Yet speak to the former First Lady’s fans — about 8,000 in the hall this crisp October night — and more than Obama herself, it’s what she represents that truly matters. She’s all about “working your way up, working hard, and following your dreams,” says Christine Galket, a Pennsylvania native, 45 and beaming. Latifa Ahmadi agrees. She first read Michelle’s memoir as a tween in her far-off Afghan village, devouring it in Farsi before translating it into pure American. “Obama’s story,” Ahmadi, now a Pennsylvania college student, tells me, “can be anybody’s story. Even if they’re not American.”

The descendant of slaves, and the daughter of a city water plant employee and a secretary, Michelle Obama’s journey to Princeton and the White House is, of course, impressive. But to blue-collar Erie, Michelle and her boot-strapping husband feel like nothing less than a Norman Rockwell painting made flesh. Blending Midwestern nice with Ivy League smarts, they exude the hustle-and-flow of their restless, striving country in a way this post-industrial corner of northern Pennsylvania can now only dream of. “It’s hard,” as Michelle’s moderator says at the start of the night, “not to be nostalgic.”

Coined by a doctor in 1688, “nostalgia” described the sad longing felt by Swiss mercenaries billeted abroad for their home. But there’s another kind of nostalgia too — not for a place, but for a time, when the grass was greener and life more full. That isn’t to say it’s a fantasy. For if Rust Belters speak nostalgia like a native tongue, there are reasons for their fluency.

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Pittsburgh vs Cleveland: a tale of two Rust Belt cities

By Jeff Bloodworth

In 1950, the region was home to nearly half of all American jobs. In 1975, a steel worker made $83,000 per year in today’s money. The Ohio Valley, home to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, boasted some of the highest home-ownership rates in the nation. Erie boomed too: half a century ago the “boiler and engine capital of the world” still belched grit and grime. Almost 20,000 labored at General Electric’s factory. And when people worked, neighborhoods did too. Each enclave had their own little gems: Rathskellars with the coldest beer, Bob & Midge’s Diner with the best beef-on-weck, a famous Rust Belt sandwich.

Those jobs and that world are gone. Today, the Ohio Valley is a champion in opioid addiction. In Erie, 24-hour vending machines dispense free Narcan right there in downtown. There are worse horrors too. Three days before Obama’s Erie visit, the town made national headlines for a grisly murder-suicide. Just off the 12th Street Corridor, all cracked sidewalks and sky-high poverty rates, a 45-year-old man murdered his wife, pregnant daughter, two sons, and one- and five-year-old grandchildren. The scene featured all the signs of post-industrial torment. Vehicles littered the yard; jugs of urine were stashed throughout. Neighbors reported drug abuse and a steady stream of domestic disputes. When the wife reportedly demanded a divorce, her husband perpetrated a crime that one veteran officer called the worst he’d ever seen.

When, in January 2009, Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he promised to change all this, to “bring manufacturing back” through the “audacity of hope”. He duly swept the Rust Belt, twice. And, to be fair, his White House did sometimes try, as Michelle Obama put it in her “Moderated Conversation”, to “represent” working-class interests. In 2009, for example, Barack authored a federal bailout of General Motors, saving 1.5 million auto jobs. An economic stimulus pulled the economy out of freefall. Forestalling catastrophe is an achievement.

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As President, then, Obama was a steady hand, and, especially compared to his successor, personally virtuous. Yet whatever his wife might now claim about defending towns such as Erie, the numbers tell otherwise. After their eight years in the White House, the number of industrial jobs in the Rust Belt had dropped another million. Little wonder upper-income households got richer — and the poor more desperate. Little wonder, too, that by 2016 enthusiasm for the Obamas had begun to ebb away. “I remember being in Youngstown, Ohio,” recalls Chris Arnade, a chronicler of working-class America, “and I kept hearing effectively the same thing: ‘We all had great hopes for Obama, and it didn’t really go the way we wanted.’”

This isn’t surprising. Consummate showmen, the Obamas were happy to offer a diet of vibes to their hardscrabble backers, patrician gestures a stand-in for meaningful, structural change. At White House shindigs, Michelle donned shoes by unknown designers to send a message. “You, too,” she seemed to be saying, “can dress a First Lady”. Or else she sponsored South Lawn lunches for low-income kids, with much less to say about their crumbling schools or needle-strewn parks.

After leaving office, the Obamas practiced their own spin on the art of the deal, making $90 million from books and podcasts. Their Obama Foundation then spent $1 billion on a presidential library, choosing as its location a suitably salubrious corner of South Chicago. They remain as influential as any party donor: the couple’s endorsement will be a considerable prize for the party’s prospective presidential candidates. Staying relevant in Erie, the swing county of the nation’s swingiest state, boosts their brand. Even now, Michelle’s “Moderated Conversation” felt like just another psychological booster shot. As the moderator put it, she wanted “every single one of you to leave here feeling lighter, for all of you to feel uplifted and to feel more connected to each other”.

We know, by now, that all this left an opening for Donald Trump, who made the same Rust Belt pitch as Obama. Less “Yes, we can”, more a gigantic “Fuck you” — both sentiments nonetheless spoke to the same rage, the same sigh of nostalgia. “A large group of people who are now told that their world no longer exists because it was bad, outmoded, or unfashionable,” is how Lawrence Quill, who wrote the book on political nostalgia, describes their audience. “They feel disconnected and dispossessed. Into that vacuum, you say, ‘I hear your pain, I understand your loss. I speak for you. I represent your interests.’”

Neither Obama’s hope nor Trump’s carnage have stopped the Rust Belt’s spiral. Yet the pull of the past is revealing all the same. “When the nostalgia kicks in,” says Quill, “it’s usually a sign something’s off; something’s wrong; this isn’t the right trajectory.” The irony is that as Trump’s two terms have betrayed their promise, and as the man himself revels in cruelty and corruption, the Obamas in all their complacency have become another vessel for wistfulness.

Mood matters. And if you can’t eat inspiration, truly successful political programs must find some way of blending soaring rhetoric with a practical plan. For Democrats, as the midterms loom, that’s more urgent than ever. With Trump polling in the mid-30s, the party has a special opportunity to win the House, and likely the Senate, and build momentum for 2028. And, on the policy front, the party, especially its progressive wing, does genuinely seem to have answers. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have seen their membership surge, with candidates from Florida to Michigan ousting establishment Democrats. The DSA offers energy, volunteers, and tangible policies from universal childcare to Medicare for All.

Ideas, then, are not the DSA’s problem. Cosmopolitan alienation is — something DSAers like Francesca Hong demonstrate with interest. When the Wisconsin DSAer said America should “cancel Thanksgiving”, she may have charmed the country’s well-educated elites. But as Hong’s primary defeat neatly proves, the best ideas in the world can’t outweigh a good story. And, whatever their flaws, Barack and Michelle are supremely comfortable with the tale America tells itself. “The Obamas believe in the myth of America,” says Nicci Page, a lawyer queueing to see Michelle in Erie. “Americans are great at myth-making. I think that’s our biggest export. We’ve made people believe that dreams come true and that they come true here.”

