Remember Ron DeSantis?

Of course you know who Ron DeSantis is. But remember who he appeared to be just a few months ago? In the first days after the 2022 midterms, the Florida governor looked like the future of the Republican Party. Donald Trump had just led the GOP to its third straight underwhelming election, thanks largely to underperformance by the former president’s favored candidates. Meanwhile, DeSantis had romped to victory in Florida. The Republican Party seemed to need an alternative to Trump, and DeSantis looked like that guy.

DeSantis officially entered the race May 24 during a disastrous appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. The decision to appear virtually is a sign of exactly what ails his fledgling campaign: DeSantis’s reputation thrived online, but once he had to actually meet people IRL, he looked strange and anything but invincible. How he stumbled is partly a story about media narratives—how press coverage can inflate and then deflate a candidate in short order—and, ironically, partly a story about how politics is strange and unpredictable, no matter what the narrative shapers tell you.

What is striking is how little has materially changed about the presidential race since the midterms. Mostly, DeSantis has continued to add to his list of conservative triumphs in Florida, with some asterisks. DeSantis’s fight against Disney has stagnated a bit; the Mouse has good lawyers who have managed to run some circles around the governor. Just last week, Disney announced that it would cancel $1 billion in development in Orlando. DeSantis also signed a ban on abortion after six weeks of gestation into law, which he wanted but which some observers expect will be a liability for him. As for Trump, his major developments are getting indicted in Manhattan and losing a $5 million sexual-assault and defamation lawsuit. These are not the sorts of things you typically expect to help a candidate.

And yet, Trump has only gotten stronger over that period. In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump has gone from a low of 47.3 percent on November 18 to 56 percent today, while DeSantis has fallen from 29 to just less than 20 percent. (Everyone else is still a distant afterthought.) The former president has benefited from Republican voters rallying around him amid his legal troubles. As for DeSantis, he has less failed than declined to seize the moment: Many supporters have been frustrated that he is only now officially launching his campaign, even though it’s been a foregone conclusion for years. Until recently, he’s declined to really criticize Trump much. His wooden, clumsy appearances overseas, in Washington, and in New Hampshire have hurt him too, as has an uncharacteristically disciplined and methodical Trump effort to tear DeSantis down. Detractors say DeSantis is too online, an impression that his Twitter campaign launch did not exactly help.

How did DeSantis stock go from so high to so low? His crash began with being overrated in the first place. Reporters love a shiny new object, pundits don’t like Trump, and the prospect of a Trump-DeSantis battle royale got everyone excited. When people asked me what I thought was the biggest flaw in conventional wisdom, I would say that DeSantis was overrated—which made me feel pretty clever, until I realized that every other political reporter felt the same way. It just took a while for polls to catch up.

Today, DeSantis is probably underrated. Now that he’s officially in the race, he’ll get a bump in the polls, and we’ll start to hear about a “Ronaissance” (trademark pending). Just how underrated, though? If he’s really going to challenge Trump, he’s going to have to show that he has the stomach to really fight back. (The vapors in DeSantis land over a pretty mild tweet from his super PAC don’t augur well, though it’s early.) He’s also going to have to solve his 2020 conundrum: He can’t very well imply that Trump is a loser while also endorsing Trump’s view that the election was stolen. Only Trump can pull off that type of cognitive dissonance.

Everyone thinks they know what it would take for Republicans to free themselves of Trump, but, like true communism, it’s never been tried: GOP politicians have never been willing or able to actually do it. DeSantis’s early hype was rooted in a belief that he had what it took to follow through. Now he has a chance, but, as Trump’s old defense secretary noted, the enemy gets a vote—and he’ll be starting from a more commanding advantage than ever over DeSantis.

This cheat sheet tracks 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?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.

Why does he want to run?
Biden’s slogan is apparently “Let’s finish the job.” He centered his launch video on the theme of freedom, but underlying all of this is his apparent belief that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

[Mark Leibovich: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

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?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. 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 were to bow out, she’d be the immediate 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?
Not right now.

(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 stepped away.

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?
Not at this moment.

(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 dropped out, 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?
No.

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?
Not if she isn’t running.

(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?
Yes. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants 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 a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
No.

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?
Not now.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run on April 19.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition—hell, he wouldn’t even be the first Kennedy to primary a sitting Democrat. You can expect a campaign arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming”).

