2 trillion bigger in 2009. American households would have earned an average of $3,685 more a year.

To come up with that estimate, the two economists built a complicated model that assumed Americans could move wherever their wages allowed and the housing supply would adjust as it would in a place with typical permitting standards. In such a world, they estimated in some associated work, 53 percent of Americans would not live where they are currently living. San Francisco would have an employed population 510 percent bigger than it does today—implying an overall population of something like 4 million, rather than 815,000, with 2 million housing units instead of 400,000. The Bay Area as a whole would be five times its current size, the economists estimated. The average city would lose 80 percent of its population. And New York would be a startling eight times bigger. Some back-of-the-envelope math (mine, not theirs) suggests that the United States would have—deep breath here—perhaps 75 million more housing units in its productive cities than it currently has.

I asked Moretti about the sheer size of the effects found in his and Hsieh’s work. “It’s not so implausible to me,” he said. “The differences in earnings and labor productivity between the areas that we’re looking at and the rest of the country are so big that if you expand those local economies, you get these big aggregate benefits.” In the real world, we miss those big aggregate benefits. We have less productivity and lower incomes, sure, but also less togetherness, less creativity, fewer babies, fewer vacations, fewer families living together, fewer people living how they want.

Moretti, a longtime San Francisco resident, is horrified by the city’s land-use policies and home prices. “This is something that is not just intellectual for me but very, very real, very present,” he said. He described walking by an empty lot in his neighborhood and being bothered over and over again that it never became an apartment building or even a single-family home. “It is inexcusable, not building on an empty lot. There is no way that having an empty lot in a place like San Francisco makes any sense.”

The NBA's Miami Heat and Miami-Dade County have terminated their relationship with bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX and will search for a new naming rights partner for their arena in downtown Miami.

You don’t have to be in Florida very long before you hear someone complain theatrically about snowbirds—the refugees from the northern winter who flock to Orlando and Miami. The coronavirus pandemic created new creatures: Call them the maskbirds, flying south to escape the stricter COVID-19 policies of other parts of the country. Net migration to Florida sharply increased from 2020 to 2021, one study found. Search through the newspapers, and you’ll see story after story about people abandoning New York for Florida’s sunshine, lower taxes, and mask-free life.

That influx alone doesn’t account for Ron DeSantis’s nearly 20-point victory in the gubernatorial race, which had many causes. But it does help explain it. The first-term Republican’s defiance of conventional public-health wisdom in the initial year of the pandemic gave him a national platform while also flattering the self-image of his current constituents—or at least a large number of them—as brave freedom lovers. (The data bear this out: His approval ratings dipped early in the pandemic before recovering.)

DeSantis takes every chance to hammer home the idea of Florida as the “nation’s citadel of freedom,” as he put it in a campaign stump speech in Melbourne last week. That allows him to champion his own state against a range of opponents defined by geography and referenced by name: crime-ridden blue cities such as San Francisco, the piously pro-immigration liberals of Martha’s Vineyard, the “elites” in Washington, D.C.

[David Frum: Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.]

In the governor’s narrative of the coronavirus, the people of Florida did not cower at home or tentatively venture outside in masks, nor did they labor under vaccine mandates as new variants spread across the country. No, they were free. Free to support their family. Free to attend school. Free to run a business. Free from the constraints of fogged glasses and not being able to unlock their iPhone.

To that, a liberal might add: free to get sick or even die from a respiratory disease for which safe, effective vaccines are available. Which is exactly the point. DeSantis’s COVID policies reassured members of his political base that they were in control: They understood the risks and took them anyway. And although Florida had a relatively high COVID death toll, the welter of confounding factors (weather, demographics, wealth) denied liberals the smackdown they craved.

Added to that, DeSantis’s instincts were not as extreme as his opponents suggest—or, knowing how it plays with his base, as he likes to claim. Florida reopened its schools in August 2020—earlier than many major blue-state districts but after many European countries. Throughout the pandemic, Florida’s work-from-home and masking policies would not have made it an outlier in European terms. Sometimes, liberals have to accept that the polarization of U.S. politics goes two ways, and that their favored policies look extreme to outsiders: “No other high-income country in the world relied to such a great extent on remote instruction,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year.