Page understands this in her blood. Like Michelle Obama, her forebears were bought and sold, yet inhabited a land where you could go from chattel slave to attorney in three or four generations. “That,” Page smiles, “says a lot about the promise that is still in America.” A pity so many progressive Democrats don’t seem to see that promise. For if the Obamas have no vision of the future, the DSA, too often, has no vision of the past. But voters, in the end, want both. This is their American way — one where the Obama mythos becomes tangible reality.

Not that the trivial is undeserving of serious attention. Alongside a shared interest in the primal and the religious, Berger and Dillard each had things to say about the trivial. They make us wonder if events as momentous as the US elections of 2016 and 2024 and everything calamitous that followed from them — let alone what might still, as they say in America, be coming down the pike — involved, to a not trivial extent, contesting ideas of the trivial.

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Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

In her memoir An American Childhood (1987), Dillard recalls how she and a group of other young girls at school were “vigilantes of the trivial”. She’s referring to matters of fashion but no phrase better describes the habits of thought-policing, constant jeopardy and apprehension that underwrote — and undermined — the cultural politics of the American Left over the last dozen or so years. This over-zealous policing was undertaken, as so often in the past, in the name of an entirely worthy cause: social justice. In America, though, this lofty aim co-existed — until Luigi Mangione burst into the debate with a vengeance — with a widespread if grudging acceptance of the idea that healthcare is run on a for-profit basis. Take the case of Joseph Heller who, in No Laughing Matter, tells the story of a long illness and extremely costly recovery. Through sheer inadvertence, as Martin Amis observed, Heller failed to pay a $20 premium which would have meant he got an extra $40,000 of health coverage. “He minds about that,” Amis continues, “but he doesn’t mind about the system” — a system in which, as he succinctly puts it, “you are getting charged for every Kleenex”.

The only concern more ultimate than illness is the least desirable prognosis, death, but in recent years much of the Left — and I think the repetition here is useful — left not just opponents but allies exposed to a creeping ideological infection whereby every little infraction of a constantly updated code (Dillard refers to herself and friends as “enforcers of a code”) risked exposure to the full force of unwritten laws. For every triumph and vindication — the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, most obviously — there was a collateral sentence of undue severity for some relatively trivial offense. Often this sentence was the opposite of lifetime imprisonment without the possibility of parole: indefinite expulsion, and the sentence could never be appealed because the perps were rarely tried. Across American campuses and institutions Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was effectively being re-staged, in real time, in contemporary dress. There’s no shortage of books — Woke Racism by the fearless John McWhorter, The War on the West by Douglas Murray, Unwanted Advances by the ferociously brilliant Laura Kipnis — documenting the absurdities and excesses of this extended moment. Inappropriate jokes, infelicities of language, slips of cultural etiquette, were punished while huge threats were underway, collective resistance to them weakened by the politics of outraged identity. Some issues sailed east across the Atlantic more successfully than others. Micro-aggressions were not such a big deal in Britain where actual aggro and old-school bovver are never more than a head-butt away. Charges of cultural appropriation also proved tricky since many of us — Peter Blake, most famously — could not be persuaded that our Saturday afternoons, our cultural heritage, had not been enriched by the magnificent Kendo Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, like a game show offering ever-escalating prize money, an addictive competition was underway to see who could be most quickly and severely offended, often vicariously, on someone else’s behalf. Ostensibly a weapon of the Left, identity politics helped to do the Right’s work, splintering what are actually shared interests and goals into competing factions of the variously aggrieved. Consciousness raising is a good thing, always, but militant doses of this variant were often consciousness lowering.

The absurdity of much of what was happening went beyond the satirical reach of Tom Wolfe in the Seventies. The prosecutorial dragnet of critical race theory was all the more irresistible because, while it was couched in the idioms of academic rigor, it had — as John McWhorter has repeatedly pointed out — many of the qualities of a cult. While Wolfe had reported hilariously on precursor fads in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers (1970), Karl Popper had pre-diagnosed the condition in 1962, in Conjectures and Refutations. He was referring specifically to Marxism and psychoanalysis, but critical race theory had the similar “effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still ‘un-analyzed’ and crying aloud for treatment.”

The irony is that the various courses of treatment could easily serve as a distraction from the larger condition to which they were a justified response. That seems to be changing. So although the BBC — of all places — recently published an article about bare nails as an expression of white supremacy, it was quickly withdrawn. During the years when so much fiddling of this kind had been going on, however, Rome, or its contemporary manifestations in Ukraine and Gaza, were busily burning. Broadening the focus beyond armed conflict to include climate change, swathes of the world were literally on fire. And the blaze continues.

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The summer of Idiossey

By Geoff Dyer

Which brings us to the other part of the triviality wars. In the Nineties, a Dutch TV crew took what was by then a well-trodden pilgrimage route — I had taken it myself in the Eighties — to make a film about Berger at his home in the village of Quincy. At one point Berger is asked if he has become more religious and conservative with age. I have transcribed his answer here, with minor edits, but do please try to watch A Touch of Grace on YouTube, from about 28 minutes 44 seconds in, as he reflects on the global triumph of the free economy:

“This system, for the first time in human history, judges and makes decisions about what is happening to our entire planet by the criterion of only one value, which is the value of increasing profit. And this is of a fanaticism by which the so-called fanatics in other parts of the world are really complex, tolerant, nuanced people, the most fanatical of them even. Because this is the absolute fanaticism, and it is a fanaticism of such triviality if one thinks about the needs and the structure of the human spirit, that everything is judged only by this one criterion… What this does is produce colossal injustice [Berger concludes with increasing passion] and against that injustice I feel more militant than ever.”

This was filmed before 9/11, before the advent of ISIS, so it’s necessary to amend what Berger says about tolerant, nuanced people. That aside, to claim that he has been proved right is an understatement. The twice-elected American President is someone who only understands the deal, who recognizes no currency or morality other than profit. The price paid for this, in oil, in land, in maiming and lives, in injustice, is, to him… trivial.

By the time this little article is published, the American midterms will be fast approaching. They may offer encouragement, but the choice is not between competing forms of the trivial. As Berger put it in a poem published more than 60 years ago, we:

go backwards or forwards
There are two directions
But not two sides.

Have these red- and purplish-state Democrats found the winning message not just for today, but for 2028? What are they doing right — and what can the party learn from them? The short answer is that, with a few exceptions, these nominees are breaking with the party’s ultra-progressive messaging on cultural issues.

Consider Iowa, a state hard-hit by the bad trade deals of the past, alienated by the cultural Left, and now hurt economically by President Trump’s war in Iran. There, two self-described “prairie populists” are in close races. Barack Obama won Iowa in 2008 and 2012. Since then, it has been solidly red — aside from one candidate who became state auditor in 2022. 

