In the space of two weeks, the country witnessed two major announcements from the Department of Justice: the first federal indictment of a former president (Donald Trump) for unlawful retention of classified documents and related acts of obstruction, concealment, and false statements, and a guilty plea by the son of the sitting president (Hunter Biden) to federal tax and gun charges.

The identities of the defendants mark these as highly significant political events. And the responses to both sets of charges tell us a great deal about the competing visions of governance on display in the early days of the 2024 election—one vision that threatens to destroy core principles of American law, and one that seeks to safeguard them.

Take, first, Trump’s reaction to his federal indictment. In his political rhetoric and in the emerging legal arguments in his defense, Trump claims that he did nothing wrong. The inquiry, by virtue of the fact that it was conducted by the Department of Justice in a Democratic presidential administration, is an inappropriate “political prosecution,” full stop. Trump leveled similar accusations of political motivation in response to the news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, although here Trump’s accusation was one of favoritism, not persecution.  

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Trump has spent years dismissing every investigation into him as a political witch hunt, so this should come as no surprise. But what has more recently become clear is that when he asserts that the charges against him are political, he isn’t actually critiquing the prosecutors for what he claims is their lack of independence, or suggesting that they should behave in a neutral and apolitical fashion. His claims that the inquiries are “politically motivated” are neither pure bad faith nor pure projection (though they may be both in part).

Instead, they are something more sinister and more revealing: a promise—a promise that if allowed to return to office, he will implement a vision of law enforcement in which no separation exists between prosecutors and political leadership, including the president. In the short term, this would mean benefits for Trump and his friends, and punishment for his enemies. But the long-term consequences would be much more dramatic: the abandonment of the core value of equal justice under law.

Viewed in the full context of the Trump presidency and the Trump reelection campaign, Trump’s charge of “political prosecution” seems to be in service of two related and complementary goals. The first is to convince the public that law enforcement and the administration of justice are inherently political, and thus that the charges against him can’t be trusted. There’s some evidence that this is working: A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 47 percent of the public believes that the charges against Trump are “politically motivated.”

The second, related purpose is to begin to prime the public to accept the fundamental changes Trump would like to make to federal law enforcement, and maybe to federal government more broadly, if given the chance. The irony, of course, is that these changes are designed to make law enforcement and government more political. But if Trump is successful enough in destroying the public’s trust and confidence in federal law enforcement, he may encounter little resistance in seeking to radically reshape core features of American governance.

Here the evidence of what Trump would like to do is crystal clear. Trump has explicitly pledged to weaponize the DOJ against political adversaries, telling supporters on the very day of his federal arraignment that he would “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Joe Biden and his family. He’s indicated that in a second term he’d bring back loyalists such as Jeffrey Clark, a key DOJ ally in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And he has begun to preview the position that all federal employees should serve at the pleasure of the president, which could mean the elimination of long-standing protections that insulate members of the civil service from politically motivated reprisal or removal.

[David A. Graham: Justice comes for Hunter Biden]

All of this is an extension of what was on display throughout Trump’s presidency. This is a man who, as president, regularly flouted norms of separation between his personal or partisan interests and those of the American government. He was also singularly focused on attacking the career civil service, which he referred to as the “deep state.” He inveighed constantly against the “shadowy cabal” that he suggested was seeking to undermine him, and he worked to weaken standards of independence and nonpartisanship inside the federal government. Late in his term in office, he issued an executive order purporting to create a new federal-employment status, “Schedule F”; had it gone into effect, this order would have allowed political appointees to reclassify large swaths of the civil service in order to bring them under political control.

So when Trump calls these prosecutions “political,” he’s offering a candid account of his understanding of the relationship between the president and federal prosecutors—that federal prosecutors, like all federal employees, are subject to the directive authority of the president, and so Biden must be behind the pursuit of Trump. Trump’s complaint actually isn’t about this as an ordering principle—it’s that at the moment, he isn’t in a position to leverage the power of the state for his personal benefit. This claim may sound startling, but it follows naturally from Trump’s brand of right-wing populism, one that that offers a narrow vision of who is authentically a member of the polity—his supporters—and pledges to both represent and protect that circumscribed population against a shifting “other”: liberals, the media, prosecutors in Democratic administrations. As Trump recently promised supporters, “I am the only one that can save this nation because you know they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. And I just happened to be standing in their way. And I will never be moving.”

