Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.

Many of DeSantis’s boosters are drawn to him as a potential Republican nominee because they believe that his record as the chief executive of an economically thriving state would position him to win back some of the college-educated suburban voters who have stampeded away from the GOP since 2016.

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know DeSantis]

But DeSantis, through his escalating attacks on what he calls “woke” ideology, has signaled that if he runs, as most expect, he will seek the GOP nomination by emphasizing the same cultural grievances about racial and social change that former President Donald Trump has stressed. Those messages have enabled Trump to energize hard-core conservatives, but at the price of repelling many well-educated suburbanites.

With that approach, DeSantis seems destined to test a question that sharply divides strategists from the two parties: Will more voters accept Trumpism without Trump himself attached to it?

As DeSantis careens through a seemingly endless succession of culture-war firefights with targets including the Walt Disney Company, the College Board, LGBTQ-rights advocates, and Black historians, many Republicans are confident he can manage the challenge of  attracting enough social-conservative voters to win a primary without alienating so many socially moderate suburbanites that he can’t win a general election. The evidence, they say, is his landslide reelection victory last November, after pursuing an aggressive strategy of keeping Florida businesses and schools open during the pandemic. The election exit polls found DeSantis winning about three-fifths of Florida’s college-educated white voters in a year when that group provided crucial support to Democrats in many other states. (DeSantis also posted notable gains with Latino and Black male voters.)

“Based upon his support for reelection, you would have to think … his support for keeping the economy going, keeping schools open [during COVID] was sufficiently popular to overcome any reticence suburban voters might have had on the culture side,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told me.

But many Democrats are growing optimistic that DeSantis is overplaying his hand. While many see him as a formidable potential 2024 opponent, they believe he is advancing such a militantly conservative cultural agenda—built on ideas such as censoring how schoolteachers talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation and a potential ban on abortion after six weeks—that he will face the same resistance in white-collar suburbs that doomed socially conservative GOP gubernatorial candidates last fall in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“The exact things that DeSantis is doing to make himself a MAGA hero for the primary,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic communications consultant, “are the things that turn away the voters they are hoping to win back.”

DeSantis has ignited so many cultural confrontations that it’s difficult to keep track of them, but he has acted most aggressively on education. During the last Florida legislative session, he passed a trio of bills. One restricted how schools, universities, and even private employers can talk about race and gender; another (dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” law) banned schools from discussing sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade; a companion measure made it easier for parents to push for the removal of books from school libraries and classrooms.

Since then, DeSantis has threatened to block  an Advanced Placement class in African American studies unless the College Board removed subjects and scholars that conservatives opposed (including discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement and “intersectionality,” an academic analysis of how forms of racial, class, and gender inequity intersect), and has proposed stringent new controls over public higher education, including eliminating departments that promote diversity on campus and making the removal of tenured faculty easier. This week, after the College Board openly criticized his actions on the AP African American–history course, DeSantis suggested he may try to end Florida’s use of other AP tests and even the SAT. Those threats echoed his successful drive to strip the Walt Disney Company of special administrative privileges for its theme park in Orlando after the corporation criticized his “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Jeremy Young, the senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, says that DeSantis’s measures to control instruction on college campuses are “unprecedented in the history of this country. It is an attempt to insert political agendas and political governance into every single aspect of the university.”

Jonathan Friedman, the director of PEN America’s free-expression program, says the breadth of Florida’s efforts to censor public-school teachers in K–12 classrooms is also unmatched. “The scale and scope of censorship in Florida schools has reached a point,” he told me, “where it is virtually un-trackable.”

DeSantis has been fulsome in his denunciations of “woke ideology” but stingy in his definitions of exactly what he considers that to be. The closest his administration has come to explaining the term was when his general counsel, in a court appearance last December, defined woke as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Friedman sees that vagueness as part of the governor’s strategy: By refusing to more precisely identify what concepts the state considers objectionable, he says, DeSantis has created a “chilling effect” whereby teachers self-censor in fear that “everything and anything” about race, gender, and sexuality “can become fodder for punishment.”

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

DeSantis’s efforts to control what Florida students are taught, and what materials they can access, have found a receptive audience in Republican-controlled states. PEN is tracking copycat bills in many of the other 21 states where Republicans hold unified control of the state legislature and the governorship.