But Iowa isn’t a conservative red state — it is what I call “populist red.” The state has areas that vote red, but aren’t traditional Republican strongholds the way, say, South Carolina is. Populist red states switched to Republican because Trump dropped the GOP’s neoliberal orthodoxies on immigration and trade. This, even as the Democrats began catering aggressively to college-educated professionals at the expense of their historic blue-collar constituencies. 

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That combination — a Republican president who could sound remarkably like the old labor Left and a Democratic Party that didn’t — proved disastrous for the Dems in places like Iowa. Rob Sand, the Democrat running for governor, seems to understand this dynamic.

Sand has broken with his party on several issues. He has advocated against “political agendas” in children’s schools, arguing instead that basic education fundamentals should be the central focus. He supports Iowa’s law barring biological males from competing against women and girls in sports. He is pro-gun. This might make him sound like a “moderate,” but his economic policies mirror those of his populist GOP opponent, who wants to regulate data centers and ban limited liability corporations from buying Iowan land. Sand combines economic-populist ideas with Left-coded ones that are also populist — raising the minimum wage and legalizing cannabis to cover the state’s looming fiscal crisis.

Like Rob Sand, the Democrats’ nominee for US Senate, Josh Turek, has also broken with the national party on the trans sports issue. But on gun rights, Turek toes the party line, and is on record for wanting to ban assault rifles. Other red-state Democrats like Amy Acton, running for governor in Ohio, and Annie Andrews, running for Senate in South Carolina, have broken with the national party on trans ideology. Both women have stated that biological boys can’t compete in girls’ sports and have come out against trans surgeries for minors. Both have also faced substantial backlash. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, for example, released a statement criticizing Acton’s remarks — even suggesting some may not vote or canvass for her. 

Annie Andrews’s ad, released this month, in which she came out against trans surgeries for minors, was reviled by progressives online. Cory Archibald, a powerful progressive activist, wrote: “Democrats who throw my trans siblings to the wolves will never get a dime out of me or a minute of my time.” Democrats like Acton, Sand, and now Andrews are paving the way for reining in the party’s excesses on issues like gender ideology, which proved consequential for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Progressive activists who criticize red-state Democrats for diverging on these issues often live on the coasts, inside blue bubbles, detached from the realities of working-class and rural areas; much of their success comes from electing progressive candidates in blue districts. 

These activists dismiss issues like biological boys in girls’ sports, insisting that it only affects a small minority of people and that Democrats should stop playing into “Right-wing hysteria.” They contend that Trump’s defining political ad against Kamala Harris was an economic argument and had very little to do with gender ideology. But by taking the wrong side of an 80-20 issue, Democrats undermine their authority on health care and the economy, too. Voters in red states see these views as “lacking common sense” across the board, and espousing them discredits Democrats on all other issues, even when the party may genuinely have better ideas than the other side. Trump’s poll numbers are in the gutter right now, but the Democrats’ brand tracks even lower. Winning the midterm elections on backlash to the affordability crisis and the Iran war alone is not a long-term strategy for Democratic politicians, especially those in red and purple states.

El-Sayed, the progressive firebrand running for the Senate in Michigan, is an exception to this trend. He’s solidly on the Left when it comes to economics. But unlike his counterparts in Iowa and Ohio, El-Sayed has remained unapologetically progressive on most cultural issues. In a Fox News interview, for example, he stuck to the progressive line on gender, and he has made little effort to critique 2020-style peak woke-ism. “Not all of those were bad ideas,” he told one interviewer, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America’s “abolitionist” positions on prisons, borders, and policing.

​For progressives, El-Sayed’s campaign is do-or-die. Winning in a purple state like Michigan will be a powerful sign that the progressive agenda is viable beyond deep-blue districts. Progressives will use this energy to advance their policy goals into the 2028 presidential contest, the same way they did in 2020, when 10 presidential candidates ran on AOC’s Green New Deal. AOC herself recently declared: “If Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.” 

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Another (partial) exception is James Talarico, who is running a surprisingly competitive race for the Senate in Texas. Campaigning in far redder territory than El-Sayed’s Michigan, Talarico has been largely unwilling to separate himself from the national Democratic Party brand — saying he was against biological boys competing in girls’ sports if it is “unfair” but quickly reversing his position after receiving backlash from his own party. But even Talarico has come out against gender surgeries for minors.

Given the political climate, candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, Rob Sand, Josh Turek, and James Talarico have a real chance of flipping red states. But if the likes of El-Sayed and Talarico lose while Amy Acton and Rob Sand win in Iowa, it should be a glaring sign to the party that winning in areas they used to win but no longer do requires rethinking progressive culture stances. 

That is the central lesson. In my experience, progressive operatives are unlikely to heed it. In Texas, they will blame Elon Musk for Talarico’s loss. In Michigan, they whine that the establishment media sabotaged El-Sayed by focusing too much on Hasan Piker. They will blame everyone else before confronting their own unpopular ideology. On the other hand, as one Democratic strategist told me: “If Amy Acton, Josh Turek, and Rob Sand win — it proves you can tell LGBTQ activists to go take a hike.”

If I underrated the degree of damage Trump would do in those first 100 days — the severity of DOGE was remarkable, and the attacks on free speech have been chilling — my thesis holds: Trump is steadily growing unpopular, and political gravity, over time, will keep tugging him down. He would undoubtedly relish becoming a genuine American fascist, but he simply isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Elections haven’t been canceled, public institutions, if cowed, are not blindly worshipping Trump, and the media still publish freely.

Trump has abused his executive authority in disturbing ways, but so did George W. Bush and FDR when it came to locking up American citizens. Trump is eroding American democracy, but the nation is greater than him. Some of the damage he’s doing might be permanent — reputationally, in terms of Washington’s relationship with the world — but much of it, with another Democratic president, could be reversible. What is ruined by executive fiat can be rebuilt by fiat.

MAGA doesn’t have to consider life after Trump right now, but that life will come. Time is undefeated. Trump will be 82 years old when he ends his second term. He could try for a third, but it’s hard to see him winning. And even if he pretends like he won an election he lost, he will struggle to subdue the military and the security apparatus in time to cling to power indefinitely as an unpopular monarch. On 21 January, 2029, would the American military really obey Trump and not the newly sworn-in president? Would ambitious Republicans who want to be president themselves want Trump lording over them into his 80s and beyond?

Anything is possible. But anything doesn’t have to be likely. Trump will leave the Oval Office, one way or the other, and there will be an American republic after him, however flawed. It will be here, though. Erosion isn’t destruction. If the Roman Empire dragged on for five centuries or so, the United States can at least range beyond 225 years.

In the short-term, Republicans will lose seats in the midterms next year. The operative question is how many. Given Trump’s unpopularity and the possibility that the GOP budget will impose draconian health-care and welfare cuts, Democrats will have much to campaign on in 2026. A repeat of the 2018 blue wave is plausible. I don’t gamble much, but I like the odds of current Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker at the start of 2027.

