Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin is entering the race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, with a campaign launch video on her YouTube page and a US Senate campaign website up.

Joe Biden seems like he’s running again, God love him.

He will most likely make this official in the next couple of months, and with the support of nearly every elected Democrat in range of a microphone. That is how things are typically done in Washington: The White House shall make you primary-proof. The gods of groupthink have decreed as much.

Unless some freethinking Democrat comes along and chooses to ignore the groupthink.

In private, of course, many elected Democrats say Biden is too old to run again and that they wish he’d step away—which aligns with what large majorities of Democrats and independents have been telling pollsters for months. The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

Yes, this would be a radical move, and would anger a bunch of Democrats inside the various power terrariums of D.C., starting with the biggest one of all, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There would be immediate blowback from donors, the Democratic National Committee, and other party institutions. But do it anyway. Preferably before Biden makes his final decision, while there’s an opening. If approached deftly, the gambit could benefit the president, the party, and even the challenger’s own standing, win or lose.

[David A. Graham: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

There has to  be one good Challenger X out there from the party’s supposed “deep bench,” right? Someone who is compelling, formidable, and younger than, say, 65. Someone who is not Marianne Williamson. Someone who would be unfailingly gracious to Biden and reverential of his career—even while trying to end it.

Before we start tossing out names, let’s establish a big to be sure. To be sure, primaries can be very bad for presidents seeking reelection. There is good reason no incumbent has been subjected to a serious intraparty challenge in more than three decades—not since the Republican Pat Buchanan launched a populist incursion against President George H. W. Bush in 1992. A dozen years earlier, President Jimmy Carter had endured an acrid primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Both Carter and Bush managed to hold off their challengers, but they came away battered and wound up losing their general elections.

Biden, however, is a special case, for two reasons. The first concerns the disconnect between how affectionately most Democrats view him versus their desire to move on from him. Recent surveys show that 60 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. These spigots of cold water in the polls have been accompanied by icy buckets of liberal commentary and chilly assessments from (mostly) anonymous elected Democrats in the press. By contrast, large majorities of Republicans wanted Donald Trump to seek reelection in 2020, and an overwhelming consensus of Democrats wanted Barack Obama to run again in 2012. Same with Republicans and George W. Bush in 2004, and Democrats and Bill Clinton in 1996.

Why should Biden not enjoy the same coronation? He’s done a good job in the eyes of the people who voted for him in 2020. His party overperformed in the midterms. He seems to be humming along fine—feisty State of the Union here, muscular visit to Ukraine there, and endless jokers to the right. He has achieved important things, has clearly enjoyed the gig, and appears quite eager for more. The difference in Biden’s case, of course, goes directly to the second reason for his special predicament. It begins with an 8.

Allow me to point out, as if you don’t already know this, that Biden is old. He is 80 now, will be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025, and will hit 86 if he makes it all the way through a second term. He was born during the Roosevelt administration (Franklin, not Teddy, but still).

The Delaware Corvette has flipped through the odometer a time or two. I’ve pointed this out before, in this publication. The White House did not like that story. But it was true then, and it’s truer now—by eight months, and a lot more Democrats are getting a lot more anxious.

“This is not a knock on Joe Biden, just a wish for competition,” says Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, one of a tiny number of elected Democrats who have expressed on-the-record trepidation about Biden’s plans. Phillips couches the absurdity of this in terms of free enterprise. “In the business world, if the dominant brand in a category had favorability ratings like the current president does, you would see a number of established brands jump into that category,” Phillips told me. “Believe me, there are literally hundreds in Congress who would say the same thing,” he said. “But they simply won’t fucking say a word.”

[Read: Why Biden shouldn’t run in 2024]

Here’s the deal, as Biden would say. No one wants to be accused of messing around with established practices when the alternative—very possibly Donald Trump—is so terrifying. But just as Trump has intimidated so many Republicans into submission, he also has paralyzed Democrats into extreme risk aversion. This has fostered an unhealthy capitulation to musty assumptions. And if you believe groupthink can’t be horribly wrong, I’ve got some weapons of mass destruction to show you in Iraq, not to mention a Black man who will never be elected president and, for that matter, a reality-TV star who won’t either.

The big riddle is: Who? Let’s assess an (extremely) hypothetical primary field. First, eliminate Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and any other member of Biden’s administration from consideration. Such an uprising against the boss would represent an irreparably disloyal and unseemly act and simply would not happen. Let’s also eliminate Senator Bernie Sanders from consideration, because been there, done that (twice), and he’s actually Biden’s senior by a year.

Otherwise, indulge me in a bit of mentioning. Here is a hodgepodge of possible primary nuisances: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey; Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; California Governor Gavin Newsom; Maryland Governor Wes Moore. This is a noncomprehensive list.

Let’s take the first Challenger X on the list, the newly reelected Whitmer, who, for the record, says she will not be running in 2024, regardless of what Biden does. She declared as much after her double-digit crushing of Republican Tudor Dixon in November. “Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says she is committed to a full second term,” reads the report in Bridge Michigan, the local publication to which she revealed her plans. The article refers to the 46th president as “aging Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.”

What might it look like if Whitmer did make a run at said “aging Democratic incumbent”? The how dare you types would be unpleasantly aroused. Words like ingrate, disloyal, and opportunist would be hurled in her face. She would be blamed for creating a turbulent situation for the self-styled “party of grown-ups,” and at a time when they can credibly portray Republicans as an irresponsible brigade of nutbags, cranks, and chaos agents. Whitmer would also, implicitly, be accused of not “waiting her turn.” Just as Obama was in 2008, when he opted to skip the line and sought the Democratic nomination, even though the groupthink memo at the time stipulated that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn.

But perhaps the pushback would not be as rough as Challenger X expected. In all likelihood, it would occur mostly in private or anonymously. Biden would be somewhat obliged to project calm and indifference in public. “The more the merrier,” the president and his surrogates would say through tight smiles. Nobody would benefit from any appearance of resentment.

[David A. Graham: The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden]

Challenger X could earn goodwill by campaigning with class and expressing unrelenting gratitude to Biden. She could simply nod and shrug in response to the various admonitions. Emphasize her own credentials and the grave threat posed by Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or any other Republican. Say repeatedly that she would do whatever was necessary to help and support the president if primary voters nominated him again.