Who wants him to run?
Despite his bizarre beliefs, he’s polling in double digits against Biden—though that may mostly be reflection of dissatisfaction with the president and of his own famous surname.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

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.

[Elaine Godfrey: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP is 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?
Yes. He is slated to finally announce a long-awaited run in an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.

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, and maybe Jeb!

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

Can he win the nomination?
He doesn’t look like the Trump-toppler today that he did several months ago, but it’s 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.

[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina]

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.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 37-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling résumé (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J. D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like Covidism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
As The New Yorker found in a long profile in December, he has some avid fans. So far, little evidence suggests this amounts to a winning coalition.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not. At this stage, Ramaswamy gives off Steve Forbes/Herman Cain/Morry Taylor vibes—an interesting character from the business world, but not a contender. Then again, Trump once did too.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, the formerly longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
Yes. Hutchinson announced on April 2 that he is running. It would have been funnier to announce a day earlier, though.

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 that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the 2020 election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.

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?
No. After giving a campaign “very serious consideration,” Hogan ruled himself out on March 5, saying he was worried that too large a field would help Trump win the nomination once more.

Why did he want to run?
Hogan argued 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 wanted him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Could he have won?
No.

(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?
No. On June 5, after weighing a campaign, he announced he would not run. Warning about the dangers of a Trump reprise, he said, “Every candidate needs to understand the responsibility of getting out and getting out quickly if it’s not working.” Points for taking his own advice!

Why did he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and saw his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism. He is also a prominent Trump critic.

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

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

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

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

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign in North Charleston, South Carolina, on May 22.

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. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first high-ish-profile endorsement.

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?
No. On April 14, Pompeo announced he wasn’t running. “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again,” he said.

Why did 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 wanted him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Could he have won 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?
Probably not. He said on May 1 that he wasn’t running “this year.” But he seems to be rethinking that as Ron DeSantis’s campaign sputters.

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?
Certainly not if he isn’t running.

(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.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

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

(Mandel Ngan / Getty) Francis Suarez

Who is he?
Suarez is the popular second-term mayor of Miami and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Is he running?
He’s been telling reporters for months that he’s considering, most recently in March.

Why does he want to run?
Suarez touts his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.” He’s also someone who voted against the Republican Ron DeSantis in the 2018 governor’s race and did not vote for Trump in 2020.

Who wants him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Suarez reports that Trump said he was the “hottest politician in America after him,” but the former president is himself running, and with DeSantis a presumptive candidate, Suarez would be an underdog in his home state.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly unlikely.

(Sam Wolfe / Bloomberg / Getty) Mike Rogers

Who is he?
Rogers is a congressman from Alabam—wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Representative Mike Rogers. This one is from Michigan and retired in 2015. He was previously an FBI agent and was head of the Intelligence Committee while on Capitol Hill.

Is he running?
He is thinking about it and has formed a group with the suitably vague name “Lead America.”

Why does he want to run?
He laid out some unassailably broad ideas for a campaign in an interview with Fox News, including a focus on innovation and civic education, but it’s hard to tell what exactly the goal is here. “This is not a vanity project for me,” he added, which, okay, sure.

Who wants him to run?
“I think the Trump, Trump-lite lane is pretty crowded,” he told Fox. “The lane that is not talking about Trump, that is talking about solutions and the way forward and what the real challenges we face—I just don’t find a lot of people in that lane.” Which, again, okay?

Can he win the nomination?
Nope.

(Ida Mae Astute / Getty) Chris Christie

Who is he?
What a journey this guy has had, from U.S. attorney to respected governor of New Jersey to traffic-jam laughingstock to Trump sidekick to Trump critic. Whew.

Is he running?
He really wants to, but he is “trying to figure out” if there’s a way to run against Trump and DeSantis, he told Fox News in late March. A former aide told The New York Times that Christie “wants for sure” to run.

Why does he want to run?
Anyone who runs for president once and loses wants to run again—especially if he thinks the guy who beat him is an idiot, as Christie clearly thinks about Trump. Moreover, he seems agitated to see other Republicans trying to run without criticizing Trump.

Who wants him to run?
“I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with donors over the course of the last few weeks,” Christie has said, as is obligatory of long-shot candidates. But he doesn’t seem to have much of a campaign-in-waiting or a clear constituency, except the Mooch.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Larry Elder

Who is he?
A longtime conservative radio host and columnist, he ran as a Republican in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20.