These views are in profound tension with core features of the American political and constitutional tradition—which since at least the late 19th century has emphasized the importance of nonpartisanship and expertise in the federal government in general, and in law enforcement in particular. But Trump is not alone in dissenting from the consensus. GOP-primary hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has suggested that long-standing norms of DOJ independence are inconsistent with the Constitution. Work by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Jim Jordan on the “weaponization” committee has sought to use congressional-oversight authority to bully and intimidate career officials.

The Trump camp’s response to the news of Hunter Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to two counts of tax evasion, and to accept a diversion agreement to avoid gun charges, is revealing on this score. For years, Trump has fixated on the DOJ’s failure to prosecute Hunter Biden as evidence of political favoritism. Now that Hunter Biden has been charged, and has pleaded guilty, Trump has shifted to accusations that the plea terms are excessively lenient, attributable to—you guessed it—political favoritism. The fact that the investigation and charging decisions were made by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee whom Biden asked to remain in office, is immaterial, as is the fact that the FBI is still run by Christopher Wray, who was handpicked by Donald Trump; so is the fact that on many accounts these charges are harsher than those that would have been brought against an individual guilty of similar conduct but with a different last name.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

All of this contrasts profoundly with President Biden’s handling of his son’s legal difficulties. Biden has bent over backwards to abide by essential bipartisan norms of law-enforcement independence and insulation from political interference. His retention of a Trump appointee as the top Delaware prosecutor was clearly driven by a desire to ensure that the Hunter investigation would be carried out by someone he had not chosen. His decision to permit John Durham to complete his investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation was similar, as was his hands-off approach to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsels to investigate the handling of classified materials by both former Vice President Mike Pence and President Biden himself.

In addition to making these personnel decisions, both Biden and Garland have held their silence on politically sensitive investigations. Biden’s lone remarks about his son’s prosecution pledged love and support “as he continues to rebuild his life.” He has maintained a studied silence on Trump’s indictment, and by all accounts intends to continue it.

In all of this, President Biden has offered, through deeds more than words, a different model of governance. His silence and discretion are admirable, and they grow out of a principled commitment to avoiding any hint of political meddling in sensitive law-enforcement matters. Two strikingly different visions are on offer when it comes to the future of the relationship between law enforcement and politics.

The trouble is, the two visions are not equally apparent. Trump’s vision is on stark display; Biden’s approach is more notable for its lack of action—the refusal to comment, his decision to remain hands-off. Americans have to note these absences as collectively the presence of something else: a demonstrated commitment to a functional system of depersonalized, impartial justice. But Biden’s approach should not be misunderstood as inaction or passivity. It is, rather, an active and considered attempt to preserve the principle that, as Special Counsel Jack Smith put it when announcing the Trump indictment, there is “one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how diverging perceptions about racial inequity have emerged as a central fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

In their presidential campaigns, Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is Black, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, have repeatedly insisted that systemic or structural racism is no longer a problem in America. That drew a sharp rebuke earlier this month from Obama, who said the pair had joined “a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can all make it.’”   

Both Scott and Haley responded by accusing Obama of treating minority voters as victims and repeating their claims that racism and structural inequities can no longer hold back anyone who will “work hard” and display “integrity” and “grit,” as Scott told a mostly white audience at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last Tuesday.

[Read: ‘People who are different are not the problem in America’]

“When I hear people telling me that America is a racist nation, I got to say: Not my America, not our America,” Scott declared to loud applause.

Scott and Haley have leaned into the criticism from Obama, highlighting it to raise their profile in a Republican presidential race where each has attracted just single-digit support in national polls. But in responding to Obama, they have demonstrated how difficult it has become for any GOP leader—especially one who is not white—to challenge the party consensus that the nation has transcended discrimination against minorities and women.

For a Republican coalition that still relies predominantly on white voters, hearing nonwhite GOP candidates dismiss racism offers “acquittal and absolution,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies American attitudes toward race and culture. Such comments from figures like Scott and Haley, he told me, provide “permission” for other Republicans “to not even have to ask the questions” about whether systemic discrimination still shapes U.S. society.

Likewise, Michael Steele, the Black former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he believes that Scott is expressing such an absolutist rejection of racism—despite Scott’s acknowledgment that he has faced racial profiling in his own life—because he recognizes that that assertion is what the GOP’s mainly white electorate wants to hear.