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Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Ross Barkan

The Senate is a different story, with the Democratic slippage in rural states making the formation of a new majority quite difficult. If Democrats can’t become competitive in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska again, they will have a hard time forming a Senate majority. At best, it seems, they can claw to a narrow 50-50 split or 51-49 advantage, and even that will not be straightforward next year. They’ll have to play defense in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia (all winnable) and try to flip Maine, where Susan Collins has been quite durable, and North Carolina, where dream recruit Roy Cooper would have a chance to knock out Thom Thillis.

There is no reason to believe Trumpism, as a style and even policy preference, won’t outlast the man. Tariffs will probably lose their appeal because no other Republican is so protectionist and the stock-market slump after Liberation Day actually rattled the political class. Still, on economics, the GOP seems to prefer the new populist flavoring to the decades of neoliberalism that peaked under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on Big Pharma have fit seamlessly into the new Republican Party’s conception of itself.

At the same time, it’s worth wondering how seriously one should take this new populist GOP. If they’re for the common man, why are they trying to gut Medicaid? What about DOGE? That’s all conventionally Republican, even libertarian. Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator, has come out against the attempted Medicaid cuts, but most of the other Republicans have defaulted to their old median. We’ll see how it all shakes out. Beyond 2025 — and even beyond the Trump White House — it cannot be known how long MAGA will persist.

What is it, after all? It’s less political machine than loose movement built around one man. Trump will leave a legacy behind, and he will have, without a doubt, wrenched the GOP in a direction that was unimaginable a decade ago. Will that wrenching continue when he’s out of office? I’m not sure.

MAGA has another three full years in power. In one sense, that’s a very long time. It’s enough of a window for an unhinged executive to continue wrongly deporting people, attacking academic freedom, and eviscerating federal agencies. It’s enough time to blatantly ignore court orders. It’s enough time to behave like an authoritarian and indulge in McCarthyite tactics. It’s enough time to be grossly corrupt. These will be rough years. Even if Democrats have the House, there will be little they can do to combat executive orders beyond filing lawsuits and protesting. That is frightening. It’s important, though, to not give in to either nihilism or catastrophism. As dark as the moment might be, the United States has seen worse.

The first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920 led to the rapid arrest of 6,000 people across 36 cities, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants with ties to Left-wing causes. The second Red Scare extended throughout much of the Forties and Fifties, obliterating countless careers across academia, media, and the arts, and outlasting Joe McCarthy himself. House Un-American Activities Committee hearings roved from city to city, terrorizing Americans who held liberal political views. The CIA and FBI, through programs like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS, spied on American citizens and infiltrated numerous civil-rights, labor, feminist, and student organizations.

They harassed and intimidated almost anyone who dared to associate with a cause deemed too progressive. And, of course, there was the Bush administration, which erected a vast surveillance state and illegally detained hundreds of individuals at Guantanamo Bay without any due process. Much of what Trump is doing now he learned from Bush the Younger, whose pointless wars brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East and thousands of US service members. It’s important not to forget this.

In short: America is drenched in sin, and America persists. America is not irredeemable; even now, I am proud to be a citizen, and believe in the promise of our Constitution.

To return to the humdrum of electoral politics: What comes next? As someone who is not too enamored with JD Vance, I predict that he is both the probable 2028 GOP nominee and someone who may preside over the crumbling of MAGA. Trump lost an election but pushed onward because he was Trump: he is in possession of an inarguable magnetism, that black magic, which holds the project together. One cannot look away from Trump. But many can look away from Vance, who underperformed in his Senate race and lucked onto the 2024 ticket.

Vance is smart person, even a serious one, but he does not possess Trump’s charisma. It is difficult to imagine him presiding over a rally of tens of thousands unless Trump is there to first lure the MAGA faithful into the tent. Hard, too, to conceive of how Vance will persuade so many millions of casual, disaffected voters to head to the polls for him like they did for Trump. One can’t quite be a fan of Vance, right? He’s not a WWE Hall of Famer.

To be sure, it wouldn’t be fair to count Vance out now, not when we don’t even know who the Democratic nominee in 2028 will be. The advantage Democrats will have, though, is that they won’t be the party of incumbency and Republicans will have little to run on unless there’s a great economic miracle in the next few years. In 2024, Trump benefited from pre-Covid nostalgia, and that playbook can’t be run again. The post-Trump GOP — or one held completely captive by the president — will have to find a new path to victory.

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Trump’s new world disorder

By Helen Thompson

No single political figure in modern times has dominated a political party like Trump has. If the Reagan and Nixon eras may still be more significantly historically, the Trump era, which began the moment he descended the golden escalator at his tower 10 years ago next month, rivals both for import. Assuming Trump remains healthy, he will have been president or running for president for more than 13 years. He loomed over Biden’s presidency, and for younger Republicans, he has supplanted Reagan in their pantheon of political heroes.

He is sanctified for all time. What this means for the movement he leads is another matter. It is difficult to see how he becomes more popular, as president, from this day forward. Second-term presidencies are a slog, and Trump’s has already proved alienating to a wide swath of people, including those who decided, without great passion, to give him another shot in 2024. Biden’s popularity never recovered from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump’s fall into the abyss might have begun with DOGE or the tariffs that wiped out all the stock market gains of the last year (mounting a cumbersome recovery since then). When he was running for president, Trump could always claim he presided over a booming 2010s economy with low inflation and nonexistent interest rates. Even though he was in the White House in 2020, most Americans thought of him as the last pre-pandemic president, and he exploited this to maximum effect.

The power of Trump’s personality permitted MAGA, to some extent, to not keep every promise to the voters who elected him. Trump winning and punishing his enemies was a form of deliverance. It feels, finally, that will no longer be enough. The US economy is still robust, as world economies go, but Trump can’t readily tame inflation, fix the housing market, and kickstart a new national industrial policy to make his tariff proposals workable. He doesn’t think that deeply. There are feints in the direction of bona-fide populism, like his executive order on drug prices, though it’s unclear how it will hold up in court.

Trump, unfortunately, is not terribly interested in dragging the GOP-run Congress towards legislation that might make permanent reforms to the health system. Biden, through the Inflation Reduction Act, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time. Trump is not leaning on Mike Johnson or John Thune to expand Medicaid, introduce a public option, or tackle monopolization in the health sector.

In fact, Republicans seem intent on undercutting the health care on offer for working-class and poor Americans. Assuming they follow through — and Trump is a willing accomplice — MAGA will lose ground. They will have accelerated the inevitable: the occlusion of one era, and a slow march into an unknowable future.

This essay was adapted from Substack.