Why does he want to run?
Glad you asked! “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable,” he tweeted. “We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President.” We don’t have any idea what that means either.

Who wants him to run?
Impossible to say at this stage, but deep-blue California is a tough launching pad for any conservative, especially an unseasoned candidate. This recall campaign also dredged up various unflattering information about his past.

Can he win the nomination?
Hope springs eternal, but probability does not.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Rick Perry

Who is he?
Perry was a three-term governor of Texas before serving as energy secretary under Donald Trump. He’s also run for president three times: in 2012, 2016, and … I forget the third one. Oops.

Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run.

Why does he want to run?
He didn’t say, but he’s struggled to articulate much of a compelling case to Republican voters beyond the fact that he’s from Texas, he looks good in a suit, and he wants to be president, gosh darn it.

Who wants him to run?
Probably no one. As Mike Pompeo already discovered, there’s not much of a market for a run-of-the-mill former Trump Cabinet member in the primary—especially one who had such a forgettable turn as secretary, mostly remembered for being dragged peripherally into both the first Trump impeachment and election subversion.

Can he win the nomination?
The third time would not be a charm.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Doug Burgum

Who is he?
What? You don’t know? Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum’s serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.

Is he running?
Apparently so! He was on approximately no one’s radar until a CBS News report on May 18 that kindly referred to his plans to run a “dark horse” campaign. Extremely dark.

Why does he want to run?
He told a North Dakota newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans want candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider, targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?)

Who wants him to run?
Lots of people expected a governor from the Dakotas to be a candidate in 2024, but they were looking at Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Burgum is very popular at home—he won more than three-quarters of the vote in 2020—but that still amounts to fewer people than the population of Toledo, Ohio.

Can he win the nomination?
“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” he has said. “That’s a competitive advantage.” But it’s even better to have a chance, which he doesn’t.

THIRD-PARTY AND INDEPENDENT (Tom Williams / Getty) Joe Manchin

Who is he?
A Democratic U.S. senator and former governor of West Virginia, he was the pivotal centrist vote for the first two years of Joe Biden’s term. I’ve described him as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.”

Is he running?
It’s very hard to tell how serious he is. He has visited Iowa, and is being courted by No Labels, the nonpartisan centrist organization, to carry its banner. He’s shown no signs of running, and would stand no chance, in the Democratic primary.

Why does he want to run?
Manchin would arguably have less power as a third-party president than he does as a crucial swing senator, but he faces perhaps the hardest reelection campaign of his life in 2024, as the last Democrat standing in a now solidly Republican state. He also periodically seems personally piqued at Biden and the Democrats over slights perceived or real.

Who wants him to run?
No Labels would love to have someone like him, a high-profile figure who’s willing to buck his party and has policies that would appeal to voters from either party. It’s hard to imagine he’d have much of an organic base of support, but Democrats are terrified he’d siphon off enough votes to hand Trump or another Republican the win in a three-way race.

Can he win?
“Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in April. If that is true, do not expect to see him in the presidential race.

(Frederick M. Brown / Getty) Cornel West

Who is he?
West is a philosopher, a theologian, a professor, a preacher, a gadfly, a progressive activist, an actor, a spoken-word recording-artist, an author … and we’re probably missing a few.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5.

Why does he want to run?
“In these bleak times I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States,” he said in his announcement video. West is a fierce leftist who has described Trump as a “neo-fascist” and Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”

Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. The People’s Party is relatively new and unproven, and doesn’t have much of a base of its own.

Can he win?
Let’s hear it from Brother West: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.” Sounds like a no, but it should be a lively, entertaining campaign.

On Sunday, 500,000 people marched peacefully through the streets of Warsaw. The occasion marked the 34th anniversary of elections that led to Poland’s nonviolent exit from communism. But the mass showing was no ritual commemoration; it was both a celebration of the past and a protest against the current Polish government’s effort to return the country to autocracy.

The ruling Law and Justice Party government had spent the previous week mocking the march’s organizers and discouraging Poles from participating. On its official Twitter account, the party even went so far as to publish an outrageous video spot featuring footage of train tracks in front of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with The June 4th March superimposed over the camp’s entrance. A few politicians walked back their party’s attempt to weaponize Auschwitz, but the offensiveness of the spot stoked public anxiety in the week leading up to June 4: Would Law and Justice try to shut down the march? Would the two dozen “counterprotests” approved for the same day become a pretext for violent provocations by some of the far-right organizations that draw government subsidies?