For any Challenger X, the main selling point would fall into the general classification of representing “new blood,” a “fresh start,” or some such. These terms would serve as polite stand-ins for the age issue rather than smears about Biden’s mental capacity. Another thematic argument would involve popular American ideals such as “choice” and “freedom.” As in: Democrats deserve a “choice” and should enjoy the “freedom” to vote for someone other than the oldest president in history—the guy well over half of you don’t want to run.

Challenger X would almost certainly receive tons of press coverage—probably good coverage, too, given that the media are predisposed to favor maverick-y candidates who inject unforeseen conflict into the process. When the voting starts, maybe this upstart would overperform—grabbing 35 percent or so in the early states, say. Maybe they wouldn’t surpass Biden, but could still reap the good coverage, gracefully drop out, and gain an immediate advantage for 2028. Or maybe Biden would take the hint, step away on his own, and let Democrats get on with picking their next class of national leaders. To some degree, the party has been putting this off since Obama was elected.

Quite obviously, Democrats today have a strong craving for someone other than the sitting president. (Also obvious: That someone is not the current vice president.) Many voters viewed Biden’s candidacy in 2020 as a one-term proposition. He suggested as much. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said nearly three years ago at a campaign event in Michigan, where he appeared with Harris, Booker, and Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

Some mischief-maker should give Democrats a path to that future starting now. Voters bought the bridge in 2020. But when does it become a bridge too far?

Democrat Jennifer McClellan easily won the special election for Virginia's 4th Congressional District last week. The fact that a Democrat comfortably retained a Democratic seat in a district President Joe Biden would have won under its new lines by 36 points in 2020 is not surprising.

After a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, national attention was slow to turn to the crash. That has now changed decisively. In the past 10 days, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, former President Donald Trump, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have all visited the town. A lively national political debate has also emerged, but it’s one that, like the burning rail cars, has produced a lot of heat, but not a great deal of light.

The disaster has become a proxy battle where existing political divides are playing out—and where the failings of both of the contemporary parties are on clear display. The Democratic Party struggles to respond effectively to a crisis with empathy rather than technocratic policy lectures. The Trump-era Republican Party, meanwhile, says all the right things and advocates for all the wrong ones.

The conversation on the right is especially revealing. Some factions of conservative media have accused the mainstream press and Democratic establishment of ignoring the story, though in fact Fox News was just as late as its competitors. Nonetheless, Trump and other MAGA-minded Republicans, like Ohio’s newly elected senator, J. D. Vance, have embraced East Palestine as an example of how the Democratic Party has abandoned white working-class areas of the industrial Midwest. Tucker Carlson has gone farther, arguing that the response has been slow because the town is conservative and largely white.

[Read: Could Positive Train Control have prevented the Washington wreck?]

The derailment is a curious type of crisis, because the material effects are so unclear. Unlike some other recent rail catastrophes, no one died in the initial derailment and fire—contrast that with the 47 people who died in a 2013 wreck in Quebec, near the U.S. border. The longer-term environmental effects are still uncertain. State and federal authorities claim that the water is safe to drink and that the chemicals that burned shouldn’t have long-term health harms. Many residents, who were evacuated, experienced odors and rashes, and saw the flames, are understandably not convinced.

Both the diagnosis and policy ideas that the MAGA Republicans have advanced offer little hope. Speaking in East Palestine on Wednesday, Trump claimed that the Biden administration had offered assistance only because he had come to visit. “They were intending to do absolutely nothing for you,” he said. Vance made a similar charge. But Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, though not close to Trump, said he had declined federal assistance: “Look, the president called me and said, ‘Anything you need.’ I have not called him back after that conversation. We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it.” The EPA did eventually move to take over the disaster response, likely in part because of pressure from Trump—but that’s different from ignoring the situation.

Vance has offered a more interesting perspective, describing a disaster that “stands at the intersection of corporate power and government power.” He’s right, and he’s also right that many residents of the region don’t trust the federal government. But these points run into the fundamental paradox of MAGA, which is the mullet of politics: populist in the front, corporatist in the back. Vance has said he wants to see higher fines for corporations like Norfolk Southern, the railroad whose train crashed. Yet when Trump was in office (as the Biden White House has been eager to point out), his signature initiatives included rolling back environmental regulations, cutting fines to corporate wrongdoers, and reducing government oversight. That even extended to eliminating rules around safety for trains transporting chemicals.

[David A. Graham: The art of the dealer]

Trump has discovered that he can get away with taking actions that don’t actually help if he’s able to show up and make people feel he’s on their side. His ability to do that is one reason that East Palestine twice voted heavily for Trump. Democrats seem incapable of communicating effectively to voters in places like East Palestine, despite having the better arguments about corporate accountability and environmental safety.

And neither party has much to offer after the initial cleanup, though the intense attention on the wreck might help produce some immediate assistance to East Palestine. The town depends on the railroad, which produces some inherent risk even with good safety rules. The prospects for new economic development are dim. Trump peddles resentment, racial and otherwise, as a salve. Biden’s enormous stimulus plans may reshape the American economy but are unlikely to make much of a dent in small, depressed towns like East Palestine. “We are here and will stay here for as long as it takes to ensure your safety and to help East Palestine recover and thrive,” Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw wrote in a statement over the weekend. That’s a promise he probably can’t keep. Recovery may be possible, but thriving is remote.

The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.

Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today’s stories from The Atlantic.

The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are When a Christian revival goes viral The invisible victims of American anti-Semitism

Today I Grieve

Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.

When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.

If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.

This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.

In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.

And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

Related:

How and when the war in Ukraine will end Biden’s hope vs. Putin’s lies

Today’s News

The prominent South Carolina former lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who is being tried for the murders of his wife and son, testified in court; he has pleaded not guilty on both charges. The musician R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his conviction last year on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. Kelly is already serving a different 30-year prison term for a 2021 conviction. Authorities said that a man in Orange County, Florida, shot and killed a fellow passenger in the car he was riding in, and then returned to the same neighborhood to shoot four more people, including a journalist who was covering the original shooting.

Dispatches

Unsettled Territory: Reading banned books and studying verboten topics are ways to defeat the forces of exclusion, Imani Perry writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Matt Chase / The Atlantic

The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat

By Yasmin Tayag

Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.

I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Happiness is a warm coffee. Never mind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce.” Why this Democratic strategist walked away

Culture Break

20th Century Fox Film / Everett

Read. “The Body’s River,” a new poem by Jan Beatty.