With no sign of a Republican resurgence, the Democrats will likely be lulled into thinking that Biden’s polarising agenda is a vote-winner, in the same way the conspiracy-minded MAGA wing of the GOP refuses to move on from 2020. Until it’s resoundingly disproved in the ballot box, stridency tends to whip up your base: Trump’s supporters have become, as the President suggested, “semi-fascist”, while his political mentor, South Carolina’s James Clyburn, goes further, decrying the GOP as the architects of a Nazi state.

When Democrats performed poorly in the past, they were forced to rethink their politics. After Walter Mondale suffered a landslide defeat to Reagan in 1984, the Democratic Leadership Council was set up to steer the ship towards the centre — and ultimately supported both a young Bill Clinton and, to an extent, Biden himself. In turn, the DLC was inspired by the moderate Coalition for a Democratic Majority, founded after Nixon’s trouncing of McGovern in 1972. Today, however, it’s hard to say that now is the time for a new political vision when virtually all the high-profile blue state Democrats won, sometimes by wider than expected margins.

So, rather than using the next two years to regroup and craft a political programme that could win the next election, the Democrats now appear stuck with a weak leader who appears unfit to deal with the global challenges that will define America in the coming decade. Internally, too, the Democrats look increasingly unstable. A stronger-than-expected Midterms performance doesn’t mask the fact that the progressives remain a dominant faction in the party — with an associated agenda that, outside of deep blue-college towns and core cities, commands remarkably low levels of support, as Barack Obama and others have warned.

Sticking to such a programme threatens the party’s already weakening hold on working-class voters, in particular those threatened by climate policies. Over time, the economic implications of Biden’s green agenda may be obvious, but for now they are hidden amid massive deficits and increased transfer payments. However, as Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira has noted, in the longer run, the party’s emphasis on “de-growth” and austerity is unlikely to attract middle and particularly working-class voters. Already, the political implications of climate policy have ruined the Democrats’ best chance to take the GOP seat in Ohio. Their candidate Tim Ryan may have claimed to support fracking, but his backing of the Pelosi Congressional agenda proved disastrous in a state whose economy is fuelled by natural gas production and hopes to attract new investment, including a possible $20 billion new Intel chip plant in the Columbus suburbs. In Florida, meanwhile, Ron DeSantis won heavily in Latino, historically Democratic regions.

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To lure back those alienated by the Left’s climate and cultural agenda, socialists such as Bernie Sanders propose a more economically redistributive policy. This has clearly worked in California where last year’s surplus was channelled into subsidies for working-class voters who are stuck paying the high rents and energy prices caused by policies dreamt up in Sacramento. To win, Sanders has noted, the Democrats need to focus more on basic economic concerns, such as pensions, healthcare, job creation and higher wages. What’s needed is a giant US welfare state, a supercharged Sweden on steroids.

The big problem for the Democrats, now that this seems an acceptable policy, lies in who will pay for it. Biden’s 2020 electoral win was largely financed and marketed by the corporate and tech elite. Today, however, many of these moguls are moving to the Right as their mega fortunes, particularly in Silicon Valley, become less mega. Most remain supportive of the Democrats, although arguably the biggest player, Elon Musk, has shifted his support to the GOP. Meanwhile, once-reliable backers, such as JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Steve Rattner, have been harshly critical of Biden’s economic policies and worry about the expansion of anti-trust regulations. And as the Democrats push their draconian climate policy, the ranks of its wealthy critics are likely to swell. Nationalising the energy industry would, for instance, rob them of the windfall from an energy “transition” to solar and wind power. Wall Street and the Valley may yet find that their alliance with the climate activists will end in tears.

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As their wealthy backers become increasingly alienated, the Democrats can’t afford to be complacent about their Midterm performance. Any sense of victory must be matched by a recognition that the best way forward is to adopt a moderate strategy that incorporates the best parts of the Sanders agenda, such as an aggressive reshoring of industry and strong policies against China, with a less intrusive cultural agenda. Democrats need to embrace the potential of America’s productive economy, from agriculture and energy to manufacture, to create jobs; they should be the ones figuring out how ordinary people can benefit from the country’s vast natural resources and creative advantages.

This is possible, although elements of its progressive wing will no doubt object to any move towards the middle ground. In Britain, Labour has largely learnt its lesson and extinguished much of Jeremy Corbyn’s far-Left, antisemitic faction, paving the way for a likely reversal in its political fortunes. Here, too, the Democrats must find ways to circumvent, and at times reject, its unpopular fringes. If they seek to become a true national, majority party, they need to rediscover something of the spirit of Harry Truman or John Kennedy, or, maybe even Joe Manchin — a party that could win support not just in blue zones, but across the entire country.

I thought of Sharif while in Georgia this weekend, trying to get to grips with the Senate race between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. People outside the state seem incredulous that anyone in their right mind could vote for Walker, a former football star whose personal history is littered with the sorts of scandals that, while not so shocking for ex-NFL players, would normally sink a Senate candidate — abortions for multiple mistresses, a parade of illegitimate and unacknowledged children, gruesome domestic violence allegations, and claims that he once threatened a shootout with Texas police. According to a Quinnipiac poll from mid-October, a majority of Georgians agree that Walker is “not honest” and “does not have good leadership skills”.

And yet, polls in the state remain deadlocked, with the latest average from RealClearPolitics showing Walker leading Warnock by a margin of 1.5%. Everyone, it seems, agrees that Walker is a flawed candidate and a flawed human being, and that Warnock, a well-spoken preacher with a penchant for funny campaign ads, is charming and relatable. The result is that this is a remarkably “clean” campaign, at least from the Republican side — there is little effort to convince people that he is “suitable” for office. Voters know that Walker is a bit of a joke. But the GOP is asking them to ignore Walker’s personal characteristics and focus on the pure, friend-enemy core of partisan politics: do you want the Senate to be controlled by Republicans or Democrats? On the strength of this issue alone, Walker might win.

That’s because Georgia, despite having two Democratic senators, is still a Republican state. For at least a decade, Democrats have been hoping that migration into the Atlanta metro area, which has nearly doubled in size since 2000 and now accounts for more than half of the state’s population, would turn Georgia purple if not blue. That has been happening — the white share of Georgia’s electorate dropped from 68.7% in 2004 to 52.7% today — but not quickly enough. Donald Trump won the state handily in 2016, and it took the chaos of 2020 — the coronavirus pandemic, the “racial reckoning”, Trump’s alienation of affluent white suburbanites, and especially his instigation of an intra-Republican civil war in Georgia between the November 3 election and the January 2021 Senate runoff, which induced his supporters to stay home — for Democrats to eke out two Senate victories by margins of 1% and 1.8%. Before Walker won the Republican Senate primary, Warnock’s seat was expected to be one of the easiest for the GOP to recapture in the midterms.

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Added to which, our national electoral environment massively favours Republicans. As a general rule, the president’s party does poorly in midterm elections, even under relatively popular presidents. Biden is not popular, and the issues the election is being fought on all benefit the GOP. Inflation hit double digits in Atlanta this year, higher than the national average, and the city had more homicides in 2021 than in any year since 1996 and could end 2022 with even more. Asked about the most important issues facing the country, 36% of Georgians said cost of living or the economy, 14% said immigration, and 6.8% said crime. By contrast, the top “Democratic” issues were “threats to democracy” at 17%, guns at 10%, and abortion — widely expected to doom Republicans among college-educated women — at 5.2%.