The rapid replication of these ideas across red states signals the potential power of DeSantis’s agenda in a Republican presidential primary. In recent national surveys, Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive organizations who specializes in studying social attitudes, has found that the voters most attracted to limiting what students learn about race and gender are those who are already receptive to core Trump cultural messages.

For many GOP voters, “this is a psychological, not policy, threat,” Undem told me in an email. “The feeling is the other side is calling me racist, calling me and my country evil, and blaming me as a man for every problem … It’s about shame, guilt, and self-worth, and it’s existential—for them and their country. Obviously, that’s going to motivate Republican base voters more than crime policy or inflation.”

But in no state where Democrats control the governorship and the legislature have they felt pressured to offer their own versions of DeSantis’s measures to refashion education. This suggests that these ideas generate much less demand outside the red states. Friedman says PEN sees no evidence that any elected official “who doesn’t answer” to the conservative base feels “any pressure … to pass this legislation.”

How these ideas are received beyond the core conservative states may ultimately depend on the prism through which they are seen if DeSantis or another GOP nominee carries them into a general-election presidential campaign.

Republicans believe that the key to building political support for their education agenda is to frame these moves as an attempt to empower parents against an arrogant educational bureaucracy and other “elitist” forces, like Hollywood and teachers’ unions. It’s common for Republicans to argue that measures such as the “Don’t Say Gay” law don’t impose their values on others, but merely constitute a defensive pushback against the left’s attempts to “indoctrinate” students.

For many GOP strategists, the proof that these ideas appeal beyond the conservative base was Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia, a state that had been steadily trending blue, after he stressed “parental rights.”

Kristin Davison, one of Youngkin’s senior strategists, told me that his message was “not even so much about the curriculum as it was that these schools don’t want parents to have a say.” As these issues grow more prominent in national politics, she said, “I think you’ll see it play out in this philosophy that parents and families and teachers should be at the forefront of education rather than government and teacher groups.” Youngkin himself might run for president in 2024 on that theme.

Even Democratic polls have found a substantial audience for many of DeSantis’s specific initiatives. In the most notable finding, a poll last spring for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) by a Democratic polling firm found that majorities of voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate who argued that schools should focus less on racism and more on core academic subjects; backed a “Don’t Say Gay” law for the early grades; would give parents more control over curriculum; and would ban transgender girls from high-school sports (another bill DeSantis has signed). In that poll, not only did about four-fifths of 2020 Trump voters say they would support a candidate expressing each of those beliefs; so did about one-third of those who voted for President Joe Biden.

But other results in that poll—and in a follow-up survey the firm conducted for the AFT last December—suggest that the whole of DeSantis’s agenda may be less appealing than the sum of its parts. In both surveys, a significant majority said they worried less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students. In the December poll, twice as many respondents said that schools are handling sensitive issues appropriately than said that schools are imposing a liberal agenda on students; likewise, a two-to-one majority said that providing schools with more resources was more important than providing parents with more say. In these surveys, and others, banning books ignited an especially forceful backlash. “Banning books is very likely to raise eyebrows and opposition among the narrow segment of voters who truly are swing voters,” Undem said.

Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster who worked on the two AFT surveys, told me that “even if voters agree with him on a couple specific things,” the larger implications of the DeSantis agenda are likely to turn off the suburban swing voters the GOP is hoping to recapture in 2024.

The key for Democrats in responding to DeSantis, Molyneux said, is to not “let him claim to be there speaking for parents; what this is really about is politicians coming in and deciding what is going to be taught.” DeSantis almost always makes his educational announcements surrounded by mothers, but Molyneux says he ultimately may be defined more by images of empty shelves in classrooms where books have been removed. “If this is about blanket imposition of political decisions about what is being taught, people will definitely trust teachers and principals way more than they trust politicians,” Molyneux told me.

Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book

Balancing potential messages for the primary and general election will likely grow only more difficult for DeSantis as the year unfolds. Trump has already released a pair of bristling videos staking out militant positions on censoring teachers and restricting LGBTQ rights (to combat what Trump called “gender insanity.”) This suggests that the GOP primary could see a culture-war arms race that tugs all of the contenders to the right and creates more hurdles with swing voters for the eventual winner. Another measure of that dynamic is DeSantis’s recent announcement that he would sign a six-week abortion ban in Florida, a significant reduction of access from the 15-week ban he signed last year.