Republicans, Steele told me, like finding “the Black man to put out there to say that shit to begin with. You pick someone to affirm the lie in a way that you ostensibly take your fingerprints off it. You create this artificial legitimacy around an illegitimate point.”

One of the core beliefs that binds the modern Republican coalition, particularly since the rise of Donald Trump, is rejection of the idea that racial minorities and women face structural bias in American society.

Studies of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections conducted by the Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner and his colleagues used the Cooperative Election Study, a large-scale national poll, to determine the factors that predicted which candidate voters supported in those races. Those studies found that in each contest, the single best predictor of who voted for Trump was the belief that systemic racism no longer exists in the U.S.; the second-best predictor was denial that systemic bias exists against women.

Within the GOP, those views command overwhelming support. In an email, Schaffner told me almost nine in 10 Republicans reject the idea that structural discrimination exists against racial minorities; about three-fourths doubt that women face entrenched bias. Fully two-thirds of Republicans say there’s little bias against either minorities or women. Only one in 20 Republicans, Schaffner found, believe that both groups still face systematic discrimination.

As Trump more overtly identified the GOP with white racial resentments, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Since Obama’s presidency, polls show, the share of Democrats who say that Black Americans and other minorities face structural discrimination has dramatically increased. With more Democrats describing systemic racism as a problem, the gap between the two parties on racial questions has notably widened over roughly the past 15 years.

Other surveys document a further step in thinking among Republicans. Not only do a majority of Republican voters assert that structural barriers no longer constrain women or minorities; a majority also claim that core GOP constituencies are the real victims of bias.

In PRRI polling, about two-thirds of Republicans agreed that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities. In a 2022 national survey, PerryUndem, a firm that polls for progressive organizations, found that about seven in 10 Republicans agreed both that “white men are the most attacked group in the country right now” and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”

[Tom Nichols: The pointless Nikki Haley campaign]

Similarly, in a national 2021 survey conducted by a UCLA  polling project, Republicans believed there to be more discrimination against white people than against other racial groups, more against men than women, and more against Christians than other religious groups, such as Muslims and Jews. “Republicans see a racial order in which historically privileged groups, like white Americans, are now the real victims,” the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck wrote in their book The Bitter End, which cited the UCLA research.

Sides, a professor at Vanderbilt University, points out that the claim that white people are the victims of “reverse discrimination” has been a rallying cry for the right since the civil-rights era. But, he told me, that long-standing conservative complaint “has become supercharged in this current climate” because of “the demographic reality that white Americans, and white Christian Americans, are not going to be as numerically dominant or as politically powerful as they used to be.”

As Obama correctly noted, both Scott and Haley are following a long line of earlier nonwhite GOP candidates who similarly declared that America has transcended racial discrimination. The late Herman Cain, a Black Republican who sought the party’s 2012 presidential nomination, insisted at the time, “I don’t believe racism in this country holds anybody back in a big way.” Ben Carson, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination and then served as his secretary of housing and urban development, offered his audiences similar assurances. Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee last year to run in Georgia against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, released an ad in which he declared, “Senator Warnock believes America is a bad country full of racist people. I believe we’re a great country full of generous people.”

Scott and Haley have regularly issued similar pronouncements. Both have stressed America’s racial progress over the past several generations. Scott has pointedly contrasted his experience with that of his late grandfather, who he said had to step off the sidewalk when a white person passed. Scott’s emphasis on that progress marks a shift that his critics find jarring after his candid acknowledgments earlier in his career that he faced racial profiling from Capitol Hill police even after his election to the Senate. Scott is “kind of whistling past the point, when you want to create this impression that there’s no racism, where in the next sentence you tell us how you have been profiled by Capitol Hill police,” Steele told me.

In their campaigns, Scott and Haley have each contended that they succeeded in life because family members encouraged them to take personal responsibility for their fate and not to identify as a victim. The same path, both say, is open today to any American regardless of race or ethnicity. “The left,” Scott insisted at the Hannity town hall, refuses “to deal with America in 2023 and not 1923 because they know that the truth of my life disproves the lies of their radical agenda.”