[From the October 2018 issue: A warning from Europe]

Elections are often written off as boring procedural exercises; even in free societies, without state TV channels that drown out the opposition with progovernment propaganda, opponents have a hard time mobilizing voters to dislodge the ruling party. Why, then, should commemorating the anniversary of elections held more than three decades ago strike such fear into the hearts of Poland’s governing elite?

Contemporaries worldwide are more likely to remember June 4, 1989, as the day when 200,000 Chinese troops made the streets of Beijing run red with the blood of protesting students and bystanders. Halfway around the world from Tiananmen Square, however, Poles had spent the day voting in their freest elections since the 1920s. That exercise led to an extraordinary, previously unthinkable moment: Poland’s autocratic, Moscow-backed communists voluntarily surrendered power, acknowledging that the Solidarity movement had overwhelmingly defeated them at the polls.

In the words of the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who observed the elections firsthand, “until almost the day before, anyone who had predicted these events would have been universally considered not a logician but a lunatic.” Mikhail Gorbachev was already celebrated across the Soviet Bloc for his reforms at home, but Poles took seriously the risk that he might green-light a Red Army intervention to keep communists in power. News of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which broke simultaneously with the Polish election results, heightened these worries. Instead, Gorbachev blessed the results, and Solidarity created a coalition government led by Eastern Europe’s first noncommunist prime minister in decades.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the election that brought down communism in Poland was therefore celebrated. But the Law and Justice Party has spent a good part of the past two decades convincing voters that the 1989 election should instead be a source of shame: Communists should have been hanged; dissidents who made the 1989 elections possible sold Poland out for a quick buck; and Poland is still governed by a shadow conspiracy.

The bottom-line message from Law and Justice is that most Polish voters should stay home, even if they worry that Poland is currently governed by autocratic xenophobes, because the only alternative is an opposition that will sell Poland out to the Russians—and that derives from a political lineage that has been doing so since the 1980s. What once was a fringe position on the right is now mainstream in Poland. Parliamentary elections are coming up this fall, and Law and Justice fears a loss, so it is making full use of antidemocratic tactics honed over eight years in government: subordinating the judiciary to elected politicians, turning public media into government-propaganda outlets, and fomenting culture wars.

Throughout 2022, experts imagined that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine might reverse Poland’s antidemocratic course, with the European Union and NATO seeing Poland as their anti-Russian bulwark. Alas, this was wishful thinking. In March, TVN, a majority-U.S.-owned television station, aired a documentary revealing that Pope John Paul II had been entangled in clerical abuse in communist Poland. The U.S. ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry to answer for the TV station’s involvement in “hybrid warfare.” The import was clear: Challenging the government-sanctioned image of a heroic Poland, symbolized by a saintly pope, threatens NATO, because NATO needs Poland.

Scholarly lectures that provide evidence of Polish anti-Semitic violence during the Holocaust are now regularly, even violently, disrupted. Just last week at Warsaw’s German Historical Institute, a far-right parliamentarian staged a sit-in to prevent a lecture on government censorship of Holocaust research. He flashed his official ID at police trying to evict him, claiming that it afforded him immunity. The would-be speaker, the distinguished historian Jan Grabowski, was spirited out the building’s back door to avoid violence by right-wing protesters. He said, “I felt like I was in Poland in the 1930s.”

What brought Poland to a frenzy in the week leading up to Sunday’s anniversary goes beyond culture wars in alleged defense of Poland’s public image. On May 29, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law a bill creating a new standing commission to investigate Russian influence in Poland from 2007 to 2022. The commission is empowered to investigate any citizen, without obligation to produce documentation. Rather than a narrowly defined mandate, the law contains vague wording (it provides no definition of Russian influence) that affords the Parliament-appointed commission almost limitless scope: It can break the legal protections surrounding confidential business dealings; it can pierce attorney-client privilege.

[From the December 1962 issue: Poland]

Polish civil-society critics have focused primarily on what the law means for elections, because the commission can ban anyone from public office for 10 years. Law and Justice lawmakers have been vocal about their intention to use the law against Poland’s main opposition politician, former Prime Minister and former European Council President Donald Tusk. (Opponents call the new law “Lex Tusk.”) But the law declares that the commission also has wide powers to reverse or declare null and void any “administrative decision that was rendered under Russian influence to the detriment of the interests of the Polish Republic.” The commission can unilaterally cancel contracts in commercial sectors connected to “critical infrastructure,” such as energy and information technology, with potentially catastrophic implications for business investment in Poland. And all of the commission’s determinations are final: They are nominally subject to an administrative court appeal, but that court can only verify that the commission acted according to the law that created it. For all intents and purposes, the politically appointed, administrative commission wields supreme judicial power.

