To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

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

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders if there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country.  If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend with Phillips on his farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—with party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuking him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.  

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make good-bye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive “DEAN”-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” he trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

Earlier this month, a woman in San Francisco was hit by a car while crossing the street. Had the story ended there, it would have been just another one of the small tragedies that occur on America’s roads, where roughly 100 people die every day. But this woman’s body ricocheted into another lane of traffic. She was hit again, this time by a robotaxi from the start-up Cruise. The car braked, coming to a stop with her pinned underneath. Then it started driving again, dragging the woman along with it for an agonizing 20 more feet. The woman, whose identity has not been made public, remains in the hospital, in serious condition.

Since driverless cars from Cruise and its competitor Waymo started taking paid passengers in San Francisco this summer, they have been entangled in a series of high-profile hiccups—including a collision with a fire truck and the wrath of protesters, who have placed traffic cones on their cars’ cameras. A bad few months for America’s robotaxis has now gotten considerably worse: On Tuesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s license to operate its driverless cars in the state, contending that they are “not safe for the public’s operation” and that the company “misrepresented” safety information. (The DMV has accused Cruise of not showing officials the full video footage from the accident involving the woman, which Cruise has denied.) Last night, Cruise announced that it was voluntarily pausing its driverless operations nationwide.

Waymo’s robotaxis are still roaming the streets of San Francisco and now several other cities, but the path to a world in which self-driving cars are everywhere, chauffeuring us around while we nap, still feels far away. Even so, the machines may have already won. Many new cars from major manufacturers such as General Motors, Ford, and, yes, Tesla already have advanced autonomous features that can control many parts of the driving process without a human touching the wheel. And more partly autonomous cars are coming. Your next car won’t be driverless, but it might be driver-ish.

[Read: It’s a weird time for driverless cars]

A recent ad for Ford’s BlueCruise system is a glimpse into this future. It shows a pregnant Serena Williams driving a Lincoln Navigator and, as the music swells, dramatically letting go of the steering wheel. With BlueCruise, a driver can go hands-free on the highway as the car stays in its lane and keeps a distance from other vehicles. The latest version can help the driver change lanes, with the vehicle doing so automatically after the turn signal is tapped. BlueCruise has been integrated into models such as the Ford Mustang SUV and the Ford F-150, the latter of which is among the best-selling cars in the country. General Motors also has a hands-free tool as part of its Super Cruise system; available on models such as the Chevy Volt EUV and the GM Suburban, it can likewise independently stay in a lane and change lanes on demand.

Both of these are what are called “level two” systems. Autonomous driving can be broken down into six different levels, from zero to five, according to a classification system created by the Society of Automotive Engineers International. A level-zero vehicle might have a basic feature such as automatic emergency braking, whereas a level-five vehicle can fully drive itself anywhere. It may not even have a steering wheel. The robotaxis made by Waymo and Cruise are level-four systems: No one is behind the wheel, but the cars are geo-fenced and limited to specific driving conditions.

Carmakers have long had souped-up cruise-control tech that meets the bar for level one, but now level-two and level-three systems are popping up in the cars they sell. The most well known is Tesla’s Autopilot and the more advanced “full self-driving” beta, in which the car drives completely on its own. Despite the name, it is still a level-two system, meaning a human must constantly monitor the driving. (Because anything that requires consistent human supervision is level two, this stage encompasses a huge range of potential autonomous features.)

Then there is level three, which is like the awkward middle child of autonomous systems: Everything below it requires the driver’s full attention, and everything above it doesn’t require any attention at all. At this stage, the driver must be able to drive when prompted by the system, but she can otherwise take her eyes off the road. Last month, Mercedes-Benz became, with its Drive Pilot feature, the first automaker to introduce a level-three system in the United States. Drive Pilot can be used only in certain conditions (not at night or in the rain) and only in certain areas (California and Nevada have both approved it). But when activated, it’ll be able to navigate road signs and traffic. As it does, you can lean back and play Tetris, which is included in the cars’ entertainment system.

Right now these autonomous features are primarily loaded into higher-end cars, says Paul Waatti, an industry-analysis manager at AutoPacific, a market-research company. Mercedes’s Drive Pilot system has an annual subscription fee of $2,500 a year, on top of the $100,000-plus sticker price for the all-electric EQS sedan that is equipped with it. Tesla’s full-self-driving mode can cost up to an additional $200 a month. Still, Waatti expects these features to trickle down to more automakers’ fleets in the coming years. BMW, Volvo, and Stellantis (the manufacturer of Jeep and Dodge) are also working on level-three technology.

Forget about the robotaxis for a moment, and start looking out for robo-creep: smaller but still powerful autonomous systems subtly taking over parts of the human driving experience. “We’re going to continue to see more autonomous features come into play,” Waatti told me. “But we’re not going to see fully autonomous cars for quite some time, especially that are going to be able to be sold to the public.”

These features are taking off in part because car companies are seeing dollar signs in offering them for a monthly fee, which is what Mercedes and Tesla are doing. “The secret that the car-company executives won’t tell you,” Reilly Brennan, a founding partner at the transportation-focused venture-capital fund Trucks, told me, is that compared with driverless cars, these driver-ish cars are “a much better business for them, because it allows them to sell both hardware and software.” Research from the consulting firm McKinsey found that about half of global consumers would be willing to pay up to $9,999 for these features, or that much in monthly fees.

A future in which everyone around you on the freeway is quietly playing Tetris in their car might be a ways off. Tesla’s Autopilot feature has been linked to at least 17 fatal crashes and has faced lawsuits. Drivers aren’t made to cede control to computers but still be ready to take back control at a moment’s notice. For safety reasons, GM’s Super Cruise has a camera over the dashboard that tracks head and eye movement, and the machine deactivates if it thinks a driver is distracted; other autonomous systems have similar mechanisms.

Most drivers will have to keep paying some attention for the foreseeable future. Ani Kelkar, an associate partner at McKinsey, told me that, in the best-case scenario, the company projects that 12 percent of new passenger vehicles will be level three or higher by the end of the decade. By contrast, he said, McKinsey expects level-two or higher vehicles to make up the majority of those sold, and 65 percent in the best-case scenario. Drivers will remain behind the wheel for now; they just might do less of the actual driving. The machines will start rounding off the corners, perhaps taking over in annoying stop-and-go traffic, mindless highway road trips, and the nuisance that is parking. They’ll ease the burden of driving, but you won’t be totally off the hook.

None of this is to say that Waymo or Cruise or another self-driving-car company won’t also eventually figure out how to crack the code to robotaxis. But their challenge is bigger. Level four—what the robotaxis are attempting—“is just tremendously difficult” and “humongously expensive,” Ramanarayan Vasudevan, a professor of mechanical engineering and robotics at the University of Michigan, told me. These cars are costly to build and costly to scale, and companies need to figure out how to recoup all of these investments while also charging fees that can compete with ride-hailing apps and taxis. (According to The Wall Street Journal, Cruise lost $1.9 billion from January to the end of last month.) And that’s still just level four, where the cars are stuck in certain cities and neighborhoods. “Level five is a science experiment,” Vasudevan said. He doubts it’s possible.

Of course, driver-ish cars might not be as revolutionary as driverless ones, which promise to cut into problems such as drunk driving. But level-two and level-three systems are here right now, parked on the lots at your local dealership—or maybe even in your driveway. Over time, a few autonomous features will become many autonomous features. And then you’ll have far more time to play Tetris on the highway.  

As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.

Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on the bet that they can target each group with harsh immigration policies without paying an electoral price.

For months, they have proposed an escalating succession of hard-line measures aimed at deterring mostly Latino undocumented migrants from crossing the southern border. And following the Hamas terror attack on Israel earlier this month, they rolled out a wave of exclusionary proposals aimed at Muslims. Trump has pledged that, if returned to the White House, he will restore his travel ban on people from a number of majority-Muslim nations, expand ideological screening of all potential immigrants to ensure that they agree with “our religion,” and deport foreign students in the United States who express hostility to Israel.