Obama, though, in his comments on The Axe Files, a podcast hosted by his former top political adviser David Axelrod, acknowledged racial progress over his lifetime: “The good news is that I think we are closer to an approximation of the ideal than we were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.” But he said that Scott, Haley, and the other Republicans stressing individual responsibility are disregarding the persistence of wide gaps between white Americans and racial minorities on a broad array of economic and social measures. If political leaders “pretend as if everything’s equal and fair,” Obama said, “then I think people are rightly skeptical” of their commitment to ensuring equal opportunity.

Steele agrees with Obama. “I cannot give quarter to this idea that people in this country don’t hold racist attitudes, No. 1, and No. 2, the institutions that a lot of these folks built reflect that racism in a variety of ways,” he told me. Steele wants Haley and Scott to try to convince an audience of Black people otherwise. “Come to Prince George’s County, and you look Black people in the eye and tell them there’s no racism,” said Steele, who served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor in the mid-2000s. “Or let’s take that conversation to Howard University. It’s easy to do when you have 1,000 white people hooting and hollering at every word you say.”

Carlos Curbelo, a Cuban American Republican former U.S. representative from Miami, also believes that, for Scott, accepting the party consensus discounting racism is the prerequisite for GOP voters listening to him on anything else. “Part of what he is banking on is that he is a man of color who is making these pronouncements,” Curbelo told me.

But Curbelo also maintains that each side in this exchange is overstating its case. Obama and other Democrats, he says, downplay the extent to which individual minorities can now overcome discrimination, while Republicans like Scott unrealistically excuse the persistence of structural racial barriers. “There is some validity to what he and Haley are saying,” Curbelo told me. “I just wish they would explain the whole issue, not just the half that is more convenient for them right now.”

As the sparring between Obama and Scott and Haley demonstrates, the two parties appear locked in an action-and-reaction cycle that is pushing them further apart on racial questions. The more traditionally marginalized groups demand greater recognition and influence, the more aggressively conservatives push back, and vice versa. For at least the rest of this decade, that cycle seems far more likely to intensify than abate.

The Democrats’ increased reliance on voters of color—and the increased focus on racial equity by the white voters in their coalition—has pressured them to direct greater attention on racial injustice in everything from school curricula to the behavior of police departments.

Republicans, whose Trump-era coalition has grown more reliant on the voters most uneasy with all the ways America is changing, have responded by digging in against these demands for new approaches. Across the red states, Republican-controlled governments are moving with remarkable speed and consistency to pass laws limiting classroom discussion of racial or gender inequities, banning books, and barring programs meant to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Republicans portray this wave of legislation as a fundamentally defensive attempt to prevent radical “woke” ideas from indoctrinating young people. But to Democrats and their allies, it’s GOP officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who are seeking to suppress the nation’s diverse younger generations with restrictive new laws on voting, LGBTQ rights, and how teachers can discuss America’s racial record.

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

PRRI’s Jones, who has written several books on race and religion, offers a telling example of how the conservative approach to racial injustice has hardened. He notes that as recently as the 1990s, the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Convention, in a formal statement repudiating its role in supporting slavery, apologized “to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”

Given the current climate on racial issues within conservative circles, Jones told me, he considers it virtually inconceivable that the Southern Baptist Convention today would acknowledge that systemic racism even exists, much less apologize for it. “The external historical reckoning the country is going through,” Jones told me, is prompting an “internal response” within the GOP that has generated a virtually lockstep rejection of racism as an ongoing problem.

There’s no question that all of these cultural causes now generate more passion inside the GOP coalition than such traditional party priorities as cutting taxes, limiting regulation, and promoting a strong national defense. “Issues related to race alongside gender identity and similar things, that’s their bread and butter,” Vanderbilt’s Sides says of GOP candidates today. “That’s what they want to talk about.”

Haley and Scott have placed themselves directly in that current. Their insistence that America has moved beyond racial inequality will surely win them loud applause from a mostly white Republican primary electorate that gets an extra jolt of satisfaction from hearing a person of color validate that view. Their endorsement of those arguments may not be enough to allow either to overtake better-known, better-funded alternatives, chiefly Trump and DeSantis, who are offering very much the same case. But echoing the claim that discrimination is in the past may be their ante for any future advancement in the Trump-era GOP.

This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.

Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.

As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.

The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.

This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.

Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”

Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”

Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.

Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”

This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.

The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.  

Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.

[Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?]

Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.

Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.

In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.

McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.

In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.

Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.

Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

Pence joins a crowded field of Republican candidates, led by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.