Does Nikki Haley really have a shot at beating Donald Trump? Does any Republican?

On Monday afternoon, a basketball gym in Bluffton, South Carolina, was packed with people who had come to hear Haley’s latest sales pitch. Hundreds more were waiting outside. No Republican candidate besides Trump can reliably draw more than a thousand attendees, but about 2,500 showed up for Haley. (Granted, this speech was in Haley’s home state, where she formerly served as governor. Also, the gym was a stone’s throw from the Sun City retirement community, a place where, gently speaking, people may have had nothing better to do at 2 p.m. on a Monday.) One of Haley’s volunteers told me this weekday event had originally been booked at a nearby restaurant, but that, given the current excitement of the campaign, organizers pivoted to the gym, on the University of South Carolina at Beaufort campus. Everyone in Haley’s orbit is understandably riveted. She’s squarely challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for second place in the Republican presidential primary, no matter how second that place may be.

While the former president still floats high above his dwindling field of competitors, Haley is the only person who keeps rising in the polls. Her climb is steady, not a blip. Haley’s campaign and super PAC are planning to spend $10 million on advertisements over the next eight weeks across Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, she received an endorsement from the Koch brothers’ network, Americans for Prosperity Action, and along with it an undisclosed amount of financial support. (It will be a lot.) But this year-end, all-in effort to stop Trump ignores the fact that he is a singular vortex, a once-in-a-century figure, a living martyr with a traveling Grateful Dead–like roadshow. His abhorrent behavior and legal woes do not matter. Three weeks ago, at his rally in South Florida, vendors told me that items with Trump’s mug shot are their biggest sellers. How does a mere generational figure, as her supporters hope Haley might be, compete with that?

Haley bounded up onstage in a light-blue blazer and jeans. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she told the crowd. She meandered back and forth—no lectern, no teleprompter. When you ask people what they like about her, many point to her presence, her poise. Haley delivers her stump speech in a singsong voice. A few words, a pause, a smile. Speaking to the Low Country crowd, she seemed to be thickening her southern accent and peppering in a few extra-emphatic finger points for good measure. She’s just a down-home, neighborly southerner whose most recent job happened to be in Manhattan, serving at the United Nations. The volunteer who had bragged to me about the venue change later pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of himself and Haley at a wedding reception. He pointed to her bare feet. She’s so real, he said.

[Read: Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality]

Several women in the audience were wearing pink shirts with a Margaret Thatcher quote on the back: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Sue Ruby, a 74-year-old attendee from nearby Savannah, Georgia, was wearing a WOMEN FOR NIKKI button on her sweater. “I feel like we’ve given men a lot of years to straighten our society out, and they haven’t done so great, so let’s try a woman,” she said. Ruby told me she’s a Republican who begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the past two elections because she viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. A Sun City resident named Lorraine, age 79, told me that “it’s time for a woman,” but that she would nevertheless vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. “I don’t want to vote for the opposite,” she said, refusing to say Biden’s name. Carolyn Ballard, an 80-year-old woman from Hilton Head, South Carolina, told me she’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump twice, but that she believes he’s past his prime and that Haley is her candidate. “He just irritates people and he stirs up a lot of trouble,” she said of Trump. “Although he’s very smart, and he did a lot for the country. I mean, everybody was happy when he was president.”

Haley doesn’t lean as hard into gender dynamics as past female presidential candidates have. Nevertheless, she skillfully uses her womanhood and Indian heritage as setups for certain lines. “I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done,” she told the room. “And it’s a blessing, because it makes me scrappy. No one’s going to outwork me in this race. No one’s going to outsmart me in this race.” Or this: “Strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” which had a surprise left turn: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports.” (Huge applause.)

Courting Never Trump voters, exhausted Trump voters, and, yes, even some likely Trump voters simultaneously is not an easy trick. She hardly ever criticizes her former boss. Here’s her most biting critique from Monday: “I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time … and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” (Note the passivity; she won’t even say Trump catalyzes the chaos.) Having already served as his ambassador to the UN, she may be under consideration for vice president. Compared with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, Trump has gone relatively soft on her, opting for the mid-century misogynistic slight “birdbrain.” Like most of her competitors, Haley has said she would pardon him.

Whereas Trump has tacked authoritarian and apocalyptic, Haley has mostly kept her messaging grounded. At the rally, she bemoaned the price of groceries and gas. “Biden worries more about sagebrush lizards than he does about Americans being able to afford their energy,” she quipped. (She also called out her fellow Republicans for adding to the deficit.) She’s a military wife, and spoke about her husband’s PTSD and the persistent problem of homeless veterans. Though she lacks Trump’s innate knack for zingers, she landed one about how things might change if members of Congress got their health care through the VA: “It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen, guaranteed.”

Although many of her fellow Republicans have adopted a nativist view of the world, Haley waxes at length about America’s geopolitical role. (And subsequently gets tagged as a globalist.) “The world is literally on fire,” she said Monday. She affirmed her support for both Israel and Ukraine, and went long on the triple threat of Russia, China, and Iran, paying particular attention to China as a national-security issue. In doing so, knowingly or not, she began to sound quite Trumpy. “They’re already here. They’ve already infiltrated our country,” Haley said. “We’ve got to start looking at China the way they look at us.” She called for an end to normal trade relations with China until they stop “murdering” Americans with fentanyl. She chastened the audience with images of China’s 500 nuclear warheads and its rapidly expanding naval fleet. “Dictators are actually very transparent. They tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said.

Perhaps Haley’s biggest advantage right now is her relative youth. She’ll turn 52 three days before the New Hampshire primary. Trump has lately been making old-man gaffes, drawing comparisons to Biden, who was first elected to the Senate the year Haley was born. She speaks wistfully of “tomorrow,” of leaving certain things—unspecified baggage—in the past. “You have to go with a new generational leader,” Haley proclaimed. Onstage, she endorsed congressional term limits and the idea of mental-competency tests for public servants older than 75. The Senate, she joked, had become “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” Throwing shade at both Trump and Biden, she spoke of the need for leaders at “the top of their game.” Hundreds of gray-and-white-haired supporters before her nodded and murmured in approval.

Monday’s event took place roughly 90 miles south of Charleston, where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, hoping to start a race war. At the time, Haley was governor of South Carolina, and Trump—who had descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy for president just the day before—still seemed like a carnival act. Photos of Roof posing with a Confederate flag ricocheted across social media. Haley had the flag taken down from the South Carolina statehouse, a reversal from her earlier position on the flag. Five years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Haley tweeted that, “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.” During Monday’s rally, though, she sounded much more like an old-school Republican: “America’s not racist; we’re blessed,” she said. “Our kids need to love America. They need to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance when they start school.”

As her audience grows, she continues to tiptoe along a very fine line: not MAGA, not anti-MAGA. In lieu of Trump-style airbrushed fireworks and bald eagles and Lee Greenwood, she’s going for something slightly classier (leaving the stage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”) while still seizing every opportunity to own the libs. At the rally, she attacked the military’s gender-pronoun training and received substantial applause. “We’ve got to end this national self-loathing that’s taken over our country,” she said. Early in her speech, she promised that she would speak hard truths. As she approached her conclusion, one hard truth stuck out: “Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans.” It was the closest thing to a truly forward-thinking message that any serious Republican has offered this cycle.

In the most generous of interpretations, the race for the GOP nomination is now among three people: Haley, DeSantis, and Trump. Mike Pence is already out. Tim Scott, Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, dropped out two weeks ago. Vivek Ramaswamy, who has struggled to break out of single digits in the polls, recently rented an apartment in Des Moines and will almost certainly stay in the race through the Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy has also unexpectedly become Haley’s punching bag: Her campaign said she pulled in $1 million in donations after calling him “scum” during the last debate.

At next week’s debate in Alabama, the stage will likely be winnowed to Ramaswamy, Haley, and DeSantis. (“When the stage gets smaller, our chances get bigger,” Haley told her rally crowd.) DeSantis seems to be betting his whole campaign on Iowa, and has secured the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. This weekend, DeSantis will complete his 99-county tour of the state. Haley needs to beat DeSantis, but she also needs his voters if she has any serious shot of taking on Trump. If DeSantis drops out before Haley, his supporters are far more likely to flock to Trump. So maybe Haley needs a deus ex machina. In 2020, Biden’s campaign was viewed as all but cooked when, here in South Carolina, with the help of Representative Jim Clyburn, everything turned around, propelling him to Super Tuesday and the nomination.

Haley’s campaign declined to let her speak with me. A spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, instead emailed me the following statement: “Poll after poll show Nikki Haley is the best challenger to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That’s why the largest conservative grassroots coalition in the country just got behind her. Nikki is second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and is the only candidate with the momentum to go the distance. Ron DeSantis has a short shelf life with his Iowa-or-bust strategy.”

[David A. Graham: Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis]

As rally-goers made their way to the parking lot, I struck up conversation with a man in a T-shirt that read NOPE NOT AGAIN, with Trump’s hair and giant red necktie decorating the O. He wore a camouflage baseball hat with an American flag on the dome. The man, Mike Stevens, told me he was a 25-year Army veteran, and that he was disgusted with Trump.

“He’s a bully. He’s not good. He causes hate and discontent,” Stevens said. “I mean, he didn’t uphold the Constitution. And now we’ve had a judge say that. First time ever—no peaceful transfer of power? Even Al Gore did it. I’ve always been a Republican, but if it’s him and Biden, I’ll vote for Biden, I guess.”

He was excited about Haley, and had been texting his friends and family about her rally—trying to wean them off their Trump addiction. But he also told me he had written Haley a letter: He was dismayed by her promise to pardon Trump, and he needed her to know that.

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Prominent Republicans criticized Donald Trump for two years. So why are even these supposed moderates now pledging to support him?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is? The dual threat of Donald Trump Putin’s deal with wife killers

Career Over Country

Breaking up, Neil Sedaka told us many years ago, is hard to do. But it shouldn’t be impossible. When a Republican governor describes Donald Trump as a “three-time loser,” warns that the party will lose “up and down the ballot” if Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, and calls the former president “fucking crazy,” it’s easy to imagine a responsible politician who has packed his bags and is waiting on the steps of the GOP’s Delta House for his taxi back to the world of sensible adults.