It is a testament to Walker’s weaknesses as a candidate, and to Warnock’s relative strengths, that the race is close at all. I was in Athens, Georgia, on Saturday for the Georgia–Tennessee football game — the place Walker became a star, and where his name and college number hang on the inside of the stadium — and even there, signs of Walker the politician, as opposed to the player, were few and far between. I counted, easily, three dozen people wearing pins and stickers for Brian Kemp, the incumbent Republican governor, but most laughed or declined to speak to me when I asked about Walker. “He’s a Republican,” shrugged one woman in a Kemp pin who declined to give her name. I finally found a group of young white men wearing Walker pins, but when I asked for their thoughts on the race, they told me, in a vaguely aggressive manner, that voting was a private matter and that I shouldn’t be walking around asking those sorts of questions.

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Walker’s critics, on the other hand, were happy to talk. A black man in his early 30s named Rashad, who said he’d already cast an early ballot for Warnock, told me bluntly that he suspected Walker had brain damage from CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that’s known to affect football players. Keith, a middle-aged white man working in corporate communications in Atlanta, told me that Walker could hardly string a sentence together and was clearly being used as a puppet. “You’re not even voting for him, you’re voting for whoever is controlling him. The whole thing is an embarrassment to the state of Georgia.”

For Georgia Democrats, the race largely comes down to voters like Keith — suburban moderates whose distaste for Trump and the Trumpian elements of the GOP helped deliver surprise victories to Warnock and Jon Ossof in 2020. There is constant talk of “ticket-splitting” — the hope is that enough independents and Republican-leaners will vote for Brian Kemp for governor but choose Warnock for Senate, or else vote third-party. In my parents’ own leafy Atlanta suburb, a Republican stronghold that flipped to the Democrats in 2018, and where the average home price exceeds $660,000, I counted perhaps a dozen houses with Warnock yard signs. There were a few for Kemp, but only one that I saw for Walker. Warnock radio ads urged listeners to vote for the candidate with “good moral character”, even if they didn’t agree with him on every issue — a concession to the fact that many of these voters would probably prefer a Republican senator in policy terms.

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But it seems increasingly likely that distaste for Biden and frustration with the state of the economy will be too much for Warnock to overcome. Over the summer, Democrats and many in the media entertained the idea that some combination of the Dobbs abortion decision, the January 6 hearings, and a brief bump in Biden’s approval ratings might save the Democrats from a wipeout. But in recent weeks, the mood — and the polls — have shifted hard toward the GOP. Once-tight races have turned into apparent Republican blowouts, and once-lopsided Democratic leads have become tight races. A story broke late Friday about how Democrats in New York are bracing for a potential loss in the governor’s race — a race that Andrew Cuomo won by more than 23% in 2018. In Georgia’s governor’s race, Kemp, a fairly generic Republican without any of Walker’s personal problems, went into election weekend leading Democratic media darling Stacey Abrams by 7.6%.

The major problem is that for all of Walker’s flaws, voters are angry at the Democrats for a whole host of reasons, and none of the Democrats’ messaging — which has largely focused on abortion and the dangerous extremism of the Republicans — is responsive to this anger. The chances are that Walker will win, and if he does, it will be because of people like the young, suburban Atlantan I spoke to who said, frankly: “Walker probably has an IQ of about 60. But at least he’s not a Democrat.”

Certainly, this norm was well-established by the following year. In October 2016, the Washington Post published an article mocking Donald Trump’s weight and asking a panel of “experts” to guess how fat he was. “Even more important than Donald Trump’s weight is how unhealthy he looks,” said cardiologist Dean Ornish. “Unhealthy complexion, puffy, pasty skin, sweating a lot.”

This type of coverage certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of medical ethics, which discourages doctors from performing armchair diagnoses of people they don’t treat. But the Left’s defence was that it was part of a vital truth-telling exercise. The press should have an adversarial relationship with those who seek the privilege of governing us! They should ask tough, even invasive, questions about a candidate’s fitness for office! The health of our aspiring leaders is a matter of public concern, after all, especially when it comes to retaining the necessary faculties to do the job. But especially, and more importantly, when the aspiring leader is that guy. And so, the resistance media was born, and went on to thrive during Trump’s presidency.

At the root of all this was a conviction that it was the job of the press to, as Arianna Huffington put it in 2015, “never [fail] to remind our audience who Trump is and what his campaign really represents” — but this was about more than Trump. He was only the catalyst for a long-overdue transformation of journalistic norms. Telling the public what is true, objectively, became somewhat less important than telling them what is right, morally. And what has since become clear is that this concept of rightness is not just morality-infused but highly partisan — which brings us to last week’s controversial interview between NBC journalist Dasha Burns and Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman.

Fetterman is nearly seven feet tall with prominent tattoos, a shaved head, and a penchant for wearing shorts and hoodies rather than three-piece suits. He has become something of a star for Democrats trying to combat their image as smug coastal elites in couture clothing who’ve fallen out of touch with the working class (even though, despite his grungy aesthetic, Fetterman actually holds a PhD). He was also, until recently, well-positioned to win in the upcoming midterm elections against his Republican opponent, Dr Mehmet Oz, a Trump-endorsed candidate who was previously best known for hawking pseudoscientific cures on Oprah.

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Unfortunately, Fetterman suffered a relatively serious stroke in May — and while he was back on the campaign trail two months later, he and his team remained somewhat tight-lipped about his health. Videos surfaced of Fetterman seemingly stumbling over his words during public speaking engagements, giving ammunition to Right-wing claims that he was no longer up to the challenges of holding office. Fetterman’s campaign said the videos were misleading; the truth, as usual, appears to be somewhere in the middle.

The NBC interview was his first on-camera since the stroke. Introducing it, Burns told NBC anchor Lester Holt that Fetterman continues to have auditory processing difficulties for which he uses technological assistance, which Fetterman himself explains in the interview: “I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear, so I use captioning, so I’m able to see what you’re saying.”

The trouble began when Burns told Holt that without the captioning, Fetterman had struggled to communicate: “In small talk before my interview, it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying,” she said. She clarified these remarks the next day on the Today show, noting that auditory processing issues are not the same as cognitive damage; Fetterman’s problems are specifically listening-related (the signal gets garbled somewhere between ear and brain), can be mitigated, and may also improve over time.

By the standards of 2016 — or indeed, of journalism in general — it was completely appropriate of Burns not to shy away from discussing this issue. Reporters have a solemn duty to tell the honest truth about a candidate’s limitations, whether or not they find that candidate repulsive.