“When my mother left me in the orphanage, / I invented love with strangers. / And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there.”

Watch. Revisit Titanic. Twenty-five years later, it feels different.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

After working for three decades as an operative in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, Simon Rosenberg in 2022 became an overnight  sensation. While most of the media was breathlessly predicting sweeping Republican gains in the midterm election (“Red Tsunami Watch,” Axios blared in a late-October headline), Rosenberg was the most visible public skeptic of the GOP-surge scenario.

For months, in a series of interviews, blog posts, and tweet streams, Rosenberg challenged the predictions of Democratic doom and highlighted a long docket of evidence—polls, early-voting results, fundraising totals, the Kansas abortion referendum—that contravened the prevailing media narrative. For anxious Democrats, in the weeks before the election, he was as much therapist as strategist.

[Read: How democrats avoided a red wave]

Apart from a few allies, such as the Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier, Rosenberg was so alone in his conviction that Politico wrote last summer that his “proclamations would carry profound reputational risk” because “history is on the side of big Republican wins this cycle.” Instead, after the election, Vox called Rosenberg “the guy who got the midterms right.” On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell said Rosenberg was “the only person I paid any attention to about polls” last year, because he “was always right,” and one host on the podcast Pod Save America asked, “Is Simon Rosenberg our God now?” before another host answered, “I think so.”

Amid all this attention, even adulation, Rosenberg delivered a major surprise last week when he announced that he was shutting down NDN, the Democratic advocacy and research group he has led since the mid-1990s. (From 1996 through 2004, the group was known as the New Democrat Network.) This week, I spoke with him by phone to talk about that decision, how the competition between the parties has changed over his career, and what he saw in the run-up to the 2022 election that so many others missed.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ron Brownstein: You just had an election in which you were unquestionably the most visible Democrat questioning the widespread expectation that a red wave was coming. We’ll talk in a minute about how you reached that conclusion. But to start, I think it’s a surprise to a lot of people that you would close up shop at NDN so soon after that success and the notoriety it generated. What prompted this decision?

Simon Rosenberg: Two things. I think that the age of the New Democrats, which was a very successful political project for the Democratic Party, has come to an end. The assumption of that politics, which began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that the Cold War had been settled, that democracy had prevailed, that the West was ascendant. But with China’s decision to take the route that they’ve gone on, with Russia now having waged this intense insurgency against the West, the assumption that that system is going to prevail in the world is now under question. And I think that it’s birthing now for the United States a different era of politics, where we must be focused on two fundamental, existential questions. Can democracy prevail given the way that it’s being attacked from all sides? And can we prevent climate change from overwhelming the world that we know?

What I’ve been thinking is that I need to take a step back from what I was doing day to day, to give this more thought. I want to try to write a book and to take the perspective of having been part of the beginning of the last big shift in American politics, the emergence of the New Democrats, and start imagining what’s going to come next for the center left in the United States and around the world.

Brownstein: You mentioned that your political career started around the time of the last big shift in American politics. What were your first experiences in national politics?

Rosenberg: I had been working at ABC News in New York, and I was offered a job to go work for Michael Dukakis. I worked as a field organizer all over the country. And then in ’92 I became the communications director in New Hampshire for Bill Clinton.

That experience in the Clinton campaign was formative for me. After I started NDN, he came and gave a speech where he said there are a lot of people in Washington who can do politics, who can’t do policy, and there are a lot of people who can’t do policy but can do politics, but NDN is where we do both. I always felt that that was the best of Clintonism: this powerful connection between what we needed to do to make the country better and how to build the politics to get it done.

Brownstein: I want to stick with Clinton for a minute, because NDN’s original name was the New Democrat Network. But certainly, as we have seen over the last two Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton’s legacy has become very contested. What do you think Clinton and his generation of New Democrats got right and wrong?

Rosenberg: Any honest assessment of the New Democrat project has to view it as wildly successful, because when I went to work for Clinton in 1992, Democrats had lost five out of the six previous presidential elections. And the central project of the New Democrats was to make the Democratic Party competitive at the presidential level again. Since then, we’ve won more votes in seven of eight presidential elections. That’s the best popular-vote run of any American political party in our history. We’ve also seen three Democratic presidents that have served [since then]—Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have also made the country materially better during their presidencies.

Brownstein: Now that we’ve seen Donald Trump’s rise, and we’ve also seen the pushback against Trump in the last few elections, what’s the main lesson you take from his emergence?

Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s obviously disappointing. The emergence of what I call “Greater MAGA” has been a dark period in our history.

[From the March 2023 issue: The GOP is just obnoxious]

You have to recognize just how central to that is this narrative of the white tribe rallying around itself, and the sense of grievance, the sense of loss, the sense of decline. That’s what MAGA is. That’s all it is. Nothing more to it than that. We know from history, we know from other countries, when countries go into sectarian or tribal warfare, it can destroy a country, pull it apart. And Trump has created a domestic argument here that could potentially destroy the U.S. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene this week—advocating for the country to split into two, red and blue.

Part of the reason I’m taking a step back from NDN is that I don’t think that we have yet figured out how to talk to the American people about the nature of the conflict we’re in right now, with rising authoritarianism around the world, the weakening of democratic institutions here and in other places. My hope is that because Biden won’t be able to legislate very much for the next two years, he’ll spend his time talking to the American people and the West about the necessity of winning this conflict.

Brownstein: Certainly, there’s a collective exhale across America in the prodemocracy ranks that says, “We came up to the brink in 2022, but voters said no to the election deniers, and it looks like we’re heading back on course.” Is that too optimistic?

Rosenberg: The threat is still here. Look, I think [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis is even more MAGA than Trump. This idea that in 2024, Republicans are going to end up with a moderate, center-right candidate and distance themselves from the insanity of the Trump years, that’s just fantasy talk.

DeSantis has decided to double down on extremism and on MAGA. We will learn in the next year and a half about how it all plays out. But I think he misread the room; he’s misread the moment in history. He needed to become an anti-Trump; instead, he became more Trump than Trump. And I just don’t think there’s an appetite for that politics, particularly in the battlegrounds.