The law is Polish McCarthyism, plain and simple. On May 29, the State Department released a press statement noting, “We share the concerns expressed by many observers that this law to create a commission to investigate Russian influence could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The European Parliament voted to debate the new Polish law. A former Polish prime minister (now a Law and Justice MEP) responded by promising to punish Poles who used “the European Parliament to incite rebellion in Poland, calling openly for people to go out into the streets.”

Jarosław Kurski, an influential commentator in Poland, noted on Sunday that it was no longer possible to separate the celebration of the country’s peaceful 1989 revolution from “fury at the shameless and incompetent governance of Law and Justice.” The turnout of a half million was 10 times what organizers had predicted—it amounted to one-third of Warsaw’s population—and that number does not even include the smaller marches across Poland’s major cities.

The far right planned to meet these demonstrations with counterprotests, but clearly 500,000 people could not be stopped even by violent far-right provocateurs. Yet Law and Justice doesn’t need to send police or fascist gangs into city streets to shut down political opposition. In the fall of 2020, more than 400,000 Poles protested the effective elimination of abortion rights by the Law and Justice–controlled Constitutional Tribunal; in the end, the government waited out the protests, then enforced the abortion ban.

Poles have taken June 4 back as a symbol of hope that one election can reverse an autocratic tide. Now comes the hard part: translating Sunday’s turnout in Warsaw’s streets into votes at the polls this autumn.

Official crime statistics are only released after a substantial delay, so for nearly a decade I’ve collected and compiled big-city crime data as a way to assemble a more real-time picture of national murder trends. And this spring, I’ve found something that I’ve never seen before and that probably has not happened in decades: strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate.

The United States may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded, according to my preliminary data. It is still early in the year and the trend could change over the second half of the year, but data from a sufficiently large sample of big cities have typically been a good predictor of the year-end national change in murder, even after only five months.

Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022. Big cities tend to slightly amplify the national trend—a 5 percent decline in murder rates in big cities would likely translate to a smaller decline nationally. But even so, the drop shown in the preliminary data is astonishing.

The good news comes with the caveat that murder is not uniformly falling everywhere. Memphis, for example, has experienced an uptick following the killing of Tyre Nichols in January. Additionally, even a record double-digit percent decline in murder in 2023 would still mean that a couple thousand more people will be murdered in America this year than in 2019. Finally, mass shootings are on the rise even as overall gun violence appears to be falling.

[David A. Graham: Murders are spiking in Memphis]

All of that said, the good news is, well, good. Murder is down 13 percent in New York City, and shootings are down 25 percent, relative to last year as of late May. Murder is down more than 20 percent in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. And, most significantly, murder is down 30 percent—30 percent!—or more in Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Little Rock, Arkansas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and others.

Explaining the trend is much more difficult than describing it. The cause of the Great Crime Decline of the 1990s, when murder fell 37 percent over six years, is still not fully understood, so any explanations of the current trend must remain in the hypothesis phase for now. The national nature of both the surge in murder in 2020 and the apparent decrease this year suggests that national explanations will be more convincing than local anecdotes. Moreover, the factors that caused murder to begin to spike in the summer of 2020 may not be the same factors (now, theoretically, in reverse) that are contributing to its decline in 2023.

“It is possible that police departments have returned to some of the proactive work that they curtailed during the COVID pandemic and after George Floyd, activities that may be inhibiting some gun violence,” Jerry Ratcliffe, a criminal-justice professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, told me. In Baltimore, for example, a new effort to focus policing resources on the small subset of the population that is believed to be responsible for a disproportionate share of violence has produced promising initial results.

Many cities have used federal COVID-relief money to hire more police officers, and there is some evidence—albeit preliminary—that adding police officers helps to reduce homicide, while also leading to more arrests for low-level offenses. We do not yet know how successful agencies have been at growing their ranks or whether more police officers are resulting in fewer shootings. Murder is down in Chicago, New Orleans, and New York, for example, but Chicago’s number of police officers is virtually unchanged from last summer, while New Orleans’s is down more than 8 percent and New York has roughly 2 percent fewer officers.