DeSantis’s COVID gamble also played into other politically useful narratives. His message was a macho one of risk-taking and courage, which tapped into the existing Republican advantage among male voters. One of the warm-up clips at the Melbourne rally was from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, in which Carlson mocked DeSantis’s Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, for wearing a mask while exercising in a hotel gym. On the big screen, Carlson said, “We reached out to Charlie Crist’s office and asked, ‘What exactly were you doing with a mask on alone in the gym, you freak?’” To that machismo, DeSantis added a dash of social conservatism, even puritanism, telling the crowd, “Heck, if we were just here four years ago and someone had told you we would have states in this country lock kids out of school for a year—you’d have them close churches, but they left the liquor stores and the strip clubs open—you would have said that would not have been possible in the United States of America.”

He solicited boos with a mention of the government infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci, showing how to draw on the well of conspiracist energy created by COVID without diving into it. Soon after in his Melbourne speech, he did something even more interesting without any fanfare. He slipped in an attack on his own party for its cowardly adherence to the scientific consensus: “Make no mistake, at the time, I was getting hammered, hit by the media; every day, 24/7; the left’s attacking me,” he said. “We even had some weak Republicans attacking me.” (More boos.)

[Derek Thompson: The curious case of Florida’s pandemic response]

No names were given, but he was subtly laundering an idea that might prove useful in a GOP primary campaign in 2024. Who in the Republican Party got vaccinated, reluctantly wore a mask, and walked back his endorsement of untested treatments for the coronavirus? Trump—who briefly played the role of “responsible world leader” for a few short months of the pandemic. To whom did the hated Fauci report? Also Trump. An ambitious governor might ask, “Hey, weren’t you the guy who stood next to Anthony Fauci all those months while I was keeping Florida’s schools and businesses open?”

If DeSantis was indeed testing such a line of attack, it lacked the immediacy of Trump’s new nickname for him, aired at a rally a day later: “Ron DeSanctimonious.” That was Trump all over: gleeful, grubby, trollish. But although the phrase shimmered in the air—and captivated Twitter—Trump didn’t repeat it again at later events and even grudgingly semi-endorsed the governor. For once, a Trump target seemed unbruised by an encounter with the great bully. Until now, no one else in the Republican Party has found a way to defuse the mockery with which the former president treats all authority not his own. But winning Florida by a greater margin than Trump did in either 2016 or 2020 speaks for itself.

When liberals look at DeSantis, they see a culture warrior with authoritarian tendencies: He has pushed back on the Biden White House’s approach to LGBTQ rights—one man at his rally wore a T-shirt that read I IDENTIFY AS NON-BIDENARY—and makes a regular show of disdaining news media. But as Americans have tired of pandemic precautions, and as regrets about long school closures have surfaced even among Democrats, DeSantis has been able to attract swing voters by positioning himself as a champion of both cultural and economic freedom. The maskbirds are too few in number to have given DeSantis his victory. But they influenced the election all the same—by becoming a symbol of Florida as an ideal.

MIAMI—It’s no longer correct, and certainly no longer quasi-mandatory, to describe Florida as “the ultimate swing state,” not after Tuesday night’s Republican blowout here. But it’s worth recalling just how spectacularly swingy it used to be.

If you count all 50 million votes Florida cast for president from 1992 to 2016, just 20,000 votes separate the two parties, or 0.04 percent. That includes the ultimate swing-state election of 2000, when George W. Bush nosed out Al Gore by a mere 537 votes in Florida—and, eventually, one vote on the Supreme Court. Florida was also a cliff-hanger in the 2012 and 2016 presidential races, both decided by 1 percent. And Rick Scott won statewide elections by 1 percent or less in 2010, 2014, and 2018, when Governor Ron DeSantis squeaked out his own 0.4 percent victory.

But DeSantis bludgeoned former Governor Charlie Crist by an astonishing 19 points on Tuesday, a pretty decent night for Democrats running almost everywhere except Florida. Senator Marco Rubio was also reelected in a huge blowout, while Republicans swept every state office and claimed unprecedented supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.

[David Frum: Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.]