Trump and other GOP 2024 candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have unveiled these proposals even as many Democratic-leaning activists warn that support for President Joe Biden is suffering in Latino and Muslim communities. Polls have consistently shown widespread discontent among Latinos over inflation and the economy. And many Muslim Americans are angry at Biden for his strong support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he pursues his military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. “There is a level of disgust and disbelief and disappointment at the administration’s handling of the crisis so far,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told me.

The movement of some of these voters away from Biden produces a powerful incentive for Republicans to escalate their rhetorical and policy offensive against immigrant communities. It means that Trump could achieve the best of both worlds politically: offering a harsh anti-immigrant agenda that energizes the most xenophobic white voters in his coalition while still maintaining, or even growing, his support among immigrant communities drawn to him (or repelled by Democrats) on other issues.

That process already seems well under way in the agenda that Trump and other Republicans are advancing about the southern border. The fact that Trump’s vote among Hispanics improved in 2020, even after he implemented such aggressive policies as starting the border wall and separating migrant children from their parents, has undoubtedly encouraged him to go even further with his new proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. and military action against Mexico (both of which DeSantis has also endorsed).

Likewise, if Trump wins the 2024 election and more Muslim Americans vote for him than in 2020, despite his threats to target Muslim immigrants, he will undoubtedly feel emboldened in a second term to impose more exclusionary policies on that community. Stephen Miller, the hard-line architect of much of Trump’s immigration agenda as president, offered a preview of the deportation agenda that might be ahead when he posted a video of a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration and wrote that ICE agents “will be busy in 2025.”

Over his four years in office, Trump instituted policies more resistant to immigration than any president had since the 1920s, and repeatedly disparaged immigrants with openly racist language (including calling Mexicans “rapists” and decrying immigration from mostly Black “shithole countries”). He is now pushing beyond even that agenda. “What comes next will be … spectacular,” Miller posted recently.

As just a first step, Trump has proposed to reinstate all of the key policies he implemented that raised nearly insurmountable hurdles for those who sought to claim asylum in the U.S., including the “remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to stay in that country, typically in crowded and dangerous makeshift camps, while their cases were adjudicated. He’s promised to finish his border wall. And during his CNN town hall last spring, Trump refused to rule out reinstating the separation of migrant children from their parents, his most controversial policy. The Biden administration has reversed all of these policies, and it recently settled a lawsuit in which the federal government agreed not to restore the child-separation policy. Still, experts say that a reelected Trump would almost certainly seek to void or evade that agreement.

After the Hamas attack in Israel, Trump also pledged to bring back his travel ban. A bitterly divided Supreme Court upheld the rule in a 5–4 vote in 2018; if reelected, Trump could unilaterally restore the policy through executive action. “The legal framework,” Mitchell from the Council on American-Islamic Relations told me, “is still there just waiting to be used.”

But Trump has new ideas too. These include ending birthright citizenship (though his legal authority to do so is highly questionable) and launching military actions against Mexican drug cartels. In a speech to a conservative group earlier this year, he promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

He is also calling for requiring prospective immigrants from any country to pass intensified ideological screenings: “If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you’re disqualified; if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you’re disqualified; and if you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified,” he said earlier this month in Iowa. Monday in New Hampshire, Trump raised the ante when he said he would bar entry for those who “don’t like our religion,” without explaining how he defined “our religion.” He’s pledged to deport students and other immigrants who express what he called “jihadist sympathies.”

David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says Trump’s record as president shows that it would be a mistake to dismiss even the most extreme of these proposals as simply campaign rhetoric designed to stir his crowds. “Every word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth ought to be taken seriously,” Leopold told me. If Trump returns to power, he said, we will see a version of his first term’s “anti-immigrant policy on steroids.”

While Trump was president, and his agenda was in the spotlight, most of his core immigration policies provoked majority opposition in polls. In a compilation of results from its annual American Values Survey polls late in Trump’s presidency, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just over half of Americans opposed his Muslim travel ban, about three-fifths opposed his border wall, and fully three-fourths opposed the child-separation policy.

But public tolerance for some of these ideas may be growing amid dissatisfaction with Biden’s record in managing the border and immigration. Less than a third of adults overall—and only about one-fourth of independents—said they approved of Biden’s handling of those issues in the latest annual American Values Survey, released yesterday. A recent national Marquette University Law School Poll found that Americans preferred Trump over Biden on controlling the border by nearly two to one.

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll found that a majority of Americans support building a border wall for the first time since the pollsters initially asked about the idea, in 2016. “With frustration building” over Biden’s record on immigration, “it looks to me that some of these more extreme ideas are gaining traction in the country,” Robert P. Jones, the president of PRRI, told me.

Even many in the communities that Trump’s immigration plans would most directly affect appear more focused on other issues. Every major data source on voting behavior agreed that Trump grew his vote among Latino voters from about three in 10 to nearly four in 10 from 2016 to 2020, largely around economic issues, but also because of gains among cultural conservatives. Though the GOP advance among Latinos stalled between the 2020 and 2022 elections, polls continue to record widespread dissatisfaction among them about inflation, which could further erode support for Democrats in 2024.

The Muslim American community is much smaller—Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the total U.S. population—so reliable information on its voting behavior is less available. Youssef Chouhoud, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, told me that Trump’s vote among Muslim Americans nationwide improved from about one in six in 2016 to roughly one in three in 2020. Key to those 2020 gains, he said, was sympathy to conservative GOP arguments on issues such as LGBTQ rights and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Now, Chouhoud and others note, those Republican gains are being reinforced by the backlash among many Muslim activists against Biden’s expansive support for Israel in the conflict with Hamas. Waleed Shahid, a Muslim American Democratic strategist who has worked for several liberal groups and candidates, says that leading Democrats are underestimating the visceral anger over Biden’s words and actions. “I think, unfortunately, Democratic leadership has their heads in the sand about this,” he told me.

Both Chouhoud and Shahid told me they believed that Trump’s return to anti-Muslim rhetoric reduces the odds that any significant number of voters from that community will abandon Biden to vote for the former president. But they both said they considered it likely that some Muslim American voters disillusioned with Biden might stay home or drift to third-party candidates. “The fact that this chorus” in the Muslim community “is so loud” in criticizing Biden, “even given the full knowledge” of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, “is telling you that there is a groundswell of real animosity toward the policies that the Biden administration is enacting right now,” said Chouhoud, who is also a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan group that studies issues concerning Muslim Americans. This discontent could matter most in the swing state of Michigan, where Muslims are a sizable constituency: A mobile billboard drove through the Detroit area this week displaying a message proclaiming that “Israel Bombs Children” and “Biden Pays For It.”

Shahid says he fears that the 2024 election won’t look like 2020’s—when Democrats of all stripes unified behind the common mission of ousting Trump from the White House. Instead, he thinks, the next election will more closely resemble that of 2016, when a decisive sliver of Democratic-leaning voters, particularly younger ones, backed the third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein rather than Hillary Clinton.

“The Democratic base did not turn out for Hillary in 2016, even though Trump was a right-wing extremist,” Shahid told me. “People somehow have collective amnesia about this. But Biden is historically unpopular with the Democratic base.”

Of course Biden may regain Muslim voters’ trust if he can jump-start renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after the fighting concludes. Similarly, very few Latinos may now be aware of Trump’s proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants and military action against Mexico; if he’s the nominee, that would likely change—and prompt substantial resistance, especially among Mexican Americans.

Still, these tensions reveal a larger dynamic underpinning the potential 2024 rematch between the two men. On almost every front, Trump has formulated a 2024 agenda even more confrontational to Democratic constituencies and liberal priorities than he pursued during his four years in the White House. Yet disenchantment with Biden’s performance could be eroding the will to resist that agenda among key components of the party’s coalition, particularly young people and voters of color.

The pressure that the Middle East crisis is placing on Muslim American support for Biden, even as Trump directly threatens that community, shows how hard it may be for Democrats to maintain a united front—even against an opponent whom they consider an existential threat to all that they value.

If you were trying to engineer a representative of the mainstream economics establishment, you might come up with Austan Goolsbee. He became an economics professor at the University of Chicago at age 26 and went on to chair Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is now the president of the Chicago Federal Reserve. So when Goolsbee says that the conventional wisdom on economic policy is dangerously wrong, it’s worth paying attention.

Last month, Goolsbee gave a speech criticizing what he calls the “traditionalist view” of monetary policy: the belief that the only way to tame inflation is by causing a recession. This view so thoroughly dominates the economics profession that it is often considered something closer to a law of nature. It is why, when inflation began taking off last year, nearly every economist, forecaster, and CEO believed a recession was around the corner. Then the seemingly impossible happened. The inflation rate, which peaked in June 2022, fell to within a point or two of the Fed’s 2 percent goal, and the much-anticipated recession never arrived. The traditionalist view had been wrong. More than that, it may now be a liability. “In today’s environment,” Goolsbee said in the speech, “believing too strongly in the inevitability of a large trade-off between inflation and unemployment comes with the serious risk of a near-term policy error.”

Don’t let the dry econ-speak fool you. For someone in Goolsbee’s position, a sentence like that is the equivalent of standing on the steps of the Federal Reserve with a bullhorn screaming, “Stop before you crash the economy!”

“If you believe that the only way to bring inflation down is to adopt a tighter policy,” Goolsbee told me recently, “then by the time you realized that wasn’t the case, you’d have created a recession that was not necessary.”

Causing a recession in order to tame inflation is painful enough. Causing a recession when inflation is already getting under control would be tragic. The past year has been something of an economic miracle. Against all odds, we didn’t actually need a recession to bring down inflation. But if the Fed is unwilling to accept the good news, then we just may get one anyway.

The traditionalist view emerged from the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. With inflation spiraling out of control, Fed Chair Paul Volcker famously jacked up interest rates to record levels and plunged the U.S. economy into a major recession. Unemployment reached nearly 11 percent in 1982 and stayed high for years. But it worked. Inflation stabilized, and Volcker went down in history as the hero who saved the economy. The economics establishment drew a clear lesson: The cure for inflation is a recession.

This remained the dominant view of monetary policy for the next 40 years, familiar to anyone who has sat through an introductory economics course. So as inflation spiked in 2022, the overwhelming view was that a recession would be the necessary treatment. The Federal Reserve projected hundreds of thousands of job losses by the end of 2023. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that the U.S. would need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to bring inflation under control. A Bloomberg Economics model forecasted a 100 percent chance of a recession by October 2023.

[Read: The simple mistake t]hat almost triggered a recession

But then inflation started falling, and falling, and falling. Prices are still not quite where the Fed wants them, but they’re close. Meanwhile, by many measures, the economy is in terrific shape. Unemployment is below 4 percent. Wages are rising faster than prices. Growth has been faster than in most of America’s peer countries. Some economists half-jokingly refer to the situation as “the immaculate disinflation.”

There are two main theories for why the traditionalist view appears to have gotten things so thoroughly wrong. The first could be summarized as “COVID was different.” When the country first reopened after the pandemic, pent-up savings collided with limited supply to push prices temporarily higher. As the economy has returned closer to normal, those prices have come down. At the same time, labor-force participation has reached its highest point in more than two decades, perhaps thanks to the rise of remote and hybrid work. That has allowed the economy to add jobs without increasing labor costs so much that employers would be forced to raise prices.

The second theory has to do with the role of expectations. The scariest thing about inflation is the way it can become self-reinforcing: When future inflation becomes expected, business owners preemptively raise prices and workers demand higher wages. This dynamic led to the infamous “wage-price spiral” of the 1970s. But inflation expectations have remained stable this time around. In other words, one reason the Fed didn’t have to engineer a recession is precisely that Americans already trust it to bring inflation under control.

Whatever the exact explanation, some economists are convinced that the old consensus—you can’t stop inflation without a recession—has turned out to be wrong. The question now is whether the Fed will learn that happy lesson. (As one of 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which convenes regularly to vote on interest rates, Goolsbee has a direct role to play in providing an answer.) At its most recent meeting in September, the Fed signaled that it will likely increase rates again before the end of 2023 and keep them at that level—the highest in 20 years—well into 2024. Higher interest rates make it more expensive for consumers to buy a home or car and for businesses to make investments, which, in turn, is supposed to reduce hiring, blunt wage growth, and depress spending. The entire point is to cool prices by grinding the economy to a halt. So far, the post-pandemic economy has been resilient, but there’s a limit to how long rates can go up—and stay up—before their full pain is felt.

Of course, there are risks in the other direction as well. An external shock—such as spiking oil prices in response to war in the Middle East—could send inflation shooting up again. But some economists find that possibility far less threatening than an overcorrection. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me an overcorrection is “the No. 1 risk I worry about.” Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, refers to it as the fear “that keeps me up at night.”

The economy, in other words, appears to be gliding smoothly toward the kind of “soft landing” that until recently seemed unimaginable. But if the Fed continues to raise interest rates, or just keeps them too high for too long, it risks driving the plane off the runway. “Paul Volcker was my mentor,” Goolsbee told me. “But what people have to understand is that this isn’t the 1970s.”

The Fed might not be able to so easily suppress a half century’s worth of inflation-fighting instincts. Although inflation has come down considerably in recent months, it is currently running at about 3 or 4 percent, depending which measure you use, which is still above the Fed’s 2 percent target. Everyone would prefer to avoid a recession, but some officials think that this “last mile” of inflation will never come under control as long as the economy maintains its current strength. As Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell put it in a speech yesterday, “Additional evidence of persistently above-trend growth, or that tightness in the labor market is no longer easing, could put further progress on inflation at risk and could warrant further tightening of monetary policy.”

[Annie Lowrey: The annoyance economy]

To this line of thinking, the traditionalist view has not been disproved; the past year of disinflation was just the easy part. The hard part is taming the labor market, which is still running too hot for comfort. The price of goods has returned to the pre-pandemic trend, but the price of services—which is driven by wages—has remained higher. Inflation hawks point to the September jobs report, which showed about 336,000 jobs added to the economy. Analysts had been expecting half that. And though inflation expectations have remained calm, the traditionalists worry how long that can last if the Fed doesn’t hit its stated target of 2 percent.

Some experts have suggested that the 2 percent number is an arbitrary goal. Goolsbee isn’t one of them. When I asked him whether the Fed would ever consider easing up on its inflation target, he replied, “Over my dead body.” Where he parts ways with some of his colleagues is in his optimism about inflation’s true trajectory. In his view, the current stickiness is a statistical artifact; the data simply haven’t caught up to reality.

Here’s why: The cost of housing is a huge component of overall inflation statistics. But because of the idiosyncratic way in which housing inflation is calculated, the official figures tend to lag current prices by about a year. That means today’s housing numbers are likely still reflecting the market of 2022. Once they’ve adjusted, inflation should get closer to the 2 percent target on its own, even if the labor market stays hot—and on that front, there’s evidence that wage growth is cooling, too, even as the economy adds jobs.

The story of Paul Volcker slaying the inflation dragon is the Federal Reserve’s founding myth. The belief in a mechanical relationship between inflation and unemployment is the closest thing it has to sacred law, and raising interest rates to cool prices is the essence of what it does. Economists like Goolsbee are asking the Fed to put all of that to the side. To suspend disbelief. To abandon its secular creed. To erase Volcker’s legacy from their memories, if just for a moment. If the central bank can achieve what Goolsbee calls the “golden path” between inflation and recession, he believes this moment will be just as defining for the Fed as the 1970s were. Only this time, its legacy will be defined by restraint rather than relentlessness.

“No central bank has ever cut inflation this much without a deep recession,” he told me. “So it’s not just a soft landing. It’s a landing from a higher level than anyone has been able to pull off. And I think we can do it.”

A Michigan couple have filed a lawsuit against US government to compel evacuation of Americans in Gaza Strip amid war.

You know the smell of warm, buttered popcorn. A crisp autumn day. The pungent, somewhat sweet scent that precedes rain. But could you begin to describe these aromas in detail? Or compare them? Your nose has some 400 olfactory receptors that do the work of translating the world’s estimated 40 billion odorous molecules into an even higher number of distinct scents your brain can understand. Yet although children are taught that grass is green and pigmented by chlorophyll, they rarely learn to describe the smell of a freshly cut lawn, let alone the ozone before a storm. The ability to express our sense of smell, in part because we’ve ignored it, eludes most of us.

Humans are not alone in this limitation. We have invented machines that can “see” and “hear”: Audio was first recorded and played back in 1877, and the first moving image followed a year later. A musical note is defined by its pitch, a single number, and computers represent a color with three numbers—the red, green, and blue (RGB) values that correspond to the types of color-receiving cells in our eyes. A song is a sequence of sounds, and an image, a map of pixels. But there has never been a machine that can flawlessly detect, store, and reproduce odors.

[Read: The hidden world of scents outside your door]

Scientists are working to change that. At the end of August, researchers published a paper presenting a model that can describe a molecule’s scent as well as, or even better than, a person (at least in limited trials). The computer program does so by placing molecules on a sort of odor map, where flowery smells are closer together than to, say, rotten ones. By quantitatively organizing odors, the research could mark a significant advance in enhancing our understanding of human perception. As it has already done for the study of vision and language, AI may be auguring a revolution in the study of this more enigmatic human sense.

“The last time we digitized a human sense was a generation ago,” Alex Wiltschko, a neuroscientist and a co-author of the paper, told me. “These opportunities don’t come around that often.” Computers can’t quite smell yet, but this research is a big step toward that goal, which Wiltschko began pursuing at Google Research and is now the focus of his start-up, Osmo. “People have been trying to predict smell from chemical structure for a long time,” Hiroaki Matsunami, a molecular biologist at Duke who studies olfaction and was not involved with the study, told me. “This is the best at this point in order to do that task. In that sense, it’s a great advance.”

Machine-learning algorithms require a huge amount of data to function, and the only information available for a scent comes from notoriously unreliable human noses and brains. (Even slight tweaks to a molecule can make a sweet, banana-scented compound reek of vomit; mysterious changes to your nose and brain, as many unfortunately learned from developing COVID-19, can make coffee smell of sewage.) Wiltschko and his team set out to identify and curate a set of roughly 5,000 molecules and associated odor descriptions (“alcoholic,” “fishy,” “smoky,” and so on) from researchers in the flavor and fragrance industries, then fed that data to a type of algorithm called a graph neural network, which was able to represent each molecule’s atoms and chemical bonds in a sort of internal diagram. The resulting program can, given a molecule’s structure, predict how it will smell as a combination of the existing odor labels.

Testing those predictions’ accuracy presented a whole other challenge. The team had to train a new, independent group of people to smell and label a new set of molecules that the program had never analyzed. “People are really bad at [describing scents] when they walk off the street,” Joel Mainland, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, who helped conduct the training for the study, told me. “If you train them for a couple hours, they get pretty good, pretty fast.”

Over five one-hour sessions, participants were given different substances associated with one of 55 different odors, such as kombucha (“fermented”), a crayon (“waxy”), or a green-apple Jolly Rancher (“apple”), to learn a reference point for each label. Participants then took a test in which they had to describe the smell of 20 common molecules (vanillin is vanilla-scented; carvone is minty), and then retook the test to make sure their judgments were consistent, Emily Mayhew, a food scientist at Michigan State University and co-author of the study, told me. Everybody who passed could help validate the algorithm.

The researchers curated a set of molecules that was highly distinct from the set used to train the program, then had participants smell and describe all of the new molecules with various labels, each rated from zero to five (hypothetically, a lemon might receive a five for “citrus,” a two for “fruity,” and a zero for “smoky.”). The average of all those ratings became the benchmark against which to compare the computer. “If you take two people and you ask them to describe a smell, they will often disagree,” Mainland said. But an average of several smell-trained people is “pretty stable.”

Overall, the AI model “smelled” a bit more accurately than the people participating in the research. The program provides “a really powerful demonstration that some key aspects of our odor perception are shared,” Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurobiologist at Harvard who did not conduct the research but is an informal adviser to Osmo, told me. Exactly what two people think a lemon smells like varies, but most will agree a lemon and an orange both smell of citrus, and an apple does not.

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Then there’s the study’s map. Every molecule, and in turn its odor, can be numerically represented in a mathematical space that the authors call a “principal odor map.” It provides insight into not just the relation between structure and smell but also the way our brain organizes odors, Wiltschko told me: Floral scents are in one section of the map, meaty ones in another; lavender is closer to jasmine on the map than it is to a beefy aroma.

Datta cautioned that he would not describe the odor map as principal so much as perceptual. “It does a beautiful job of capturing the relationship between chemistry and perception,” he said. But it doesn’t take into account all the steps—from receptors in our nose to the cerebral cortex in our brain—that occur as a molecule is turned into chemical signals that are then transformed into verbal descriptions of a smell. And the map isn’t like RGB values in that it doesn’t describe basic components that can make any smell—although it does “suggest to us that RGB [for smell] is possible.” The computer model’s perceptual odor map is an “extraordinarily important proof of concept,” he added, and provides crucial insights into how the brain appears to organize smells. For instance, you might assume certain categories of smell—citrus and smoky, for instance—are entirely separate, Datta said. But the odor map suggests that paths connect even these disparate scents.

The model is just the first in many advances needed to digitize scent. “It still lacks some of the important aspects of smell,” Matsunami told me, which the paper’s authors readily admit. Their program cannot predict how molecules smell in combination, and most natural odors are the results of very complex mixtures. It also wasn’t designed to take into account odor concentration, which can change not just the degree but also the quality of a smell (the molecule MMB, for instance, gives off a pleasant odor in small doses and is added to household cleaners, but in high concentrations it helps make cat urine smell like cat urine.) That the model also predicts a smell only on average makes it unclear how well the program would do in real-world settings, given people’s individual perceptions, Datta said. Even though the research is like the “Manhattan Project for categorizing odor qualities relative to physical, chemical parameters,” Richard Doty, the director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the study, told me, it’s unclear to him how much further the model can bring our understanding of smell given how complex our nose is. “I don’t know where it leads us.”

Still, future research could tackle some of these problems, Wiltschko argues, and fine-tune the map itself. The number of dimensions in the map, for instance, is arbitrarily set to optimize the computer program; changes in the training data might improve the model as well. And studying other parts of our olfactory system, such as receptors in our nose or neural pathways to the brain, will likely also help reveal more about how and through what stages the human body processes various smells. One day, a set of programs that can translate the structure, concentration, and mixture of molecules into a smell, paired with a chemical sensor, could truly realize digital olfaction.

Even without proper Smell-o-Vision, it is shocking, in a sense, that a computer model removed from the facts of human embodiment—a program has no nose, olfactory bulb, or brain—can reliably predict how something smells. “The paper implicitly advances the argument that you don’t need to understand the brain in order to understand smell perception,” Datta said. The research reflects a new, AI-inflected scientific understanding that seems to be popping up everywhere—using chatbots to study the human brain’s language network, or using deep-learning algorithms to fold proteins. It is an understanding rooted not in observation of the world so much as that of data: prediction without intuition.

This week, a teenager might open up their TikTok feed and immediately be served a video about a hairbrush that promises to gently detangle the roughest of tangles. Or a clip about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s rumored romance. Or the app could show them a scene from the Israeli Supernova music festival, where on Saturday a young woman named Noa Argamani was put on the back of a motorcycle as her boyfriend was held by captors.

Footage from Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, and the retaliatory strikes it has prompted, is appearing in social-media feeds across the world. Videos about the conflict have drawn billions of views on TikTok alone, according to The Washington Post, and queries related to it have appeared in the app’s trending searches. Hamas reportedly posted the murder of one grandmother to her own Facebook page.

Hamas reportedly captured about 150 hostages, and has threatened to execute them. Some schools in Israel and the United States have asked that parents preemptively delete social-media apps from their children’s devices in order to protect them from the possibility of seeing clips in which hostages beg for their lives. “Together with other Jewish day schools, we are warning parents to disable social media apps such as Instagram, X, and Tiktok from their children’s phones,” reads one such statement, posted by The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern. “Graphic and often misleading information is flowing freely, augmenting the fears of our students.”

Parents have good reason to be concerned. Psychologists don’t fully know how watching graphic content online can affect kids. But “there’s enough circumstantial evidence suggesting that it’s not healthy from a mental-health standpoint,” Meredith Gasner, a psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me, citing research on the viral videos of George Floyd’s death in police custody.

Of course, kids have long been at risk of encountering disturbing or graphic content on social media. But the current era of single feeds serving short videos selected by algorithms, sometimes with little apparent logic, potentially changes the calculus. Firing up TikTok feels like pulling the lever of a content slot machine; every time a user opens up the app, they don’t necessarily know whether they’ll find comedy or horror. Lots of kids are pulling the lever many times a day, sometimes spending hours in the app. Nor is this just a TikTok problem: Instagram and YouTube, among other platforms, both have their own TikTok-like feeds. Much of the material on these platforms is benign, but on weeks like this one, when even adults may have trouble stomaching visuals they encounter, the idea that children are all over social media is particularly unsettling.

If hostage videos appear, the social-media platforms are hypothetically in a position to prevent them from going viral. A spokesperson for TikTok did not respond to a request for comment, but the platform’s community guidelines forbid use of the platform “to threaten or incite violence, or to promote violent extremism,” and the website says that the company works to detect and remove such content. Instagram, for its part, also moderates “videos of intense, graphic violence,” and has established a special-operations center staffed with experts to monitor the situation in Israel, a spokesperson for Meta said in an email. Both platforms offer safety tools for parents. Still, social-media platforms’ track record when it comes to content moderation is abysmal. Some videos that are upsetting to children may find their way onto the apps, especially those posted by reputable news outlets.

I talked to eight experts on children and the internet who told me that deleting social-media apps unilaterally might not work. For one, TikTok and Instagram videos are often cross-posted on other platforms, like YouTube Shorts, so you’d have to delete a lot of apps to create a true bubble. (And even so, that might not be impenetrable.) Kicking your teen off social media, albeit temporarily, may also feel like a punishment to your kid, who did nothing wrong.

But that doesn’t mean that parents are helpless. A better approach, experts told me, is for parents to be more open and communicative with their kids. “Having that open dialogue is key because they’re not really going to be able to escape what’s going on,” Laura Ordoñez, head of digital content and curation at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that advocates for a safer digital world for kids and families, told me. Even if children can avoid videos of violence, the realities those videos represent still exist.

Families with a direct connection to the region may have a tougher time navigating the next few days than those without one. And age matters a lot, the experts said. Younger kids, particularly those in second grade or below, should be protected from watching upsetting videos as much as possible, says Heather Kirkorian, the director of the Cognitive Development and Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They’re too young to understand what’s happening. “They don’t have the cognitive and emotional skills to understand and process,” she told me.

At those younger ages, parents can realistically bubble kids from certain platforms and sites. Though that’s not to say they won’t hear about the war at school or have questions about it. When discussing with younger children, experts advise talking in kid-friendly language and, when appropriate, letting them know that they personally are safe. If the child is under 7, Ordoñez advises using “very simple and concrete explanations” like “Someone was hurt” or “People are fighting.” She also recommends that adults avoid watching or listening to news in front of children, who may overhear material that upsets them.

For older children, quarantining them from life online is rarely plausible. If you do delete TikTok from their phone, kids may just download it again or find another way to view it—by, say, using another kids’ device or a school computer. As Diana Graber, the author of Raising Humans in a Digital World, pointed out: “The minute you tell a child you can’t look at something, guess what they’re going to do?” Experts told me that a more productive approach is to ask kids questions about what they know, what they’ve seen, and how they feel. Warn them that the content they encounter may upset them, and talk to them about how it might affect them. Graber notes that a lot of kids these days are fluent in the language of mental health. If you’ve seen graphic content on your feeds, you can assume that your kid might see it, too. Julianna Miner, the author of Raising a Screen-Smart Kid, notes that “it’s important to give your kids a heads up” and to “prepare them for what they might see.” After that, you can “give them the choice of logging off or changing settings or taking some steps to potentially limit the types of things they could be exposed to.” This way, you’re on the same team.

In tense moments like this one, kids—like everyone else—are likely to encounter misinformation and disinformation, some of which began circulating even as the attacks were first being carried out. Bloomberg reported that a video from a different music festival in September was making the rounds on TikTok and had gotten almost 200,000 likes. For this reason, Sarita Schoenebeck, a professor at the University of Michigan who directs its Living Online Lab, recommends reminding kids that we don’t always know whether what we see online is real or fake.

In general, experts advise that parents should personalize their approach to their children. Some are more sensitive than others, and parents know their kids and what they can handle best. More broadly, monitor for signs that they’re upset. That might look different depending on the child. One good rule of thumb Schoenebeck gives when advising parents about whether kids are ready for smartphones is to think about how well your child is able to self-regulate around technology. “When you say, ‘Oh, time to turn the TV off!’ or whatever, are they able to self-regulate and do that without having a fit?” she asked. Are they capable of doing a dinner without phones or do they sneak a peek under the table? The same questions may show how ready they are to self-regulate their social-media use in upsetting times.

We like our female icons, as they age, to go quietly—to tiptoe backwards into semi-reclusion, away from our relentless curiosity and our unforgiving gaze. Tina Turner managed this arguably better than anyone else, holed up for the last decade of her life in a gated Swiss château with an adoring husband and a consulting role on the hit musical about her life, watching a younger performer step nimbly into her gold tassels. Joni Mitchell retreated to her Los Angeles and British Columbia properties for so long that when she reappeared for a full set at the Newport Folk Festival last year, it was as though God herself was suddenly present, ensconced in a gilded armchair, her voice still so sonorous that practically every single person onstage with her wept.

If you age in private, the deal goes, you can reemerge triumphantly as royalty in your silver era. But Madonna never signed up for dignified placating. At 47, as sinewy as an impala in a hot-pink leotard and fishnets, she moved with such controlled, physical sensuality in the video for “Hung Up” that the 20-something dancers around her seemed bland by comparison. At 53, she headlined a Super Bowl halftime show—part gladiatorial circus, part intergalactic ancient-Egyptian cheerleading meet—while 114 million people watched. At 65, Madonna regularly uploads videos of herself to TikTok, her face plumped into uncanny, doll-like smoothness, strutting to snippets of obscure dialogue or electronica in psychedelic outfits categorized by one commenter as “colorful granny.”

What’s most striking to me about the videos is how Madonna retains the power to scandalize each generation anew—even teenagers nourished on a cultural diet of Euphoria and hard-core pornography—with her adamantly sexual self-presentation. “Lost her mind,” one TikTok commenter wrote as Madonna, wearing a black lace fetish mask, simply stared confrontationally at the camera. About a clip of her waving her arms in a diamanté cowboy hat, her chest festooned with chains, a cheerful-looking boy posted, “Someone come get Nana she’s wandering again.”

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This is, mark you, almost 40 years after Madonna rolled around on the floor at the MTV Video Music Awards in a corseted wedding dress, her white underwear and garters fully visible to the cameras, in an early TV appearance that an outraged Annie Lennox called “very, very whorish … It was like she was fucking the music industry.” At the time, Madonna’s manager, Freddy DeMann, told her she’d ruined her career. One of the few who approved was Cyndi Lauper, perpetually compared to Madonna in those days. Lauper seemed to recognize what her contemporary was trying to do, and what she’s been doing ever since, often operating just beyond the frequency of comprehension. “I loved that,” Lauper said. “It was performance art.”

People have argued about Madonna from the very beginning. That people are still arguing about her—over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless—underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna’s oeuvre. She makes music, but she’s not a musician. She’s not an actor either, or a director, or a children’s-book author, even though she’s embodied each of these roles (with varying degrees of success). She is, rather, an artist. More than that, she’s a living, breathing, constantly metamorphosing work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk—her life, her physical self, her sexuality, her presence in the media interweaving and coalescing into the totality of the spectacle that is Madonna. “My sister is her own masterpiece,” Christopher Ciccone told Vanity Fair in 1991, the year Madonna: Truth or Dare, a movie capturing her Blond Ambition tour, became the then-highest-grossing documentary in history.

In her reverent, 800-page Madonna: A Rebel Life, the writer Mary Gabriel offers the argument that Madonna’s entire biography is an exercise in reinventing female power. She crystallizes this mission of masterful defiance in a chapter about Madonna’s Sex, a 1992 coffee-table collection of photographic erotica that sold more than 1.5 million copies and almost torched her career. A decade into her stardom, Madonna had already

inhabited all the stereotypes that patriarchal society concocted for women—dutiful daughter, gamine, blond bombshell, adoring wife, bitch—in her pursuit of a new woman, a person who exercised her power freely, joyously, even wantonly, if that’s what she wanted. Her quest was what the French philosopher Hélène Cixous described as the search for a “feminine imaginary … an ego no longer given over to an image defined by the masculine.”

Before long, Madonna had broken multiple records for a female solo artist, having sold more than 150 million albums around the world. She had also “transformed the traditional pop-rock concert format into a full-scale theatrical experience,” Gabriel writes, “raised music video from a sales tool to an art form, and put a woman—herself—in control of her own music, from creation to development to distribution.”

All of this is true, and yet the volume of evidence that Gabriel amasses reveals something even greater: not just a cultural phenomenon, or even a postmodern artist transforming herself into the ultimate commodity, but a woman who intuits and manifests social change so far ahead of everyone else that she makes people profoundly uncomfortable. We may not understand her in the moment, but rarely is she wrong about what’s coming.

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To try to write about Madonna is to stare into an abyss of content: the music, the videos, the movies, the books, the fashion, but also the responses that those things generated, a corpus almost as significant to the construction of Madonna as the work itself. More than 60 books have been devoted to her, encompassing biography, critical analysis, comic books, sleazy profiteering, and even a collection of women’s dreams about her. “With the possible exception of Elvis, Madonna is without peer in having inscribed herself with such intensity on the public consciousness in multiple and contradictory ways,” Cathy Schwichtenberg wrote in The Madonna Connection, a 1993 book of essays summarizing the growing academic field known as Madonna Studies.

Gabriel’s biography is astonishingly granular in its attention to biographical detail, and also to historical context. You could, if you wanted, read the book as a kind of late-20th-century history of women’s ongoing fight for liberation, filtered through the lens of someone whom Joni Mitchell variously derided as “manufactured,” “a living Barbie doll,” and “death to all things real” and Norman Mailer described as “our greatest living female artist.” More often, A Rebel Life reads like a Walter Isaacson biography of a Great Man, a thorough life-and-times synthesis of a world-changing, civilization-defining genius—only with a lot of cone bras and syncopated beats.

Gabriel’s attention to context is key, because trying to understand Madonna as a flesh-and-blood person—the biographer’s traditional endeavor—is a trap. Self-exposure, for her, is about obfuscation more than revelation. Every new identity she disseminates into the world is just a different layer; the more you see of her, the more the “truth” of her is obscured. Truth or Dare famously includes a contretemps between Madonna and her boyfriend at the time, the actor Warren Beatty, while Madonna is having her throat examined by a doctor mid-tour. “Do you want to talk at all off camera?” the doctor asks. “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk,” Beatty interjects. “Why would you say something if it’s off camera? What point is there of existing?”

Beatty was then the embodiment of Old Hollywood, square-jawed and restrained, while the considerably younger Madonna supposedly represented the MTV generation, coarse and venal, willing to trade even her most intimate moments for hard profit. (Truth or Dare premiered a full year before The Real World ushered in a new realm of “reality” entertainment.) What Beatty, along with many others, missed was that exposure wasn’t about selling out in any conventional sense. For Madonna, the construction of her public-facing persona was about spinning masquerade, fantasy, and fragments of self-disclosure into mass-media magic that confounded, again and again, efforts to categorize her.

She teased ideas about gender fluidity and bisexuality; she declared herself to be a “gay man”; she played up her friendship with the comedian Sandra Bernhard as rumors flew that the two were sleeping together. The main constant through her kaleidoscopic permutations was the response they elicited: As the cultural theorist John Fiske once put it, her sexuality was perceived as a new caliber of threat—“not the traditional and easily contained one of woman as whore, but the more radical one of woman as independent of masculinity.” (No wonder Beatty, the most masculine of screen stars, chafed at it.)

And yet, believe it or not, Madonna is human, and she was born—to a woman also named Madonna and a man named Silvio “Tony” Ciccone—in Bay City, Michigan, in 1958. When she was 5 years old, her mother died, a fact that seems as fundamental to the arc of her career as music or sex or religion. Tony, Gabriel writes, struggling alone with a houseful of unruly children, simply raised Madonna in the same way that he raised her two older brothers. (At the time of her mother’s death, Madonna had three younger siblings; two more followed when Tony married the family’s housekeeper.) She played as they played; she fought and bit and belched and yelled just as they did. When we think about Madonna later, effortlessly disrupting conventions of feminine sexual presentation and power dynamics, this upbringing makes perfect sense. (In one of my favorite photos from Sex, Madonna stands by a window, facing outward, wearing just a white tank top, motorcycle boots, and no underwear, her buttocks exposed as she appears to scratch an imaginary pair of balls.)

Gabriel, from the start, is alert to signs of Madonna’s self-transfiguring urges: how, in elementary school, she put wires in her braids to make them stick up like those of her young Black friends; how, in eighth grade, she scandalized her junior-high-school audience with a risqué, psychedelic dance sequence set to the Who’s “Baba O’Riley”; how, at 15, she first presented herself to her dance teacher and mentor, Christopher Flynn, as a childlike figure carrying a doll under her arm, as if to signal that she was a blank slate for him to work on.

But the years that seem most crucial are the ones she spent in New York City trying to make it as a modern dancer after dropping out of the University of Michigan. In 1978, when she arrived, the city was experiencing ungovernable urban blight and a simultaneous creative renaissance. Modes of artistic expression were becoming ever more fluid; the Warholian creation of a persona, and the postmodern appropriation of original ideas and images into new art forms, expanded performance possibilities. After quickly realizing her limitations as a dancer, Madonna did a stint as a drummer in a New Wave band called the Breakfast Club. She did nude modeling to pay for a series of truly scuzzy apartments. When her father begged her to come home, she’d say, “You don’t get it, Dad. I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want to be a lawyer. I want to be an artist.”

Her desire to make art was tied up with her ferocious ambition, her early comprehension that celebrity could be its own kind of art form. A friend of Madonna’s recalls to Gabriel that when she first met her, in a club in New York in the early ’80s, Madonna said, “I’m going to be the most famous woman in the world.” By 1982, she had redirected her focus toward music and become embedded in what Gabriel describes as “a radical art kingdom” that melded high and low culture, where punk kids and street artists were suddenly the new creative aristocracy. The previous year, MTV had transformed music into a visual medium. Madonna started writing songs, and seems right from the start to have had a sweeping conception of what pop music could provide: not the kind of plastic, bubblegum stardom that jeering critics believed she was after, but a global canvas on which she aimed to project her vision.

Kim Gordon, of the band Sonic Youth, once wrote that “people pay to see others believe in themselves.” Madonna’s earliest fans were girls, gay men, queer teenagers of color who found community in the same spaces where her own sense of self was honed. In the video for her first single, “Everybody,” in 1982, Madonna dances onstage at a nightclub in a strikingly unsexy, punk-esque outfit: brown leather vest, plaid shirt, tapered khaki pants, theatrical makeup. The camera keeps its distance; you can hardly see her face. But by the video for her second, “Burning Up,” a year later, she’s unmistakably Madonna, with teased blond hair, armfuls of rubber bracelets, the mole above her lip and the slight gap between her teeth underscoring her confrontational, intent gaze. This was the moment when the product of Madonna seems to have coalesced. She wasn’t just making music (one critic famously described her vocals on her early albums as “Minnie Mouse on helium”). Provocation was part of her act—her second record, 1984’s Like a Virgin, was clear on that front—but not the point of it.

Rather, what her fans immediately recognized in Madonna was the animating spirit of her work: complete certainty in her worth, and a pathological unwillingness to give credence to anyone other than herself. Everything else about Madonna may change, but this fundamental self-conviction is always there. And for anyone who’s been raised to be or to feel like a modified, shamed, incomplete version of themselves, it’s intoxicating. At 7, in 1990, I wore out my cassette tape of I’m Breathless—the concept album Madonna recorded to accompany her role in Dick Tracy—thrilled by the unthinkable bravado, the cockiness of “Sooner or Later.” At 40, I keep coming back to her “Hung Up” video, stunned at the visual evidence that a middle-aged mother of young children could be so strong, so strange and charismatic and compelling.

This kind of power is unnerving to observe in women; instinctively, we’re either drawn to it or driven to destroy it. A Rebel Life sometimes feels excessively boosterish, noting and then brushing over criticism of Madonna’s more questionable acts over the years—her decision to forcibly kiss Drake at Coachella in 2015, to his apparent distress, among them. But Gabriel’s useful goal is perhaps to get beyond a debate that’s been stoked by an extraordinary amount of vilification. Madonna, the most successful female artist of all time, is also indubitably the most loathed. And her haters often respond to the same quality in her self-presentation that her most ardent fans do: her confidently incisive mockery of the way culture prefers women to be portrayed. People reacted to Sex—a work that constantly identifies and then undercuts how people want to see her—with the pearl-clutching faux horror that tends to accompany Madonna’s provocations, as though she had done something utterly novel and irredeemably graceless.

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In fact, the book was right in step with contemporaneous art-world forays into hard-core erotica. Sex scandalized a mainstream audience that had presumably never seen Cindy Sherman’s Sex Pictures (the artist was one of Madonna’s inspirations) or Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven series, in which the artist created explicit renderings of himself having sexual intercourse with the porn performer Ilona Staller, who was briefly his wife. Madonna has said she intended her book to be funny (in more than one photo, she outright laughs). But Sex also asserts her engagement with a lineage of artists who helped shape her, and highlights her determination to unsettle the conventional gaze.

Madonna’s videos and live shows, Gabriel argues, tend to be where you get the most complete sense of her vision, “a new kind of feminism, a lived liberation” that pointed the way for a woman to be captivating “not because she was so ‘pretty’ but because she was so free.” In her 1986 video for “Open Your Heart,” which features a giant Art Deco nude by the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, Madonna struts in a black corset in front of an audience that watches her—sneeringly, or with feigned lack of interest—but doesn’t see anything more than surface-level sexuality. At the video’s end, Madonna (dressed now in a suit and a bowler cap, with cropped hair) dances away with a preteen boy who’s been waiting for her outside. The spectators in the club want to possess and objectify Madonna; the boy wants to be her, recognizing her as an artistic kindred spirit, not just a sex object. (The video has long been interpreted by Madonna’s queer and trans fans as a gesture of affirmation.)

Three years later, in “Express Yourself,” directed by David Fincher, Madonna stages a riff on the 1927 Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, in which she rides a stone swan through a dystopian cityscape. She’s a kind of Ayn Randian femme fatale in a green silk gown, holding a cat; later, dressed in an oversize suit, she flexes her muscles and grabs her crotch; in another scene, she lies naked, in chains, on a bed. (“I have chained myself,” she later clarified in an interview with Nightline. “There wasn’t a man that put that chain on me.”) Madonna moves fluidly from subject to object, man to woman, captor to captive, skewering misogynistic Hollywood tropes. Her potent allure, whatever her guise, is unexpectedly disconcerting.

The video also has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the song, which is a totally generic, upbeat pop confection encouraging women to pick men who validate their mind and their self-worth. The discrepancy is, I think, purposeful: It begs us to notice the different registers her work is operating in, and to observe how “pop star,” for her, is just another chameleonic guise. I love Madonna’s music, which functions at a level that enables her to be stupendously successful, ridiculously wealthy, a public figure of a sort no one has ever seen before. But those accomplishments are so much less interesting than everything else her music allows her to do through the performance she choreographs around it: blast through boundaries of sexuality and presentation; explore the permeability of gender; expose the hypocrisy of a music-video landscape in which, as she said in that same Nightline interview, violence against women is readily portrayed but sex gets you banned from MTV.

Thirty years later, in a culture where bombastic, sexless superhero movies now dominate mass entertainment and where erotica—as opposed to porn—has been all but banished to the nonvisual realm of fiction, her explorations of sexuality feel as radical as ever. And we continue to resist them, to reflexively recoil. When I told people I was writing about Madonna, they invariably responded with some dismayed version of “Her face!!!” It’s easy to assume that she’s just another woman navigating the horror of aging in plain sight via an overreliance on cosmetic enhancements, just another former bombshell who won’t concede that her time as the ultimate sex object has ended.

But Madonna has never seemed to think of herself as a sex object. An objectifier who greedily prioritizes her own pleasure, yes; an alpha, absolutely; but never a sop to someone else’s fantasy. And the AI-esque strangeness of her appearance now suggests something else, too. I keep thinking about bell hooks’s argument, in a 1992 essay, that Madonna “deconstructs the myth of ‘natural’ white girl beauty” by exposing how artificial it is, how unnatural. She bends every effort, hooks notes, to embody an aesthetic that she herself is simultaneously satirizing. One might deduce that Madonna senses better than anyone where female beauty standards are heading, in an era of Facetune, Ozempic, livestreamed TikTok surgeries, and Instagram face. And that she knows what she’s doing: Her current mode of self-presentation is Madonna supplying yet another dose of what the media want from women—sexiness, youth, erasure of maturity—distorted just enough to make us flinch.

This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Madonna Forever.”

Abortion foes thought Roe v. Wade’s reversal would usher in a more pro-life America by finally clearing the legal obstacles to the eventual abolition of abortion.  But in the 16 months since Roe fell,  everywhere abortion has been on the ballot—including red states such as Kansas, Ohio, Montana, and Kentucky—voters have instead supported measures that protect abortion rights. Even some Republican presidential candidates, who in previous cycles might have pressed for sweeping abortion restrictions, are instead advocating for a 15-week limit, a policy that would protect the vast majority of abortions. Donald Trump, the front-runner for the nomination, and a man who has called himself “the most pro-life president” in American history, labeled Florida’s de facto abortion ban a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

The conservative calls for moderation should sober pro-life activists. Now more than half a century old, their movement seems trapped by internal tensions. Its bold demand for a new society that rests on rights for all humans—born and unborn—has been its singular strength, inspiring a level of devotion matched by few other causes. Having spent countless hours interviewing and observing its activists, I know at least one thing with certainty: They sincerely consider themselves human-rights crusaders. Supporters of abortion rights who don’t see this are underestimating what they’re up against.

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

The ideals of the pro-life movement have also buoyed anti-abortion sympathies in the broader public amid the fast-rising tides of social liberalization. Although surveys show that the United States is much more supportive of gay rights and gender equality than it was 50 years ago, support for abortion rights has not had a similar increase.

But the movement’s ultimate ambition—the abolition of abortion—is also a call for social revolution that scares Americans, especially now that Roe’s reversal has brought that revolution to their doorsteps. Just as center-left Democrats turned against police abolitionists in droves, so too have many Republicans rejected the dream of abortion abolitionists in their ranks. For Americans across the political spectrum, calling their local police or Planned Parenthood is sometimes an unfortunate necessity, however ambivalent they might feel about those institutions.

Laws that protected abortion rights were certainly revolutionary way back in the 1960s, but now they are our tradition, deeply embedded in our way of life. Americans from all walks of life have come to rely on these protections. This is no less true of Republicans than Democrats, especially as the GOP’s base has become more working-class. Research shows that women without a college degree are more likely to get an abortion than women with more education.

Even so, it still might be possible for pro-lifers to nudge the nation in their direction by pushing for something well short of abolition, such as a strict national limits on abortion access after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a policy for which Republican presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Tim Scott have all voiced support.

But to pursue any such settlement, right-to-life advocates must accept an America remade by 50 years of abortion rights. That is hard. How does any movement set aside the very ambition that drives it? That is the pro-life movement’s dilemma: It can’t easily push for a durable settlement to the abortion conflict without vitiating the ideals that have held it together.

The liberalism of the pro-life movement has been the unacknowledged secret to its success. While socially conservative causes have lost considerable ground since Roe was decided, abortion opinion has been remarkably stable. One explanation is that the core claims of right-to-lifers continue to resonate in a culture committed to the proposition that all human beings are created equally, entitled to life, liberty, and happiness.

That means pro-life and pro-choice activists are fellow children of the Declaration of Independence, fighting over its meaning. Both movements are trying to expand the frontiers of human freedom and equality. The abortion fight is often cast as a culture war that divides Americans into competing worldviews, one liberal , the other theocratic. But it is in fact a fight over what liberalism means.

     From the beginning, many right-to-life activists have been inspired by the ideals of freedom and equality, rather than the sexism they are often accused of. Even back in the 1970s, many of the most radical pro-life leaders were hardly Archie Bunker conservatives. Centered in the anti-war, Catholic left, many early radicals saw their activism as part of a broader ethic of nonviolence. One leader, John O’Keefe, was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and aimed to prove his commitment to feminism by adding  his wife’s last name to his in 1976, changing it to Cavanaugh-O’Keefe. Unlike O’Keefe, Francis Schaeffer—an early Protestant leader who inspired legions of evangelicals to join the anti-abortion cause—was no lefty, but he still wanted nothing to do with Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign to fight the Equal Rights Amendment. As different as they were, leaders such as O’Keefe and Schaeffer were mostly consumed with, as they put it, “saving babies,” not some retrograde desire to keep women in their place.

Their ranks became more conservative in the ’80s when Protestant fundamentalists enlisted, diminishing what one history of the movement called its early “sixties leftist feel.” Many were openly anti-feminist. Randall Terry, the leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, even excluded women from leadership positions.

But if views on gender roles were what animated the movement, then the dramatic rise in gender egalitarianism since the ’80s should have depressed pro-life sentiments and activism. Surveys show, however, that gender traditionalism declined markedly without depressing pro-life opinion. As a consequence, today the gap between the gender ideologies of pro-life and pro-choice citizens is much smaller than it was in the ’80s. Other survey-based research on pro-life activists themselves finds that, compared with other Americans, their views on gender roles are only slightly more conservative.

The vitality of the pro-life movement is partly why the Supreme Court overturned Roe. That the public seemed no less divided over Roe than it had in 1973 gave the Court’s conservative justices room to reconsider it. Had the pro-life movement and the sentiments that power it waned significantly over time, the Court might well have left Roe alone. It would have been just another social issue the Court was a little ahead of, like same-sex marriage. But Roe was never legitimated by the forward march of social attitudes.

Yet as soon as it was overturned, voters turned against the pro-life cause everywhere they could. Of course, citizens often fear the sudden disruption of the status quo, and some research on voting behavior suggests that people are particularly susceptible to such concerns when asked to vote on ballot measures. And naturally, a preference for normality may be especially strong among conservative voters.

That raises an interesting possibility: Although the pro-life movement hasn’t generally been propelled by conservative values, it may be ultimately defeated by them.

Perhaps the best evidence of pro-choice conservatism comes from the purple state of Michigan. In 1972, voters rejected a law that would have made abortion legal in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. Fifty years later, in 2022, voters approved a nearly identical ballot measure. The shift can’t be easily explained by dramatic changes in abortion attitudes, which, as I’ve noted, have been remarkably stable since the ’70s.

But while abortion attitudes haven’t changed all that much, nearly everything else has. When the citizens of Michigan rejected abortion rights in 1972, they were affirming the world they knew. They were voting against social revolution. When the state’s citizens took to the polls in 2022, their vote to sustain a long legacy of abortion rights expressed the same essential conservatism. Michigan voters didn’t change. The context did.

For years, pro-choice Boomers have lamented younger generations’ distance from a pre-Roe America. They supposed that Gen Xers and Millennials would be more committed to abortion rights if only they had witnessed the horrors of “back alley” abortions. But America’s emerging pro-choice consensus suggests that the opposite is more true: Our collective distance from a world without Roe makes us reluctant to resurrect it.

Although a reflexive bias toward the status quo is sometimes irrational, that isn’t true in this case. Even those of us—myself included—who have genuine sympathy for the philosophical case against abortion should be uneasy about reimposing broad abortion prohibitions in an America remade by the sexual revolution.

In the era prior to Roe, unplanned pregnancies tended to impose heavy burdens on men, not just women. Men were generally expected to commit to lifelong marriage when their girlfriend got pregnant. Until the 1970s, shotgun marriages were still the norm.

After Roe, though, the sexual revolution unraveled the social expectations that had once distributed the burden of unplanned children more equally. More and more, women were left to go it alone in cases of unplanned pregnancy. Roe itself accelerated this revolution, but it also reduced its costs by giving women something closer to the same freedom from parenthood that men enjoyed. Hence, Roe didn’t simply reject an old conservative social order; ironically, it did some of the work of the old order by attempting to re-create a semblance of equality between the sexes.

That means if abortion were prohibited in this age of sexual freedom, a troubling social experiment would result: compulsory motherhood without demanding anything from men in return.  Pro-lifers should accept reality. Absent any agreement on the moral status of the embryo, Americans will never support a radical social revolution on its behalf. They don’t want to live in a nation without abortion any more than they want one without police.

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Movement leaders probably can’t afford to surrender that dream and still maintain the dedication of their activists, but they can recognize that their dream won’t be coming true anytime soon. Pro-lifers should also see that flirting with strong-arm tactics—like impeaching a newly elected pro-choice judge in Wisconsin—to achieve what they could not at the polls might backfire by further alienating voters.

Doing so might also undermine a real opportunity to attain durable and meaningful limits on abortion. A 15-week limit is a good one from the point of view of right-to-life advocates. It would move us well past the extremism of Roe, which, with its companion decision (Doe v. Bolton), established one of the most radical abortion policies in the world. Yes, Roe and Doe technically permitted third-trimester bans, but they also neutralized them by subjecting such bans to an exception that allowed physicians to perform abortions for any reason they deemed relevant to the health of their patients, including “emotional, psychological, [and] familial” concerns.   

     

One model that might attract bipartisan support is France’s abortion policy: It provides funding for poor women who seek abortion and allows for late-term procedures in rare cases (e.g. severe fetal abnormalities and serious maternal health risks), but also limits abortion to 14 weeks.  France’s policy is close to the norm throughout other Western democracies, perhaps because it is consistent with common moral intuitions that predispose us to feel more protective of embryos once they begin to resemble newborns, roughly after the first trimester.  Though more restrictive than many pro-choice advocates would prefer, it would still protect the vast majority of abortions, even as it would prevent many thousands of later-term ones that pro-life advocates find most troubling.

Alternatively, pro-lifers could seek more restrictive abortion policies by trying to subvert the will of a pro-choice majority, as they recently attempted to do in Ohio and are contemplating in Wisconsin. Not only does that strategy risk alienating the American public; it also represents a troubling about-face: After decades of rightly insisting that citizens should not be effectively disenfranchised by Roe, pro-lifers are now seeking their marginalization.

It is easy enough for me to say what pro-life activists should do. But as abortion foes weigh their options, they should remember what our post-Roe politics has revealed: When given a choice between prohibition and expansive abortion rights, Americans seem to prefer the latter—and they have good conservative reasons for doing so.

A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.

An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.

After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.

[Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem]

With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.

If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.

“Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.

But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”

These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.

Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”

The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.

The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.

These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.

Such places have continued to break sharply toward Democrats in other elections this year that revolved around abortion, particularly the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election won by the liberal candidate in a landslide this spring, and an Ohio ballot initiative carried comfortably by abortion-rights forces in August. In special state legislative elections around the country this year, Democrats have also consistently run ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the same districts.

“There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.

Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”

Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.

In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.

“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”

In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master. And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”

The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.

Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters. “That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The abortion policy most Americans want]

Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.

Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.