In this last election, there were really two elections. There was a bluer election inside the battlegrounds, and there was a redder election outside the battlegrounds. We actually gained ground in seven battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. It’s an extraordinary achievement given high inflation, a low Biden approval rating, traditional midterm dynamics. My view is, that happened because the fear of MAGA has created a supercharged grass roots; our candidates are raising unprecedented amounts of money; we have more labor to work in these races than we’ve ever had before. And where we have these muscular campaigns, we were able to control the information environment. And also push turnout up through the roof.

But outside the battlegrounds, we fell back in New York and California, and in Florida and Texas, the four biggest states in the country. And the admonition to us is that we are still not competitive enough in the national daily discourse; the Republicans, because of this incredible noise machine that they built, are still far louder than we are. Democrats have to become obsessive about being more competitive in the daily political discourse in the country.

There are two things we have to do. We have to build more media institutions. Republicans use ideological media to advance their politics in a way that we’ve never done. And we’re going to have to match that to some degree.

The second piece is that average Democratic activists have to recognize that they need to become information warriors daily. I worked in the [Clinton campaign] war room 30 years ago, and the way we think of the war room is 20 sweaty kids drinking Red Bulls, producing 30-second videos. I think the way we have to think of the war room now, it’s 4 million proud patriots getting up every day, spending a little bit of their day putting good information into our daily discourse to try to crowd out the poisonous information and right-wing propaganda. There’s a lot that average citizens can do in this.

Brownstein: Let me give you the devil’s-advocate view. Isn’t there a case that while the Republicans’ message machinery has proven extremely powerful at mobilizing their voters, it has pushed the Republican Party toward a politics that cannot win national majorities, and cannot win independent voters?

Rosenberg: One of the projects that I’m involved in is a way for Democrats to start thinking about how to get the 55 percent of the vote nationally and to not accept this unbelievably precarious place that we’re in. For all our success in 2022, we still lost the House, and MAGA is now in control of the building that they attacked two years ago. The Supreme Court isn’t done changing the United States. There’s still a lot of power and potency in MAGA, even if they don’t win this next election. The key is to defeat MAGA in such a definitive and declarative way that Republicans move on to a different kind of politics and become something more like a traditional center-right political party.

Brownstein: If you’re thinking about getting to 55 percent, let’s talk a little about what it might take to do that. There is a whole school of journalists and analysts making a late-’80s-style argument that Democrats are too influenced by a college-educated leadership class and are taking excessively liberal positions on cultural issues, especially crime and immigration, that are driving away working-class voters of all races. Are they right?

Rosenberg: I don’t think that we’re as out of position as they think we are, as evidenced by the last election.

We must stick together as a party because what will cause far-right political parties to succeed is when the prodemocracy coalition splits, and we can’t allow that to happen. As much as sometimes we want to have interfamily battles, those are self-indulgent at this point.

Those voices in our party that are arguing that we’re weak and we’re struggling, they’re wrong. When I look back at the arc of the Democratic Party since the late 1980s, we are arguably the most successful center-left party in the developed world over this period, probably with no near peer in terms of our ongoing success. And I’m very proud of that, but we now have different things we have to do than what we did before.

So I don’t think that this emerging criticism is entirely wrong, but it’s only half right. The goal should be to expand, not to reposition. There are four areas that I think we have to bear down on in the next two years for a potential Democratic expansion: young voters, Latinos, Never-MAGA or -Trumpers, and young women, post-Dobbs.

The No. 1 job is we just need more young people voting, period. It’s more registration, more communications, targeting them more in our campaigns. In the Democratic Party, young people are still at the kids’ table; they have to become the center of our politics now.

Brownstein: There was a widespread narrative in the media about the red wave. I spoke on the weekend before the election to half a dozen top-level Democratic operatives and pollsters who were anticipating disaster. You and a couple others were really the conspicuous exceptions to that. I’m wondering why the general wisdom, not only in the media, but in much of the party, was so off? And what are the implications of that for 2024?

Rosenberg: When I look back at what happened, I go back to something we’ve been discussing, which is the power of the right-wing propaganda machines to bully public opinion into places that it shouldn’t be going. And I think there was never a red wave, and there needs to be a lot more public introspection done by those of us who do political analysis about why so many people got it wrong.

The only way you could believe that a red wave was coming was if you just discounted the ugliness of MAGA. You had to get to a place where insurrection and these candidates that Republicans were running and the end of American democracy were somehow things that really weren’t important to people; where, as you heard commentators say, “Well, people, I guess, have settled that eggs costing 30 cents more is more important than loss of bodily autonomy by women.” It was always one of the most ridiculous parts of the discourse in the final few weeks of the election.

We had real data backing up everything that we were seeing, and we were sharing that data with reporters. I was writing it in my Twitter feed, which got 100 million views between the middle of October and Election Day. It wasn’t like the data wasn’t available to all the media analysts and others. But what happened wasn’t a failure of data, but a failure of analysis.

Brownstein: So, roll all of this forward for me into 2024. Are you comfortable with Democrats relying on Biden running again? And how do you assess the landscape at this point?

Rosenberg: I think that Biden is running for reelection. And I think that we’re favored in the presidential election. For us to win next year, the economy has to be good. And we have to look like we’ve been successful in Ukraine. Those two things are going to be paramount in him being able to say, “I’ve been a good president, and I may be a little bit old, but I still got 90 miles an hour on my fastball, and I’m able to get the job done right versus they’re still a little bit too crazy.”

What the Republicans should be worried about is we’ve had three consecutive elections where the battleground states have rejected MAGA. And so, if the Republicans present themselves as MAGA again, which looks almost inevitable, it’s going to be hard for them to win a presidential election in 2024 given that the battleground has muscle memory about MAGA and has voted now three times against it.

History works for Ron DeSantis as an argument. It would be a mistake, though, to think he doesn’t care about it deeply or hasn’t devoted serious deliberation to his own understanding of the American past. In fact, his biography indicates a great respect for the discipline. DeSantis reportedly received special praise for his performance in an Advanced Placement U.S. history course at Florida’s Dunedin High School before he graduated in 1997. He majored in history at Yale during some of the years I taught there. He instructed high-school students in history for a year at the Darlington School, in Georgia, before attending Harvard Law School and joining the U.S. Navy. And get this: Two of his children are named Madison and Mason presumably after James Madison and George Mason, the most intellectually interesting of the Virginians who helped fashion the Constitution.