The end of the emergency phase of the coronavirus pandemic may also be contributing to the decline in murder. “With COVID restrictions being lifted and a return to some degree of normalcy, the traditional constraints that occurred within society affecting the routine activities of people have returned,” Ratcliffe said.

Anthony Smith, the executive director of Cities United, an organization working to address community violence, agrees that the end of the pandemic is playing a role in falling violence. “Structures and systems that folks relied on are back open and driving. A lot of this took place during COVID time when a lot of stuff was shut down and folks didn’t have access. There was a lot of bleakness, there was just nothing,” Smith told me. “The world opened back up.” Smith believes that young people were particularly disconnected by the shutdown in services prompted by COVID, contributing to increasing violence among youth.  

Smith also points to additional efforts to fund community interventions from the federal government and the efforts of philanthropic organizations to fund violence interventions. “There are more resources for the work, more investment in the work,” Smith told me. “A lot of cities have used [American Rescue Plan Act] dollars or general-fund dollars and decided to invest more in the intervention and prevention work around violence prevention.”

Smith highlighted the Department of Justice awarding $100 million to community groups addressing gun violence last year as an example of this investment. Cities have “increased their community-violence-intervention ecosystem and have focused in on identifying [those residents] most at risk and creating systems where they can identify, engage, and support them,” he told me.

The current downward shift in murder may reverse between now and December, and even if it doesn’t, it may ultimately prove to be a one-year anomaly. But whatever the causes—and whatever the staying power—the first five months of 2023 have produced an encouraging overall trend for the first time in years.

Millions of people first discovered the pleasures of piecing together a mystery through series such as Nancy Drew and The Mysterious Benedict Society; my touchpoint was Something Queer Is Going On, by Elizabeth Levy, later rebranded as The Fletcher Mysteries. I loved those chapter books, where a pair of best friends and their sweet, lazy basset hound, Fletcher, solved cases. As an adult, I still welcome riddles in my reading life, although I’ve broadened the way I think about them. I enjoy a good whodunit, but I’ve come to deeply appreciate fiction that doesn’t present a straightforward resolution to the puzzle that’s been introduced.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to describe writing like this. Some titles are like M. C. Escher’s impossible drawings, driving you to scratch your head, look closer, and try to make sense of how it all coheres. Others are reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan films (the good ones), where at the very end you begin questioning everything that came before. Such books sometimes provide answers of a kind, or leave you to ruminate on your own. The six below represent an eclectic mix of various styles and moods, but any one of them will be exactly right if you want a brainteaser.

Vintage

A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro

A Pale View of Hills, the Nobel laureate’s debut novel, is narrated by Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in the English countryside. The story begins in the aftermath of the death by suicide of her eldest daughter, Keiko. But Etsuko doesn’t want to dwell on Keiko—or so she tells us. Instead, she’s interested in reliving her memories of Nagasaki directly after World War II. She had been pregnant—presumably with Keiko—and living with her husband in a hastily erected apartment block when she met Sachiko, a young mother living in a small cottage with her own daughter, Mariko. The two women’s developing friendship has an undercurrent of tension; Etsuko quietly disapproves of Sachiko’s parenting—Mariko runs off occasionally, disobeys her mother, and is obsessed with a woman who doesn’t appear to be real—and Sachiko coldly defends herself from the unspoken criticism. As the novel unfolds, Etsuko’s reliability as a narrator becomes wobbly. What isn’t she telling us? What is she editing into or out of her own history? Is she aware that she’s doing it? Near the end, a single pronoun slip—a we rather than a you—instantaneously upends Etsuko’s entire account.

[Read: The movie that helped Kazuo Ishiguro make sense of the world]

Mariner

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

Don’t let this volume’s slimness fool you into thinking it’s insubstantial. Calvino’s masterpiece has multiple layers of riddles: Its chapters are arranged in mathematical precision according to the Fibonacci sequence, it involves real historical figures but isn’t realistic, and the titular cities are full of impossibilities. The narrative is structured as a continuous conversation between the traveling merchant Marco Polo and the ruler Kublai Khan, interspersed with 55 brief chapters—many shorter than one page, none longer than several. These are Marco Polo’s descriptions of a variety of places that are nominally part of the Khan’s empire. Each city is mysterious, and many are nonsensical. Ersilia, for instance, is repeatedly abandoned by its inhabitants and built elsewhere; Eusapia’s denizens have constructed an exact copy of their city underground to which they bring their mummified dead so that they can eternally pursue the pleasures they enjoyed in life; Isidora appears when a weary traveler yearns for a city, and fulfills dreams that belong to the traveler’s younger self rather than to who he is now. Whether the places exist literally or only metaphorically, whether Kublai Khan and Marco Polo are actually conversing—well, that’s up to you to decide.

