Cambridge-based Arm files papers to list in New York after opting against London, in a blow to the UK.

The death toll of the Maui fires, the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century, now stands at 114 people. Another 1,000 people are still missing. About 1,800 in people are in temporary housing. Displaced or not, people in Maui need food, water, toiletries, and medications. And in the coming days, weeks, and months, all that and more—everything needed for a long, difficult recovery—will have to come from somewhere.

“Imagine building the entire town of Lahaina from scratch, and how many hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars are needed to recover and rebuild,” Joe Kent, the executive vice president of Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank, told me.

A week in, locals are still struggling to find housing and meet their daily needs. The federal government has deployed hundreds of employees to help provide shelter and other assistance to those affected by the blaze. But in some parts of Maui, government assistance has been noticeably absent. Instead, Hawaii residents have been providing shelter, generators, and food.

“This happened in Puerto Rico—a constant clash between community kitchens or mutual-aid centers and municipalities or state agencies,” Roberto Vélez-Vélez, a sociologist at the State University of New York at New Paltz who studies disaster response, told me. When the authorities didn’t step in, community-run aid groups did. “We’re seeing this all over again.”

[Read: Maui’s fire risk was glowing red]

In 2017, Hurricane Maria, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in the 21st century so far, barreled into Puerto Rico, leaving about 3,000 dead. One week after the storm’s landfall, the island was still crossed with downed power lines and almost entirely dark. In the six years since, recovery has been slow and uneven. Last September, many damaged homes were still covered in blue tarps. Puerto Ricans endure constant power outages after the island’s antiquated electric grid was decimated.

Recovery after any disaster of this scale is bound to take time. But in Puerto Rico—and very possibly in Hawaii—a real, distinct lag slows response even further. Though they are across the continent from each other, devastated by different disasters, these islands’ remoteness and their particular relationship to the United States determine the aid they receive in these moments of crisis.

On the most basic level, geography constrains disaster recovery on an island. If a firestorm happens in the contiguous U.S., responders will have a much easier time getting supplies in and out. But on an island, that process is painstaking, Ivis García, an urban planner who has researched disaster-recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, told me. It involves a lot of ships.

And for Hawaii, as for Puerto Rico, all aid shipped in must adhere to the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, more popularly known as the Jones Act. This law allows only U.S.-flagged ships that are built, owned, and operated by Americans to carry goods among U.S. ports. Under normal circumstances, this results in increased prices for consumers on islands: One 2020 study estimated that the average Hawaii family pays an extra $1,800 a year because of the Jones Act. And as happened in Puerto Rico, these restrictions can make a crisis worse, by slowing the response and making it more costly.

There are 55,000 ships worldwide equipped for carrying cargo from port to port, and fewer than 100 Jones Act–eligible ships in operation today. Just two main operators dominate Jones Act shipping between the contiguous U.S. and Hawaii—Matson and Pasha. Although these operators have been deployed to send in aid, experts worry that the limited amount of ships available could bottleneck aid. Imagine, Kent told me, “all the materials that are needed to build housing and rebuild commercial districts” in Lahaina. All of those materials will have to come in Jones Act–eligible ships. If Japan wanted to send emergency supplies directly to Hawaii, for instance, it would not be allowed to because of the Jones Act, García told me.

The Jones Act can be temporarily waived: Former President Donald Trump issued a 10-day waiver to facilitate disaster relief to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. But a short-term waiver doesn’t ease long-term recovery. “Ultimately, the real cost of the Jones Act is going to be borne over a long period of time,” Kent said.

[Read: The relief effort in Puerto Rico]

Hawaii is often packaged as paradise, but that identity, too, can have a specific price following a disaster. Both Hawaii and Puerto Rico are archipelagoes that depend on the tourism industry; they are desirable places, where land is at a premium. The cost of living is high and constantly rising. “Things in general are already more expensive. In a time of disaster, that is really multiplied,” García said. “Everything is disrupted.” Food, shelter, and transportation are all harder to find. Inevitably, after a disaster, people leave their homes, and not everyone comes back.

More than 200,000 people left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In the years since, García told me, only a small percentage have returned to the island. On Maui, even before the historic fires, residents were dealing with an influx of wealthy outsiders buying properties and displacing residents. Even in these first days after the fire, one of locals’ first concerns was that this land rush would accelerate—that people who wanted to come back simply wouldn’t be able to afford to. That happened in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, a wave of foreign investors bought up properties, displacing working-class residents to meet tourism demands and get their own slice of island life. From 2018 to 2021, housing prices for a single family home on the Caribbean island increased by 22 percent.

Kent, for his part, has watched the aftermath of Hurricane Maria closely; he has seen how long recovery can take. “That’s a daunting thought for us, because we’re about to go on a journey that lasts many years,” he told me.

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Lizzie: One night several years ago, Kaitlyn and I and a group of other friends ended up at a party in the South Street Seaport. It was at the apartment of someone none of us knew, and I can’t say for sure how we got there. We were excited to see what kinds of people lived in this gift-shop neighborhood, and what their apartment would look like. Would every room feature its own ship in a bottle? Would there be portholes instead of windows?

Of course, the reality couldn’t compare to our fantasy, as is standard for reality. It was a regular old apartment, with regular old IKEA furniture. There was a nice rooftop and cheap beer in the fridge. Eventually, the host requested that our group please leave the premises, probably because they’d realized that no one knew who we were, and also perhaps because Kaitlyn may have mildly insulted their taste in literature.

Anyway, it was this party that we reflected on last weekend as we headed to a sold-out Friday-night book club at McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport location—where we’d be discussing, with strangers, the novel about weaseling your way into places you don’t belong that everyone’s been talking about this summer: Emma Cline’s The Guest.