Republicans even romped in the urban Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County, where DeSantis lost by more than 20 points in 2018. My heavily Democratic Miami neighborhood sits in one of Florida’s most Democratic state-assembly districts, but a Republican convicted of fraud the last time she held public office will be my new representative. My Republican congresswoman, Maria Salazar, whose reelection was once considered a toss-up, coasted to victory by 15 points.

I chatted last night with a shell-shocked Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor who runs the Florida Democratic Party, and he didn’t even try to spin me.

“My God, we’ve hit rock bottom,” he said.

So what the hell happened? How did a purple state suddenly become South Alabama?

Yes, Florida Democrats faced the usual headwinds of a midterm election with a president from their party in the White House, as well as the specific 2022 headwinds of inflation, rising interest rates, and rising crime. But so did Democrats who overperformed in other states. In Florida, the party also has an attitude problem, an organizational problem, a Latino problem, a growth problem, and a broccoli problem. And none of them will be easy to solve.

But let’s first note what didn’t happen, because Democrats began whining about this even before the election: Republicans didn’t steal it. The magnitude of the wipeout shows that it wasn’t about a few Proud Boy poll workers, and the statewide nature of the wipeout shows that it wasn’t about gerrymandering. DeSantis did get the GOP legislature to enact partisan voting laws limiting drop boxes and mail-in ballots while rolling back the felon voting rights that had been restored by a public referendum. But although the governor took well-deserved flak for siccing his “election police” on 20 confused and probably innocent voters, that doesn’t explain how he won by 1.5 million votes.

The pitiful turnout of Florida Democrats probably had less to do with voter suppression than voter depression. Republicans have controlled Tallahassee since 1998, consistently winning narrow statewide elections when Florida actually was a swing state, even when Democrats did well nationally in 2018. This is the attitude problem: Biennial heartbreak gets frustrating for volunteers, donors, and voters. Diaz told me Democrats have been dropping their party affiliation “in droves,” and it’s easy to see why casual voters would get tired of identifying with a losing team.

The national Democratic establishment also seems tired of identifying with this losing team. After Donald Trump won Florida for the second time, expanding his margin to 3.4 points while making major inroads in Miami-Dade, Democratic groups that spent $58.7 million in the state in 2018 spent only $1.4 million in 2022. DeSantis raised more than six times as much as Crist.

Did the money dry up because the situation was hopeless, or did the situation become hopeless because the money dried up? Probably some of both, but in any event the state party is now in shambles. Since 2020, the number of registered Democrats declined in all but one of Florida’s 67 counties, and they were outnumbered by registered Republicans on Election Day for the first time ever. Anyone involved in Florida politics will also tell you that the GOP does far more voter outreach, not only during election season but all the time. Diaz is a smart guy who inherited an organizational mess—my mom tried to volunteer for the Democrats in 2018, but nobody returned her calls—and he reminded me that voter registration and outreach cost money. But at this point, it doesn’t really matter whether the chicken or the egg came first.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Is Florida still a swing state?]

The party’s inability to engage voters seems especially egregious with Latino voters, which helps explain the tectonic shift in Miami-Dade. Again, a big part of the problem seems to be that Republicans actually show up in Latino communities.

Scott visited Puerto Rico eight times as governor, and held six events at a Venezuelan restaurant in Doral; the senator he narrowly unseated in 2018, Bill Nelson, once told a Democratic operative that he wasn’t reaching out to Latino media because he wasn’t going to get the Cuban vote. In fact, Cubans are only a third of Florida’s Latino voters, something a U.S. senator should have known about his own state, and Barack Obama nearly won the Cuban vote in 2012. The problem extends beyond Cubans and Miami-Dade; exit polls suggested that DeSantis even won the Puerto Rican vote, and his surprising victory in heavily Puerto Rican and reliably Democratic Osceola County supports that.

It’s hard to know how much of the Democratic Party’s struggle to attract Latino voters is blocking and tackling, and how much is political messaging and substance. While Spanish-language radio here is full of right-wing misinformation portraying Democrats as socialists and Communists, the smears might pack less punch with exiles from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua if Democratic surrogates took to the airwaves to fight back. When Biden extended protections to migrants fleeing Venezuela, he did not make a big deal about it, and neither did his party.