[Read: Italo Calvino’s 14 definitions of what makes a classic]

Unnamed Press

Rubik, by Elizabeth Tan

Rubik’s Cubes, with their colorful squares and simple design, are nevertheless notoriously difficult to solve. So, too, is Tan’s debut, which begins with a random tragedy: One night, Elena Rubik, a young adult who has recently moved out of her parents’ home and is living with roommates, gets hit by a car and dies. Even in death, Elena’s presence is felt via her social-media profiles, her fan fiction, and the other detritus of her online life—and her existence reverberates across Rubik’s interconnected stories. These all take place within the same universe, which is basically ours except that the behemoths of Apple, Google, and Amazon are all replaced by Seed, a tech corporation with brilliant guerilla-marketing schemes and questionable motives. Seed features heavily within the plot; so do characters that reappear, sometimes changing drastically, as well as pop-culture elements and fandoms unique to the Rubik world. The sections seem disconnected and random at first, but as you begin to put together the pieces, you’ll find a dark aura rippling through the book.

Penguin Classics

Ice, by Anna Kavan

The narrator in Kavan’s most well-known novel, Ice, initially reads as candid and trustworthy. Through his eyes, we learn that the Earth is on the brink of ecological disaster—a spreading freeze seems like it might plunge the planet into a new ice age and eradicate humanity. As the ice spreads, the protagonist obsessively follows the trail of a girl he once knew. But how is he able to travel as he does amid the panic, the closing borders, and the impending collapse of society? Kavan allows only glimmers of possible explanation: Perhaps he’s working for a particular government, or maybe he’s connected to whoever is organizing the coming postapocalyptic world order. Ambiguities abound—who is this girl, and who is she to the narrator? He seems to be able to access her mind, to feel her terror and her pain—but how? The unconventional point-of-view shifts and the increasing creepiness of the narrator’s desire for the girl lead to many interpretations of the book’s plot, characters, and even its title, making Ice perfect to discuss with friends.

[Read: Apocalypse is now a chronic condition]

New Directions

Oreo, by Fran Ross

Oreo is a wonderfully irreverent story that plays fast and loose with the hero’s journey. Tragically, it’s the only novel Fran Ross ever published. Christine Clark, a 16-year-old known as Oreo (derived from what her grandmother calls her, Oriole, but purposely recalling the racialized insult) is on a quest to find her father, a white Jewish man who left the family when she was young. Oreo’s mother, who is Black, is a musician, on the road much of the time, so Oreo has been raised by her maternal grandmother and educated by a host of eccentric tutors. A child prodigy who invented her own martial art, among other accomplishments, Oreo is more than ready when her mom gives her a list of clues meant to help track down her dad. With little fanfare, she heads to New York City, echoing Theseus from Greek mythology. Oreo plays with form; its labyrinthine structure is another classical allusion, and it’s full of menus, lists, and math equations (though you don’t need to understand them to follow the plot) that both contribute to and digress from the main narrative. If you aren’t up on your myths, Ross helpfully includes back matter titled “A Key for Speed Readers, Nonclassicists, Etc.”

Mariner

PopCo, by Scarlett Thomas

Thomas’s PopCo features a delightfully quirky narrator, Alice, who works for the titular, massive international toy company, noted as being third in size only to Mattel and Hasbro. As part of the ideation-and-design team, she is in the middle of creating several activity kits for children when she has to put the work on hold in order to attend a corporate retreat at a country estate. When she’s invited to stay longer to crack the toy industry’s biggest challenge—how to get teenage girls to buy its products—she accepts. Thomas’s first books were murder mysteries, and this novel has some classic hallmarks of the genre: a secluded estate, hidden treasure, anonymous messages sent in code. But Thomas subverts expectations, much as Alice does, and the plot eschews the obvious questions about how to sell things, or what toys are even for, in favor of answering different ones about childhood, corporate greed, and conformity. As a bonus, Thomas has placed a tongue-in-cheek crossword in the back, along with some essential cryptanalysis tools, in case readers want to practice what they’ve learned from Alice’s educational asides.