Former President Donald Trump reveled in his own ignorance and preference not to read at all, much less read history. In his four years in office, most of his statements about the Constitution were bluster about how it allowed him to do anything he wanted. By contrast, DeSantis has an intellectual pedigree and a book from 2011, his first, to prove it. Dreams From Our Founding Fathers is a revealing treatise, lively and polemical. While clearly a direct rebuke to Barack Obama’s 1995 coming-of-age memoir, Dreams From My Father, it is also filled with ample quotation from 18th-century writings, footnotes to a smattering of scholarly works, and highly selective use of then-current reportage, tacking back and forth over 26 thematic chapters from Madison and Alexander Hamilton to Obama and the Democrats, the apparent betrayers of the Founders’ dreams. The book clarifies how DeSantis’s view of history has shaped his politics and explains his fierce reaction to any attempt to discuss the role of racism in America’s past.

Published by a very small (some would say vanity) press in Jacksonville, total sales of the book languished in the low hundreds. It clearly got lost in the generic haze of anti-Obama screeds. Shockingly, for a book by a man who is likely running for president, the only way to acquire a physical copy is to buy a used one, which can sell for over $1,000. But Dreams From Our Founding Fathers is actually a remarkably cogent and well-written attempt to undo exactly what Barack Obama had done: write himself into the national imagination as an emblem of historic, yet distinctly American, change. It’s because Obama had incorporated American history into his presidential campaign, giving his famous speech on race at the National Constitution Center, that DeSantis has to deny at such length that Obama’s Americanism amounted to anything more than a shell game.

[Read: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.

Against this “redistributive agenda” DeSantis positions himself as an originalist’s originalist, though he rarely uses the term, leaning on an “ethic of constitutionalism” that he attributes to the Founders. His favorites are Madison and Hamilton, whom he presents as deeply conservative men whose intent was firstly to protect freedom—especially property—and wise, representative government. Their eventual differences, epitomized by the partisan battles of the 1790s, don’t matter next to what they shared. They fashioned a constitution to check excessive legislation—what they called too much democracy in less guarded moments—in the new states. Constitutionalism, then, is conservative means to conservative ends.

DeSantis repeatedly skewers Democratic legislators for not knowing their constitutional clauses and, worse, for misconstruing an admirably clear set of guidelines the Founders laid out for limits on government. Like the demagogues of the 1780s that Federalists such as Madison and Hamilton saved us from, he writes, Democrats always want to “vote themselves the property of others.” Hamilton, by contrast, pushed for true “national greatness, not redistributive change.”

But the most revealing and consequential element of his book is not so much his drawing of a straight line from the founding precedents to the Tea Party movement’s dissent over big government. It’s rather how his entire reading of American history is enveloped in both unquestioning fealty to the Founders and an insistence that the role of slavery, and race more broadly, in that history does not seriously change anything about how we should understand the birth and development of our country. For Obama and his teachers, the problem of slavery exemplified the need to adapt and improve the Constitution. For DeSantis, would-be reformers who misunderstand the role of slavery in our history are themselves the root of the problem in our politics.

While DeSantis admits grudgingly that Obama embodied a major advance in “breaking the presidential color barrier,” he insists that even past leaders who promoted necessary change—such as emancipation and civil rights—embraced “conservative change … often explicitly invoking the Founding Fathers.” He then selectively quotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech about cashing the “promissory note” of the Declaration of Independence, contrasting MLK’s words with those of Obama and Thurgood Marshall in their critiques of the Founders’ exclusions and imperfections.

To turn Thurgood Marshall, the civil-rights lawyer and Supreme Court justice, into an ideological radical in contrast to MLK takes some doing. Not as much, though, as is required by DeSantis’s insistence that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 is the signal example in American history of an activist judge ignoring fealty to the letter of the law and being guided instead by his own racist beliefs. There is a consensus among historians and legal scholars that Dred Scott v. Sandford, which turned on the question of whether a fugitive slave could sue for his freedom after he crossed into a free state, was wrongly decided, because Taney declared that African Americans could not be considered citizens. They had in fact been voting citizens in numerous states. DeSantis wants to distance himself and the Constitution from Taney’s obvious and decisive hatefulness. So he doesn’t mention that the entire logic of Taney’s willful forgetting of statutory laws rested on his insistence that the Founding Fathers never could have meant for there to be any kind of racial equality. In other words, Taney made a politically conservative, notably partisan decision precisely on his interpretation of the Founders’ intent. It was originalist to the core: the original originalism, where gut feelings about what the Founders thought and wanted trumped actual state laws. DeSantis can’t see, or won’t admit, that it is often originalism that is selective with evidence.

It becomes necessary for DeSantis to cleanse the Founders from any connection to slavery. In his first chapter, he tries to make quick work of those who stress the “personal flaws” of great Founding Fathers (i.e., their enslavement of other humans). First, an explicitly antislavery Constitution couldn’t possibly have been ratified, he writes—we should rather trust the good faith of the “strongly anti-slavery” Founders (Hamilton, Franklin) who supported it anyway. Slavery had been a “fact of life” throughout history. A failure to secure the future of the nation by ratifying the Constitution, DeSantis argues, would have enslaved everyone. Moreover, “the philosophical foundations of the Constitution are incompatible with slavery.” This made slavery “doomed to fail” in the new republic. In the end, “the Constitution was created despite the existence of slavery, not because of slavery.” Most of its provisions had nothing to do with slavery anyway, according to DeSantis.

[Read: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is exactly how the Founders, politicians all, justified what most of them knew was morally wrong, before, during, and after the Constitutional Convention. They were already practiced at defending hypocrisy on the slavery issue: Tories and antislavery activists in England and America had brought it up repeatedly. But by never looking up from the Founding Fathers’ own words, DeSantis doesn’t have to confront what other contemporaries knew and modern scholarship knows. Hereditary racial slavery was a new thing associated with the Americas. It had gotten worse—more all-encompassing, more deadly, with fewer opportunities for emancipation—by the mid-18th century, which was why more and more people publicly criticized it in North America and Europe, beginning in the 1750s, not the 1770s.

Many provisions of the Constitution, including the three-fifths clause, its highly calibrated brand of federalism, and the Electoral College, indeed contributed mightily to slavery’s survival and even expansion in the United States despite allowing the northern states to emancipate enslaved people within their borders. Northerners and southerners alike knew this. No less an authority than John Quincy Adams admitted in his diary as early as 1820 that the constitutional dice were loaded in favor of slavery, and that the resulting compromises had tragically shaped most of the early republic’s political history.

In short, in the book DeSantis has to create a Constitution that is not so much aspirational as imaginary in order to align himself with the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and others who used the notion of the Founders’ benign original intentions to actually liberate Black people and increase equality. But whereas these figures wanted to talk about the Black past and present, and the impact of racial domination on everyone Black or white, DeSantis insists that a return to first principles means never bringing up slavery except to praise those who ended it.

Even when they didn’t. In the months before he denounced the AP African American Studies curriculum, DeSantis also invoked the American Revolution as the real origin and cause of slavery’s abolition. The eminent historian Gordon Wood has been saying similar things recently, as he has taken issue with the 1619 Project’s emphasis on how Virginians and South Carolinian planters joined the Revolution when their slave property was threatened explicitly by crown officials. Wood, too, lately insists more loudly than his teacher Bernard Bailyn did 50 years ago that antislavery idealism is the main thing we need to know about slavery and the founding. But it is an exaggeration that nobody thought to make until historians in the 1960s began to realize and emphasize how much enslavers won in 1776 and 1787.

For DeSantis, Black people telling a different story about the American past is a threat to his entire worldview. It isn’t an academic disagreement; it’s basic to his politics. To admit a different view of the founding upsets his constitutionalist conservatism, which might be best defined as using the Constitution to oppose anything the other side prefers, while looking the other way when Republicans overstep founding strictures about good government, much less actual, crystal-clear clauses in the Constitution (emoluments and insurrections, anyone?).

The question of whether or how the American Founders were complicit with slavery might seem to be a seemingly minor, even technical, matter compared with other legislative maneuverings in Florida. But for DeSantis, it’s the beginning and the essence of what he opposes. The Florida Commission of Education said that the recently passed Stop WOKE Act targeted “revisionist history” while the Florida House speaker said, “The bill provides assurance for parents that some of the most difficult lessons about our nation’s history and current events are taught accurately while treating everyone as individuals.” A state senator cited it as a move back to “historical facts” instead of “indoctrination.” There’s room for disagreement about how to view and teach the intertwined legacies of the American Revolution, slavery, and the Constitution. But as his own book suggests, it is DeSantis himself who ignores certain facts, is prone to identity-driven circular logic, and dismisses what Black voices, past and present, have to teach.

Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.

Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and cruelties of fate as did Kennedy and his family. But I think Carter’s long years in the public eye highlighted a theme of most lives, public and private: the tension between what we plan and what happens. Between the luck that people can make for themselves and the blind chance they cannot foresee or control.

In the decades of weekly Bible classes he led in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter must have covered Proverbs 19:21. One contemporary translation of that verse renders it as: “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Not everything in his life happened the way Jimmy Carter proposed or preferred. But he made the very most of the years that God and the fates granted him.

Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

Jimmy Carter made his luck, and benefited from luck, when he ran for president. He couldn’t have done it without his own discipline and commitment, and his strategy. He seemed to shake every hand in Iowa—but his team was also the first to recognize that the new Iowa caucus system opened the chance for an outsider to leap into the presidency. At a time when his national name recognition was 1 percent, he spent all day walking up to strangers and saying, “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” Stop and imagine doing that yourself, even once. Carter was easier to admire—when delivering his stump speech to a rapt crowd, when introducing himself at a PTA meeting or in a diner—than he was to work for. But that is probably true of most public figures with such a drive to succeed.

Because he was so engaging in person, and made such a connection in countless small-group meetings across Iowa, he won the caucuses and went on to win the nomination and the presidency. No other candidate has gone from near-invisibility to the White House in so short a time. (Barack Obama became a Democratic Party star with his famous convention speech in 2004, four years before he won the presidency. Donald Trump had been a celebrity for decades.)

This is how Carter and his team helped themselves. Other developments they hadn’t planned affected the race—mainly to their benefit.

By early 1976, Carter had become the new thing. He embraced rock music and quoted Bob Dylan. He was as powerful and exciting a fusion of cultures as any candidate who came after him. He was a Naval Academy graduate and an Allman Brothers fan. He was deeply of the South and of the Church. He also spoke about Vietnam as a racist war. He quoted poems by Dylan Thomas. He was, yes, cool. He appeared at a Law Day meeting at the University of Georgia’s law school and upbraided the audience about the injustice of America’s legal system. Here’s just one sample of the speech, which would now be considered part of the Sanders-Warren platform:

I grew up as a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record … ”Maggie’s Farm.”

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

But what if Hunter S. Thompson had not noticed this speech and announced that he “liked Jimmy Carter” in an influential article in Rolling Stone? What if Time and Newsweek, also very influential then, had not certified him as a serious potential leader with their coverage? What if the civil-rights figures Martin Luther King Sr. and Andrew Young had not endorsed Carter to Black audiences around the country, and reassured white liberals that he was the southern voice an inclusive America needed? (As governor of Georgia, Carter had placed a portrait of MLK Jr. in the state capitol.) What if Jerry Brown had not waited so long to enter the primaries? What if Teddy Kennedy had dared to run? What if Mo Udall had figured out the Iowa-caucus angle before Carter did? What if Scoop Jackson had not been so dull? Or George Wallace so extreme?

And for the general election, what if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon, turning Watergate into Ford’s own problem? (The Carter team knew that this was a campaign plus. But in the first sentence of his inaugural address, Carter thanked Ford for all he had done “to heal our land.”) What if Saturday Night Live, then in its first season and itself hugely influential, had not made Ford the butt of ongoing jokes? What if Ford had not blundered in a crucial presidential debate? What if Carter’s trademark lines on the stump—I’ll never lie to you and We need a government as good as its people—had not been so tuned to the battered spirit of that moment, and had been received with sneers rather than support?

What if, what if. There are a thousand more possibilities. In the end the race was very close. Luck ran his way.

Then he was in office. Intelligent, disciplined, self-contained, spiritual. President Carter made some of his own luck, good and bad—as I described in this magazine 44 years ago. There is little I would change in that assessment, highly controversial at the time, except to say that in 1979 Carter still had nearly half of his time in office ahead of him, and most of his adult life. I argued then that his was a “passionless” presidency. He revealed his passions—his ideals, his commitments—in the long years to come.

In office he also had the challenge of trying to govern a nearly ungovernable America: less than two years after its humiliating withdrawal from Saigon, in its first years of energy crisis and energy shortage, on the cusp of the “stagflation” that has made his era a symbol of economic dysfunction. It seems hard to believe now, but it’s true: The prime interest rate in 1980, the year Carter ran for reelection, exceeded 20 percent. You never hear, “Let’s go back to the late ’70s.”

Probably only a country as near-impossible to lead as the United States of that time could have given someone like Jimmy Carter a chance to lead it.

Despite it all, Carter had broader support during his first year in office than almost any of his successors, except briefly the two Bushes in wartime emergencies. Despite it all, most reckonings have suggested that Carter might well have beaten Ronald Reagan, and held on for a second term, if one more helicopter had been sent on the “Desert One” rescue mission in Iran, or if fewer of the helicopters that were sent had failed. Or if, before that, Teddy Kennedy had not challenged Carter in the Democratic primary. Or if John Anderson had not run as an independent in the general election. What if the ayatollah’s Iranian government had not stonewalled on negotiations to free its U.S. hostages until after Carter had been defeated? What if, what if.

Carter claimed for years that he came within one broken helicopter of reelection. It’s plausible. We’ll never know.

Because we do know, in retrospect, that Reagan had two landslide victories, over Carter and then Walter Mondale, and that the 1980 election broke heavily in Reagan’s favor in its final weeks, it’s natural to believe that Carter never had a chance. But it looked so different at the time. History changed, through effort and luck, when Carter arrived on the national stage in 1976. And it changed, through effort and luck, when he departed four years later.

Effort and luck combined for Jimmy Carter’s first two acts: becoming president, and serving in office.

Luck played a profoundly important role in his third act, allowing him to live mostly vigorously until age 98, and to celebrate his 76th wedding anniversary with his beloved wife, Rosalyn. He had 42 full years in the postpresidential role—10 times longer than his term in office, by far the most of any former president.

This extended span mattered for reasons within Carter’s control, and beyond it. Good fortune, medical science, and a lifetime history as a trim, fit athlete (he was a good tennis player, a runner, and a skillful softball pitcher), helped Carter survive several bouts of cancer and other tolls of aging. But his faith, will, idealism, and purpose allowed him to invent and exemplify a new role for former presidents, and to see his own years in office reconsidered.

Suppose that, like Lyndon B. Johnson, he had died of a literal and figurative broken heart at age 64. His record and achievements would have concluded with Ronald Reagan still in office, and his story would have been summarized as ending on a loss. Carter could never have received the Nobel Peace Prize, which he won while nearing age 80, in 2002. (Nobel Prizes cannot be given posthumously.)

With health like Lyndon Johnson’s, Jimmy Carter would not have had a chance to establish his new identity—and to see prevailing assessments of his role as president change as profoundly as those of Harry Truman did. As with Truman, the passing years have made it easier to see what Carter achieved, and to recognize what he was trying to do even when unsuccessful. But Truman was no longer alive to see that happen. For Carter I think the process of reassessment will go on.

It is hard for most Americans to imagine the Jimmy Carter of those days. It is hard even for me to recognize how different the country is as a whole.

Just to talk about politics: The South was then the Democrats’ base, and the West Coast was hostile territory. Jimmy Carter swept all states of the old Confederacy except Virginia, and lost every state west of the Rockies except Hawaii. In Electoral College calculations, the GOP started by counting on California.

The Democrats held enormous majorities in both the Senate and the House. Carter griped about dealing with Congress, as all presidents do. But under Majority Leader Robert Byrd, the Democrats held 61 seats in the Senate through Carter’s time. In the House, under Speaker Tip O’Neill, they had a margin of nearly 150 seats (not a typo). The serious legislative dealmaking was among the Democrats.

In culture and economics—well, you just need to watch some movies from the 1970s, Rocky, Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon (or, if you prefer, Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars). The United States was a country fraying on all its edges, just beginning to absorb the shock of the Vietnam years, in its first wave of grappling with globalization and environmental constraints.

Prevailing memories reached back far beyond Vietnam to the Korean War, World War II, and the Great Depression. In campaign speeches, Carter talked about the difference it made to him, as a boy, when Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration brought electric power to small communities like his. We on the speechwriting staff could rely on the story for applause. Enough people remembered.

There were no cellphones then, nor even bulky “portable” phones. Computers meant behemoths at major data centers.

And in civic life, Richard Nixon’s downfall seemed to have reinforced the idea that there was such a thing as public shame. It was construed as embarrassing for Jimmy Carter that his hard-luck brother, Billy, was in a penny-ante way cashing on the family fame by promoting six packs of his own “Billy Beer.” Carter, from a small-town business-owning background, felt that he had to sell the family peanut mill to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. After Nixon’s scandals and Spiro Agnew’s resignation, “doing the right thing” mattered, and Carter did so.

Jimmy Carter took office in the “before” times. We live in an unrecognizable “after.” He did his best, in office and out, to promote the values he cared about through it all.

What did he do in office? He did a lot. He was visionary about climate and the environment. He changed the composition of the federal courts. For better and worse he deregulated countless industries, from craft brewing to the airlines. I direct you to Stuart Eizenstat’s detailed and authoritative President Carter: The White House Years for specifics. I’ll just add:

Jimmy Carter did more than anyone else, before or since, to bring peace to the Middle East, with his Camp David accords. The agreement between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat could not possibly have been reached without Carter’s all-in, round-the-clock involvement. I was there and saw it. Any other witness would agree. (This was also the theme of Lawrence Wright’s excellent Thirteen Days in September.) Jimmy Carter saved the United States decades of woe with his Panama Canal Treaty. Jimmy Carter bought the United States several generations’ worth of respect with his human-rights policy. Can such an approach be no-exceptions or absolute? Of course not. Carter recognized as clearly as anyone the tension between ideals and reality. But does even imperfect idealism make a difference? That is the case Carter made in a speech at Notre Dame in 1977. I think it stands up well. Its essence:

We have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy …

This does not mean that we can conduct our foreign policy by rigid moral maxims. We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect—a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.

I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.”

In the life of the human spirit, words are action.

Jimmy Carter spoke to the “values” and “engagement” crises decades before demagogues like Trump or healers like Obama. In the summer of 1979, he gave an unusually sober and sermonlike address on the national “crisis of confidence.” This is generally known as the “malaise” speech, and is widely considered a downbeat marker of a down era. But as Kevin Mattson points out in his entertaining What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?, the speech was well received at the time. Carter’s popularity rating went up nearly 10 points in its wake. (Also, the speech didn’t include the word malaise.) Things again started going wrong for Carter soon after that—he made mistakes, and was unlucky—but the speech deserves respect. It was a leader’s attempt to express the fears and hard truths many people felt, and to find a way forward.

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee on Tuesday announced her campaign for US Senate in California.

Americans hate—or claim to hate—their politicians, but even by those standards, the early shape of the 2024 presidential race is a little bizarre. More than 20 months out from the election, Americans consistently say they don’t want to see a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet the most likely outcome today is a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

As Biden’s political fortunes have risen since late 2022, Democratic elected officials have slowly come around to the idea that he’s likely to be the nominee again next year, but Democratic voters remain skeptical, as I wrote recently. Still, they’re likely to get Biden, thanks in part to the advantage of incumbency.

On the Republican side, Trump looks weaker than he has at any time since shortly after he entered the 2016 race. His overall favorability is low, but that’s not new—he’s never won the national popular vote, and many of his chosen candidates have lost. More worryingly from the Mar-a-Lago point of view, a good chunk of Republicans now seem ready to move on from Trump, and he hasn’t managed to clear the field of rivals. Nikki Haley, who vowed not to run if he did, changed her mind. Ron DeSantis has not declared but seems sure to, and poses a larger electoral threat. Yet Trump still manages to top primary polls with a plurality of support.

How did we end up in such a situation? What in the structure of contemporary American politics led us to the cusp of a clash of meh? One easy answer is incumbency. Not since fellow Democrat Franklin Pierce in 1852, when Biden was just a wee lad, has a sitting president lost his party’s nomination. (That’s a joke, by the way.) Trump is not in office, but he is a sort of demi-incumbent as the most recent Republican president, a status he has reinforced with his false claims that he actually won in 2020.

Political scientists I asked about this offered a couple of additional, nuanced views. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, told me that the increased ideological unity within each of the two parties might explain the rise of unpopular standard-bearers. For most of U.S. history, the parties were a little more mixed, and a large portion of affiliated voters might still consider voting for a candidate of the other party.

“That kept it so both parties would nominate candidates that were broadly appealing to a larger swath of the country,” he said. Now the real prize is to win the primary, because once you’re the nominee, the party will coalesce around you, no matter what—a point that Trump 2016 and Biden 2020 both proved. “As the parties have polarized and separated, what’s happened is that while the parties remain internally fractious, what unites them more than ever is hatred of the other party.”

Julia Azari, a political-science professor at Marquette University, made a dovetailing point about the primary process, which has changed since the mid-20th century. Once largely under the control of the party organizations, it’s now much more open and small-d democratic—which ironically can produce candidates voters don’t actually love. “I think the free-for-all nature of presidential primaries makes it easier for candidates who can command roughly 40 percent of the primary vote to win the nomination while the rest of the field is fractured,” she wrote in an email. “In a weird way, it would be easier to navigate intra-party divisions if the parties had clearer and more organized factions that could consolidate around candidates with similar views and bargain at the nomination stage to incorporate multiple ideological perspectives.”

Once a candidate emerges from that process, he or she can rely on the party rallying together. As Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative.” And if it comes down to Trump and Biden, lots of voters from both parties will be swallowing hard and doing just that.

This cheat sheet will track who’s in, out, up, and down in the 2024 races. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Not officially, but in every other respect, yes. Every time he’s been asked, he says he expects to run, and when his longtime aide Ron Klain departed as chief of staff, Klain said he’d be there “when” Biden runs in 2024. An announcement could come soon, now that the State of the Union has passed.

Why does he want to run?
Biden has always wanted to be president and is proud of his work so far; he also seems to believe that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
If he runs, it’s probably his for the taking. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden does not, she’s expected to be the favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
It’s too soon to tell, but she’d start with an advantage if Biden sits this out.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden bows out.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden doesn’t, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
Say it with me: No, but if Biden doesn’t, she might.

Why does she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Perhaps.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Not officially, but she has visited New Hampshire and tells The New York Times she’s considering a run, Biden or not.

Why does she want to run?
She told the Times she wanted to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
If Biden, etc.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP are still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Not officially, but clearly the answer is yes. DeSantis is getting a campaign and super PAC up and running, marshaling donors, and inserting himself into national politics. He reportedly might not announce until May or June.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early 2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
Members of the Republican establishment who want a pugilistic alternative to Trump, disaffected MAGA types.

Can he win the nomination?
No one quite knows how a Trump-DeSantis battle will play out, but it seems very possible.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Perhaps as a MAGA-friendly alternative to Trump? It’s hard to say, as my colleague Tim Alberta has chronicled. Haley served under Trump, condemned him over January 6, said she wouldn’t run if he ran, and now is running anyway.

Who wants her to run?
That’s also hard to say, but if DeSantis stumbles in the spotlight, she could make a play for his supporters.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, a longtime member of Congress, is now governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
It sure looks like it. He’s been making the rounds and having the conversations one has if one is going to run, and he says he will probably decide by April.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying he disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the election.

Who wants him to run?
Some old-school Republicans would welcome his candidacy, but it’s hard to imagine a groundswell.

Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
He says he’s giving a campaign “very serious consideration.”

Why does he want to run?
Hogan argues that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.” He’s also a vocal critic of Donald Trump.

Who wants him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Can he win?
Hard to imagine.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
“Maybe I run, maybe I don’t,” he said in early February. But he passed on a Senate run last year and just created a fundraising vehicle that typically presages a candidacy.

Why does he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and sees his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Maybe. Scott has visited Iowa and considered a campaign, and says he doesn’t plan to run for another Senate term.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him.

Can he win the nomination?
Who knows? The soft-spoken Scott is untested in this kind of campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
Most likely. He’s released a campaign-style memoir, though he had to blurb it himself, and has pointedly distanced himself from Trump on some issues.

Why does he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wants him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
He hasn’t said, but he’s been traveling to stump for Republicans and meet with donors, and he’s limited to a single term as governor.

Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.

Who wants him to run?
Republicans who see him as able to run on Trumpy cultural issues while keeping some distance from Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as governor of Indiana and U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Pretty likely, though he hasn’t declared.

Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His time as Trump’s VP both makes him more plausible and probably rules him out, because he’s fallen afoul of his old boss.

Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers.

Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.