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, however, is not such a politician.

Sununu gained a lot of media attention and applause from the Never Trump Republicans for being one of the former president’s most brutal critics. But now that Trump is all but inevitable as the GOP nominee, Sununu is bashing Joe Biden and embracing Trump as the lesser of two evils. “Did you see [Trump’s] last visit to New Hampshire?” Sununu said to reporters earlier this month. “He was comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and talking about Jesus Christ being speaker of the House—it was kooky talk … He sounds almost as bad as Joe Biden.”

Almost as bad as Joe Biden? I will be the first to note, as I did here, that Biden’s reputation as a walking gaffe hazard is well deserved. He gets carried away, embellishes, and remembers things that didn’t happen (a sign, I think, more of his penchant for self-important Irish blarneying than of his age). He spent his life as a senator; senators talk a lot, and sometimes they say dumb stuff.

But to compare Biden’s blunders to Trump’s derangement is inane. Trump’s mind often slips the surly bonds of Earth: He has claimed that he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, invented people who invariably call him “sir,” lied endlessly about an astonishing number of things, embraced the QAnon conspiracy theories, and, as Sununu himself admits, compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”

So why is Sununu going to vote for Trump? Because Republicans have to win. That’s it. “I just want Republicans to win,” Sununu told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a podcast released yesterday. “That’s all I care about.”

Perhaps if Sununu had been forced from office or personally threatened by Trump supporters, he might feel differently—or at least be less inclined to stand for such mindless hyper-partisanship.

Or perhaps not. Peter Meijer, the former GOP representative from Michigan who was primaried out of Congress and harassed because of his vote to impeach Trump a second time, has endured far worse than Sununu, and yet he, too, is backing Trump again. Meijer is running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, and he seems to be trying to mollify the MAGA church long enough to carry a statewide election. Meijer, like Sununu, is laying his more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick on the incumbent: “My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president,” he told Adam Wren at Politico.

We could mine the statements of other Republicans for similar pyrite nuggets of shiny Trump criticism that amount to nothing. (Even Nikki Haley can bring herself to say only that Trump was the right guy at the right time—but now is the wrong time.) None of them, I would argue, really believes that Biden is a worse president than Trump was, and they all know the danger of a second Trump term. So why would they bend the knee one more time?

The Republicans coming back to Trump are driven by two factors: ambition and delusion.

Ambition is the easiest motive to explain. Mitt Romney, at 76 years old, is retiring: He can afford to say that he might vote for a Democrat rather than enable Trump again. He’s had it with his Republican colleagues and he wants to go home. But Haley is 51, Sununu is 49, and Meijer is 35. None of these people is ready, in Washington vernacular, to go spend more time with their family. They all probably expected Trump to be disgraced and driven from public life by now, and they had plans for their own future. They did not grasp that disgrace, in today’s GOP, is a fundraising opportunity, not a disqualification from office.

Numbed by opportunism, many Republicans will simply hunker down and try to survive the next five years. They’re all sure that, after that, it’ll be their time, and they will triumphantly cobble together a new GOP coalition out of independents, moderate Republicans, and what’s left of the MAGA vote, gaining that last group by assuring Trump’s base that no matter what they may have said about their idol, at least they never went over the fence and voted for a Democrat.

But these ambitious Republicans are also under a self-serving delusion that the next Trump term will be something like the first Trump term. They assume that adults will somehow restrain Trump and that the nation will function more or less normally while Trump goes off to his beloved rallies. They are committed to the fantasy that four more years of a mad king will be akin to weathering one more passing storm. (They have also likely convinced themselves, as Haley did while working for Trump, that they can best limit the damage by being in the mix of GOP politics, rather than by being excommunicated.)

This dream narrative ends with the normal Republicans emerging from their tornado shelters, surveying some limited and reparable damage, and restoring the center-right, conservative kingdom. President Haley or Senator Meijer will get the GOP back to cutting taxes and erasing government regulations, all while mending fences with millions of people who were horrified by the violence and madness of Trumpism.

None of that is going to happen.

Trump has made it clear that he has no regrets about any ghastly thing he did as president, that as president again he will bring a legion of goons and cronies with him into the White House (including seditionists and rioters whom he will pardon and release from jail), and that he fully intends to finish the job of burning down American democracy. Politicians such as Sununu or Meijer know all of this, but they apparently think they will remain untouched by it. They have put their party and their personal fortunes over their allegiance to the Constitution, perhaps hoping that they will at least have a chance to rule over whatever is left in the ashes of the republic.

Today’s News

A new CDC report shows that U.S. life expectancy at birth rose in 2022, in part because of falling COVID deaths. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted an Indian man on murder-for-hire charges over an alleged plot to kill a Sikh activist in New York. Officials from Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. are asking for an extension of the cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Evening Read

Bettmann / CORBIS / Getty

Must the Novelist Crusade?

By Eudora Welty

Published in the October 1965 issue of The Atlantic.

Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.” Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. But I feel in these words and others like them the agonizing of our times.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The case that could destroy the government Photo essay: Holiday lights and holiday cheer

Culture Break

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Noel Celis / AFP / Getty; Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty.

Read. Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is a powerful story that seamlessly segues from Evangelista’s own life story into a riveting police procedural.

Listen. Is it possible to argue productively? On Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin explores some practical advice for handling both private and political disagreements.

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Shan Wang contributed to this newsletter.

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In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte, the former mayor of Davao City, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, easily defeated four other candidates in the country’s presidential election. Within hours of taking office, the new president began to make good on his campaign promise: killing those whom he called the “sons of bitches” involved in the country’s illegal narcotics trade. The first corpse, described by the police as an “Unidentified Male Person” in his 20s, turned up around 3 a.m. in an alley just a five-minute walk from the sports complex where Duterte had declared victory. The victim had been shot once behind the left ear. The killers had placed a cardboard sign on his chest that read I AM A CHINESE DRUG LORD.

Over the following months, the killings spread across the Philippines. Men wearing masks burst into homes and shot people in front of their children. They snatched others off the streets in unmarked cars and disposed of their bodies in trash heaps. Dealers—most selling crystal meth, or shabu, the drug of choice of the Filipino poor—as well as addicts, former addicts, and small-time criminals became targets. National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa described a rising tide of bodies: “The dead who were just found floating along canals, the dead who were dumped along the road with their hands tied and their faces, eyes, and mouths taped.” Dela Rosa classified those deaths as unsolved homicides. In the first six weeks of Duterte’s presidency, according to the police count, 899 people were killed in “deaths under investigation.” In many other cases, the police took responsibility but always claimed that they had acted in self-defense. Three years into his administration, when I traveled to the Philippines to report on the drug war, the number of estimated extrajudicial killings neared 30,000.

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is, on one level, a powerful story of disillusionment. The granddaughter of a Manila newspaperman, Evangelista grew up in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 “People Power Revolution” that brought down the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, an exhilarating transformation that she describes early in the book. It was “one part myth, two parts magic, peopled by giants, all thunder and power and bright yellow hope.” A prodigy on the debate stage in college, she embraced journalism as a means of safeguarding the country’s hard-won democracy. Evangelista began her career as a reporter for the country’s biggest broadcaster, ABS-CBN, where she distinguished herself covering political killings. In 2011, she joined Rappler, a feisty online start-up co-founded by the investigative reporter and future Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa.

[Read: Maria Ressa on how to fight fascism before it’s too late]

Then, five years later, Duterte swept into office. Evangelista seamlessly segues from her own life story into a riveting police procedural. Joining up with a band of photographers who were sometimes called “nightcrawlers,” a term derived from a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, she prowled the slums of Manila after dark, chasing tips and interviewing survivors, family members, neighbors, and police. All along she was tormented by the question: How did a country that had won admiration for its peaceful ousting of a dictator choose, one generation later, a murderous autocrat as its leader? Evangelista reaches back into her own past to examine how infatuation with charismatic authoritarians, apathy, and instincts for self-preservation might have induced people to make such a choice. In one withering moment, she describes her shock and sense of betrayal upon learning that her grandfather, whom she had believed was a fervent democrat, was actually a supporter of Marcos.

Marcos was a U.S.-backed kleptocrat who ruled the Philippines for two decades, most of that time under a state of emergency that granted him absolute power. On August 21, 1983, a year before Evangelista was born, the opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. defied Marcos’s warnings and returned to Manila from a self-imposed exile in the U.S. Moments after stepping off China Airlines Flight 811, he was shot dead by a soldier in front of horrified journalists and supporters. Marcos denied that he was behind it. But abuses and corruption were sapping the government’s authority. In 1984, I visited Samar, a large, jungle-covered island about 400 miles south of Manila; a leftist priest told me that “80 percent” of the island was in the hands of the anti-Marcos Communist New People’s Army. Two years later, U.S. President Ronald Reagan pressured Marcos to hold elections, and Corazon Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, defeated him. The Philippine armed forces backed Aquino, and the dictator and his wife, Imelda, flew into exile in Hawaii. “We Americans like to think we taught the Filipinos democracy,” declared the CBS correspondent Bob Simon that night, referring to the country’s nearly five decades as a U.S. colony. “Well, tonight, they are teaching the world.”

At the moment that Aquino was consolidating her power in Manila, a young prosecutor was beginning his political rise in Mindanao. The son of the provincial governor, Duterte was a crudely charming figure with a violent streak: At 27, he had shot and wounded a fellow law-school student. The circumstances of the shooting were unclear and no charges were filed. Elected Davao City mayor in 1988, he allegedly created the Davao Death Squad, which gunned down drug dealers, drug users, petty thieves, and, eventually, political rivals.  

Reports about Duterte’s hit squads were well-known when he announced his candidacy for president in 2016. And he made no secret of his intention to run Malacañang Palace the same way he managed Davao’s city hall. “There’s been enough warning during the campaign,” he declared just after his victory. “There will be no blaming here. I told [the drug dealers] to stop. Now if anything happens to them, it’s on them. They asked for it.”

Some Filipinos dismissed his talk as political rhetoric. Others had grown weary of the ineffectual outgoing president, Benigno Aquino III (the son of Ninoy and Corazon), and disgusted by corruption. Evangelista describes an oft-used scam in which airport security staff planted bullets in the luggage of travelers at Manila’s airport and then demanded payoffs in return for not arresting them. Duterte—a macho populist with a fondness for profanity and a “tell it like is” message—exerted an almost-religious hold over his supporters. Like Donald Trump, to whom he has frequently been compared, Duterte had a performer’s instincts, an  earthy humor, a misogynistic streak (he often made comments seeming to endorse rape, which his fans shrugged off as jokes), and a visceral message. Aware that many Filipinos were terrified to walk in their barrios after dark, Duterte promised to take care of the problem—without regard to cumbersome, tainted judicial procedures. “She saw him on television,” Evangelista writes of one Duterte enthusiast, in what could also be a description of a MAGA acolyte. “It was like seeing Jesus.” To vote for Duterte, Evangelista writes, in one of the many lyrical—and chilling—passages that run through the book, “you had to believe in certain things”:

You had to believe, for example, that he was a righteous man … You had to believe that God had a peculiar preference for deadly autocrats, because the presidency is destiny and Rodrigo Duterte was destined to lead … You had to believe that a mayor who kept peace by ordering the undesirables out of his city could succeed in a country where undesirables were citizens too. You had to believe the intended dead would be drug lords and rapists, only drug lords and rapists, and not your cousins who go off into Liguasan Marsh to pick up their baggies of meth. You had to believe there would be a warning before the gunshots ring out.

Duterte’s language became more vicious as the killing campaign intensified. In August 2016, he claimed to have 144,202 names on a drug watch list. “If your name is there, son of a bitch, you have a problem, I will really kill you,” he declared. Street dealers, meth addicts, and small-time pushers would “have to perish,” he said later in his administration. He would “slaughter those idiots,” and hang them with sharpened barbed wire so that “when you drop, you leave your head behind when your body falls.” But the exact circumstances of the murders were deliberately kept vague, and a new vocabulary arose that reflected the murkiness. People weren’t murdered, they were salvaged—an English-language euphemism derived from the Spanish salvaje, or “wild.” Tokhang, a portmanteau from the Visayan words for “knock” and “plead,” was allegedly a police policy that encouraged low-level dealers to identify themselves and surrender, but that often resulted in their executions.

Evangelista introduces a memorable cast of villains, heroes, and victims. Lieutenant Colonel Domingo, the commander of a prolific death squad, is presented as an affable killer fond of bestowing nicknames on reporters. Domingo takes a liking to Evangelista and, against her wishes, keeps calling her “Trish”—a sinister reminder of who holds the power in their relationship. Efren Morillo, a fruit vendor who survived a police attack that killed four others, found the courage to testify against the murderers. After Morillo’s testimony and the abduction-murder by the police of a South Korean businessman in October 2016, Duterte seemed to turn his back on the hit squads, calling the police “corrupt to the core.” Evangelista was one of the first journalists to report on a shift in tactics: the use of local vigilante groups to carry out the homicides, with the police compiling target lists and directing their movements in the shadows. No hard evidence links Duterte to this change of policy, but Evangelista makes the case that the president had, with a wink and a nod at least, given it his approval.

[Read: The paradox of Rodrigo Duterte]

By the time I arrived in the Philippines in 2019, Duterte’s drug war was still playing out—though the numbers had dropped significantly from the dozens of corpses that had filled Manila’s streets each night early in his presidency. When I visited Malacañang Palace, Duterte’s spokesperson was unrepentant about the killings, insisting that hundreds of police had died in shootouts while trying to arrest drug dealers. And Duterte remained wildly popular. At a political rally I attended in Davao for the senate candidates from his party, supporter after supporter told me how grateful they were that Duterte had cleaned up their neighborhood. This may have been more perception than reality: In 2020, the head of drug enforcement for the Philippine National Police said that “drug supply is still rampant” and that the “shock and awe” of the Duterte years had not worked.

Duterte reburied Marcos, who had died in exile in Hawaii, as a hero at the national cemetery in Manila. Obliged by the Philippines’ constitution to step down after one term, he endorsed Marcos’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Jr., to be his successor. The country had come full circle. Evangelista’s book is an extraordinary testament to half a decade of state-sanctioned terror. It’s also a timely warning for the state of democracy in 2024. Eight years ago, most Filipinos shrugged off Duterte’s homicidal rhetoric as political buffoonery. The horrors that followed suggest that demagogues with a violent message might well be taken at their word.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I noted that presidential candidates in the 2024 election will discuss U.S. foreign policy toward China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran, Mexico, and beyond, and asked, “What foreign-policy matters are most important to you and why?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Caroline focuses on the movement of people:

When I started thinking about this question, my immediate response was: the wars. Gaza and Ukraine. But no. That’s not the biggest foreign-policy issue we face today. A far bigger issue is the worldwide migration of people, from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern, caused as much by climate change as by political threats. As climate change makes the southern half of Earth less habitable, freedom and food and water all get unbearably scarce, forcing the mass movements we’re seeing today. How governments in the north respond to this crisis, or fail to respond, is crucial to world peace. Sadly, because of the nasty political situation in Washington, the U.S. government has no coherent policy to deal with this. It’s an international issue and urgently needs attention.

V.F. flagged the war in Ukraine:

This situation has profound implications not only for Ukraine itself but also for regional stability and international security. First and foremost, the conflict jeopardizes the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty, which are fundamental tenets of the international order.

Moreover, the war in Ukraine has a significant impact on the geopolitical landscape in Europe. The annexation of Crimea by Russia and the strife in eastern regions of Ukraine have resulted in extensive devastation and human losses. Such instability may provoke alarming reactions from other nations and lead to further strained relations.

Additionally, it is crucial to consider Ukraine’s geostrategic position as a key player in contemporary geopolitical and economic processes. This country serves as a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe, and the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine could shape future relations between Russia and the West. Ensuring peace and stability in Ukraine becomes a vital component of foreign-policy strategy to guarantee security and promote democratic development in the region. In general, it is essential for candidates in the 2024 elections to address the issue of resolving the conflict in Ukraine, examining it within the context of international relations and democratic development, and implementing measures to secure peace and stability in the region.

For Jaleelah, “it’s Palestine”:

Of course it’s Palestine. My family in the West Bank are actively under threat. The IDF arbitrarily invades their homes and degrades them at checkpoints. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt and toothless organization that allows Israeli soldiers to throw their children in prison. What American would stand by if their family was in that position? What American would vote for a government that dropped even a single bomb on one of their cities in order to root out cartel members suspected to be hiding there?

A sizable [number] of Arabs and Muslims oppose Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Lots of non-Arab and non-Muslim Americans agree. But political parties refuse to take even mild, wildly popular stances that criticize Israel. This is baffling to me. The Democratic Party ignored its working-class base for years, and it culminated in a loss to a clown in 2016. Now it believes that it can ignore its base’s calls for peace without facing repercussions simply because the Republicans are also bad. But the hundreds of thousands of Arab voters in Michigan and Ohio do not care that Donald Trump moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem; they care that Joe Biden is sanctioning the murders of thousands of innocent people. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley would probably rather drop out of the race than adjust their stances, but Trump is unpredictable. All it would take is a single social-media post calling for a ceasefire—or even a post that says “I condemn Israel’s killings of civilians”—for him to capture massive support in very important areas!

For Nati, it’s Israel:

For the average American, U.S. foreign policy is a problem that rarely affects their lives. As an expat Israeli who belongs to the Jewish people, I have great fear for my people, wherever they are. The way candidates plan to protect us will be a deciding factor for me. Cracks in Biden’s support for Israel are forming and expanding. These are not mainly due to sudden changes in Israel’s response, but to mounting pressure from young “progressives” in American universities and on the streets throughout Europe. Perhaps more important than the candidates’ 10-minute pitch on their foreign-policy focus, I want to know how they are going to sell it to the American people.

Biden’s remarks after October 7 are all but an echo now. Obama described the “[extraordinarily] complex situation” in the region well, but stopped short of addressing protesters directly, in a way that could have shifted the rhetoric significantly worldwide. Nikki Haley’s hawkish arguments are only sold to those who already bought into them to begin with (me included).

Dale wants candidates to debate an international policy aimed at eradicating drug cartels. He writes:

For generations, American youth who experiment with drugs have had to plug into a criminal subculture run by violent predatory gangs to get their drugs. As a licensed marriage and family therapist with a two-year certificate in alcohol and drug counseling, I have had many years to observe how corrosive this contact can be. The predatory attitudes of dealers and suppliers have, I believe, been normalized over the years in many individuals who use street drugs, and my guess is that they have spread into youth culture in general.

American administrations from Reagan on have continued doubling down on the War on Drugs while refusing to provide equal amounts of money to support treatment for addicts. Nobody has the political will to point out that 50 years of this war has left us in worse shape than we were in 1990.

Leo argues that strength abroad depends on changes at home:

What we seem to see in the rise of nations like China and India, as best I understand them, is not just the promotion of their own interests but also the assertion of their own worldviews. They don’t just want to win a conflict; they want to redefine the terms of engagement.

To whatever extent the West (the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., the European Union, and other nations with similar ideals) still promotes a cohesive vision for the world, that vision involves what the West understands as basic human rights, the primacy of individual liberty, and the principles of an open and diverse society. Some of the most powerful nations of the 21st century, however, do not seem inclined to accept these values as a fundamental, let alone obligatory, aspect of their own international relations.

Countries like the U.S.A., of course, often fall short of their own aspirations. We suffer from a MAGA movement that seems keen to elect a candidate openly embracing the language of fascists. We also suffer from a leftist movement opposed to free speech, contemptuous of dissent (other than its own), and seemingly oblivious to its own narrow-minded tendencies. Showing we can counter these dangerous movements at home might be the most productive thing we can do to maintain a convincing voice abroad.

This newsletter will be off next week. We wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, and we’ll be back the week of December 4.

In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated had hatred led to death on a horrifying scale.

“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”

Ndahiro pointed out that in 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, an influential political figure within the largest ethnic group in Rwanda, the Hutus, had openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi, the second-largest of Rwanda’s ethnic groups. Gitera referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.”

“The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun,” Ndahiro wrote. It culminated in a 100-day stretch in 1994 when an estimated 1 million people were killed, the majority of whom were Tutsis. “The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed,” Ndahiro wrote. “What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT the events that led up to the Rwandan genocide after I heard Donald Trump, in a Veterans Day speech, refer to those he counts as his enemies as “vermin.”

“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech in Claremont, New Hampshire. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” The former president continued, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

When Trump finished his speech, the audience erupted in applause.

Trump’s comments came only a few weeks after he had been asked about immigration and the southern border in an interview with the host of a right-wing website. “Did you ever think you would see this level of American carnage?” Trump was asked.

“No. Nobody has seen anything like this,” Trump responded. “I think you could say worldwide. I think you could go to a banana republic and pick the worst one and you’re not going to see what we’re witnessing now.” The front-runner for the Republican nomination warned that immigrants pose an immediate threat. “We know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

In a September 20 speech in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump said, “What they’re doing to our country, they’re destroying it. It’s the blood of our country. What they’re doing is destroying our country.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.

Dehumanizers view their targets as having “a human appearance but a subhuman essence,” according to David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor who has written on the history and complicated psychological roots of dehumanization. “It is the dehumanizer’s nagging awareness of the other’s humanity that gives dehumanization its distinctive psychological flavor,” he writes. “Ironically, it is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.

THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. At a Trump event in Iowa, days after that post, one Trump supporter asked why Milley wasn’t “in there before a firing squad within a month.” Another told NBC News, “Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”

Trump has taken to mocking the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which left him with a fractured skull that required surgery and other serious injuries. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two indictments against the former president, is a “Trump-hating prosecutor” who is “deranged” and a “disgrace to America”—and whose wife and family “despise me much more than he does.” The former president posted the name, photo, and private Instagram account of a law clerk serving Judge Arthur Engoron, who is currently presiding over Trump’s civil fraud trial and whom Trump despises and has repeatedly attacked, describing him as “CRAZY” and “CRAZED in his hatred of me.” (Trump later deleted the Truth Social post targeting the law clerk, whom he called a “Trump Hating Clerk,” but not until after it had been widely disseminated.)

And in the first rally of his 2024 campaign, held in Waco, Texas, Trump lent his voice to a recording of the J6 Prison Choir, which is made up of men who were imprisoned for their part in the riot at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The song “Justice for All” features Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance mixed with a rendition of the national anthem.

“Our people love those people,” Trump said at the rally, speaking of those who were jailed. “What’s happening in that prison, it’s a hellhole … These are people that shouldn’t have been there.”

The Washington Post “identified five of the roughly 15 men who are featured in the video. Four of them were charged with assaulting police, using weapons such as a crowbar, sticks and chemical spray, including against Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died the next day.”

At the Waco rally, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” He added, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Trump has described 2024 as “our final battle.” He means it; so do tens of millions of his supporters.

TRUMP’S RHETORIC IS CLEARLY fascistic. These days, Trump is being “much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU, told PBS NewsHour. That doesn’t mean that if Trump were elected president in 2024, America would become a fascistic state. Our institutions may be strong enough to resist him, though it’s an open question. But Trump can do many things short of imposing fascism that can do grave harm to America.

Trump, after all, has been impeached twice, indicted four times on 91 counts, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Courts in New York have found that he or his companies have committed bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, and charity fraud. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He was the catalyzing figure that led to a violent attack on the Capitol. And he has argued for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

In our nation’s history, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served in four Republican administrations and was part of the Republican leadership in the House, “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”

That Trump would say what he’s said and done what he’s done is no surprise; he is a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically. And he’s been entirely transparent about who he is. The most troubling aspect of this whole troubling drama has been the people in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to Trump’s corruptions time after time after time. Some cheer him on; others silently go along for the ride. A few gently criticize him and then quickly change topics. But they never leave him.

By now I know how this plays out: For most Republicans to acknowledge—to others and even to themselves—what Trump truly is and still stay loyal to him would create enormous cognitive dissonance. Their mind won’t allow them to go there; instead, they find ways to ease the inner conflict. And so they embrace conspiracy theories to support what they desperately want to believe—for example, that the election was stolen, or that the investigation into Russian ties to the 2016 Trump campaign was a “hoax,” or that Joe Biden has committed impeachable offenses. They indulge in whataboutism and catastrophism—the belief that society is on the edge of collapse—to justify their support for Trump. They have a burning psychological need to rationalize why, in this moment in history, the ends justify the means.

As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.”

This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before. In 2016, during the Republican primaries, a person I had known for many years through church wrote to me. “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: BHO,” they said, using a derogatory acronym for Barack Obama that is meant to highlight his middle name, Hussein.

If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP; he carried 94 percent of the Republican vote in 2020, an increase from 2016, and he is leading his closest primary challenger nationally by more than 45 points.

White evangelical Protestants are among the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies, and in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump, as had 81 percent of those who attend less frequently. That’s an increase over 2016. Trump’s support among white evangelicals is still extremely high: 81 percent hold a favorable view of him, according to a poll taken in June—after Trump was indicted for a second time.

The evangelical movement in America has been reshaped by the sensibilities of Trump and MAGA world. For example, in one survey, nearly one-third of white evangelicals expressed support for the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day. Many of the same people who celebrate Christianity’s contributions to civilization—championing the belief that every human being has inherent rights and dignity, celebrating the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan, and pointing to a “transcendent order of justice and hope that stands above politics,” in the words of my late friend Michael Gerson—continue to stand foursquare behind a man who uses words that echo Mein Kampf.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Taking a stand for conscience, even long after one should have, is always the right thing to do.

“When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric and promote dehumanizing images,” the best-selling author Brené Brown has written, “we diminish our own humanity in the process.” We are called to find the face of God in everyone we meet, she says, including those with whom we most deeply disagree. “When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our humanity.”

Far too many Christians in America are not only betraying their humanity; they are betraying the Lord they claim to love and serve.

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.

But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination. Donald Trump’s lead appears prohibitive, but no candidate has ever won his party’s nomination while facing four (so far) separate felony indictments. (Then again, no one has ever lost his party’s nomination while facing four separate felony indictments either.) Ron DeSantis is still barely clinging to his position as the leading challenger to Trump, but Nikki Haley has closed most of the distance with him—though the title seems ever more meaningless. Behind them is a large field of Republicans who are hoping for a lucky break, a Trump collapse, a VP nomination, or maybe just some fun travel and a cable-news contract down the road.

[David A. Graham: The first debate is Ramaswamy and the rest]

On the other side, Democratic hesitations about a second Joe Biden term have mostly dissolved into resignation that he’s running, but Representative Dean Phillips is making a last-ditch effort to offer a younger alternative. Biden’s age and the generally lukewarm feeling among some voters have ensured that a decent-size shadow field still lingers, just waiting in case Biden bows out for some reason.

Behind all of this, the possibility of a serious third-party bid, led by either No Labels or some other group, continues to linger; Cornel West is running, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has leapt from the Democratic primary to an independent campaign. It adds up to a race that is simple on the surface but strangely confusing just below it. This guide to the candidates—who’s in, who’s out, and who’s somewhere in between—serves as a road map to navigate that. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP was always fully behind Trump, and as his rivals have failed to gain much traction, he's consolidated many of the rest and built an all-but-prohibitive lead.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, and he very likely will.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run in a train wreck of an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers a synthesis of Trump-style culture warring and bullying and the conservative politics of the early-2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
From the advent of his campaign, DeSantis presented the prospect of a candidate with Trump’s policies but no Trump. But his fading polling suggests that not many Republicans are interested.

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

Can he win the nomination?
A better question these days: Can he hold on to take honorary silver in the race?

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Haley has tried to steer a path that distances herself from Trump—pointing out his unpopularity—without openly attacking him. She may also be the top foreign-policy hawk in the field.

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

Who wants her to run? Haley is on the rise now, and seems to be challenging DeSantis for status as the top Trump alternative—but still lags far behind Trump himself.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 38-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling résumé (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J. D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

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

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

Who wants him to run?
That remains a bit unclear—though his Republican rivals all seem to viscerally detest him. Ramaswamy had a summer surge when he was a new flavor, but it’s subsided as people have gotten to know and, apparently, dislike him.

Can he win the nomination?
Seems unlikely. Ramaswamy broke out of the ranks of oddballs to become a mildly formidable contender, but his slick shtick and questionable pronouncements have dragged him down.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

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

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

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the 2020 election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.

Who wants him to run?
Old-school, very conservative Republicans who also detest Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

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

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

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

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first highish-profile endorsement. As DeSantis stumbles, he’s gotten some attention as a possible likable Trump alternative.

Can he win the nomination?
Doesn’t look like it. Scott has always been solidly in the second tier, but he’s running out of time to ever get anywhere.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as the governor of Indiana and a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
No! He shocked a Las Vegas audience by dropping out on October 28. He’d been running since June 7.

Why did he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. As the campaign went on, he slowly began to develop a sharper critique of Trump while still awkwardly celebrating the accomplishments of the administration in which he served.

Who wanted him to run?
Conservative Christians and rabbit lovers, but not very many people overall.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

Could he have won the nomination?
It wasn’t in the cards.

(Ida Mae Astute / Getty) Chris Christie

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

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on June 6 in New Hampshire.

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

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical donors, liberal pundits.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Doug Burgum

Who is he?
Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum is serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.

Is he running?
Apparently! He formally
launched his campaign on June 7 in Fargo.

Why does he want to run?
It’s tough to tell. His campaign-announcement video focuses so much on North Dakota that it seems more like a reelection push. He told a state newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans wants candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?) He also really wants more domestic oil production.

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

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

What else do we know?
He’s giving people $20 gift cards in return for donating to his campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Will Hurd

Who is he?
A former CIA officer, Hurd served three terms in the House, representing a San Antonio–area district.

Is he running?
No. Hurd, who announced his campaign on June 22, dropped out on October 9 and endorsed Nikki Haley.

Why did he want to run?
Hurd said he had “commonsense” ideas and was “pissed” that elected officials are dividing Americans. He’s also been an outspoken Trump critic.

Who wanted him to run?
As a moderate, youngish Black Republican and someone who cares about defense, he is the sort of candidate whom the party establishment seemed to desire after the now-discarded 2012 GOP autopsy.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Mandel Ngan / Getty) Francis Suarez

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

Is he running?
No. He suspended his campaign on August 29, less than three months after his June 15 entry.

Why did he want to run?
Suarez touted his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.”

Who wanted him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Apparently not! Despite dabbling in fundraising shenanigans, Suarez failed to make the first Republican debate (or any other splash).

Could he have won the nomination?
No way.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year, after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Hogan ruled himself out of the GOP race on March 5, saying he was worried it would help Trump win the nomination, but he is now rumored as a potential No Labels candidate, even though such a run might hand the presidency to … Trump.

Why does he want to run?
Hogan has argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.”

Who wants him to run?
Dead-ender centrists.

Could he win the nomination?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he is the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and the son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

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

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

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

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

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

Why did he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

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

Could he have won the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
No. He spent much of 2023 refusing to categorically rule out a race but not quite committing. As Ron DeSantis’s Trump-alternative glow dimmed, Youngkin seemed to be hoping that Republican success in off-year Virginia legislative elections would give him a boost. After Democrats won control of both the state’s legislative chambers, however, he said he was “not going anywhere.”

Why did he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran for governor largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, but the legislative defeat makes that unlikely.

Who wanted him to run?
Rupert Murdoch, reportedly, as well as other wealthy, business-friendly Republican figures.

Could he have won the nomination?
Certainly not without running, and almost certainly not if he did.

(Sam Wolfe / Bloomberg / Getty) Mike Rogers

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

Is he running?
No. He thought about it but announced in late August that he would run for U.S. Senate instead.

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

Who wanted him to run?
It’s not clear that anyone even noticed he was running.

Could he have won the nomination?
Nope.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Larry Elder

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

Is he running?
Not anymore. Elder announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20, but then disappeared without a trace. On October 27, he dropped out and endorsed Trump.

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

Who wanted him to run?
Practically no one.

Could he have won the nomination?
Absolutely not.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Rick Perry

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

Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run. Nothing’s been heard since. We’ll say no.

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

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

Could he have won the nomination?
The third time wouldn’t have been a charm.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Rick Scott

Who is he?
Before his current gig as a U.S. senator from Florida, Scott was governor and chief executive of a health-care company that committed massive Medicare fraud.

Is he running?
The New York Times says he’s considering it, though an aide said Scott is running for reelection to the Senate. He’d be the fourth Floridian in the race.

Why does he want to run?
A Scott campaign would raise a fascinating question: What if you took Trump’s pose and ideology but removed all the charisma and, instead of promising to protect popular entitlement programs, aimed to demolish them?

Who wants him to run?
Not Mitch McConnell.

Can he win the nomination?
lol

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.

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

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

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters that they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person to be elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Joshua Roberts / Getty) Cenk Uygur

Who is he?
A pundit from the party’s left flank, Uygur is probably best know for his The Young Turks network. He was briefly an MSNBC personality and also ran for Congress in California in 2020.

Is he running?
Apparently. He announced his plans on October 11.

Why does he want to run?
Uygur believes that Biden will lose the 2024 election and thus wants to force him to withdraw. “I’m going to do whatever I can to help him decide that this is not the right path,” he told Semafor’s Dave Weigel. “If he retires now, he’s a hero: He beat Trump, he did a good job of being a steward of the economy. If he doesn’t, he loses to Trump, and he’s the villain of the story.”

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

Who wants him to run?
We’ll see if anyone does. Uygur has a sizable audience—his YouTube channel has millions of subscribers—but that doesn’t mean he has any real presidential constituency.

Can he win the nomination?
No, and he has a deeper problem: He is ineligible to serve, because he was born in Turkey. This isn’t an interesting nuance of the law, as with misguided questions about Ted Cruz’s or John McCain’s eligibility, or disinformation, as with Barack Obama. Uygur is just not a natural-born citizen. He claims he’ll take the matter to the Supreme Court and win in a “slam dunk.” As Biden would say, if he were willing to give Uygur any attention: Lots of luck in your senior year.

(Bill Clark / Getty) Dean Phillips

Who is he?
Phillips, a mildly unorthodox and interesting figure, is a Minnesota moderate serving his third term in the House.

Is he running?
Yes. He launched his campaign October 27 in New Hampshire. That follows a Hamlet act to make Mario Cuomo proud—in July, he said he was considering it; in August, he said he was unlikely to run but would encourage other Democrats to do so; then, after finding no other Democrats willing to run, he said he was not ruling it out.

Why does he want to run?
In an in-depth profile by my colleague Tim Alberta, Phillips said he’s most concerned about beating Trump. “Look, just because [Biden’s] old, that’s not a disqualifier,” Phillips said. “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.” He added: “Someone had to do this. It just was so self-evident.”

Who wants him to run?
Phillips told Alberta that even some Biden allies privately encouraged him to run—but no one will say it openly. Though many Democrats feel Biden is too old, that doesn’t mean that they’re willing to openly back a challenger, especially a little-known one, or that Phillips can overcome the structural barriers to beating an incumbent in a primary. There’s a reason Phillips couldn’t draft another Democrat to run.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not in 2024—even if Biden leaves the race.

What else do we know?
His grandmother was “Dear Abby,” and he made a fortune running the Talenti gelato company.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden were to bow out, she’d be the immediate favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
Not right now.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden stepped away.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Not at this moment.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden dropped out, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
No.

Why would she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Not if she isn’t running.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Supposedly. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C., but the only peeps from her have involved staff turnover.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice: “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
No.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Not now.

THIRD-PARTY AND INDEPENDENT (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run for the Democratic nomination on April 19, but on October 9 he dropped out of that race to run as an independent.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition. His campaign is arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming”), but tending toward extremely dark places.

Who wants him to run?
Soon after he announced his campaign, Kennedy reached double digits in polls against Biden—a sign of dissatisfaction with the president and of Kennedy’s name recognition. It has since become clear that Democratic voters are not interested in anti-Semitic kookery, though some other fringe elements might be.

Can he win?
No. The relevant question is whether a third-party candidacy would help Biden, Trump, or neither. The short answer is no one knows, but he very well might boost the president’s chances.

(Tom Williams / Getty) Joe Manchin

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

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

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

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

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

(Frederick M. Brown / Getty) Cornel West

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

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5. Soon thereafter he switched to the Green Party, which might have gotten him the best ballot access. But as of October, he’s running as an independent.

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

Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. Now that he is running as an independent, he will likely have trouble building a base of his own.

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

“Anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” former President Donald Trump asked last night. “He was a nice fellow. But that’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

The leader of the Republican Party—and quite likely the 2024 GOP nominee—was on an extended rant about mental institutions, prisons, and, to use his phrase, “empty insane asylums.” Speaking to thousands of die-hard supporters at a rally in South Florida, Trump lamented that, under President Joe Biden, the United States has become “the dumping ground of the world.” That he had casually praised one of the most infamous psychopathic serial killers in cinema history was but an aside, brushed over and forgotten.  

This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.—a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to return.

His candidacy is rife with a foreboding sense of inevitability. Trump senses it; we all do. Those 91 charges across four separate indictments? Mere inconveniences. Palm trees swayed as the 45th president peered out at the masses from atop a giant stage erected near the end zone of Ted Hendricks Stadium in Hialeah. He ceremoniously accepted an endorsement from Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary. He basked in stadium-size adulation and yet still seemed sort of pissed off. He wants the whole thing to be over already. Eleven miles away, in downtown Miami, Trump’s remaining rivals were fighting for relevance at the November GOP primary debate. “I was watching these guys, and they’re not watchable,” Trump said. His son Donald Jr. referred to the neighboring event as “the dog-catcher debate.”

[Read: Trump’s rivals pass up their chance]

Though not a single vote has been cast in this election, Trump’s 44-point lead and refusal to participate in debates has made a mockery of the primary. And though many try to be, no other Republican is quite like Trump. No other candidate has legions of fans who will bake in the Florida sun for hours before gates open. No one else can draw enough people to even hold a rally this size, let alone spawn a traveling rally-adjacent road show, with a pop-up midway of vendors hawking T-shirts and buttons and ball caps and doormats and Christmas ornaments. Voters don’t fan themselves with cardboard cutouts of Chris Christie’s head.

Multiple merchandise vendors told me that the shirts featuring Trump’s mug shot have become their best sellers. Some other tees bore slogans: Ultra MAGA, Ultra MAGA and Proud, CANCEL ME, Trump Rallies Matter, 4 Time Indictment Champ, Super Duper Ultra MAGA, Fuck Biden. “Thank you and have a MAGA day!” one vendor called out with glee. As attendees poured into the stadium, some of the pre-rally songs were a little too on the nose: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Jailhouse Rock.” Kids darted up and down the aisles between the white folding chairs, popping out to the snack bar for ice cream and popcorn. The comedian Roseanne Barr, who a few years ago was forced out of her eponymous show’s reboot after posting a racist tweet, took the stage early and thanked the MAGA faithful for welcoming her in. “You saved my life,” she said. Feet rumbled on the metal bleachers. People danced and embraced. In the hours before the night’s headliner, this felt less like a political event and more like a revival.

I saw the GOP operative Roger Stone and his small entourage saunter past the food trucks to modest applause. Onstage, Trump complimented Stone’s political acumen. (Stone, who is sort of the Forrest Gump of modern American politics, has played a role in seemingly every major scandal from Watergate to January 6, not to mention the Brooks Brothers riot that helped deliver Florida to George W. Bush in the 2000 election.)

That afternoon, seeking air-conditioning at a nearby Wendy’s, I met Kurt Jantz, who told me he’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies. Jantz had driven down to Hialeah from his home in Tampa. His pickup truck is massive, raised, and wrapped in Trump iconography. (He has an image of Trump as Rambo with a bald eagle perched on one shoulder, surrounded by a tank, a helicopter, the Statue of Liberty, and the White House, plus a background of exploding fireworks. That’s only one side of the truck.) Jantz has found a niche as a pro-MAGA rapper—he performs under the name Forgiato Blow. Tattoos cover much of his body, including a 1776 on the left side of his face. He rolled up his basketball shorts to show me Trump’s face tattooed on his right thigh. “Trump’s a boss. Trump’s a businessman. Trump has the cars. Trump has the females. Trump’s getting the money. He’s a damn near walking rapper to the life of a rapper, right? I want a Mar-a-Lago.” Jantz said he’s met and spoken with Trump “numerous times,” as recently as a couple of months ago at a GOP fundraiser. Trump, he said, was aware of the work Jantz was doing to spread the president’s message, not only through his music. “I mean, that truck itself could change a lot of people’s ways,” he said.

Though people travel great distances to experience Trump in the flesh—I spoke with one supporter who had come down from Michigan—many attendees at last night’s event were local. Dalia Julia Gomez, 61, has lived in Hialeah for decades. She told me she fled Cuba in 1993 and supports Trump because she believes he loves “the American tradition.” Hialeah is more than 90 percent Hispanic and overwhelmingly Republican. Onstage last night, Trump warned that “Democrats are turning the United States into Communist Cuba.” People booed. Some hooted. He quickly followed up, seemingly unsure of what to say next: “And you know, because we have a lot of great Cubans here!”

Trump won Florida in 2016 and 2020. His closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has just been endorsed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, but has otherwise been struggling to connect with voters for months. Trump has already secured many key Florida endorsements, including from Senator Rick Scott. (Senator Marco Rubio has yet to endorse.)

[Read: Inside Ivanka Trump’s dreamworld]

The night was heavy on psychological projection. “We are here tonight to declare that Crooked Joe Biden’s banana republic ends on November 5, 2024,” Trump said. Later, he vowed to “start by exposing every last crime committed by Crooked Joe Biden. Because now that he indicted me, we’re allowed to look at him. But he did real bad things,” Trump said. “We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist, and reverse enforcement of the law on day one.”

He seemed to tiptoe around the idea of January 6, though he did not mention the day, specifically. Instead, he said: “We inherit the legacy of generations of American patriots who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to defend our country and defend our freedom.” Earlier in the day, I spoke with Todd Gerhart, who was selling Trump-shaped bottles of honey, with a portion of the profits going to January 6 defendants (Give the “Donald” a Squeeze: $20). Gerhart lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and is among the vendors who follow the Trump show around the country. He told me that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, is a fan of his product, as is General Michael Flynn. He introduced me to a woman from Tennessee named Sarah McAbee, whose husband, Ronald, was convicted on five felony charges related to January 6 and is currently awaiting sentencing. She told me she’s able to speak with him by phone once a day. Yesterday she informed him she was going to the Trump rally. “It’s a one-day-at-a-time sort of thing,” she said.

About 100 yards away, people were lining up to meet Donald Trump Jr., who was scheduled to sign copies of his father’s photography book, Our Journey Together. Junior smiled and scribbled as his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, snapped selfies with fans. Walking around yesterday afternoon, I heard a rumor: Not only had Trump already picked his next vice president, but there was no one it could conceivably be besides his loyal namesake, Don Jr.

A little while later, I saw Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, milling about. I asked him about this rumor explicitly. He gave me an inquisitive look. “President Trump’s not ready to announce his VP pick yet,” he said. “Can you even have someone from the same family? I know you can’t have two people from the same state. So that rules it out right there.”

Family remains a confounding part of the Trump story. His daughter Ivanka spent the day in Manhattan testifying in the case that could demolish what’s left of the family’s real-estate empire. Trump himself had taken the witness stand on Monday. The occasion seemed to still be weighing on him, and at the rally, yielded a microscopic moment of familial self-reflection. “Can you believe—my father and mother are looking down: ‘Son, how did that happen?’” (For this he did an impression of a parental voice.) He quickly pivoted. “‘We’re so proud of you, son,’” he said (in the voice again). It didn’t make much sense. He rambled his way to the end of the thought. “But every time I’m indicted, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you,” Trump told the crowd. “Thanks a lot, everybody.”

During my conversation with Miller, I asked him if the campaign had discussed the logistics—or practicalities—of Trump getting convicted and having to theoretically run the country from prison. “There’s nothing that the deep state can throw at us that we’re not going to be ready for,” he said. “We have a plane, we have a social-media following of over 100 million people. We have the greatest candidate that’s ever lived. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”

What about something like a house arrest at Mar-a-Lago?

“Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”

Democrats yesterday continued to perform better at the polls than in the polls.

Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights, and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers. Among the major contests, Democrats fell short only in the governor’s race in Mississippi.

The results extended the most striking pattern from the 2022 midterm election, when Republicans failed to match the usual gains for the party out of the White House at a time of widespread public dissatisfaction with the president. Democrats, just as they did last November, generated yesterday’s unexpectedly strong results primarily by amassing decisive margins in urban centers and the large inner suburbs around them.

The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues.

“The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.”

The surprising results yesterday could not have come at a better time for Democratic leaders. Many in the party have been driven to a near frenzy of anxiety by a succession of recent polls showing Biden trailing former President Donald Trump.

Yesterday’s victories have hardly erased all of Biden’s challenges. For months, polls have consistently found that his approval rating remains stuck at about 40 percent, that about two-thirds of voters believe he’s too old to effectively serve as president for another term, and that far more voters express confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the economy than in Biden’s.

But, like the 2022 results in many of the key swing states, the Democrats’ solid showing yesterday demonstrated that the party can often overcome those negative assessments by focusing voters’ attention on their doubts about the Trump-era Republican Party. “Once again, we saw that what voters say in polls can be very different than what they do when faced with the stark choice between Democrats who are fighting for a better life for families and dangerous candidates who are dead set on taking away their rights and freedoms,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the chief strategy officer of Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, told me in an email last night.

Even more than a midterm election, these off-year elections can turn on idiosyncratic local factors. But the common thread through most of the major contests was the Democrats’ continuing strength in racially diverse, well-educated major metropolitan areas, which tend to support liberal positions on cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Those large population centers have trended Democratic for much of the 21st century. But that process accelerated after Trump emerged as the GOP’s leader in 2016, and has further intensified since the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

Across yesterday’s key contests, Democrats maintained a grip on major population centers. In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear carried the counties centered on Louisville and Lexington by about 40 percentage points each over Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

In Ohio, abortion-rights supporters dominated most of the state’s largest communities. That continued the pattern from the first round of the state’s battle over abortion. In that election, as I wrote, the abortion-rights side, which opposed the change, won 14 of the state’s 17 largest counties, including several that voted for Trump in 2020.

The results were equally emphatic in yesterday’s vote on a ballot initiative to repeal the six-week-abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed, and Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed, in 2019. The abortion ban was buried under a mountain of votes for repeal in the state’s biggest places: An overwhelming two-thirds or more of voters backed repeal in the state’s three largest counties (which are centered on Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati), and the repeal side won 17 of the 20 counties that cast the most ballots, according to the tabulations posted in The New York Times.

Democrats held the Virginia state Senate through strong performances in suburban areas as well. Especially key were victories in which Democrats ousted a Republican incumbent in a suburban Richmond district, and took an open seat in Loudoun County, an outer suburb of Washington, D.C.

The race for an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat followed similar tracks. Democrat Daniel McCaffery cruised to victory in a race that hinged on debates about abortion and voting rights. Like Democrats in other states, McCaffery amassed insuperable margins in Pennsylvania’s largest population centers: He not only posted big leads in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but he also built enormous advantages in each of the four large suburban counties outside Philadelphia, according to the latest vote tally.

[Read: America’s bluest state loves its Republican governor]

From a national perspective, the battle for control of the Virginia state legislature probably offered the most important signal. The Virginia race presented the same competing dynamics that are present nationally. Though Biden won the state by 10 percentage points in 2020, recent polls indicate that more voters there now disapprove than approve of his performance. And just as voters in national polls routinely say they trust Trump more than Biden on the economy and several other major issues, polls found that Virginia voters gave Republicans a double-digit advantage on economy and crime. Beyond all that, Youngkin raised enormous sums to support GOP legislative candidates and campaigned tirelessly for them.

Yet even with all those tailwinds, Youngkin still failed to overturn the Democratic majority in the state Senate, and lost the GOP majority in the state House. The principal reason for Youngkin’s failure, analysts in both parties agree, was public resistance to his agenda on abortion. Youngkin had elevated the salience of abortion in the contest by explicitly declaring that if voters gave him unified control of both legislative chambers, the GOP would pass a 15-week ban on the procedure, with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother.

[Read: Why deep-red Kentucky reelected its Democratic governor]

Youngkin and his advisers described that proposal as a “reasonable” compromise, and hoped it would become a model for Republicans beyond the red states that have already almost all imposed more severe restrictions. But the results made clear that most Virginia voters did not want to roll back access to abortion in the commonwealth, where it is now legal through 26 weeks of pregnancy. “What Virginia showed us is that the Glenn Youngkin playbook failed,” Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group, told me last night. “We showed that even Republican voters in Virginia weren’t buying it, didn’t go for it, saw right through it.”

Youngkin’s inability to capture the Virginia state legislature, even with all the advantages he enjoyed, will probably make the 2024 GOP presidential contenders even more skittish about openly embracing a national ban on abortion. But Timmaraju argued that yesterday’s results showed that voters remain focused on threats to abortion rights. “Our job is to make sure that the American people don’t forget who overturned Roe v. Wade,” she told me.

None of yesterday’s results guarantees success for Biden or Democrats in congressional races next year. It is still easier for other Democrats to overcome doubts about Biden than it will be for the president himself to do so. In particular, the widespread concern in polls that Biden is too old to serve another term is a problem uniquely personal to him. And few Democrats really want to test whether they can hold the White House in 2024 without improving Biden’s ratings for managing the economy. Trump’s base of white voters without a college degree may be more likely to turn out in a presidential than off-year election as well.

But a clear message from the party’s performance yesterday is that, however disenchanted voters are with the country’s direction under Biden, Democrats can still win elections by running campaigns that prompt voters to consider what Republicans would do with power. “We have an opening here with the effective framing around protecting people’s freedoms,” Fernandez Ancona told me. “Now we can push forward on the economy.”

Yesterday’s results did not sweep away all the obstacles facing Biden. But the outcome, much like most of the key contests in last fall’s midterm, show that the president still has a viable pathway to a second term through the same large metro areas that keyed this unexpectedly strong showing for Democrats.

I met Rashida Tlaib in 2009, before she was elected to Congress, when she was a young Palestinian American newly serving in the Michigan House of Representatives. I was the highest-ranking Arab American woman in the Obama administration and was receiving a key to the city of Dearborn, known as the heart of Arab America. She may not remember me from that day, but I remember her. She was a mesmerizing presence: attentive, sociable, and seemingly fearless.

Nearly a decade later, Tlaib won a U.S. House seat and became one-quarter of the outspokenly progressive “Squad.” Her ascent was an inspiration to many women of Muslim and Arab heritage—including me, a Lebanese American Christian who’s raising her children in their father’s faith, Judaism—because so few of us play any visible role in American politics. She was also noteworthy as a prominent advocate for Palestinians, who have suffered terribly for their statelessness.

[Benny Morris: Rashida Tlaib has her history wrong]

But Tlaib is not helping anyone’s cause by amplifying activist rhetoric that, to many ears, casually deploys the language of annihilation.

Last week, Tlaib circulated a video on X, formerly Twitter, that sharply criticized President Joe Biden for supporting Israel’s military retaliation against Hamas in Gaza. She went on to justify a highly inflammatory Palestinian-resistance slogan. “From the river to the sea,” she wrote, “is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”

As Tlaib knows, many Israelis, Jewish Americans, and others hear the slogan as calling for extending a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, presumably by killing or deporting the people now living in Israel. This interpretation is plausible not least because the terrorist group Hamas, which rules Gaza, has previously committed itself to slaughtering Jews and refusing peace negotiations and early last month launched a series of sadistic attacks against Israeli civilians. The use of From the river to the sea in Hamas’s 2017 constitution suggests that the phrase need not refer only to Palestinian self-determination; it specifies geographic coordinates for future violence.

At a moment when many Palestinians are taking pains to distinguish their cause from that of Hamas—whose actions triggered a brutal Israeli-military response that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza—Tlaib is defending one of the terror group’s preferred tropes. That she has a relatively benign interpretation of it is irrelevant.

The language of annihilation heralds an escalation of violence, and not only in the Middle East. Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray offered deeply disturbing testimony about how the threat of terrorism has grown in the United States after the Hamas attacks of October 7. That threat, he said, has reached a “whole other level.” He noted that multiple extremist organizations overseas have called for attacks against the United States, but also that homegrown terrorists might attack American Muslims or Jews. Anti-Semitic harassment has spiked. A young Palestinian boy was murdered because of his identity. Individuals can be radicalized to the point of violence, even if their reasoning is muddled. When the language of holy war is invoked, compromise and de-escalation become impossible.

Public figures can make a fraught situation worse. The disgraced former Trump Cabinet secretary Ryan Zinke, now a member of Congress, is touting legislation that his website describes as a “Bill to Expel Palestinians from the United States.” The Fox News host Jesse Watters recently went on an unhinged rant, saying about Arab Americans, “We have had it with them.”

[Juliette Kayyem: How MAGA extremism ends]

The burden of promoting a more civil discourse shouldn’t fall only on Tlaib and others sympathetic to the Palestinians. Supporters of Israel should not assume that pro-Palestinian means pro-Hamas. Students on many campuses genuinely view Israeli administration of the Palestinian territories as immoral; to portray their activism as mere anti-Semitism is to stifle legitimate inquiry. To defend any and all Israeli military actions by pointing out that Hamas started the war is to deny Israel agency.

Rather than making reasoned arguments that might win other people over, Tlaib has made herself the story by defending From the river to the sea. In response, the House passed a resolution last night to censure Tlaib for her comments. In a statement earlier yesterday, Tlaib accused her critics of trying to silence her. But she also took a notably more nuanced stance than her social-media posts did. “I will continue to work for a just and lasting peace,” she said, “that upholds the human rights and dignity of all people, centers peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, and ensures that no person, no child has to suffer or live in fear of violence.”

That comment shows a belated recognition that the choices members of Congress make about language are important, and that good causes are seldom served by dubious and loaded slogans.

Representative Adam Schiff was mingling his way through a friendly crowd at a Democratic barbecue when the hecklers arrived—by boat. Schiff and two other Senate candidates, Representatives Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, convened on the back patio of a country club overlooking the port of Stockton, California. Schiff spoke first. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” he said, thanking the host, local Democratic Representative Josh Harder.

It was hard to know what to make of the protest vessel, except that its seven passengers were yelling things as Schiff began his remarks. And not nice things. Although their words were tough to decipher, the flag flying over the craft made clear where they were coming from: FUCK BIDEN. Notably, of the three candidates, Schiff was the only one I heard singled out by name—or, in one case, by a Donald Trump–inspired epithet (“Shifty”) and, in another, a four-letter profanity similar to the congressman’s surname (clever!).

Schiff is used to such derision and says it proves his bona fides as a worthy Trump adversary. Given the laws of political physics today, it also bodes well for his Senate campaign. The principle is simple: to be despised by the opposition can yield explicit benefits. This is especially true when you belong to the dominant party, as Schiff does in heavily Democratic California. One side’s villain is the other side’s champion. Adam Schiff embodies this rule as well as any politician in the country.

In recent years, Schiff has had a knack for eliciting loud and at times unhinged reactions from opponents, even though he himself tends to be quite hinged. The 45th president tweeted about Schiff 328 times, as tallied by Schiff’s office. Tucker Carlson called the congressman “a wild-eyed conspiracy nut.” A group of QAnon followers circulated a report in 2021 that U.S. Special Forces had arrested Schiff and that he was in a holding facility awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay for trial (the report proved erroneous). Before Schiff had a chance to meet his new Republican colleague Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, she filed a resolution condemning his “Russia hoax investigation” and calling for him to potentially be fined $16 million (the resolution failed).

This onslaught has also been good for business, inspiring equal passion in Schiff’s favor. A former prosecutor, he became an icon of the left for his emphatic critiques of Trump’s behavior in office, including as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said as part of his closing argument, a speech that became a rallying cry of the anti-Trump resistance. (“I am in tears,” the actor Debra Messing wrote on Twitter.) Opponents gave grudging respect. “They nailed him,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told Mitt Romney, according to an account in a new Romney biography by my colleague McKay Coppins. Schiff’s own Trump-era memoir, Midnight in Washington, became a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

Representative Adam Schiff speaks to supporters at a barbecue hosted by fellow Democratic House member Josh Harder in Stockton, California. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

You could draw parallel lines charting the levels of vilification that Schiff has encountered and his name recognition and fundraising numbers. Both the good and the grisly have boosted Schiff’s media profile, which he has adeptly cultivated. Schiff has come in at or near the top of the polls in the Senate race so far, along with Porter. A Berkeley IGS survey released last week revealed him as the best-known of the candidates vying for the late Dianne Feinstein’s job; 69 percent of likely voters said they could render an opinion of him (40 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable). He raised $6.4 million in the most recent reporting period, ending the quarter with $32 million cash on hand, or $20 million more than the runner-up, Porter. That’s more than any Senate candidate in the country this election cycle, and a massive advantage in a state populated by about 22 million registered voters covering some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.

[Read: A final chapter unbefitting an extraordinary legacy]

“He’s become an inspiration and a voice of reason for many of us,” Becky Espinoza, of Stockton, told me at the Democratic barbecue.

Or at least the sector of “many of us” who don’t want him dead.

Schiff started getting threats a few months into Trump’s presidency. “Welcome to the club,” Nancy Pelosi, his longtime mentor, told him. He endured anti-Semitic screeds online and actual bullets sent to his office bearing the names of Schiff’s two kids. “I can’t stand the fact that millions of people hate you; they just hate you,” Schiff’s wife, Eve—yes, Adam and Eve—told her husband after the abuse started. “They just hate you.”

No one deserves to be subjected to such menace, and the threats can be particularly chilling for a member of Congress who would not normally have a protective detail. (Schiff’s office declined to discuss its security staffing and protocols.) Schiff is not shy about repeating these ugly stories, however. There’s an element of strategic humblebragging to this, as he is plainly aware that being a target of the MAGA minions can be extremely attractive to the Democratic voters he needs.

In June, congressional Republicans led a party-line vote to censure Schiff for his role in investigating Trump. As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy attempted to preside, Democrats physically rallied around Schiff on the House floor chanting “shame” at McCarthy. On the day of his censure, Schiff was interviewed on CNN and twice on MSNBC; the next morning he appeared on ABC’s The View. “Whoever it was that introduced that censure resolution against him probably ensured Adam’s victory,” Representative Mike Thompson, another California Democrat, told me. A few colleagues addressed him that day as “Senator Schiff.”

I dropped in on Schiff periodically over the past few months as he traversed the chaos of the Capitol, weighed in on Trump’s legal travails, and campaigned across California. What did a Senate candidacy look like for a Trump-era cause célèbre who is revered and reviled with such vigor? I found it a bit odd to see Schiff out in the political wild—glad-handing, granny-hugging, and, at the barbecue in late August, nearly knocking a plate of brisket from the grip of an eager selfie-seeker. He has graduated to a full-on news-fixture status, someone perpetually framed by a screen or viewed behind a podium, as if he emerged from his mother’s womb and was dropped straight into a formal courtroom, hearing room, or greenroom setting.

I watched a number of guests in Stockton clutch Schiff’s hand and address him in plaintive tones. “After I stopped crying a little bit, I just wanted to thank him for all he did during impeachment and to just save our democracy,” said Espinoza, following her brief meeting with the candidate.

Nearby, David Hartman, of Tracy, California, put down a paper plate of chicken, pickles, and corn salad and made his way to Schiff. “I just want to shake the man’s hand and thank him,” Hartman told me, which is what he did. So did his wife, Tracy (of Tracy!), who was likewise surprised to find herself in tears.

“I’m like a human focus group,” Schiff told me, describing how strangers approach him at airports. “Sometimes I will have two people come up to me simultaneously. One will say, ‘You are Adam Schiff. I just want to shake your hand. You’re a hero.’ And the other will say, ‘You’re not my hero. Why do you lie all the time?’”

For his first eight terms in Congress, Schiff, 63, was not much recognized beyond the confines of the U.S. Capitol or the cluster of affluent Los Angeles–area neighborhoods he has represented in the House since 2001. “I think, before Trump, if you had to pick one of these big lightning rods or partisan bomb-throwers, you would not pick me,” Schiff told me.

Largely true. Schiff speaks in careful, somewhat clipped tones, with a slight remnant of a Boston accent from his childhood in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts. (His father was in the clothing business and moved the family to Arizona and eventually California.) A Stanford- and Harvard-trained attorney, Schiff gained a reputation as an ambitious but low-key legislator in the House, and a deft communicator in service of his generally liberal positions.

A Fox News reporter and other guests at the barbecue in Stockton.(Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

After Trump’s election, however, Schiff’s district effectively became CNN, MSNBC, and the network Sunday shows, along with the scoundrel’s gallery of right-wing media that pulverized him hourly. This included a certain Twitter feed. The worst abuse Schiff received started after Trump’s maiden tweet about him dropped on July 24, 2017. This was back in an era of relative innocence, when it was still something of a novelty for a sitting president to attack a member of Congress by name—“Sleazy Adam Schiff,” in this case.

Schiff tweeted back that Trump’s “comments and actions are beneath the dignity of the office.” Schiff would later reveal that he rejected a less restrained rejoinder suggested by Mike Thompson, his California colleague: “Mr. President, when they go low, we go high. Now go fuck yourself.” Anyway, that was six years, two impeachments, four indictments, 91 felony counts, and 327 tweets by Donald Trump about Adam Schiff ago.

[Adam Schiff: America must stand as a bulwark against autocracy]

“Adam is one of the least polarizing personalities you will ever find,” said another Democratic House colleague, Dan Goldman, of New York. “The reason he’s become such a bogeyman for the Republican Party is simply that he’s so effective.” Goldman served as the lead majority counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, working closely with Schiff. “We originally met in the greenroom of MSNBC in June of 2018,” Goldman told me. (Of course they did.)

Schiff understands that some of the rancor directed at him is performative, and likes to point out the quiet compliments he receives from political foes. Trump used to complain on Twitter that Schiff spent too much time on television—in reality, a source of extreme envy for the then-president. Schiff tells a story about how Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, came to Capitol Hill for a deposition from members of Schiff’s Intelligence committee in 2017. “Kushner comes up to me to make conversation, and to ingratiate himself,” Schiff told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you do a great job on television.’ And I said, ‘Well, apparently your father-in-law doesn’t think so,’ and [Kushner] said, ‘Oh, yes, he does.’” (Kushner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

One of Trump’s most fervent bootlickers, Senator Lindsey Graham, walked up to Schiff in a Capitol hallway during the first impeachment trial and told him how good of a job he was doing. Schiff, who relayed both this and the Kushner stories in his memoir, says he gets that from other Republicans, too, usually House members he’s worked with—including some who lampoon him in front of microphones. A few House Republicans apologized privately to Schiff, he told me, right after they voted to censure him.

“The apologies are always accompanied by ‘You’re not going to say anything about this, are you?’” Schiff said. When I urged Schiff to name names, to call out the hypocrites, he declined.

I asked Schiff if he would prefer the more anonymous, pre-2017 version of himself running in this Senate campaign, as opposed to the more embattled, death-threat-getting version, who nonetheless enjoys so many advantages because of all the attention. He paused. “I’d rather the country didn’t have to go through all this with Donald Trump,” he said, skirting a direct answer.

As with many members of Congress seeking a promotion or an exit, Schiff gives off a strong whiff of being done with the place. “The House has become kind of a basket case,” he told me, citing one historic grandiloquence that he was recently privy to—the episode in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called her colleague Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor.

“And I remember thinking to myself, There used to be giants who served in this body,” Schiff said. He sighed, as he does.

I met with Schiff at the Capitol in early October, amid the usual swirl of weighty events: Feinstein had died three days earlier; news that Governor Gavin Newsom would appoint the Democratic activist Laphonza Butler as her replacement came the night before. That afternoon, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz had filed his fateful “motion to vacate” that would result in the demise of McCarthy’s speakership the next day. Schiff stood just off the House floor, colleagues passing in both directions, Republicans looking especially angry, and reporters gathering around Schiff in a small scrum.

No matter what happens next November, Schiff is not running for reelection in the House. He told me he has long believed that he’d be a better fit for the Senate anyway, where he has been coveting a seat for years. Schiff said he considered running in 2016, after the retirement of the incumbent Barbara Boxer (who was eventually succeeded by Kamala Harris).

A Democrat will almost certainly win the 2024 California race. Senate contests in the state follow a two-tiered system in which candidates from both parties compete in a March primary, and then the two top finishers face off in November, regardless of their affiliation. In addition to Schiff, Porter, and Lee, the former baseball star Steve Garvey, known also for his various divorce and paternity scandals, recently entered the race as a Republican. A smattering of long shots are also running, including the requisite former L.A. news anchor and requisite former Silicon Valley executive. Butler announced on October 19 that she would not seek the permanent job.

To varying degrees, all of the three leading Democratic candidates have national profiles. Lee, who has represented her Oakland-area district for nearly 25 years, previously chaired both the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Porter was elected to Congress in 2018 and has gained a quasi-cult following as a progressive gadfly who has a knack for conducting pointed interrogations of executives and public officials that go rapidly viral. A few of her fans were so excited to meet Porter at the Stockton barbecue that three actually spilled drinks on her—this according to the congresswoman, speaking at an event a few days later.

[Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?]

Schiff, Porter, and Lee all identify as progressive Democrats on most issues, though Schiff tends to be more hawkish on national security. He voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and supported the 2011 U.S. missile strikes against Libya. Lee, who opposed all three, recently criticized Schiff’s foreign-policy views as “part of the status quo thinking” in Washington. (Porter was not in office then.) Schiff expressed “unequivocal support for the security and the right of Israel to defend itself” after last month’s attacks by Hamas. Lee has been more critical of the Israeli government, and called for a cease-fire immediately after the Hamas attacks. As for Porter, she has been a rare progressive to focus her response on America’s Iran policy, which she called lacking and partly to blame for the attacks.

Although Schiff is best known for his work as a Trump antagonist—and happily dines out on that—he is also wary of letting the former president define him entirely. “This is bigger than Trump,” he reminds people whenever the conversation veers too far in Trump’s inevitable direction. Schiff dutifully pivots to more standard campaign themes, namely the “two hugely disruptive forces” he says have shaped American life: “the changes in our economy” and “the changes in how we get our information.” He reels off the number of cities in California that he’s visited, events he’s done, and endorsements he’s received as proof that he is a workmanlike candidate, not just a citizen of the greenroom.

A group of hecklers in a boat floats by near the barbecue. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

Recently, he lamented that many of his Republican colleagues are now driven by a “perverse celebrity” that he believes the likes of Greene and Boebert have acquired through their Trump-style antics and ties to the former president. I pointed out to Schiff that he, too, has received a lot of Trump-driven recognition. Doesn’t being affiliated with Trump, whether as an ally or an adversary, have benefits for both sides?

“Well, I don’t view it that way at all,” Schiff said. “I don’t view it as having any kind of equivalence. On one hand, we’re trying to defend our democracy. And on the other hand, we have these aiders and abettors of Trump by these vile performance artists. It’s quite different.”

Schiff’s biggest supporter has been Pelosi, who endorsed him over two other members of her own caucus and delegation. This included Lee, whom Pelosi described to me as “like a political sister.” I spoke by phone recently with the former speaker, who was effusive about Schiff and scoffed at any suggestion that he benefited from his resistance to Trump and the counter-backlash that ensued. “If what’s-his-name never existed, Adam Schiff would still be the right person for California,” Pelosi said. It was one of two occasions in our interview in which she refused to utter the word “Trump.”

“I just don’t want to say his name,” she explained. “Because I worry that he’s going to corrode my phone or something.”

In one of my conversations with Schiff, I asked him this multiple-choice question: Who had raised the most money for him—Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump? My goal was to get Schiff to acknowledge that, without Trump, he would be nowhere near as well known, well financed, or well positioned to potentially represent the country’s most populous state in the Senate.

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” he said. After a pause, he picked himself. “I am my own biggest fundraiser,” he declared. Okay, I said, but wasn’t Trump the single biggest motivator for anyone to donate?

“It’s the whole package,” Schiff maintained, ceding nothing. He then made sure to mention the person who’s been “most formative in helping shape my career and phenomenally helpful in my campaign—Nancy Pelosi.” He was in no rush to give what’s-his-name any credit.