Democrats have also struggled to respond to Republican attacks on cultural issues. While Florida Latinos are more liberal than their reputation suggests on kitchen-table economics—Obama ran Spanish-language ads touting the Affordable Care Act in South Florida when it was unpopular almost everywhere else—polls suggest that they were uncomfortable with Democratic support for the Black Lives Matter movement, with calls to defund the police, and with other progressive stances on social issues. The Cuban American Democrat running to be my state senator featured her wife prominently in her campaign literature, and invited supporters to a get-out-the-vote drag party. She lost by eight points in a district Biden won.

Democrats can’t win Florida if they can’t win around Miami, and they can’t win around Miami if they keep hemorrhaging Latino votes. But their biggest problems are in heavily white, heavily Republican communities such as the Villages, Fort Myers, Naples, St. Augustine, and Cape Coral, because those are the state’s fastest-growing communities. In 2016, 10 of America’s fastest-growing metros were in Florida, and nine of them voted for Trump, a Boomer-skewing partisan influx that has only accelerated as the state has become more of a MAGA magnet.

If Democrats want to do something about this problem, they can’t think of it as an inevitable fact of life in the Sunshine State; they need to ask why the Republican Party is so attractive to newcomers, and why Florida is so attractive to Republicans. My two cents, as I wrote in an essay about Cape Coral after Hurricane Ian, is that the sugary DeSantis vision of a Free State of Florida paradise where nobody will force you to pay income taxes, get vaccinated, care about climate change, limit your water consumption, or build your house in a safe location is extremely alluring. It promises ice cream when Democrats are mostly offering broccoli.

[David A. Graham: The divided states of America]

Don’t get me wrong: We should all eat our vegetables. The DeSantis approach is irresponsible, a formula for crumbling infrastructure, climate chaos, recurring droughts, and $100 billion storms like Ian. It’s also a formula for budget gaps, if Democratic suckers in Washington don’t send billions of dollars to plug them. But we’re a species of short-term thinkers, so now-mine-more politics works well. And if Democrats can’t figure out a way to punish Republicans for insurance crises, water crises, and other consequences of their neglect of the future—or come up with some short-term goodies of their own—the MAGA magnet could be entrenched for the long term.

Change is certainly imaginable. Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist in Miami who helped Obama do so well with Latinos in the state in 2012, says that after that election, Republicans realized their path back to the White House depended on making sure that didn’t happen again. “They got serious, and they’ve been on the ground nonstop for the last 10 years,” Amandi told me. “Democrats went to celebrate the inauguration and never came back.” He said his party needs its own 10-year plan—“and it needs to start tomorrow.”

But that does not seem likely. Biden showed that Democrats can win the White House without Florida, and his team seems to be planning to try that again. For the foreseeable future, the ultimate swing state will be just another red state.

Three men have been arrested in Miami for their role in a multistate theft ring targeting beef and pork packaging plants, according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Every sports fan, whether they acknowledge it or not, has a line they won’t cross—where the intrusion of the ugly real world onto the playing field becomes too much to ignore and they have to look away. Maybe you’re a Miami Dolphins fan, so you’ll root for Tyreek Hill, the Dolphins’ $120 million wide receiver whose girlfriend accused him of threatening her life and breaking their 3-year-old son’s arm, but you refuse to draft him in your fantasy league. Maybe you stuck with the Brooklyn Nets’ Kyrie Irving when he wouldn’t get vaccinated, but dropped him when he finally got suspended this week for refusing to apologize for tweeting out the link to an anti-Semitic, Islamophobic documentary.  

What are Cleveland Browns fans supposed to do about DeShaun Watson, their new franchise quarterback, whom team ownership signed to a five-year, $230 million megadeal this spring knowing full well that the NFL was about to suspend him for being a sexual predator? Boycott the team? Root for everyone on the field but him? His 11-game suspension ends in early December. What if he turns their season around and they make a playoff run? Some Browns fans won’t skip a beat—they’ll mutter something about second chances and note that the criminal charges were dropped—and some Browns fans are going to feel lousy about it until the day he leaves Cleveland.

I was so obsessed with college football growing up that I would spend all of December watching every single televised bowl game, until it got preposterous, until I was wasting a Saturday afternoon watching the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl. I still love so much about the game—the unhinged unpredictability, the ludicrous offensive schemes, the mad carnival that is ESPN’s College GameDay, Lee Corso going to his grave in a Wisconsin Badgers mascot head. I wasn’t looking for reasons to break up with college football. The reasons came and found me.

[Jemelle Hill: College football is cannibalizing itself]

I drifted from the game for all kinds of reasons, but at first it was just life stuff. I had two kids, and once you have kids you can watch football on Saturday or Sunday, but not both, and my fantasy team plays on Sunday. I went to a college in the Atlantic Coast Conference, but it was a basketball school—let’s leave it at that.

My queasiness began with the revelations about undiagnosed concussions, the science of traumatic brain injuries (known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE), and the obvious reality that no one in a position of authority at any level of football—high school, college, or pro—could be trusted to worry about what used to be called “getting your bell rung.” Maybe it seems hypocritical to swear off college football but still watch the NFL. It is hypocritical. Stipulated. I was watching when the Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s fingers twisted up during what looked like a seizure after his head slammed on the turf. But at least Tua had $30 million in the bank. He wasn’t a teenager, too young to understand the risks, counting on the adults to protect him. The NFL has also, at a minimum, acknowledged the link between the sport and CTE; the NCAA, which is fighting a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of a former University of Southern California linebacker, has not.

Over the same period, head coaches at elite college programs were accumulating so much power that I began to see them as dictators of their own sovereign kingdoms. They had grown rich off of free labor, and they could get away with anything, it seemed, except losing.

College-ball coaches have always been larger than life, but that’s all they wanted to be—ball coaches. Politics was for bullshitters and pantywaists. True, Nebraska sent the Cornhusker legend Tom Osborne to the U.S. House of Representatives during George W. Bush’s presidency, but he was an exception—and a rock-ribbed conservative, not a far-right ideologue. Now there’s a wave of college-football candidates, and this generation has higher aspirations and scarier politics.

In North Carolina’s most competitive congressional district, the Republican nominee is a 27-year-old Trump disciple named Bo Hines, who has built his political brand around his college-football career. Hines chose a scholarship to North Carolina State University (Go Pack!) over several other offers because he already knew, at 18, that he wanted to run for office. Now he speaks largely in football jargon, except when he’s arguing that rape or incest victims should be allowed to get an abortion only “on a case-by-case basis through a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government” according to a local news site. Hines spent one year at NC State, transferred to Yale, blew through his first marriage in 10 months, and lives off of a trust fund. He’s probably going to win.

The trite old phrase about sports holding up a mirror to our society no longer applies to college football. The image is no longer just imagery. The sport’s tribalism is being repackaged as an electoral strategy. It’s an offshoot of Trumpism—cults of personality disguising a multibillion-dollar engine of capitalism fueled by nostalgia and grievances about how great America used to be. For people who live in SEC or Big 10 country—and the way those two conferences keep gobbling up schools, soon all of America will be one or the other—the degrees of separation between college football and the gears of politics, the daily operation of our nation, are being erased.

Looking back, my breaking point with college football occurred in August 2020, during that awful first summer of COVID-19. A plague was sweeping through Mississippi. ICUs were full. Bodies were piling up. And so Governor Tate Reeves invoked the only thing he could think of that might get his citizens’ attention, something even more dear to them than their own survival.

“I want to see college football,” Reeves said in a press conference. “The best way for that to occur is for us all to realize that wearing a mask—as irritating as that can be, and I promise I hate it more than anyone watching—is critical.” If you won’t wear a mask for your loved ones, do it for the Ole Miss Rebels.

That was it. That was when I completed my transition from a kid who grew up cheering for Bobby Bowden and the Florida State Seminoles—no matter how often they lost to Miami, because my stepfather went there—to the guy I am now: a grown man and father of two who still watches sports way too much, but who can’t watch college football at all anymore.