In this case, the NBC appearance was arguably to the candidate’s benefit. The interview, along with the background provided by Burns, makes the extent of his current limitations clear in a way that voters might find reassuring. In contrast to the viral videos, which seemed like serious cause for concern, he came across here as being in relatively good shape.

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But rather than being lauded for her brave and honest reporting, Dasha Burns became the resistance media’s sworn enemy of the week. Podcaster Kara Swisher tweeted a scathing criticism of Burns to her million-plus followers, writing: “Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.” The women of The View also jumped on the “Dasha Burns is bad at small talk” train, with Sunny Hostin also claiming that she “broke journalistic ethics”. Buzzfeed condemned Burns for ableism and included quotes from a disability activist who said the interview would “worsen attitudes and violence towards disabled people in a time when virtual accommodations are being removed left and right after they were implemented overnight in 2020”. And Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, said she couldn’t believe Burns had been allowed to describe the candidate’s communication difficulties without “consequences”; she demanded them a few days later: “I would love to see an apology towards the disability community from her and from her network for the damage they have caused,” she said.

The word “damage” is interesting, in that it seems like a rare, open acknowledgement of the deference politicians on the Left have come to expect from the press. (The Burns interview triggered nearly as much outrage as a far more scandalous remark from Oz’s communications adviser Rachel Tripp, who mocked Fetterman’s struggles, saying that if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly”.) Fetterman was, of course, not personally harmed by the observation that he still struggles to interpret speech. His chances of election, on the other hand… well.

But this is what happens when journalists begin to see themselves not as mere reporters, but arbiters of moral truth, with a responsibility not just to inform the public but to guide them to the proper conclusions. And the new norms, and new normal, ushered in during the Trump presidency have lingered long after the conclusion of his time in the White House, to the detriment of basically every election since.

The problem isn’t a press that challenges power, which is of course what the press should always do. The problem is that it challenges inconsistently, and only in one direction. The same folks who spent all of 2016 chortling about how Trump was too fat and crazy and congenitally stupid to be elected president are now, in 2022, calling for sanctions on any journalist who raises salient questions about Fetterman’s fitness for office — and relatedly, studiously ignoring some fairly newsworthy senior moments on the part of President Biden.

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That call for moral clarity, which sounded so elevated in theory, becomes something far baser in practice: a facile narrative about heroes and villains that invariably breaks along party lines. We see this not just in the expectation that Fetterman be protected, but in the treatment of his opponent, who has been roundly mocked as an elite Trumpian carpetbagger who can’t even pronounce the name of the local grocery store. Oh, the irony of Oz being condemned for his “Wegners” stumble by the same people who consider it a cardinal sin to even mention the other candidate’s difficulties with verbal communication.

One need not be a Republican to understand why this stuff makes ordinary people feel like they’ve stepped through the looking glass. Or to observe that the media establishment that now frets over the scourge of “big lie” conspiracies is the same one that spent years salivating over the end (it was going to happen, any day now!) of Trump’s obviously stolen presidency. Or to wonder why Stacey Abrams’s refusal to concede the legitimacy of her election loss in 2018 is courageous and inspirational, while Trump’s represents an unprecedented fascist threat. And yet the expectation is that good liberals will not notice the lopsidedness of this narrative — or if they do, that they will never mention it — because to do so would be to express “a Right-wing talking point”. Everything, even the truth, is now filtered through the lens of tribal politics.

Obviously, this makes for especially high drama when a presidency is on the line; obviously, it is especially bad and shocking when the norm-flouter is also the most powerful man in the nation. But it’s the trickling-down of this phenomenon to state and local elections, a reshaping across the board of both politics and the way the press covers them, that genuinely imperils democracy. Elections, once understood as a race, are being increasingly treated like an endless war — one that goes beyond politics as spectator sport, into a world of divergent realities. A world where the loser might capitulate to a corrupt system but never concede defeat. A world where the polarised press no longer even pretends to care about truth, but instead acts like a sort of hype team for its respective party.

And on that front, the upcoming midterms seem poised to be a watershed moment — one in which we either collectively move on from Trump’s America, or decide to live in it, forever.

At issue is the very nature of populism. The 38-year-old Vance, a Republican who emerged from Appalachian poverty to serve in the Marines and attend Yale Law School, epitomises the grassroots radicalism of the Scots-Irish in America: anti-elitist, culturally conservative, sceptical toward draconian climate policies and hostile toward China. Ryan, after 20 years as the Democratic representative from the former industrial stronghold of Northeast Ohio, touts a more traditional, pro-union, but also firmly anti-globalist politics.

The state’s size, and its location in the politically volatile Midwest, render it a critical battleground. Ohio is home to 11 million people, making it the seventh largest state in the union. It has all the basic components of 21st-century America: challenged, largely minority cities such as Cleveland and Toledo, relatively prosperous Cincinnati, an emerging boom town in Columbus (the university town that also serves as state capital), and a vast array of rural towns and villages.

Ohio may no longer be the decisive “bellwether” of America — it has been trending Republican for over a decade — but it is still a competitive state. Veteran political scientist Herb Asher notes that despite its GOP leanings, Ohio remains open for Democratic challengers in a way that is hard to imagine in deep-red states such as Texas. In Ohio, successful Democrats are not gentry types like California Governor Gavin Newsom, but hard-bitten, pro-working class New Dealers like Senator Sherrod Brown. Ryan is cut from much the same cloth. At a time of heated polarisation, he has cast himself as a folksy, open-minded family man who puts country over party.

To his credit, Ryan has been willing, at least on the campaign trail, to declare his independence from Democratic orthodoxy. He has supported fracking and opposed Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness scheme. He has praised Trump’s protectionism and opposition to China. He does not much appeal to the tech-and-finance elites who now dominate the Democratic Party — one reason, suggests Midwest scholar John Russo, that he has been slow to attract big donor money.

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Vance, by contrast, is not a great candidate. On stage, the hillbilly turned intellectual and venture capitalist is rigid and off-putting — you would rather sink a couple of bourbons with Ryan. Even Vance’s populism seems less people-friendly than Ryan’s. Vance’s biggest blessing, and greatest curse, is Donald Trump, who carried Ohio twice, and whose endorsement saved Vance in a hard-fought Republican primary. Like many conservative intellectuals, Vance opposed Trump at first but then quickly cosied up to him after he won. Ryan has not hesitated to make hay of this about-face, saying that Ohio needs “an ass-kicker not an ass-kisser”.

The outcome of the race will depend on two swing demographics: working-class whites and suburbanites. According to Russo, the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, combined with the increasingly rancid stench of Trumpism, could alienate affluent suburban voters, particularly in burgeoning cities such as Columbus. “The middle-class suburban moderate voter is the key for Ryan,” Russo notes.