In all of this, Democrats see DeSantis embracing ideas that will cast him, if he runs, as a threat to the values held by the coalition (particularly college-educated white voters, young people, and African Americans) that turned out in big numbers to resist the Trump-era GOP in each of the past three national elections. Based on the gubernatorial wins for DeSantis in 2022 and Youngkin in 2021, Republicans, in turn, remain confident that a message of empowering parents and prioritizing the economy can claw back a decisive slice of the suburban voters who found Trump unacceptable.

In the Democratic portrayal, DeSantis looks like an intolerant bully with authoritarian and bigoted inclinations; in the Republican version, he’s a buttoned-down, business-friendly manager imposing commonsense constraints on unaccountable forces threatening families. The picture that ultimately commands the frame will likely determine whether DeSantis can broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond its constricted boundaries under Trump.

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American teenagers—especially girls and kids who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning—are “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. And everybody seems to think they know why.

Some psychologists point to social media, whereas others blame school shootings; others chalk it up to changes in parenting. Climate-change activists say it’s climate change. Atlantic writers like me blather on about the decline of physical-world interactions. These explanations aren’t equally valid, and some of them might be purely wrong. But the sheer number of theories reflects the complexity of mental-health challenges and suggests that, perhaps, nobody knows for sure what’s going on.

The numbers are undeniable. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the gold standard for measuring the state of teen behavior and mental health. From 2011 to 2021, the survey found, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, with the highest jump coming during the coronavirus pandemic. The share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the decade. (For teenage boys, the increase was smaller.)

Life is worse for LGBQ teenagers in almost every respect measured by the survey. (The YRBS did not ask about trans identity.) Compared with heterosexual teens, they are more likely to experience poor mental health; more likely to experience unstable housing or homelessness; more likely to be threatened or injured by a weapon in school; more likely to miss school for safety reasons; less likely to feel close to people at school; more likely to be raped; twice as likely to be bullied; almost three times more likely to have recently misused prescription opioids; three times more likely to have considered suicide, made a suicide plan, or attempted suicide; and seven times more likely to be injured in a suicide attempt.

This surge in sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts among teenagers has coincided with other behavioral trends that aren’t obviously bad. Reports of smoking are down. Drug use and drinking have declined. Bullying has not increased among boys; for girls, it’s declined slightly. Big-picture economic trends don’t have much explanatory power either. In the period when teen anxiety increased, joblessness, poverty, and child hunger mostly declined, and real disposable income mostly grew.

The inexorable rise of teen anxiety ought to be a national crisis. Mental-health services have become more available due to the rise of telehealth. The number of therapists is growing faster than the U.S. average for all occupations, as demand for counselors rises in high schools and colleges. More people are using mental-health services, yet outcomes for teens just keep getting worse. How can this be?

Last year, I offered four possible theories: the prevalence of social-media use; the decline of time spent with friends; a more stressful world of mass-shooting events and existential crises such as global warming; and changes in parenting that might be reducing kids’ mental resilience.

I still think the fullest explanation for teen anxiety may live in that causal stew. But this year, I want to lead with four questions rather than four answers.  

Is peak teen anxiety just another pandemic bubble?

Teen anxiety and depression grew more from 2019 to 2021 than during any other two-year period on record, raising the question of whether they might decline as most of the country moves on from the pandemic. Indeed, many pandemic trends that seemed like accelerations into the future turned out to be more like mini-bubbles. Crypto-asset prices went up in 2020 and 2021, and then came crashing down. Streaming looked like the future of entertainment for a few years, and now it looks like a money pit for many entertainment companies. We’ll have to wait another year or more for the YRBS to tell us if the reopening of schools and other physical spaces has lessened teen anxiety.

Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health?

The story seems simple from a distance: Teen anxiety increased during a period when smartphones and social media colonized the youth social experience. Offline time with close friends went down. Time spent alone staring into a virtual void went up. Sounds pretty bad.

But the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated. Perhaps the most famous and trusted study of the effects of social media on polarization and mental health is “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” When researchers paid people to deactivate their Facebook accounts, they found that online activity went down, offline activity went up, both polarization and news knowledge declined, and subjective well-being increased. Many participants who had been randomly selected to leave Facebook stayed off the site even weeks after they had to, suggesting that using social media may be akin to compulsive or addictive behavior. The researchers describe the effect of Facebook deactivation on depression and anxiety as “small—about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy.”

