The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.

The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.

DeSantis delivered a stronger overall debate performance than Haley. But the evening mostly displayed the structural limitations of the theory that each campaign is operating under, and the limited progress either candidate has made toward surmounting those obstacles.

As he showed during the debate, DeSantis is grounding his coalition on the right by defining himself as an unflagging champion for the party’s most conservative elements. During the debate, the Florida governor’s frequent attacks on Haley, and more infrequent (and oblique) jabs at Trump, both represented variations on the charge that neither rival can be trusted to advance conservative priorities.

Haley, in mirror image, is grounding her coalition in the party’s center. She has focused on consolidating the centrist GOP voters and donors who have long expressed the most resistance to Trump. That includes moderates, people with at least a four-year college degree, GOP-leaning independents, and suburbanites.

DeSantis’s vision, in other words, has been to start on the right and over time build toward the center; Haley wants to grow in the opposite direction by locking down the center, and then expanding into the right.

Supporters of both Haley and DeSantis believe that the other’s approach lowers their ceiling too much to ultimately topple Trump. The problem for all Republicans looking for an alternative to the former president is that last week’s debate offered the latest evidence that each camp may be right about the other’s limitations. With the voting beginning only five weeks from Monday in the Iowa caucus, neither Haley nor DeSantis has found any effective way to loosen Trump’s grip on the party.

Neither, in fact, has even tried hard to do so. Instead, they have centered their efforts almost entirely on trying to squeeze out the other to become Trump’s principal rival. To beat Trump, or to come close, eventually either of them will need to peel away some of the roughly 60 percent of GOP voters who now say in national polls that they intend to support him for the nomination. But both have behaved as if they can leave that challenge for a later day, while focusing on trying to clear the field to create a one-on-one contest with the front-runner.

The theory in DeSantis’s camp has been that the only way to beat Trump is to aim directly at his core supporters with a conservative message. DeSantis advisers acknowledge that his positioning has not connected with many centrist voters. But his camp believes that if DeSantis can emerge after the early states as the last viable alternative to Trump, the moderates most resistant to the former president will have no choice but to rally around the Florida governor, even if they consider him too Trump-like himself.

The voters now drawn to Haley “share a goal in common with Governor DeSantis in that they want an alternative to Trump,” Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa religious conservative who has endorsed DeSantis, told me. “The more that DeSantis proves there is one alternative to Trump, he will start peeling off that lane as well.” By contrast, Vander Plaats argues, if DeSantis falls out of contention, his support is more likely to flow back to Trump than toward Haley. “I haven’t heard any supporter of DeSantis yet saying: ‘I’m deciding between him and Haley,’” he told me. “Basically, they are between Trump and him.”

DeSantis’s supporters anticipate that his strategy will pay off if he finishes strongly in Iowa. But so far, his decision to offer voters what amounts to Trumpism without Trump has returned few dividends. With his Trump-like agenda on immigration and foreign policy, and emphasis on culture-war issues such as transgender rights, DeSantis has alienated many of the centrist GOP voters most dubious of the former president while failing to dislodge many of his core supporters.

“Ron DeSantis should have consolidated the non-Trump wing of the party from the get go and then gone after soft Trump supporters,” Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me in an email. “Instead, he tried to out-MAGA Trump from the right and alienated not only soft-Trump voters but also the more pragmatic wing of the party. It was a strategic blunder.”

Haley has filled that vacuum with the elements of the party most skeptical of Trump. Her approach has been to start with the primary voters who like the former president the least, with the hope of eventually attracting more of those ambivalent about him. Her backers believe she has a better chance than DeSantis to reach those “maybe Trump” voters. As the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me, DeSantis “has tried to appeal to some of the ‘always Trump’ voters, but the ‘always Trump’ voters are always Trump for a reason. Nikki Haley seems to have figured out the job is to consolidate the ‘maybe Trump’ voters who supported Trump twice but now … want a different style and different temperament.”

[Read: A war on blue America]

DeSantis still leads Haley in most national polls, though that may be changing. And he remains even or ahead of her in the polls in Iowa, where he has campaigned relentlessly, won support from most of the state’s Republican leadership (including Governor Kim Reynolds), attracted broad backing in the influential religious-conservative community, and spent heavily on building a grassroots organization.