For two years now, Alabama has been represented in the U.S. Senate by Tommy Tuberville, the former head football coach at Auburn University, who won in a landslide even though his most recent qualification for the job was winning the Chick-fil-A Bowl in 2007. (A year later they paid him $5 million to leave. Two years after that, his successor led Auburn to a national title.) As The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill pointed out recently on Twitter, Tuberville’s coaching career depended on being invited into the homes of young Black men, looking into their parents’ eyes, and asking them to put their sons’ futures in his hands. “He made millions off their abilities, but here’s what he really thinks about Black folks,” she wrote, sharing a clip of Tuberville at a Donald Trump rally on October 8, ranting about a nonspecific “they” who “want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullshit!”

No prominent Republican called for Tuberville to resign, or even to apologize. That includes Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia running back, another ghost of Southeastern Conferences past, whom Georgia Republicans are trying to put in the Senate alongside Tuberville. A couple more and they can caucus together.

Walker’s ex-wife says he once put a gun to her head and told her he was “going to blow [her] brains out.” According to his estranged son, Christian, now 23, Walker was such a threat that he and his mother moved “over 6 times in 6 months running from [his] violence.” When Donald Trump released a statement urging Walker to run, he didn’t mention any of this. Nor did he mention Walker wasting his prime on the former president’s New Jersey Generals of the USFL, the historic bust that brought the two of them together in the mid-1980s. But Trump did mention the Georgia Bulldogs, Walker’s team when he won the Heisman Trophy 40 years ago. That trophy is Walker’s one and only qualification for the U.S. Senate, and the only one he needs.

[Peter Wehner: Herschel Walker perfectly embodies the GOP]

“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?” Trump said. “He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”

Regardless of whether Walker wins or loses next week, Republican kingmakers surely realize by now that they’ve discovered a gold mine of future candidates. What’s most perplexing about Tuberville’s ascendance is that he’s way down on the list of popular ex-football coaches from Alabama. He’s not even the most popular ex-football coach from Auburn. (That would be Gus Malzahn, who led Auburn to a national title in 2013.) Walker is a serial abuser who played football at Georgia so long ago that no voter under the age of 40 was alive yet to witness it. These aren’t even the good candidates yet.

If Nick Saban decided to run for president tomorrow, he could remain on the sidelines in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for the next two years and he’d still roll tide into the White House in 2024. Except Saban would never do it, because his current job pays far too well, and he’s very good at it. Tommy Tuberville wasn’t, and that’s why he was available to run for Senate. Now whenever I see a clip of the Clemson head football coach, Dabo Swinney, patrolling the sidelines embodying every tweet by the blowhard-coach parody account @3YearLetterman, all I see is a future senator from the great state of South Carolina.

Sometimes I’m not quite sure what unnerves me more: when good coaches aren’t held to account for being bad people, or when bad people aren’t even held to account for being bad coaches.

Consider Urban Meyer, who built a pair of elite college programs and got paid roughly $9 million to bring his culture of winning to the NFL’s hapless Jacksonville Jaguars. He was fired after just 13 games, having revealed himself to be a toxic and abusive leader, a goofus too stupid not to get filmed in a bar after a loss with a woman who was not his wife grinding on his thigh. He seemed particularly baffled that grown men making actual salaries weren’t okay with being bullied by some Big 10 loudmouth with zero NFL wins.

But within months, he had passed back through the college-football reality-distortion field and was restored to his seat on Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff pregame-show panel, where he wasn’t the worst coach in NFL history—he was the two-time national champion Urban Meyer, former head coach at the Ohio State University, where they extend your contract for kicking the kicker when he misses a goddam kick, as well as the former head coach at the University of Florida, where he remains a Gator for life. Meyer is a future senator, too, if he ever wants to switch careers. The only question is whether he runs in Florida or the Ohio state.

In this alternate universe, Brett Favre, the NFL Hall of Fame quarterback and University of Southern Mississippi football star who pushed the state’s previous governor to siphon off welfare funds in order to build a volleyball stadium, isn’t a shameless embezzler. He’s a family man and a gridiron legend who was just trying to give back to his community. Tuberville isn’t an ignorant racist who viewed every Black kid he recruited as someone he was rescuing from jail or slavery—he’s a proven winner. If Georgia voters send Walker to Washington, they won’t be electing a failed ex-athlete who fumbled his pro career, beat his wife, and terrorized his children—they’ll be electing grainy YouTube footage of a Heisman Trophy winner. They’ll be electing someone who makes them feel about America the way they feel about college football.

My earliest college-football memory might explain why I fell so hard for the sport: Doug Flutie, Boston College’s pint-size quarterback, with the bashed golden helmet and smeared white jersey, flinging the ball 60 yards into the end zone as time expired in the Orange Bowl in 1984 against the University of Miami Hurricanes. Unlike the ball used in the NFL, the college ball has white stripes on either end, so even without the video, I can still picture Flutie’s perfect spiral, the ball sneaking through a crack in the wall of bodies and flailing arms at the goal line and into the end zone, where the wide receiver Gerard Phelan caught it while falling backwards. BC wins, 47–45. “I don’t believe it!” Brent Musburger, the voice of college football, yelped on CBS. Here in New England, they still call it the “Hail Flutie,” or just “Flutie to Phelan.”

In retrospect the game was meaningless. Miami had already lost the previous week and was out of the running for the national title. BC finished the 1984 season 10–2, ranked fifth overall in the final AP poll, beat the Houston Cougars in the Cotton Bowl, and hasn’t been heard from since. The Hail Flutie was thrilling, but there are thrilling Hail Fluties every other weekend in college football. The play lingers in sports history primarily because of the story around it—the collision of two very different cultures, a tidy allegory for the War on Drugs era—all of which went over my head at the time, because I was 8.

I didn’t know that this game was viewed by many people through a prism of good versus evil, with a none-too-subtle racial coding. I didn’t know anything about “the U,” Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew, the Mariel Boatlift, race riots, or police brutality, and I only knew about cocaine because of Nancy Reagan. I didn’t understand that the story here—at least the story my team was telling—was about a bunch of scrappy white Catholic boys from Massachusetts storming into a drug den from Miami Vice and pulling off the college-football miracle of the century. The day after Thanksgiving no less, as though inspired by the Pilgrims themselves.

What I remember is the spiral. Most pro coaches back then believed in patient ball control, three yards and a cloud of dust, and no one threw the ball over the middle because decapitation was still legal. The NFL was dour and militaristic. Your jersey number corresponded strictly to your position. Quarterbacks stayed below 20, and even 19 was a little weird. Wide receivers were expected to wear numbers in the 80s, and only the 80s. Maybe one wideout in the league wore a 12, and if you pulled that kind of shit, you better be good. But no one gave a flip in college football. Gerard Phelan wore 20! Doug Flutie—a quarterback—wore 22! You make simple decisions when you’re a kid.

College football was sloppy fun, and best of all, they chucked the ball over the field. Some schools did, anyway. Some didn’t throw the ball at all, ever—they were so earthbound and conservative that they ran an offense called the “wishbone” that featured three running backs. Power football. System football. Final score 13–9 football. I hated the wishbone. If this whole sport was just one big war metaphor, then I wanted to see an all-out aerial attack. I wanted quarterbacks who threw the football like they’d just pulled all the pins out of a box of grenades. For me, college football peaked on Friday nights, when I would stay up past midnight watching Western Athletic Conference football—the Wacky WAC of the Rocky Mountains—where all the coaches were light-headed from the altitude and breathing all of that Bill Walsh West Coast Offense air. I’d fall asleep watching Robbie Bosco shatter passing records at Brigham Young University and win games by scores like 59–48.

The college game in that era was regional and ragtag, a loose confederacy in the mold of America itself, and the bowl system helped keep it that way by being, in a word, idiotic. Intentional chaos, purposeful haziness. You had to be invited to a bowl, which was shady and favored the big programs that could deliver big TV ratings. Then they’d play all of these huge games with national-title implications on New Year’s Day, one right after another, into the night, and then the season just … stopped. The title was decided by not one but two polls, one for coaches, one for the sports media. Sometimes two teams split the polls, and the college-football season would end with something downright un-American: co-national champs. It was destined to be replaced with a playoff system, and eventually it was, and I think I speak for all sports fans when I say good riddance.

But I also loved it. Each bowl had its own quirks, silly traditions, historic enmities. Each New Year’s Day, a different bowl could luck into deciding the national title. And in the same way that Flutie to Phelan was filling me with a story about America while I was focused on the tight spiral and the cool white stripes, bowl season had the grateful optimism of a colorful bounteous harvest. The Peach Bowl! The Sugar Bowl! The Cotton Bowl! The Orange Bowl! All these … crops. All these games held under the beating sun, on giant fields all across the former Confederacy … played by strong young Black men … monitored by older white men who took all the money.

[Read: The Super Bowl was a game changer for the NFL]

Right around this time, Herschel Walker was carrying the Georgia Bulldogs to a national title at the Orange Bowl. After he retired from pro football, Walker was institutionalized for dissociative identity disorder rooted in deep childhood trauma, and he has said that at one point he was managing 12 different “alters.” There’s no cure for dissociative identity disorder. It’s often triggered by stress. He’s a damaged man who’s done terrible things, but to Georgia Republicans, he’s just a promising recruit with a spotty record, and they’re counting on him to carry them to victory. He’s a teenager again, and they’re back in his living room, looking him in the eye. And if he loses on Election Night, they’ll dump him before sunrise.

The optics of college football have always been problematic, but they’ve mostly been just that: optics. Now Tuberville is a U.S. senator who, by the way, adamantly opposes college athletes getting paid for the use of their NIL—their “name, image, and likeness”—in other words, for owning their own body. He fears that last summer’s monopoly-busting Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Alston, which ruled that restrictions on “education-related benefits” for college athletes violate antitrust law, “has created an environment where student-athletes can be exploited.” He thinks only coaches should be able to do that.

College-football coaches despise the idea of players getting paid, and they’ve taken to slinging mud at one another’s programs, accusing rivals of buying recruits. That’s how you know it’s working, by the way: The fraternity is turning on itself. They keep doomsaying about how fair compensation for NIL is going to destroy college football, when in reality, that’s the only justification for saving it.

I often think about a photograph, by the artist Hank Willis Thomas, of two young Black men squaring off on a floodlit field at night. You know Thomas’s work if you’ve ever crossed the Brooklyn Bridge—he made the 22-foot bronze sculpture near the bridge’s exit of a Black athlete’s outstretched arm pointing a finger to the heavens, or maybe it’s spinning an invisible basketball, or maybe it’s anointing its owner the greatest. (The arm belongs to the All-NBA center Joel Embiid, who plays in Philadelphia—a little inside joke from a sports-mad artist.) In Thomas’s photograph, the two men crouch in the familiar arrangement of opposing linemen prior to the snap. On the right side is a football player in a classic three-point stance, ready to explode; on the left, another man is in the same pose, only he’s in a cotton field, and instead of a uniform he’s wearing weather-beaten clothes and a wide-brim straw hat. The photograph is called The Cotton Bowl.

Thomas made the photo in 2011, but I didn’t come across it until many years later, right around when all these thoughts started swirling in my head. The idea came to him, Thomas told me recently, when he saw an archival photo of prison laborers at Angola, the infamous Louisiana state penitentiary that was named after the former slave plantation upon which it was built. The pitched angles of the prisoners’ bodies reminded him of that three-point stance. Once I saw The Cotton Bowl, I couldn’t unsee it: two economies of human exploitation, captured in a single photograph.

Thomas isn’t prescribing any behavior; he’s not calling for a boycott of college football. He’s doing what artists do: showing us the truth. He’s challenging us to take in the whole portrait, and not just the parts that are reassuring to see, or that tell us the story about America we want to believe.

Thomas made The Cotton Bowl during President Barack Obama’s first term, and in that moment, it looked reflective, an act of connecting past to present. But when I look at it now, it feels more like a warning about how easily we could slide backwards. Tommy Tuberville coached in the Cotton Bowl in 2007. He’ll be in the U.S. Senate until at least 2026. He is America’s future.

While paramotoring -- a form of flying with a small engine and a paraglider -- a Miami man spotted a woman clinging to her car submerged in a canal.