Kaitlyn: The other thing I remember about that Seaport party was that someone there was blowing up a bunch of pool inflatables to use as roof furniture. (Imagine being at a party where most people are standing but some people are sitting down on pink inner tubes …) I want to be clear that we brought our own Bud Light Limes from a nearby Duane Reade and did not steal anything from those people, other than their view of the East River. I don’t remember being embarrassed about being asked to leave, and that’s because nothing is embarrassing when you have co-conspirators. (This is called the “Watergate burglar principle.”) It’s only when you’re alone that you can be humiliated (“Nixon principle”).

Lizzie has already covered the vibe of the South Street Seaport, but I also think you should know that one of its main features is a construction site that has been the subject of a lot of controversy for years and years, most of which is too boring to explain, but one of the issues is that it is on top of the rubble of a 19th-century thermometer factory and some people have worried that digging around could release a lot of mercury vapor. Anyway, I was in a bit of a mood the day of the Guest book club. I left work early and stomped downtown. Online, some had been referring to The Guest as “Uncut Gems for girls,” which I consider a spoiler and not accurate. While I was walking, I passed the AT&T Long Lines building, which is a hideous brown skyscraper known for having zero windows and maybe having some relation to the surveillance state. Looking up, I thought that someone should instead write “Underworld for girls.” (I love baseball and I’m very paranoid.) I also thought that people have been talking about “girls” too much lately.

I then passed what I have to assume is a temporary business, Malibu Barbie Café New York. I waited for Lizzie at the deserted end of Front Street, while staring at a bunch of garbage trucks parked under an overpass and regretting my choice to make a pre-book-club reservation for us at a bodega-and-speakeasy called The Little Shop. The chalkboard sign on the sidewalk said “purveyor of fine and junk foods.”

Lizzie: On my way to The Little Shop, I walked past a new pickleball court hogging the sidewalk in front of a Duane Reade. I wondered if the people playing in matching outfits were actors paid to create unthreatening “bustle” for the neighborhood. I stopped to buy a granola bar, and when I needed to throw out my wrapper, the only available trash can was one that looked like a barrel. In the South Street Seaport, gimmicks are the most important currency, and the neighborhood’s commitment to them continued at The Little Shop.

You walk through a “convenience store” to get to the bar in a back room, but the store felt more like a sanitized sitcom set than a convincing front. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the boxes of cereal and the cans of soup lining the shelves turned out to be empty. Is anyone actually shopping here for pantry goods? How often do they restock the Fruit Loops? I’m guessing never!

Kaitlyn: Lizzie thought that if you were taking a date to The Little Shop, a suave thing to do would be to pick up one of the boxes of pancake mix and say something like, “This is for tomorrow morning.”

It’s a clever set-up in The Little Shop, for sure. The idea is that you pick out your snacks, and then pay a 20 percent markup to have them “plated” for you. We had no problem with this fee. We did wonder why the only cheeses available were Cabot and Organic Valley. Even a Heluva Good would be more luxurious, don’t you think? Not to be snobs. But this is Manhattan. Also, if you buy a whole brick of cheese and then someone slices up the whole brick of cheese for you, that’s really too much cheese for two ladies to get through together at happy hour.

To their credit, The Little Shop does provide sandwich bags for your excess cheese. They also return your Pretzel Chips bag so you can put the rest of your Pretzel Chips back into it. So, after a short white-wine pregame, I tossed our snacks in my tote bag and Lizzie plucked a fake peacock feather out of a juice glass on the table to slip into hers. This behavior was what she called “going Guest-mode.” (In The Guest, the main character steals an expensive watch and a lot of prescription pills.)

We should say a little more about The Guest. Everyone in New York is reading it (or has read it). The book is about a generically pretty young woman named Alex who is more grifter than guest. She’s on the run from financial obligations and threats of violence in “the city,” and living with a rich man named Simon in his beach house, in what seems to be the Hamptons. He kicks her out (politely, through the staff, of course) after she embarrasses him at a pool party, and that’s when the real events of the novel start. She reasons that if she waits it out until Simon’s Labor Day party, he will no longer be mad at her, so she has five days to kill. Alex pinballs around town, manipulating one rich person after another into hosting her for an extra few hours or a night or two at a time. Of course, her plots get only more ill-considered and dangerous as she goes along. No spoilers!

Great cover. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Our own plans that evening were possibly ill-considered, but not dangerous, and maybe this is where we went wrong. Had we better planned the night to thematically align with elements of The Guest, maybe I wouldn’t have had to take that fake feather for the thrill of it. Maybe Kaitlyn wouldn’t have had to carry around half a block of warm cheese for the rest of the night. But, like Alex, we had gone too far to back out now. It was time to leave the bar and head to the book club, without committing any crimes.

We didn’t know what to expect. The other day someone said to me, “No one’s talking about how Greta Gerwig directed Barbie,” and it occurred to me that there’s a universe where The Guest is a book that no one’s ever heard of. But this was the second McNally Jackson “After Hours” book club dedicated to the book, and New York magazine just published their own book-club newsletter about it, so we know that, anecdotally, NYC-based book clubs at least are ravenous for it.

Kaitlyn: If not dangerous, a book club is still a risk, especially with a book about modern-day “the city.” It’s too easy for people to say things like “This reminded me of my own life” or to talk about the characters as if they’re real people who they’ve met and know things about. But we were excited about this one because it would have professional guidance (a McNally Jackson moderator) and because anyone who RSVPs in advance to talk about a book on a Friday night must be serious. Probably more serious than us!

When we arrived, we chatted with the event organizer, Mikaela, who is very chic and has an Australian accent. She was wearing cream satin. She’d had cocktail napkins made up with a curly “After Hours” logo and conversation starters on them, and she’d also come up with the brilliant innovation of ordering people to shuffle into new mini-groups every 20 minutes or so. This prevented awkward silences and the horrible experience of having someone’s eyes wander up over your shoulder and around the room while you are talking to them.

Lizzie: The shuffle was welcome. Our first round was a little bit messy, so we can call it a warm-up. I couldn’t hear what the far end of the table was saying. One girl admitted that she hadn’t read the book and was just accompanying a friend who had. She seemed incredibly regretful. One guy mentioned that, compared with other books he had recently read, he actually didn’t have that much to say about this one.

A book club might not be the ideal place to find yourself at a loss for words, but maybe he was on to something. Maybe there was nothing left to say about The Guest. Or maybe we just needed to try harder.

Arguably we do live in the world of this book, but we're not happy about it. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: With those guys, I tried arguably way too hard. I wanted to make them feel better about their lack of interest in the book, so I ended up doing a little rant about how it was fun and well plotted but “unsubstantial.” It wasn’t doing much as a novel, I said. Well, I was being obnoxious, but I was coming from a good place. (And it isn’t Middlemarch; that’s just a fact.)

With our next set of conversation partners, two women roughly our age, we did better. The four of us talked about all the moralizing we’d seen in The Guest’s Goodreads comments. A lot of people on the internet were worried that Emma Cline wasn’t aware that the character she’d written was not a very good person. Maybe, by writing about this fictional girl, she was endorsing all of her made-up choices, they suggested. We’d all gotten sick of this aspect of the culture, we agreed. In fact, we’re so sick of it that we’re sick of being sick of it. Stop putting us in the position of defending fake people … and books we didn’t even love.

Last note of importance: Before book club, our dearest friend Ashley, who was off on an actual beach vacation, had asked us to find out what everyone thought happened at the end of The Guest. The last 10 pages or so are kind of mystical and vague, and a reader has to make some guesses about what’s literally going on because [SPOILER] the main character is a bit out of it and possibly concussed. There’s been a lot of discussion about this. Like some of the Reddit commenters, Ashley was sure that the book ended with [SPOILER] murder, and she also was sure that everyone else aside from me and Lizzie would agree with her. Well, not one real-life book-club person did. As they say in English class, the theory wasn’t supported by the text … Sorry, Ash!

Lizzie: The “she was murdered” theory was floating around online, but in real life it was met with blank stares. Ah, well. Maybe we just didn’t ask the right people. But time wasn’t on our side! Like a 20-something scammer on her way to party in the Hamptons, we also had places to go and people to see.

We were back on the cobblestone streets of the Seaport by 8 p.m., headed out to the second halves of our respective nights, with tote bags full of items we stole (just kidding!).

On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, a collection of Famous People letters from the past five years, is available now from Zando Projects and The Atlantic.

It’s always election season in America. Dozens of local contests are taking place across the country this month, from Montgomery, Alabama to the Mariana Ranchos County Water District in California. On August 8 alone, Custer County, Colorado held a recall election for a county commissioner; Ohio asked residents to consider a major ballot measure; and voters in Oklahoma weighed in on several ballot measures.

America has roughly 90,000 local governing bodies, and states do not—at least publicly—track all of the elections taking place on their watch, making an exhaustive accounting nearly impossible. In many cases, contests come and go without any local media coverage, either. I came across a notice for an August 29 election in Marin County, California. When I called the Registrar of Voters for more information, the county assistant had to search a few moments before he could tell me that the town of Tiburon (population 9,000) was selecting a short-term council member.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trees? Not in my backyard.

Americans are used to pundits and civic leaders shaming them for low-turnout elections, as if they had failed a test of civic character. Voters are apathetic, parties don’t bother with the hard work of mobilization, and candidates are boring—or so the story goes. But this argument gets the problem exactly backwards. In America, voters don’t do too little; the system demands too much. We have too many elections, for too many offices, on too many days. We have turned the role of citizen into a full-time, unpaid job. Disinterest is the predictable, even rational response.

“One of the unique aspects of the electoral process in the United States is the sheer number of decisions American voters are asked to make when they go to the polls,” three political scientists argued at the turn of the millennium. “In any single election, American voters face much higher information costs than the citizens of almost any other democracy in the world.”

These information costs are immense. Americans are asked to fill numerous and obscure executive, legislative, and judicial positions, and to decide arcane matters of policy, not just on the first Tuesday in November but throughout the year.

How are we expected to know how the roles of our mayors and city councils are distinct from the roles of county executives, county council members, treasurers, controllers, and boards of supervisors? On what basis should we choose our coroners, zoning commissioners, or commissioners of revenue? Who should we punish when things go wrong? Reward when things go right?

And how can we keep up with the details of hopelessly complicated policy questions? Ohio’s aforementioned August 8 ballot measure proposed raising the threshold for changing the state constitution. It failed 57 to 43 percent, or roughly 1,700,000 to 1,300,000. This apparent matter of process attracted an unusually large number of voters because Ohioans understood that they were engaging in a proxy fight over abortion; advocates expended significant time and energy to explain to the general public what the ballot measure was really about.

Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

Usually, however, voters are expected to puzzle out even quite complicated issues without the benefit of a government-sponsored education campaign or significant explanatory reporting. In 2022, Georgia voters were asked to approve a statewide ad valorem tax exemption for certain equipment used by timber producers. California has repeatedly asked citizens to vote on regulatory requirements for kidney-dialysis clinics.

Americans are asked to vote too much, and Americans are asked to vote too often. One of the most pernicious ways politicians overburden voters is by holding off-cycle elections. Making time to vote is harder for some people than others; it’s harder for people with inflexible job schedules and needy dependents, for instance. Employers are used to making accommodations for presidential elections—but some random election over the summer? Hardly. As a result, off-cycle local elections are heavily weighted toward higher-income voters, more so than are statewide and national elections.

They’re also heavily weighted toward senior citizens: The most important factor for predicting who votes in city elections is not class or education or race, but age. An analysis by Portland State University’s “Who Votes for Mayor?” project found that people over the age of 65 who live in the poorest, least educated parts of a city typically vote two to five times more frequently than 18-to-34-year-olds in the most educated, affluent parts of a city. Overall, city residents 65 and older were 15 times more likely to vote than those ages 18 to 34.

Ohio Republicans knew that by scheduling the constitutional ballot measure in August, they could dampen turnout and benefit their side. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, had vocally opposed off-cycle elections as recently as December 2021. While testifying in a legislative hearing, he’d pointed to the record voter turnout in November 2020, when “74 percent of all registered voters made their voice heard.” Off-cycle elections, LaRose warned, mean that “just a handful of voters end up making big decisions.” He argued persuasively that “the side that wins is often the one that has a vested interest in the passage of the issue up for consideration. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.” State Republicans voted last year to eliminate most August special elections.

But LaRose, who declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate last month, supported the timing of the August 8 ballot measure, arguing that a statewide issue is “very different” and “not unusual.” According to local Ohio reporting, “There have been only two August statewide votes regarding the constitution”: in 1874 and 1926.  

Nostalgic political commentators long for the bygone days when American democracy still worked. But election-timing manipulation has always been a feature of American local politics. The UC Berkeley political scientist Sarah Anzia looked at the timing of local elections in New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia over the course of the 19th century and concluded, “Election timing manipulation was a common event.” Politicians exploited timing as a way to “exert some control over the electorate.”

For example, in 1857, New York’s nativist Know-Nothing Party and its Republican Party, which controlled the state legislature, bumped the city’s voting schedule so that municipal elections would no longer take place alongside federal ones, but a month later, in December. All of the Democrats voted against the change in part because they feared that it would hurt their mayoral candidate’s chances. (City Democrats knew their voters would show up for state and national elections, but that in a lower-turnout environment, their opponents could out-organize them.) They were right to be scared: Their mayoral candidate lost that very same year.

Off-cycle elections continued, and voter turnout in the city’s elections “consistently fell far below turnout levels in gubernatorial and presidential elections,” according to Anzia. By 1868, more than 155,000 votes were cast for governor in the November statewide election; a month later, just 96,000 people turned out for the mayoral contest. When the city went back on-cycle in the 1870s, voter turnout for the mayor’s and governor’s races reached near parity.

Americans rationally respond to such intense and random demands on our time by simply checking out. In November 2021, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor. That same year in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections, comprising 890 contests and more than 2,500 candidates. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out.

America’s voting problem is primarily a local one. When compared with that of peer nations, our general-election turnout is actually middle-of-the-pack. And although more voting at the federal level is desirable, some political-science research casts doubt on whether the results of national elections would significantly change if everybody showed up. Not so in local elections, where the electorate is remarkably unrepresentative.

In 2020, the year before that dismal local turnout in North Carolina, about 75 percent of voters—five times as many people—turned out for the general election and statewide contests. And in 2022, 51 percent of registered voters, or nearly three and a half times as many people as the previous year, turned out for the statewide election. The “Who Votes for Mayor?” project examined 23 million voting records in local elections across 50 cities, and came away with alarming findings: In 10 of America’s 30 largest cities, turnout didn’t exceed 15 percent. In Las Vegas, Fort Worth, and Dallas, turnout was in the single digits. Portland, Oregon, was the only city in the sample that saw the majority of its registered voters turn out, probably because Portland regularly votes for mayor on the federal-election holiday in November. The city’s special elections are more in line with national trends: In November 2019 and May 2023, voter turnout was only about 30 percent.

The failed Ohio ballot measure is an instructive case study in the low expectations Americans have for voter engagement. In the days following the election, newspapers proclaimed it a “boost for democracy.” A Columbus Dispatch article noted “high participation” and quoted a spokesperson for the Association of Elected Officials who marveled that “so many people turn[ed] out,” deeming the results “the will of the people.”

Relative to other ballot measures, sure. But only about 38 percent of Ohio’s registered voters cast a ballot, a proportion that shrinks to roughly 34 percent when you include all citizens of voting age. Regardless of whether you support the outcome, is it laudable that, on major questions, just a third of voters bother to weigh in?

The minority who do vote end up with disproportionate power. In Tarrant County, Texas, a judge recently told a meeting of the conservative True Texas Project how just 75 people could make a big difference in local elections where “the turnout is so low by percentage … By you bringing neighbors, friends, picking up the phone, doing postings on social media, there are races that, quite frankly, we ought not to be able to win that we can probably win just because we raise awareness and get people out.” At least two candidates endorsed by the True Texas Project ended up winning their races in Fort Worth. In a city of almost 1 million, fewer than 43,000 people cast ballots.

Aligning local elections with national ones would increase turnout and likely create a more representative electorate, but just filling out a ballot doesn’t constitute meaningful accountability. That’s in part because most races at the local level go uncontested: In 2020, 61 percent of city races and 78 percent of county races were uncontested, as were 62 percent of school-board races and 84 percent of judicial races. Even when a race is competitive, finding reliable information about local candidates can be nearly impossible, turning voting into an exercise in randomness or, at best, name recognition.

Incumbents have a staggering advantage in local races. In a 2009 paper, the legal academic Ronald Wright reviewed election data for prosecutors, a role that is both well understood and highly important to voters. (Public safety and crime regularly rank at the top of voters’ list of concerns.) Wright observed that when district attorneys run for reelection, they win 95 percent of the time and run unopposed in 85 percent of races.

This month alone, I found three elections in Delaware that were canceled because not enough people were running. In each case, the candidates who bothered to file simply ascended to their theoretically elected positions. In local government, elected office is apparently first come, first served.

Nature abhors a vacuum: Where voters disappear, special interests rush in. In the absence of regular voter direction, our local elected officials are not directionless. Instead of democracy, what we’ve got is government by homeowners’ associations, police unions, teachers’ unions, developers, chambers of commerce, environmental groups, and so forth.

“All is not well in local government, and it hasn’t been for some time,” Anzia writes in her book Local Interests. Anzia finds, unsurprisingly, that pressure from interest groups works. Political activity by police and firefighters’ unions correlates with greater spending on their salaries, and cities with more politically active police unions are less likely than cities with less active ones to have adopted body cameras. In cities with strong environmental groups, Anzia found, winning candidates are significantly less likely to favor policies conducive to economic growth. And in school districts where teachers’ unions are the dominant interest group, jurisdictions that hold off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers more than those that hold on-cycle elections.

These specific policies may be good or bad. That’s not the point. The point is that the government should act according to public need, not based on who has the money, time, and will to create and sustain an advocacy group.   

Blaming the voters is easy: Democracy is on the line; people need to get up off their asses and vote! The problem isn’t the system; it’s the people. Maybe if they saw one more Instagram infographic or heard one more speech about the importance of civics, they would become regular voters.

Putting aside the moral status of nonvoters, this argument is pure fantasy. As the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped, “Like other performers (including teachers, ministers, and actors), politicians and political activists are prone to overestimate the interest of the audience in their performance.”

Contrary to what good-government types may wish, few Americans want to be full-time political animals. Most of us have absolutely no desire to learn what our county commissioners or district attorneys are up to, let alone take on the herculean task of evaluating their records. Effective representational government must empower voters to hold their elected officials accountable without sucking the life out of its citizens. Even the most dedicated participants in local politics aren’t experts in everything, just in the parts of local government that provide them with benefits they find meaningful.

When ordinary voters do show up in local politics, they’re not walking onto an even playing field. Individuals who become motivated to seek criminal-justice reform after an unjust killing by a police officer, or parents who feel compelled to change school curricula, are entering unfamiliar territory that has been landscaped by special interests. And elected officials know that a flurry of political activity can die out quickly, while interest-group activity remains constant.

When I ask local government officials about this problem, I usually hear denial or resignation. “Nonsense,” Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, told me a few months ago when I asked him whether he worries that low voter turnout yields an unrepresentative government. He suggested that this view calls “into question not only the legitimacy of a municipal election but the integrity of the people elected, as if they don’t represent their community. Those are the things that academics and people say that have never been to a city-council meeting and don’t go to planning-commission meetings.”

Steven Waldman: The local-news crisis is weirdly easy to solve

I don’t doubt that most local officials have integrity. Many if not most of the local officials I’ve spoken with are kind, hardworking, and genuinely committed citizens. They are pledging their efforts for very few benefits and are forced to face ire and controversy as they serve their communities. But our system shouldn’t depend on the benevolence of local officials. In a healthy democracy, it should depend on the electorate holding local officials accountable through the ballot box.

Giving power to the people is sometimes conflated with giving people more access to government decision making through, say, community meetings or ballot measures. But if only a small, unrepresentative group of people are willing to be full-time democrats, then that extra ballot measure, election, or public meeting isn’t more democracy; it’s less. Most of us are part-time democrats. That’s not going to change, and political hobbyists should stop expecting it to.

Photographs by Danny Wilcox Frazier

Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner.

Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment.

That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a large notebook. It was on a flight like this, he told me, where he sketched out his 10 “truths”:

God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

“I just wrote down things that are true,” he said flatly. “It took me about 15 minutes.”

Ramaswamy doesn’t consider himself a culture warrior; he insists that he is merely speaking the truth. He presents his ideas as self-evident, eternal truths. I asked him if he believes that truths can change over time. For instance, what did he make of the fact that most white Americans used to view it as a “truth” that Black people were genetically inferior—that they weren’t fully human?

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.

“It is true,” I said. “That’s partly what justified slavery.”

“But it was a justification; it wasn’t a belief,” he said. “Look at emperors—Septimius Severus in Rome. He was Black. He had dark skin. They viewed dark skin as the way we view dark eyes.”

This is how a debate with Ramaswamy unfolds. He’ll engage with your question, but, when needed, he’ll expand its parameters. If that fails, he’ll pivot to thoughts on the existence of a higher power. “I don’t think that human beings ever accepted that Black people were not created equal in the eyes of God,” he said. (His favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, believed exactly that.)

Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’'s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.

Ramaswamy radiates confidence: steady eye contact, knowing nod, satisfied smile. He campaigns for up to 18 hours a day. He mostly keeps to a uniform of black pants, black T-shirt, and a black blazer. He operates in a world of declarative statements and punctuates his sentences with “right?” and “actually,” like a tech bro. He’s currently in third place in most national polls. At last month’s Turning Point USA conference, in Florida, Ramaswamy had a breakout moment when 51 percent of straw-poll respondents said he was their second choice for president. “Pretty remarkable how far he’s come in a very short amount of time,” Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, tweeted.

Last week, leaked documents designed to inform Ron DeSantis’s strategy at Wednesday’s first presidential debate portrayed Ramaswamy as the candidate to beat. The Florida governor’s super PAC advised him to “take a sledgehammer” to the 38-year-old outsider. Many potential voters will likely be intrigued when they hear Ramaswamy speak his truths onstage this Wednesday. He is living a life they can only dream about: Start a company or two, make half a billion dollars, say whatever you want. And then, naturally, run for president.

The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on his phone after a taping of the PBS political talk show Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.

A colossal American flag hangs on the outside of Ramaswamy’s spare-no-expense campaign headquarters in Columbus. The property is a former barn; the word TRUTH is plastered everywhere. One communal work area, for phone banking, is roughly the size of a basketball court. He has his choice of two production studios from which to record his never-ending stream of cable-news hits, podcast appearances, and social-media videos.

During my visit, John Schnatter—a.k.a. Papa John—flew in from Kentucky via private helicopter to speak his truth on Ramaswamy’s own nascent podcast, The Vivek Show.

Papa John told the candidate how he became very rich—how his single pizza shop grew into a chain of over 5,000 stores—then turned to a long, complicated story about his downfall. He claims that he was set up by a PR firm that goaded him into saying a racial slur during a private coaching session and that this firm is connected to Hillary Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the PR firm referred me to a recent partial summary judgment against Schnatter in the firm’s favor.) He used the words “demonic” and “satanic” to describe the American left. At one point, the conversation veered toward Russia and Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I don’t know why the Creator put me through this,” Papa John said.

[Read: A bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism]

All the while, Ramaswamy nodded, smiled, or, when applicable, shook his head in disbelief. This was his media-forward candidacy, distilled: a morning behind the mic inside a posh podcast setup chatting with a fellow entrepreneur about the perils of woke capitalism. When the episode aired, he’d have a cautionary tale for listeners, a potentially viral clip that would get him in front of new voters.

The night before, I watched Ramaswamy speak to a couple hundred young conservatives at the Forge Leadership Summit. He looked around the room and preached that “hardship is not a choice, but victimhood is a choice.” It’s one of his favorite lines, and a nod to his second book, Nation of Victims. The crowd that night was almost exclusively white, and Ramaswamy’s inflection was temporarily suffused with twang.

“We’re starved for purpose and meaning and identity at a time in our national history when the things that used to fill our void—faith, patriotism, hard work, family—these things have disappeared,” he said. He rattled off a list of “poisons” that have filled the void, pausing for dramatic beats between each one: “Wokeism. Transgenderism. Climatism. COVIDism. Globalism. Depression. Anxiety. Fentanyl. Suicide.” The crowd murmured.

He kept rolling. He said that Russia’s war against Ukraine is “really just a battle between two thugs on the other side of Eastern Europe.” He warned that incremental change within American institutions is impossible.

Right now, he said, we have reached a “1776 moment” in this country.

“Do we stand on the side of reform?” he asked. “Or do we stand on the side of revolution?”

When he finished, half the people in the room jumped to their feet.

Vivek Ramaswamy with his son, Karthik, before speaking at a house party and fundraiser in Hubbard, Iowa.

Ramaswamy hurried out and ducked into an SUV: He feared he’d be late for his prime-time interview on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show. During the ride, he revisited one of the more challenging audience questions. A woman had asked if, as president, he would commit to making abortion illegal at the federal level. He told her that he is “unapologetically pro-life,” but a strict constitutionalist—an originalist. He said he viewed recent state-level abortion restrictions as victories for federalism. The woman seemed unsatisfied.

Ramaswamy knew that abortion questions would keep coming up. “I do feel like I’m being bullied a little bit on this issue,” he told his aides. They ran through his options. A video? A public address? Suddenly the subject seemed fraught. “Eh, probably an abortion speech isn’t a good idea, to be honest with you,” he said.

After the Cuomo interview, we drove to Ramaswamy’s house. It’s bright and white with giant ceilings—suburban palatial. One of the family’s two nannies appeared and started putting together a spread: chili, kale, watermelon salad, tofu tacos.

Throughout his professional life, Ramaswamy has aimed to be perceived as an American traditionalist who is simultaneously ahead of the curve. He is the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. As a high-school student at St. Xavier, a Jesuit prep school in Cincinnati, he quickly got up to speed on all things Bible. On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes spirituality, and his message has the feel of old-school Christianity.

[Read: What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump]

Growing up, he loved hip-hop, especially Eminem, and his own performances under his alter-ego “Da Vek” as a Harvard student landed him in The Crimson. He still occasionally leans into it. The day we met, he had just freestyled on Fox News. Earlier this month, he grabbed the mic and did an Eminem impression at the Iowa State Fair.

Though now running as a Republican, he long identified as a libertarian. He cast his first vote, when he was a 19-year-old, in the 2004 election, supporting the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. (He sat out every subsequent presidential election until 2020, when he voted for Trump.)

Ramaswamy told me a story about how in eighth grade, he was pushed down a flight of stairs at his public school. Though he underwent hip surgery afterward, he was careful not to portray himself as a victim. Instead, he described the event as the catalyst for his arrival at St. Xavier.

I asked him about coming of age in the post-9/11 world, when many ignorant Americans assumed that anyone with brown skin might be a terrorist. He told me about the experience of being singled out and questioned while flying to Israel—that unique sensation of being the last passenger permitted to board. “I didn’t chafe at that, though, because, honestly, in some ways it was data-driven,” he said. I asked if he considered the action itself to be racist. “No, I think racism has to involve some level of animus, actually,” he said. “I have experienced racism, to be clear. But that’s not—I don’t think that entails animus. So it doesn’t qualify as racism to me.”

He told me he doesn’t believe his race will negatively affect his electability in 2024. He said that among most GOP voters, the No. 1 political problem is “not, like, Arabs right now.” He spoke of what he saw as other underlying American anxieties, such as “the feeling of being victimized right here at home,” he said. “Forces that are different than Mohamed Atta,” he added, alluding to one of the 9/11 hijackers.

The entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa's 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, which featured 13 Republican presidential hopefuls including former President Donald Trump.

Ramaswamy’s wife, Apoorva, was leaning on the kitchen island, listening to our conversation. After her husband slipped away to hop on a Zoom call with “a bunch of people from Silicon Valley,” she joined me at the table. She was fighting a cold but nonetheless happy to make time for a stranger in her home at nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight. Besides, she said, she wanted to wait up for Vivek when he was done for the day.

The couple met at a house party in 2011, when they were both graduate students at Yale. They struck up conversation, realizing they were neighbors. Apoorva was following in her father’s footsteps, studying medicine, while Vivek was pursuing a law degree after a few years working in finance in New York. “He just seemed awesome, like someone who was interesting and someone who was full of life,” she said. “I was pretty sure pretty early on that I was going to probably end up marrying him.”

Apoorva, like her future husband, grew up a practicing Hindu. The couple is now raising their two toddlers, Karthik and Arjun, in the faith. Apoorva’s parents also came to the United States from India. “I think, as a child of immigrants, we defaulted toward being Democrats insofar as we thought about it at all, which was honestly not very much,” she said. In recent years, she told me, her mom and dad had become Trump supporters. “They chose this country—they love this country more than any country in the world, and they believe in it,” she said. “And it was cool” for them “to see someone who was unapologetic about it.”

I asked Apoorva if she could recall the first time Vivek told her he wanted to become president.

“I think that, like, on a serious level, it was …” she paused for a long moment. “This December.” Vivek, she said, saw the presidency as one of “the different options open to him.” Other young, rich men unsure of what to do next with their life have bought a yacht or a big-city newspaper, or run for governor of Texas. Ramaswamy chose the presidency.

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

Apoorva is a head-and-neck-cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University. I asked her if, as a physician, she supported vaccines. She told me that she and her entire family had received COVID shots, but like her husband, she endorses the idea of personal choice over government mandates. This libertarian approach permeates many aspects of their life. Instead of sending their kids to public school, they have “some educators who come to the house.” (She pointed to the special relationship between Alexander the Great and his private tutor, Aristotle, as a model.) Like Vivek, she’s ambitious and career-driven. She told me she doesn’t necessarily plan to give up her job at OSU even if her family moves into the White House. “I think Jill Biden did show that it is possible to be a spouse who is working,” she said.

“This is a totally new world for me, and the concept of being a political spouse is not, like, the fifth thing I would call myself,” she said. “It’s, you know, this is the thing we’re doing, for sure. And I’m proud to support my husband in it. But I think this is about him and his vision. This is not about me.”

The next day, in Des Moines, Ramaswamy periodically stepped away from our interview aboard his campaign bus to play with his older son, Karthik, who had come along for the trip. I asked Ramaswamy if his friends and family were surprised when he told them he was running for president.

“Not shocked, but a combination of excited and personally concerned for me, actually—just knowing how dirty this is,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising. And I think most people have an impression that politics is a dirty sport where you have to, you know, be compromised.”

I brought up something Papa John had told him: This wasn’t a knife fight, but a gunfight.

“I mean, I would phrase it differently, but I would say you need a spine of steel to play this sport, for sure,” Ramaswamy said. “Some people who have been coddled in their siloed kingdoms, mini kingdoms they’ve created for themselves, have not been ready for when they’ve shown up for the real thing. I think it was an advantage not to be surrounded by people who heaped false praise on me in one of the 50 states of the union—I think that’s a trap that certain governors almost every cycle have fallen into.”

He smiled, making it clear that he was going out of his way not to invoke his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by name.

While DeSantis spent the first stretch of his campaign blackballing the mainstream media, Ramaswamy has taken a different approach. His presidential candidacy was preceded by a profile in The New Yorker, and though he himself is perpetually on cable news, he said he hardly ever tunes in. With one exception: “I think Tucker Carlson was great, actually. I really enjoyed watching him.”

“I think Tucker had something to say,” he said. “We’re not slaves to a partisan orthodoxy. I don’t have a particular affinity for the Republican Party apparatus, and I think neither does Tucker.”

He told me he admired how Carlson wasn’t a “delivery mechanism” for something that showed up on the teleprompter. I asked if he had read any of the evidence that came out in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, the case that ultimately led to Carlson leaving the network. “I really didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “It didn’t strike me as super interesting because it seemed like a lot of inside baseball.” I told him that Carlson had been saying certain things on air and, in some cases, texting the direct opposite to his producer. For instance: He said he hates Trump. “Did he say that?” Ramaswamy asked.

For a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised.

The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a live event with Elon Musk and David Sacks on X Spaces (formerly known as Twitter).

“Most people have barely heard of me,” Ramaswamy admitted to Elon Musk. He was pacing barefoot around his 30th-floor downtown–Des Moines hotel room, doing a live Twitter (X) Spaces broadcast. It was late Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Lincoln Dinner. Half-eaten takeout was idling in clamshell containers. Ramaswamy had been going nonstop but didn’t seem remotely tired.

Musk and his Silicon Valley friend David Sacks had been trying to make the social network’s shaky audio platform a virtual destination on the 2024 campaign trail, with intermittent success. I could hear Musk’s voice through Ramaswamy’s earbuds. Over and over again, he’d interrupt the candidate. If Ramaswamy was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. After having watched several of his media hits in a row, I noticed how Ramaswamy had developed an array of tricks to wrangle attention, such as when he brought up “our mutual friend Peter,” as in Thiel. He told Musk how much he “loved” the Twitter Files. By the end of the broadcast, he seemed to have made a new fan. Last week, Musk called him “a very promising candidate.”

He continues to find support among a group of very online iconoclasts. “That Vivek guy is very interesting,” Joe Rogan said recently. “He’s very rational and very smart.” Jordan Peterson has praised him as “hard to corner in the best way.” Andrew Yang, who ran as a freethinking businessman in the 2020 Democratic primary, told me he believes that people are just waiting for others to rally behind Ramaswamy. “Vivek’s going to have his moment. There’s going to be a wind at his back. And then when that wind hits, I think people will be stunned at how quickly his support grows.”

At the Iowa Events Center, more than 1,000 people listened politely as 13 Republican candidates (pretty much the entire field except Chris Christie) each made a 10-minute case for themselves. DeSantis announced that “The time for excuses is over!” before clomping away in his heeled boots. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina preached the value of hard work, telling the room that President Joe Biden and the left were selling “a narcotic of despair.” Former Vice President Mike Pence trudged through his speech and received hardly any applause when endorsing the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

[Read: The bow-tied bard of populism]

Just after 8 p.m., Ramaswamy was waiting offstage, looking over his notes. He bounded up the steps to the sounds of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America.”

“It’s good to be here, back in Iowa. I feel like I live here now!” Ramaswamy told the crowd.

He was speaking slower than usual, and he had ditched the twang from the previous night. He seemed utterly at ease. He talked about securing our southern border “and our northern border too.” He received lively applause after saying he would shut down scores of three-letter government agencies. He cycled through his list of poisons and his 10 truths. The clapping waxed and waned. His line about “two genders” was a hit, as was his finale about the Constitution. All in all, he received one of the strongest responses of the night: When the speech concluded, he was treated to a partial standing ovation. He paused for a few extra moments to take it all in, waving at the crowd with both hands.

Downstairs, Ramaswamy glowed in his after-party suite. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a series of country songs blared from speakers. He told the few dozen people before him that he was prepared not only to win the nomination but to deliver a Ronald Reagan–style landslide victory. Some seemed convinced.

The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy leaves American Dream Machines after he and his son, Karthik, visited the vintage-car shop between campaign events. Ramaswamy’s son joined the candidate on the two-day campaign trip to Iowa.

The next morning, as his campaign bus lumbered to rural Hubbard, I asked Ramaswamy if he had heard what his fellow Republican Will Hurd had said at the event. Hurd, a former Texas congressman, was booed off the stage after telling the Lincoln Dinner crowd “the truth”: that Trump was running only to stay out of prison. “I know the truth,” Hurd said. (Loud boos.) “The truth is hard.” (Louder boos.)

Ramaswamy waved away Hurd’s assertion. He told me that if Trump weren’t running, “they” wouldn’t be prosecuting him. With each passing month, with each new indictment, Ramaswamy has doubled down on his public promise to pardon Trump if elected. He told me that he believes doing so would be “the right thing for the country.” He said the indictments, so far, were “obviously politically motivated.”

During one of his “truth” monologues at the Lincoln Dinner, Ramaswamy told the crowd, “We can handle the truth about what really happened on January 6.” As the bus rolled north, I asked him: What is the truth about January 6?

“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” he said. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”

Then, suddenly, he was talking about 9/11.

“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to. Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he said. “‘Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.’ What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”

I pressed him on the comparison, and suddenly, the bold teller of truths was just asking questions. “Oh yeah, I don’t think they belong in the same conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. But I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the January 6 commission.”

[Read: A star reporter’s break from reality]

But is he actually confused about who was behind the 9/11 attacks? It was hard to get a straight answer from him. “I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11,” he said. “I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.” Some truths, it seems, can be proudly affirmed; others are more elusive. (Asked to clarify Ramaswamy’s views on 9/11, his spokesperson pointed me to a 1,042-word tweet from the candidate, in which he suggested that the U.S. government covered up involvement by Saudi intelligence officials in planning the attacks.)

Ramaswamy told me he’s not interested in being Trump’s vice president, or serving in Trump’s Cabinet. “Reporting in to somebody is not something I’m wired to do well,” he said. “I’m not in this to be a politician. I think there’s a chance to lead a national revival, cultural revival, that touches the next generation of Americans. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to do that if I’m in an administrative role.”

Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy has signed the “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual GOP nominee—a prerequisite for participation in the debate. He also told me that he would commit to accepting the results of the election. So far, the closest he’s come to ever actually criticizing Trump is saying that 30 percent of the country became “psychiatrically ill” when he was in office. Throughout our discussions, it was clear that Ramaswamy seemed to view Trumpism as something he could tap into. He told me that his path to winning involved recognizing and celebrating Trump’s accomplishments, and promising to build on them.

“I believe with a high degree of conviction that I will win this election,” he said.

If, for whatever reason, that didn’t come to pass, he told me he would “probably just go back to what I was doing”—business, writing books, hanging out with his family. “And I might take a look at the future.”

During our final conversation, I asked Ramaswamy if he felt understood or misunderstood as a candidate. He didn’t hesitate to answer.

“Mostly misunderstood.”

What do you think people misunderstand about you?

“My motivations,” he said.

“I’m not aggrieved by that. I’m patient. But I hope that by the end of this, actually—it’s a deep question—but I think I would rather be properly understood and lose because people decided that the real me is not who they want, than to lose because people never got to know who I really am. That would bother me. And it would be hard to reconcile myself with that. But if people across this country really know just who I am and what I stand for, and then that’s not what they want in a leader, I am 100 percent at peace with that. I have no problem. So that’s kind of my goal in this process.”

The bus pulled onto a sprawling private property in the middle of nowhere. Ramaswamy and his aides hopped off. The millionaire outsider candidate, beholden to no one, was preparing to speak his truth before a wealthy Iowa donor and his friends.