But DeSantis is in a much weaker position in the other early states. A recent poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found him falling to fourth in the Granite State. That poll found Haley emerging as a clear second to Trump, as did another recent CNN survey in South Carolina. In each state, she attracted about twice as much support as DeSantis did. Polls also consistently show Haley running much better than DeSantis, or Trump, in hypothetical general election match ups against President Joe Biden.

All of these positive trends largely explain why DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP contender, attacked Haley at the debate. Haley was right when she suggested that the attention reflected anxiety in DeSantis’s camp about her rise. But that motivation doesn’t necessarily make the attacks any less effective.

After delivering the most assured performances in the first three GOP debates, Haley seemed wobbly last week as DeSantis and Ramaswamy pummeled her from the right. Dave Wilson, a longtime Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me that Haley had not faced that kind of sustained ideological assault from the right during her career in the state. “It hasn’t been used against her in South Carolina,” Wilson said. “Nikki has never been some kind of mainstreamer or a shill for the big corporations. That’s not who she has portrayed herself as, or how she governed, when she was governor of South Carolina.”

[Read: Trump voters are American too]

At the debate, Haley never seemed to find solid ground when DeSantis accused her of resisting the hard-line approaches he has championed in Florida on issues affecting transgender people. Haley neither embraced DeSantis’s agenda nor challenged it and instead insisted he was mischaracterizing her own record, without entirely clarifying her views. “Especially on those types of cultural issues, it is probably always going to be advantage DeSantis,” Vander Plaats told me. “I think if you turned down the volume and just [looked at] the physical appearance, Nikki was very concerned at that point, like she knew she was in a tough space, and DeSantis was in a very confident space.”

Her uneasy response on issues of LGBTQ rights was a stark contrast to the confident course she has set on abortion. One reason Haley has gained favor with more centrist Republicans is that she has so clearly argued that the GOP cannot achieve sweeping federal abortion restrictions and must pursue consensus around more limited goals. “I think Nikki Haley talks about social issues the same way that real people do: not through demagoguery or hysterics like some candidates, but having real policy disagreements while showing compassion for those affected—and I think that’s the winning formula,” Stroman said.

But at the debate, Haley was unwilling to apply that formula to LGBTQ issues, even as she seemed to seek a more empathetic tone than DeSantis.

“She has clearly thought through a more moderate, nuanced position on abortion that would have greater appeal in a general election,” Alice Stewart, a longtime GOP strategist who has worked for leading social-conservative candidates, told me. “It appears she has not mapped out her position on other culture-war issues, such as transgender procedures and school bathrooms.”

Doubling down on his message at the debate, DeSantis’s campaign told me afterward that “within the confines of the Constitution” he would support nationalizing the key laws affecting transgender people that he has passed in Florida, such as banning gender-affirming care for minors. Haley’s campaign still appeared focused mostly on deflecting this argument: In comments to me after the debate, her aides stressed that although DeSantis criticized her for opposing legislation as governor requiring students to use the restroom of the gender they were assigned at birth, he similarly indicated that the issue was not a priority for him not long thereafter, during his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018. Their message was that DeSantis is stressing these issues now merely out of expediency. But in an email exchange with me after the debate, Haley’s campaign drew a clearer distinction with DeSantis than she did during the encounter: rather than national action to impose on every state the restrictions Florida has approved on LGBTQ issues, the campaign said Haley would “encourage states to pass laws” that ban classroom discussion of sexual orientation or regulate bathroom use for transgender kids. The one exception the campaign noted is that, like DeSantis, she would also support national legislation banning transgender girls from competing in school sports.

The debate drew only a small audience and is unlikely by itself to significantly change the trajectory of the DeSantis and Haley competition. Wilson and Stroman both said they doubt that DeSantis’s ideological attacks will hurt Haley much in the South Carolina primary. “It’s going to be harder in South Carolina than he thinks, because everyone knows what Nikki Haley did in this state,” Wilson said. “Under her leadership, a lot of strong conservative stands were taken.”

But, of course, GOP voters don’t know nearly as much about Haley in the cascade of states that will vote in early March, after South Carolina. DeSantis supporters view her unsteady response to his ideological assault at the debate as validation of their belief that Haley can never attract enough conservative voters to genuinely threaten Trump. “There’s just no path for her to win the nomination,” Vander Plaats argued. “That lane doesn’t exist.”

The path for any alternative to beat Trump is a rocky one, but it’s premature to assume that Haley cannot outlast DeSantis to become the last viable challenger to the former president. She still has time to formulate better responses to the charge that she’s insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era GOP. Portraying Haley as too squishy in the culture war might help her in New Hampshire, the state where she’s hoping to emerge as Trump’s principal rival.

But the debate underscored her need to sharpen her answers on those issues as the race moves on. And for Haley’s supporters, it raised an ominous question: If she couldn’t respond more effectively to an attack on her conservative credentials from DeSantis and Ramaswamy, how would she hold up if she ever becomes enough of a threat for Donald Trump to press that case himself?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Culture has a way of defining a year for even the under-rock dwellers among us: A good movie, TV show, book, or album can shape our conversations, our experiences, and even the way we think. Today’s newsletter rounds up some of the culture writing that guided our readers through a year of controversial awards shows, deepfakes, and—it must be said—Che Diaz.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Our 10 favorite books of 2023 Selling art to the rich, famous, and inebriated The 10 best films of 2023

Your Culture Cheat Sheet

Barbie Is Everything. Ken Is Everything Else.

By Megan Garber

The biggest blockbuster of the year was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and in this essay, Garber goes beneath the film’s shiny surface to explore its questions about personhood and political power.

What Made Taylor Swift’s Concert Unbelievable

By Spencer Kornhaber

A ticket to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was a precious commodity in 2023, and, as Kornhaber reported from the tour’s kickoff, in Arizona, Swift’s performance justifies the hype.

Beyoncé Tickets Are the New Status Symbol

By Shamira Ibrahim

Purchasing tickets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour was a cultural experience unto itself, Shamira Ibrahim writes.

Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology

By Ross Andersen

Andersen spoke with Nolan about the similarities between Nikola Tesla and Robert Oppenheimer, the techno-optimism of Interstellar, how Inception anticipated the social-media age, and why the director hasn’t yet made a film about artificial intelligence.

The Death of the Sex Scene

By Sophie Gilbert

Depictions of love in film and TV have become strangely loveless. Gilbert asks: What do we lose when we don’t see intimacy on-screen?

The Unexpected Power of Second-Chance Romance

By Hannah Giorgis

This year, TV turned the cameras in a new direction, Giorgis writes, as shows such as And Just Like That and The Golden Bachelor explored what it means to date after 50.

The Fury of Chris Rock

By David Sims

In his latest special, the comedian opened up about the Oscars slap heard ’round the world. The result, Sims writes, was 10 minutes of raw anger.

The Succession Plot Point That Explained the Whole Series

By Nina Li Coomes

In Shiv, what is often a clichéd storyline became both poignant and tragic in the HBO show’s finale, Nina Li Coomes writes.

The Week Ahead

The second part of The Crown’s final season (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Wonka, adapted from Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, stars Timothée Chalamet and Hugh Grant (in theaters Friday). In How to Draw a Novel (on sale Tuesday), Martín Solares studies the craft of literary fiction through a series of essays.

Essay

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty.

America Isn’t Ready for the Two-Household Child

By Stephanie H. Murray

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.

The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010 … Regardless of whether it’s the right outcome for a given separation, though, joint custody is a growing reality—one that our systems for accounting for and supporting families aren’t built to accommodate. Americans may be ready for the two-household child, but American public policy isn’t.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Who’s afraid of women’s pleasure? The stunted emotional lives of May December Norman Lear’s many American families Let them cook. A soulless holiday-shopping strategy A spiritual manifesto for the dispossessed The George Santos number that brought SNL to life Poem: “My Ancestors Ride Wit Me”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

If Trump Wins: A project that considers what Donald Trump might do if reelected The sanctions against Russia are starting to work. The hybrid-car dilemma

Photo Album

A Rohingya woman walks to the beach after the local community temporarily allowed a boat of refugees to land for water and food, in Ulee Madon, Indonesia. (Amanda Jufrian / AFP / Getty)

An annular solar eclipse over North America, Israel’s war against Hamas, the felling of a famous tree in England, and more in our editor’s selection of the year in photos.

P.S.

When you’ve finished your journey through this year in culture, consider booking one for further back: This retrospective from 2019 runs through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the 2010s zeitgeist, and it may be the only place to see Elena Ferrante and the poop emoji discussed in adjacent paragraphs.

— Nicole

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

“No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.” The rest of Slough House isn’t much better: a nest of abandoned keyboards and empty pizza boxes strewn around by agents who would rather be anywhere else. On the top floor is the lair of the spymaster Jackson Lamb, stinking of “takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer.”

Herron’s spy-novel series is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government. After years of obscurity, his books are now best sellers, and Apple has so far adapted three for television under the name Slow Horses, after the first novel in the series. The reviews of the show’s newest season—which premiered late last month and is based on the third novel, Real Tigers—have been adulatory.

I live in Britain. Watching Herron’s stories unfold on-screen, I’m struck by what has—and hasn’t—happened since the first book in the series appeared. The Conservative Party has achieved Brexit and precious little else since 2010, leaving the country feeling pinched, and pessimistic, and stuck.

[From the October 2019 issue: The loser-spy novelist for our times]

In recent films, even James Bond has swapped glamour for grit, but Apple’s Slow Horses goes far beyond that. The humor is pitch-black, and the overriding tone is one of cynicism—the perfect match for post-austerity, post-Brexit, post–Boris Johnson Britain. In the foreground is a succession of double crosses, mole hunts, car chases, and assassinations. The background is a quiet hum of institutional failure, political corruption, and hopelessness. National assets are sold off, extremists are indulged, and no one is trustworthy. The failures of recent Tory rule seem all the more squalid when viewed through the conventions of genre fiction. Forget the Cold War; Britain’s contemporary problems feel less like grand ideological struggles and more like persistent clerical errors. We are a nation of slow horses.

When I first read Herron’s books, I wondered if the murk and mildew of Slough House were an elaborate cover. What better disguise for a great spy than masquerading as a terrible one? But the decrepit building isn’t a novelist’s ruse; the agents working there really are no-hopers, misfits, and has-beens cast out of Regent’s Park, MI5’s gleaming headquarters. “The Park” is everything Slough House is not—a high-tech paradise of ambitious Millennials wearing sharp suits and headset mics. Here is the difference between Britain’s self-image as an international colossus and the reality of its poor productivity and stagnant living standards.

If this were a more conventional spy drama, the hero would be River Cartwright. Played in the Apple series by Jack Lowden, he is the grandson of a former head of the intelligence services: smart, impulsive, and faintly arrogant, and still clinging to idealism. In Herron’s universe, however, Cartwright was robbed of his nepo-baby potential and sentenced to Slough House after shutting down an airport during a training exercise. Over the course of more than a dozen books, he is joined in the crumbling building by a constantly changing cast of addicts, dropouts, the wrongly accused, and the doomed. (Compared with Herron, the Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin is an amateur at killing characters.) Everyone at Slough House clings to the hope of redemption, in the form of a summons back to the Park, while torturing their fellow rejects with their mere presence.

I only picked up Herron’s books two years ago, after the weight of friendly recommendations became too much to ignore. My late arrival reflects his slow-burn career. A former copy editor, he started to write on the long commute to the office, and initially struggled to find an audience. Slow Horses sold so badly that he couldn’t find a British publisher for the sequel, Dead Lions. He was rescued when his American editor nominated the work for a crime-fiction prize, the Gold Dagger, which it unexpectedly won. Bigger sales followed, as did a new novel or short-story collection almost every year.

The TV version, adapted by the English satirist Will Smith, is just as good as the books, not least because Apple managed to get Gary Oldman to play Lamb. For an actor who likes to disappear into his role, this one is a gift-wrapped delight. Oldman’s transformation—lank hair, bowling-ball belly, elderly-badger stubble—involves the kind of punitive grotesquery that used to win attractive actresses an Oscar. The dandruff and dirt matter, because Lamb is the center of the story arc. In a bleakly cynical world, he follows a strong, if quixotic, moral code. Slough House might be hell, but it’s also a family. Lamb continually insults his employees—in the latest season on Apple, he tells two of them: “I’ve got hemorrhoids that are more fucking use than you.” But the show’s plotline revolves around his efforts to rescue his deputy, Catherine Standish, from a bungled kidnapping. (When he succeeds, he goes right back to taunting her about her alcoholism.)

Lamb understands that his superiors at MI5 are out for themselves. “If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse,” Herron writes in Slow Horses. “Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.” But Lamb isn’t scheming for promotion. He knows he is a knife in the hands of the security services, and the point of a knife is to be used.

He is also the only character who knows that escape from Slough House is impossible. Over the course of the books, we learn that Lamb is a relic of the Cold War, who was stationed in Berlin just after the Wall came down. He has watched Britain’s decline from postimperial power to rainy Brexit island. The world of Slow Horses has plenty to say about the danger of angry young men—the thugs of the far right, for instance—but it’s also haunted by old ones, the clapped-out survivors of an existential battle who are now moldering away on meager military pensions. (Herron’s female characters are equally flawed: One of the most ruthless backstabbers of the lot is Diana Taverner, ice queen of the Park, played in the television series by Kristin Scott Thomas.) The inevitable comparison is with John Le Carré, and sure enough, River’s grandfather David Cartwright is named after the novelist, who was born David Cornwell. But whereas Le Carré showed a country in decline, Herron’s Britain is fully decayed. In the Cold War, some defectors at least betrayed their country for an ideology. Now the rewards are only power and money.

British writers have a recurrent grumble that television adaptations funded by American money tend to Yankify their characters and settings to suit U.S. audiences. The disastrous film version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, which turned a story saturated with English folklore into a showcase for irritating American child actors, is an obvious example. Even the smart, fun dramedy Sex Education uses the trappings of an American high school despite its setting in rural Wales. Thankfully, Apple has declined to Americanize Slow Horses, which would lose both its charm and its satirical sharpness if transplanted to Pittsburgh or Pensacola. Its version of Britain makes the entire country seem somehow provincial—low-rent, run-down, closed early on Sundays.

Herron has named Slough House after a commuter town in southern England that the poet John Betjeman once suggested was so ugly and depressing that it should be razed to the ground: “Come, bombs and blow to smithereens / Those air-conditioned, bright canteens, / Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, / Tinned minds, tinned breath.” Although Herron lives in Oxfordshire—in a house with no Wi-Fi—he has also made London itself a character. The real-life British capital rarely feels dangerous, but parts of it certainly seem down-at-the-heels, which fits a series where bike accidents and bureaucracy can be as fatal as gun battles.

Slough House sits opposite the Barbican, a housing estate that architects hail as a brutalist masterpiece and that my brain associates with a fruitless struggle to find the entrance. The area is just north of the City of London, a mixture of sterile skyscrapers and warrenlike alleys with names like Knightrider Street. In one episode of the latest season, Lamb peers into a cake shop in pessimistic, and stuck.

Leadenhall Market, the spiritual home of men in pinstripes boasting about their bonuses. “London was more than one city,” the narrator in Real Tigers declares. There was one “whose views were spacious and [whose inhabitants] spoke in agreeable accents of wealth and plenty”; meanwhile, “the other was cramped, soiled and barbarous, peopled by a feral race who’d strip you bare and chew the bones.”

[Read: ‘The most influential action movies ever made’]

Luckily, the books are funny, or their vision would be unremittingly bleak. There is no justice in the world of Slough House: Bad people prosper and the good die young. (Even worse, the mediocre and cowardly—that is, the most relatable characters—also die young.) A recurrent theme of the series is the privatization of government, a process that Herron presents as arrogant predators streamlining an organization so it is briefly more efficient—read: profitable for them—before it collapses into dust. Herron is not reflexively liberal, however. Of Britain’s only left-wing broadsheet newspaper, he writes: “Martin Kreutzmer liked to read The Guardian, because it kept him in touch with that strain of self-lacerating smugness which hoped to inherit the earth, but would have no clue what to do with it.” Still, Herron’s most compelling villain is the fictional right-wing politician Peter Judd, a chilling portrait of how much more destructive Boris Johnson could have been if only he had an attention span. Judd wants to get rich by breaking up the intelligence services and selling the parts to his cronies; Johnson lacked that level of focus, and was reduced to asking for loans from rich businessmen to meet his child-support payments. But both men mask their overweening ambition with an unserious persona and fake bonhomie.

Britain is Slough House: damp and drafty, creaking along, with its basic infrastructure gummed up by neglect, and a ruling class that has insulated itself from failure. Like the Park, the country proceeds seamlessly from screwup to cover-up. If only there were a Jackson Lamb somewhere out there, sitting in a fog of smoke and yesterday’s curry fumes, ready to sort the problems out.