In a few years, the assumption that social media is making us crazy might look eye-bleedingly obvious, like a surgeon-general warning that sucking on cigarettes to pull addictive carcinogens into your lungs is, in fact, bad for your lungs. But the best evidence we have suggests that social media isn’t really like smoking. My guess is that it’s more of an attention alcohol—a substance that, in small doses, can be fun or even useful for adults, but in larger doses can cause problems for certain people. But maybe even that’s too strong. Just as academics now believe we overrated the danger of online echo chambers (in fact, social media probably exposes us to a much wider range of views than cable news does), we’ll realize that we unfairly blame social media for declining mental health.

“There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University, told The New York Times last year. I think we still need more high-quality studies and randomized trials to fully understand what’s happening here.

What do we make of the relationship between rising LGBQ self-identification and rising LGBQ anxiety?

Major progress has been made in terms of accepting gay, lesbian, and trans Americans in the past few decades. The Supreme Court struck down bans on same-sex marriage; major institutions, such as the NBA and Disney, have stood up against bigoted laws; more television shows now depict gay and transgender characters in a positive, or appropriately complex, light.

Meanwhile, LGBTQ self-identification has increased markedly. According to Gallup, more than 20 percent of Gen Z Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That figure is several times higher than for any previous generation, including seven times higher than for baby boomers—many of whom now tell stories about how harmful it was to be in the closet during a more intolerant era.

But the state of mental health in the LGBQ community is dire, and it’s worsening faster than the national average. “Close to 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and more than 50% had poor mental health during the past 30 days,” the CDC reported.

Liberal and conservative explanations for this phenomenon are irreconcilable. According to liberals, the election of Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of anti-gay and transphobic attitudes, which are now overrunning schools, most notably in Florida; wiping out whatever legal progress we might have celebrated at the national level; and making vulnerable teens feel like their very identity is being challenged by the country’s loudest politicians. According to conservatives who brand themselves as anti-woke, the real culprit is liberals’ obsession with victimization and identity.

The point of juxtaposing these interpretations is not to suggest that I find them equally convincing (I side with the liberal argument) but rather to show just how broken this front of the culture war has become. This is the tragic state of things: Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that the way their political opponents talk about identity is making teens want to kill themselves. America needs its best and least-biased sociology and psychology researchers to take up the question “Why is mental health deteriorating rapidly among a segment of the Gen Z population that is also growing rapidly?” Given that almost 25 percent of LGBQ teens attempted suicide in the past year, a convincing empirical answer could help save thousands of lives.

Why are Americans so mentally distressed even as they’ve become better at talking about mental distress?

It’s obvious, you might say: As anxiety rates have escalated, more people have had to build their own personal therapeutic glossary.

Or maybe something else is going on. In the past few years, a great deal of U.S. discourse has absorbed the vocabulary of therapy, with frequent references to trauma, harm, emotional capacity, and self-care. But the ubiquity of “therapy-speak” on the internet has coincided with the emergence of an internet culture that is decidedly anti-therapeutic.

Research from both the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Beihang University, in Beijing, have found that intense and negative emotions are among the most likely to go viral online. Anger and outrage seem to be aerodynamic on the internet not only because we’re drawn to the emotional meltdowns of our fellow humans, but also because demonstrating outrage about a topic is a good way of advertising one’s own moral standing.

Anger, outrage, and catastrophizing are exactly what modern therapists tell their patients to avoid. One of the most popular modes of clinical psychology is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which formalizes an ancient wisdom: We don’t often control what happens in life, but at the margins, we can change how we think about what happens to us. We can learn to identify the most negative and unhelpful thoughts and restructure them, so as to guide us toward better feelings and behaviors. In life, treating minor problems as catastrophes is a straight path to misery—but online, the most catastrophic headlines get the most attention. In life, nurturing anger produces conflict with friends and family; online, it’s an excellent way to build an audience.

Modern internet culture has adopted therapy-speak while repeatedly setting fire to the actual lessons of modern therapy. It’s a bizarre spectacle, like a hospital where fake doctors know the words for every disease but half of the surgeries result in sepsis. In the open expanse of the internet, we could have built any kind of world. We built this one. Why have we done this to ourselves?

A new study found that Antarctica's 'doomsday glacier' is losing contact with the sea floor, with a potential to rapidly retreat in the coming years. CNN's John Berman speaks to an author from the study about how this may affect global sea levels.

Hundreds of marchers, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton and other activists, held a rally outside Florida's state Capitol on Wednesday to protest Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration's rejection of a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies.