The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it.

There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this:

1). Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.

2). Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.

3). Offer plausible ideas on drugs, crime, and border enforcement.

4). Reassure women worried about the post-Roe future.

5). Don’t be too obvious about suppressing Democratic votes, because really blatant voter suppression will provoke and mobilize Democrats to vote, not discourage them.

Unfortunately for them, Republicans have turned every element of the plan upside down and inside out. Despite lavish anti-Trump donations by big-money Republicans, Trump is cruising to easy renomination. Rather than capitalize on existing economic troubles, Republicans have started a debt-ceiling fight that will cast them as the cause of America’s economic troubles. Worse for them, the troubles are fast receding. Inflation is vexing, but the recession that Republicans hoped for did not materialize: Instead, Joe Biden has presided over the fastest and steepest unemployment reduction in U.S. economic history since he took office in January 2021.

[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]

The big new Republican idea to halt the flow of drugs is to bomb or invade Mexico. Instead of reassuring women, Republican state legislators and Republican judges are signaling that they will support a national abortion ban if their party wins in 2024—and are already building the apparatus of surveillance and control of women necessary to make such a ban effective. Republican state-level voter-suppression schemes have been noisy and alarming when the GOP plan called for them to be subtle and technical.

It’s early in the election cycle, of course, but not too early to wonder: Are we watching a Republican electoral disaster in the making?

Biden’s poll numbers are only so-so. But a presidential election offers a stark and binary choice: this or that? Biden may fall short of some voters’ imagined ideal of a president, but in 2024, voters won’t be comparing the Democrat with that ideal. They will be comparing him with the Republican alternative.

An American must be at least 36 years old to have participated in an election in which the Republican candidate for president won the most votes. An American must be at least 52 years old to have participated in two presidential elections in which the Republican nominee got the most votes.

Despite this, over the past 30 years, the GOP has succeeded in leveraging its smaller share of the vote into a larger share of national power. That same 36-year-old American has lived half of his or her adult life under a Republican-controlled Senate, and even more of it under a Republican-majority House of Representatives. Through almost all of that American’s adult life, Republicans have held more than half of all state legislatures. Conservative dominance of the federal courts has become ever more total in the past two decades, culminating in the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

Some of the Republicans’ leverage can be explained by the American electoral system’s tilt against metropolitan areas. Some of their success is due to luck. The GOP’s big year of 2010 also happened to be a redistricting year, so one successful election translated into a decade of more comprehensively gerrymandered state legislatures. (Democrats have not had a big win in a redistricting year since 1930.)

But the tilt is not infinite, and the party’s luck is running out. Republicans have suffered a series of heavy defeats since the rise of Trump: loss of the House in 2018, loss of the presidency in 2020, loss of the Senate in 2021, losses at the state level in 2022 (Democrats won net two governorships and net four legislative chambers).

Trump-era Republicans have difficulty absorbing and reacting to negative news. Led by Trump himself, they misrepresented 2016 as—in the words of his former adviser Kellyanne Conway—a blowout, historic landslide. They misrepresented 2020 as an election that they deservedly won, but that was stolen from them by fraud and chicanery. Out-of-office Republicans like Paul Ryan will acknowledge on CNN that Trump lost. But they won’t say it on Fox News. Trump’s own leading party rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, won’t say it. And if Trump is indeed the primary winner that he insists he is, what on Earth is the case for denying this political superstar the third nomination he wants?

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

The Democrats, by contrast, are a party that has trouble absorbing and reacting to good news. Few Democrats predicted that the party would do as well as it did in 2022. Most feel deep dread and anxiety about 2024.

Maybe it’s good to guard against complacency. The American electoral system’s tilt against Democratic-voting regions remains as pronounced as ever. The Senate map is especially unpromising for Democrats. Yet it’s also important to understand that although America is intensely and bitterly polarized, it is not evenly polarized.

The potential strength of the Democratic coalition is greater than that of the Trump coalition. The Democratic disadvantage is that their coalition spans a lot of groups that face extra difficulties casting a ballot: renters, college students, hourly workers, single parents, people who don’t own cars. The American voting system has been engineered to deter and discourage them.

If motivated to turn out, however, those deterred and discouraged blocs can swing elections. In 2018, 36 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds turned out, the highest level recorded. Their votes helped change control of the House. Turnout of this cohort in 2022 finished second only to what it had been in 2018, and those votes altered the political complexion of many state legislatures. The state that had the highest youth turnout in 2022 was Michigan—not so coincidentally, the state where Democrats scored some of their biggest gains, flipping both chambers of the state legislature from red to blue.

Chief among what motivates voters who face obstacles is hope. People will endure and overcome barriers when they feel that their vote can make a difference. If Democrats succeed in communicating hope in 2024 that young people can contribute to a decisive defeat of Trump and MAGA extremism, then that is what they will do.

[Peter Wehner: The institutional arsonist turns on his own party]

This cycle, that hope is well founded. Republicans are doing everything wrong. They are talking to their voters about Trump’s personal grievances and about boutique culture-war issues that their own base does not much care about, such as the state of Florida’s “war on Disney.” At the same time, Republican leaders are confronting Democratic voters with extremist threats on issues they care intensely about: bans on abortion medication by mail, restrictions on the freedom of young women to travel across state lines, attacks on student voting rights, proposed big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the GOP debt-ceiling ransom demand. Republicans offer no economic message and no affirming vision, even as they make new moves to police women’s bodies and start a land war in Mexico. They are well on their way to earning a deep, nasty defeat—and the smell of that defeat may be an additional draw to the polls for the Democratic-leaning constituencies that will inflict it.

Of all the major-party candidates to run for president since 2000, only one scored worse than Trump in the popular vote: John McCain in 2008. That was not a personal verdict on McCain. He was running for a third Republican term in the throes of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression and against the backdrop of the most grinding military frustration since Vietnam.

Biden’s reelection-announcement video, released yesterday, defines the principal issue at stake in 2024 as “freedom.” From the New Deal to Trump, “freedom” was a Republican slogan; “security” was its Democratic counterpart. But Trump, together with DeSantis, has completely rebranded the GOP as the party of bossing around women, minorities, and young people.

If Trump secures the GOP nomination to run for a second term in 2024, the conditions are all in place to transfer the title of “worst popular-vote loser of the century” from the great Arizona senator to the putsch-plotting ex-president. Trump’s own party is doing its part to deliver this debacle. Soon enough, all Americans will have the opportunity to do theirs.

Tucker Carlson was in a good mood on Friday night. He was giggly. He was giddy. For the final segment of his Fox show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host was joined on set by a newly famous pizza-delivery man: While en route to drop off some pies earlier this month, the man had seen a police chase in action and had tripped the fleeing target with a nonchalant kick, pizzas still in hand. The scene had been captured on a doorbell camera; Carlson had aired it repeatedly on his show. Now the man in question had driven—from Pennsylvania—to deliver pizza to his studio-bound fan. He and Carlson ate the slices together, taking big bites (“It’s actually still hot!”) as they bantered. Carlson, still chewing, offered a merry sign-off to his viewers. “We’ll be back on Monday!” he said.

Except, of course, he wasn’t. Friday’s episode, it turned out, was the last one Carlson would film for Fox. The most-watched host on cable has left the network for reasons that may involve lawsuits, prickly office politics, or the ongoing liabilities of a say-anything star. What seems clear for now is that Carlson’s departure had little to do with the dangerous vitriol he spewed on his show—and that the decision to “part ways,” as Fox’s announcement put it, was as much a surprise to him as it was to everybody else. Carlson is a very good actor—he has spent the past seven years convincingly playing a propagandist—but his final show gave no indication of the new script. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have ended his run on Fox with a mouth full of interstate pizza. And he probably wouldn’t have chosen, as his swan song, a bizarre and menacing riff about castration.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]

“Heaven’s Gate! Remember that?” Carlson began the segment, cheerfully. He proceeded to rehash the well-known details of the cult that made so many headlines in the ’90s: the mass suicide; the bowl-cut-sporting co-founder, Marshall Applewhite; the belief that the Hale-Bopp comet was an interplanetary message. “Members of the cult believed they were part of an alien species trapped in human form,” Carlson said. “Applewhite taught them to give up all human attachments: their relationships with their families, their friends, their jobs, their possessions, ultimately their names”—here, he paused for dramatic effect—“their genders, and their own bodies. Sound familiar?”

Applewhite castrated himself, Carlson told viewers, in an effort to achieve “androgynous immortality,” and encouraged his fellow cult members to do the same. “You can go on Wikipedia and read all about it,” Carlson said, “and we recommend that you do. Why? Because, once again, it sounds familiar. Heaven’s Gate is proof that when religious fanatics command you to surrender your gender and become androgynous, castrate yourself and your children—it’s probably not going to end well.”

And then, abruptly, the segment ends.

Carlson’s lawyers have argued that he is not a journalist but instead, effectively, an entertainer—that anyone who might see him as a reliable purveyor of facts is making a foolish category error. His show’s appeal, though, depends on its gaudy adjacency to journalism: Carlson’s segments look like the news and act like the news, even as they regularly distort the news. But his Heaven’s Gate rant defied that logic. The cult’s deaths took place in 1997; as far as I can tell, they have no explicit connection to the current moment. Except, that is, for the cultish commands that Carlson treated as abiding dangers to his viewers: Surrender your gender. Castrate yourself, and your children.

The host shares a skill set with the man he once called “a demonic force” and a “destroyer.” Both Carlson and Donald Trump have a way with words. They wield them not simply as tools of meaning but also, often, as simple punctuation. What Trump does in his writing—the repetition, the ad hoc capitalization—Carlson does in his speech. He turns the core message of every segment he airs—they’re coming for you; be afraid—into a rhythmic proposition. Like a jingle rendered in a minor key, Carlson’s show turns fear into music.

[Read: How Fox News became a language]

And here is the grim refrain of his Heaven’s Gate riff: castrate. The segment may have seemed discordant; it was, on the contrary, all too harmonious with everything else. One of Carlson’s most consequential legacies, my colleague Charlie Warzel writes, will be his mainstreaming of hard-right agendas. This is what Carlson was doing as he offered up his weird little history lesson. He was vilifying transgender people—in particular, transgender women. He chose to mock 39 people who died 26 years ago in order to make an insidious suggestion: that those who identify as transgender are in the thrall of a cult.   

The segment bears one more mark of a typical Carlson screed. For all its insinuations, it retains plausible deniability. In an earlier moment on Friday’s show, Carlson referred to the Nashville school shooter as a “transgenderist terrorist,” the invented adjective suggesting an ideological choice rather than a human truth. But in the Heaven’s Gate segment, Carlson never says transgender. He merely implies, and hints. Were he questioned, he could easily argue that the segment was a throwaway, a callback to the ’90s that filled space in the waning minutes of a Friday-night broadcast. That ambiguity—that willingness to air words that are vetted and violent at the same time—is a core element of Carlson’s rhetoric. The slippery language flatters his audience. They’ll understand its grammar, the implication goes, in a way those woke liberals won’t. The language protects Carlson. It serves everyone involved—save for the people who have to live in the shadow of Carlson’s insinuations.

[Read: American cynicism is winning]

It was an apt coincidence, then, that Carlson spent his final moments on Fox mocking the failures of a cult. Cults and conspiracy theories tend to share similar dynamics: They offer community to their adherents. They rationalize the world’s chaos. They start from their preferred conclusions, and work backwards. “It’s super-simple,” Carlson said in an opening segment on Friday’s show, as he spun a dizzying argument that combined home appraisals, FICO scores, HUD, Kamala Harris, redlining, job training, and marijuana legalization into a claim about Democrats’ electoral machinations. (“If you want total control over the entire country,” Carlson said, “you need demographic change everywhere.”)

Conspiracy theories tend to involve what scholars call epistemic or cognitive closure: Their tales create vacuum-sealed worlds where truth becomes tautological, where everything has an easy answer, and where earwormy refrains—the ruling class, the woke left, the PC police—anchor every melody. Fox may brand itself as a bold teller of truths, fighting against conformity and groupthink; in fact, as so much reporting has suggested, the network is desperate to keep its adherents from doubting their mission or defecting from the cause. So too with Carlson. His show offered opinion; what it really sold, though, was daily reassurance: that his viewers’ fears are justified, that their biases are noble, that the world is precisely as disordered as they claim it—and need it—to be. Carlson gave his audiences the stories they wanted to hear; in return, they gave him fervent loyalty.

And so, now, Carlson is a celebrity with a massive fan base and a minimized platform. (Given that his $20-million-a-year contract will reportedly be paid out, he will also be doing what he has spent years deriding others for: getting paid for not working.) Carlson, in leaving Fox, has attained that most powerful of statuses. He is a free agent with a following. He could become the next Alex Jones. He could become the next Bill O’Reilly. He could become the next president. Carlson might have already hinted—ambiguously, teasingly—at his plans. Yesterday, his personal website transformed to acknowledge his departure from Fox. TuckerCarlson.com, like a ground game in waiting, instructs fans to text Carlson. In exchange for their data, the new language promises, they’ll be among the first to learn the answer to the question so many are waiting to hear: “what Tucker’s up to next.”

US prosecutors accuse group's leaders of 'seditious conspiracy' in alleged plot to prevent peaceful transfer of power.

By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.

His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.

Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”

[David A. Graham: Biden’s in]

And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.

There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“I think there’s no question that neither Trump nor Biden are where they want to be, but … if you project forward, it’s just easier to see a path for victory for Biden than for Trump or DeSantis,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few analysts in either party to question the projections of a sweeping red wave last November.

Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.

The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.

On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.

“The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”

After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.

Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost their reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.

With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

[Read: Biden’s blue-collar jobs bet]

But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.

If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.

That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.

For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.

In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.

For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.

Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.

The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”

Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.

Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more. “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.”

Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.

In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”

On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump. Although Devine told me, “I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”

One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.

[Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment]

In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.

A potential re-run of the 2020 US election is on the cards - that's not exciting voters for now.

Donald Trump, who is accused of rape, will likely not appear in court to defend himself against the charge. The former president declined the chance to appear at the trial that begins today, he explained through his lawyer, because of the “logistical burdens” his presence would place on the courthouse and on New York City, where the civil proceeding is taking place. It seems he does not want to be an inconvenience.

But Trump will be an unavoidable presence as the trial unfolds. The writer E. Jean Carroll is suing him for damages related to the allegation she made in 2019, which he has vehemently denied: that Trump, encountering her in a New York City department store in the 1990s, led her into a dressing room and raped her. At issue in the trial are defamation and battery—the latter claim made possible by a New York State law that provides a one-year window for adult victims of sexual assault to file civil claims after the criminal statute of limitations has expired. Carroll is also suing Trump in a separate defamation case, based on the disparaging comments he made in response to her accusation; the path of that case may depend in part on the outcome of the current trial. Jury selection will begin today, with arguments expected throughout the week.

[Read: The cruel paradox at the heart of E. Jean Carroll’s allegation against Trump]

Trump has tried to dismiss Carroll’s claims in both the narrow sense—his lawyers tried and failed to get both cases dismissed—and the broad. You could read the empty excuse Trump offered for his non-appearance at the trial in a similar vein: as an extension of efforts he has made to minimize Carroll’s accusation, undermine her credibility, and paint her story as a hoax. Trump has made those attempts not merely in public statements but also in sworn testimony. In January, Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge hearing both of Carroll’s cases, ordered a partial unsealing of depositions that both Carroll and Trump had given in October 2022 for the defamation suit. The portions of the transcripts made available detail the contested events of that day as well as their public aftermath. In them, Trump repeats his familiar insults. But he also acknowledges, seemingly in spite of himself, the gravity of Carroll’s claim. “She’s accusing me of rape—of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge,” Trump says. In testimony that found the former president ranting, rambling, and generally resisting the word rape itself, this was a rare moment of clarity.

Carroll had also been hesitant to use the word rape, she has made clear: The word had felt too loaded, too stark, to describe what she says happened in that dressing room. She does not use the term in the book excerpt, published in 2019 in New York magazine, in which she first made her claim public. Per her account, the interaction began when she encountered Trump at Bergdorf Goodman. He told her that he wanted to buy clothes for someone else as a gift, she alleges, and asked her to try on his selection. As she writes in her excerpt:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. … He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

She struggled against him, she alleges, as he raped her.

I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand—for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other—and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

Not until Carroll told a friend about the alleged assault, she says in the deposition, did she find the language for it. “Lisa shocked me in the call,” Carroll says. “She told me I had been raped.”

“Had it occurred to you?” Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba asks.

“No,” Carroll replies.

[Read: The real meaning of Trump’s ‘she’s not my type’ defense]

Elsewhere in her deposition, Carroll explains her initial hesitance to go public with her claims. “Did you ever consider coming forward with your account prior to #MeToo?” Habba asks.

“Never,” Carroll replies.

“Why not?”

“Just—I’m going to say something that even surprises me—because women who have been raped are looked at in this society as less, are looked at as spoiled goods, are looked at as rather dumb to let themselves get attacked. I mean, even you have to say, ‘Did you scream?’ I mean, every woman who admits to being attacked has to answer that question—‘Why didn’t you scream, why did you come forward when you did, why didn’t you come forward before?’ And so, no, I didn’t—I would have been fired.”

Carroll, throughout the deposition, acknowledges the cultural reality of rape: the suspicion placed on those who say it has happened to them, the impulse to blame them, the stigma that follows. Trump, by contrast, repeatedly describes her allegation as a mere political tactic—one more effort, waged by unnamed enemies, to take him down. He repeatedly attacks Carroll: In his testimony, he treats her mental fitness (“sick,” “really sick,” “sick, mentally”) as a refrain. He dismisses Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, as a political operative, and threatens to sue her. He threatens to sue Carroll as well (“I’ll be suing her very strongly”). He writes off Judge Kaplan (no relation to Carroll’s lawyer) as “not a fan of mine.” He returns to his favored role—the cable-TV critic—to analyze an appearance Carroll made on CNN, and thoroughly misrepresents the claims she made during the segment. At one point, he gets in a dig at Joe Biden. At another, via his dismissal of this publication’s report about Trump’s disparagement of Americans who died in war—“hoax,” “total hoax,” “failed magazine”—he gets in a dig at The Atlantic.

[Read: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]

It’s all extremely familiar: Distract, deflect, “flood the zone with shit.” The strategy has proved effective for him in the past, both when it comes to Carroll’s claims and when it comes to those of the other women—more than 20—who have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied all of their claims.) It is the same tactic that Trump reportedly demanded of Brett Kavanaugh when the then–Supreme Court nominee was credibly accused of assault: Perform rage. Sell it. Make the indignation so incandescent that the heat of it consumes everything else.

But the pared-down scope of the trial will likely limit Trump’s ability to put his typical antics to use. The case will rest on a binary question: Did he rape Carroll, or didn’t he? The question is big and consequential. That helps explain why Trump has seemed to resist talking about it in straightforward terms. Robbie Kaplan, in the deposition, asks him about public statements he made about Carroll from 2019 to 2022. Carroll’s claim, Trump wrote in one of them, is that he “swooned her” in the dressing room.

“What does ‘swooned her’ mean?” Kaplan asks.

“That would be a word,” Trump replies, “maybe accurate or not, having to do with talking to her and talking [sic] her—to do an act that she said happened, which didn’t happen. And it’s a nicer word than the word that starts with an F, and this would be a word that I used because I thought it would be inappropriate to use the other word.”

Kaplan looked up swoon in the dictionary, she notes. Did Trump intend it to mean “to faint with extreme emotion”?

“Well, sort of that’s what … she said I did to her,” Trump replies. “She fainted with great emotion.”

That is manifestly not what Carroll says happened. But Trump’s evasion also acknowledges, in its way, the immensity of the assertions she has made. Swoon is simply not a word most people use—unless, that is, they are trying to avoid using another one.

Carroll’s defamation case against Trump preceded the current one: In denying her allegations so disparagingly and so personally, Carroll argued, the former president has harmed her reputation. That claim will hover over the trial as it moves forward this week. The proceeding itself, for that reason and others, will likely be particularly complicated, as lawyers struggle to find unbiased jury members and debate which evidence is admissible and which is beyond the trial’s scope. Still, the stakes of it all are painfully clear. The trial will make Carroll one of the few Trump accusers to have her day in court. And it will decide whether the man who has earned so many epithets over the years is deserving of one more: rapist.

Carroll is suing Trump for alleged rape under new New York law and defamation; she says attack took place in mid-1990s.

As the race for the GOP presidential nomination gets under way, the party’s ideological divisions are sharpening.

Consider the opening salvo of Donald Trump’s third Republican presidential campaign. The former president and his allies have fusilladed Ron DeSantis over the Florida governor’s past support for curbing the growth of Medicare and Social Security spending, echoing a similar line of attack from President Joe Biden. This all comes before DeSantis has even formally announced a presidential bid, an indication, perhaps, that Trump aims to deter his most formidable Republican opponent from entering the fray.

Faced with a pincer movement from an adroit former president and Democrats keen on a Trump-Biden rematch, DeSantis finds himself in the most vexing position of his strikingly successful political career. His chief advantage in running against Trump has been the widespread perception that as the governor of a competitive, vote-rich state, he would be more appealing to suburban independents and other marginal voters. But with Trump pivoting to the political center—on entitlements but also, more tentatively, on the scope of abortion regulation—DeSantis is at risk of losing the electability argument. Despite his many liabilities, the former president is positioning himself as the only candidate capable of cementing working-class moderates as a core part of the Republican coalition.

Assuming that DeSantis does move forward with a presidential campaign, he’ll have to decide how to counter Trump’s moderate turn on entitlements. He could charge the former president with hypocrisy, pointing to the fact that the Trump administration explicitly called for reducing future safety-net spending in its fiscal 2021 budget. But it’s hard to see that approach succeeding. A famously protean figure, Trump has always worn his ideological commitments lightly. As the political strategist Liam Donovan recently observed in an interview with The New York Times, “In 2016, Trump was exempt from the punitive standards we hold conventional politicians to, and what’s remarkable is that seven years and a presidential term later, that still holds true.”

[Read: The glaring contradictions of Republicans’ rhetoric of freedom]

Recognizing that Trump will continue to press his advantage on entitlements, DeSantis could instead offer a vigorous defense of entitlement reform, leaning into his own apparent vulnerability. In the absence of a larger narrative connecting fiscal consolidation and American renewal, however, the Florida governor would risk reinforcing Trump’s role as the GOP’s defender of middle-class economic interests. And of course DeSantis wouldn’t be the only Republican aspirant to face this dilemma.

What the former president’s Republican rivals are missing, in short, is a compelling ideological thesis, one that offers a clear alternative to Trump’s class-war conservatism and that resonates with the “somewhat conservative” voters who are the party’s center of gravity. What they need is a conservatism of normalcy.

In his influential 1957 essay “Conservatism as an Ideology,” the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington defined conservatism as “that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter.” Conservative ideology is thus best understood as situational, not ideational. Rather than offer a substantive vision for the remaking of a given social order, the task of conservatism is to defend established institutions and beliefs against those with the power and determination to remake them.

Given the anti-establishment ethos of contemporary conservatism, this definition might at first seem out of date. But it still captures something important about how conservatives understand their role in American life. Conservatives see themselves as guardians of the nation’s distinctive constitutional and cultural inheritance and their opponents as partisans of destructive innovations that would make Americans less prosperous and free.

The question for conservatives, then, is which threat to the American social order merits their focused attention?

Last month, Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker examined the differences between two clashing conceptions of what the right should stand against: rural economic populism, which he associates with Trump and Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, and “the ‘anti-woke’ educational crusade that has captured other corners of the GOP.”

In keeping with his class-first sensibilities, Kang sees the populist political formula as more potent. As much as he might doubt the credibility of Vance’s and Trump’s populism, Kang warns that the two politicians “understand how to sell a message to the rural, economically depressed white voting population.” Viewed through Huntington’s lens, this rural populism identifies the most urgent threat to American flourishing as the advent of a cosmopolitan corporate elite committed to shredding the social protections, both formal and informal, that have undergirded the civic and economic health of the nation’s middle-class communities.  

As for conservative anti-wokeness, Kang deems it little more than a distraction from class politics, “a smoke screen of supposed cultural principles that allow the establishment to feel comfortable with a candidate who likely will protect business interests without inviting the potential chaos of a Trump Presidency.” Michael Lind offered a similarly biting assessment of anti-wokeness in UnHerd, characterizing it as “just a revival of the old culture-war politics of the Bushes, particularly George W. Bush.”

But new cultural fault lines can give rise to new coalitions, and discounting the power and resonance of anti-wokeness would be a mistake. Critics on the left take the notion that there is something deeply flawed with America under “late capitalism” for granted, hence their begrudging respect for class-war conservatism. A large majority of Republican voters, by contrast, describe themselves as believers in capitalism for whom hard work is its own reward, and one of the main conservative objections to wokeness is that it represents a rejection of meritocratic ideals.

Although class-war conservatism undoubtedly has a constituency, it remains a minority persuasion on the right. For example, when Gallup asked voters if they favored imposing heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in 2022, 24 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed, far lower than the 79 percent support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. And in April, a Wall Street Journal survey found that 55 percent of GOP respondents prioritized fighting “woke ideology in our schools and businesses” over protecting entitlements. It would be foolish to overinterpret this finding, not least because the same survey found that Republicans oppose entitlement reform by a wide margin. Nevertheless, it speaks to the potential for a conservative synthesis that would incorporate anti-racialism into a larger politics of normalcy.

In 1920, the Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding successfully campaigned on a “return to normalcy,” an implicit rebuke of the dislocation the nation had endured under Woodrow Wilson, who was very much a modernizing progressive. Our own era has been similarly tumultuous, and one can imagine a new return to normalcy having broad appeal. Indeed, as Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation noted in January, DeSantis explicitly contrasted woke ideology with “normalcy” in his second inaugural address. DeSantis’s formulation—“We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy”—offers a way forward for those on the right who consider class-war conservatism a distraction from the threat of militant progressivism.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

Rooted in growing Sun Belt suburbs, this ideological tendency would be less nostalgic and more aspirational. If class-war conservatives define business elites and entitlement-cutters as the fundamental challenge to America’s social order, a conservatism of normalcy would stand in opposition to the divisive racialism, unlimited welfarism, and cartel federalism of the progressive left. It would celebrate America’s multiethnic mainstream, defend law and order, and demand responsive, efficient, and limited government. And above all else, it would aim to competently advance its policy priorities.

It might be too much to expect this still-inchoate brand of conservatism to emerge victorious in the coming months. For one, a not-inconsiderable number of Republican primary voters are in no mood for normalcy. But as the right looks to the future, and to an electorate exhausted and demoralized by the politicization of every aspect of public life, the prospects for a conservatism of normalcy will grow only stronger.

The trial comes a month after former US President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty in an unrelated criminal case surrounding payments made to bury accounts of alleged extramarital sex.

Jury selection begins in a case where the ex-president is accused of attacking a woman in the 1990s.