If the American economy were not experiencing massive inflation under a Democratic president, Ryan would most probably win. But, like other Democrats, he is haunted by the state of the economy under Joe Biden. Crime, on the rise in Ohio cities, is another vulnerability. Vance has also tried to score points by associating Ryan with Biden’s border policies, which the Congressman has criticised but not opposed. But perhaps the most effective Republican talking point is that Ryan has raised campaign funds from some of the biggest distributors of opioids — this in a state that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic. Yet here, too, Vance has his own skeletons in the form of a failed non-profit he set up to combat addiction.

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Ultimately the decisive issue may turn out to be energy. Much of Ohio’s recent resurgence has relied on massive growth in the state’s natural gas sector, which has boomed as the vast Appalachian basin has increased production fivefold since 2010. This has proved not just a spur for direct employment, but has also attracted investment into the state. In 2020, Ohio gained more than four times the total investment than California. Perhaps the biggest boon has been Intel’s proposal to invest $20 billion in a new chip plant in the Columbus suburbs. And just this week, Honda and LG Energy Solutions announced a $4 billion car battery plant in another adjacent county.

Much of the credit for this growth must go to Republican Governor Mike DeWine, whom Democrat Asher describes as “a non-Trumpster”. He is on his way to a landslide re-election; this form of Republicanism — conservative but not crazy — has also characterised current Senator Rob Portman, a pragmatic Republican who in 2016 won 300,000 voters more than Trump could muster in the state. But DeWine also does not have Donald Trump on his back, and is not running against anyone as effective as Ryan.

Ryan’s key problem lies with the increasingly progressive, climate-obsessed Democratic Party. Even as he describes fracking as a “great opportunity” to blue-collar audiences, Ryan also supported Biden’s drilling moratorium and opposed legislation to deregulate the permitting process for oil and gas pipelines. He even embraced the anti-fossil fuel jihad of the Green New Deal.

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If he loses, Ryan can thank the influence of these coastal, establishment initiatives. “Tim must deal with national Democrats who are a drag on his campaign,” Asher notes. “They are seen as anti-exploration and anti-pipeline. These positions are less popular here than in California.” Ryan’s riposte, labelling Vance a “San Francisco phoney” seems a bit desperate when hurled at someone who, after all, grew up in one of Ohio’s most hardscrabble communities, served in the Marines, and then chose to return to his home state. Ryan has to hope there’s not an early onset of the cold winter that will see much higher heating prices, further highlighting the energy issue.

Many working-class Democrats, notes long-time consultant Ruy Texeira, rightfully see the current green policies essentially as an abandonment of their interests and communities. But just as Vance can’t ditch Trump (who has been losing support in the state), Ryan is stuck with Pelosi, Schumer and Senator Bernie Sanders. Ryan’s earthy Left-populism may be appealing, but Biden’s standing in the state is about the same as in deep-red Texas. The winner in Ohio will be the candidate who can overcome the burden of their political affiliation — an indictment ultimately of both national parties, and their contemporary detachment from flyover America.

Well, that was then. Today — after the Dobbs decision in late June, a better-than-expected inflation report in July, recent Democratic victories in Congress, and a Republican primary season that has seen Trump-backed candidates edging out their more conventional rivals — the terrain is looking a lot more favourable for the Democrats. While the GOP is still expected to take the House in November, the Senate has become a gigantic question mark. As RealClearPolitics election analyst Sean Trende put it in June, what we are looking at now is “a classic battle between an irresistible force and an immovable object”. The irresistible force is Biden’s unpopularity; the immovable object is the fact that GOP primary voters have reliably opted for weak, unproven, and at times cartoonishly bad Senate candidates to run against Democrats. Faced with one of the most favourable electoral environments in decades, Republicans are finding a way to blow it.

Take Georgia, which, on paper, should be as reliably Republican as they come. Although immigration to the metro Atlanta area is steadily shifting the partisan balance in the state, Georgia went for Donald Trump by 5 points in 2016, and, until 2020, it had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2000. In the last election, however, college-educated suburban whites moved heavily into the Democratic column, granting a narrow victory to Biden and to two Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock. Still, most observers at the time attributed the blue wave to Trump’s personal unpopularity and predicted that Warnock would be one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the Senate in 2022.

Georgia Republicans, however, selected as their challenger to Warnock the Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker. Walker is not a politician — he is a former college football star at the University of Georgia who played professionally for the New Jersey Generals, a Trump-owned team in a failed competitor league to the NFL. There was, to be fair, a certain logic behind the choice. College football is what white Southerners have today instead of a religious or regional identity. I come from a multigenerational Georgia family: I, my mother, my father, my brother, my grandfather, and the majority of my aunts, uncles, and cousins have all received degrees from the University of Georgia. Walker was a god in our household, and in many households across the state, for his leading role in winning the 1980 college football national championship, much in the way that Diego Maradona is still revered in Argentina for the 1986 World Cup. I can’t count on both hands the number of dogs named “Herschel” I have met in my life.

And yet, with all due respect to Walker, who has received countless blows to the head over his years as a football player and mixed-martial artist, he is likely among the dumbest men ever to run for Senate. Even to those jaded from watching Biden press conferences, his interviews are remarkable for their incoherence. When asked in March about gun violence, he answered: “Well, Cain killed Abel, you know, and that’s a problem that we have… You talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media?” He has cautioned against green energy investments on the theory that “when China gets our good air, their bad air gotta move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we’ve got to clean that back up.” Amazingly, these quotes sound even worse when you listen to them.

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But even if Walker did not sound like President Camacho minus the showmanship, he would still be plagued by a string of scandals. He has admitted to struggling with dissociative identity disorder and of having up to 12 different personalities, or “alters”, including one that prompted him to play Russian roulette with a loaded pistol and another that nearly led him to murder a man for failing to deliver a car on time. His ex-wife has accused him of threatening her with knives and of holding a gun to her head, meaning that whoever wins the Georgia Senate seat will have faced domestic violence allegations from their former spouse. Indeed, it’s a testament to the strength of Republican feeling in Georgia that Walker is running only two points behind Warnock. It’s also telling that he’s polling a full five points behind Brian Kemp, the GOP candidate for Georgia governor.

Walker is the most colourful Republican seeking election to the Senate, but he’s not the only one with problems. Pennsylvania, for instance, should have been a decent opportunity for the GOP. The Democratic nominee, John Fetterman, is another one of those American politicians who can barely talk — he suffered a stroke in May and has rarely appeared in public since. For that and other reasons, he would appear to be a soft target. A radical from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, Fetterman attempts to project blue-collar authenticity (largely by wearing hoodies) but is in reality something more like a middle-class slummer. He received an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard, and he subsisted into his 40s on the largesse of his parents, from whom he purchased an “industrial-style loft” for $1. He’s also got what, if he were a Republican, the media might call a “racially tinged” past. In 2013, Fetterman used a shotgun to detain an unarmed black jogger whom he (wrongly) suspected of criminal activity in his neighbourhood — behaviour that in other cases has been charged as the federal crime of kidnapping.

Fetterman’s Republican opponent, however, is Mehmet Oz, another Trump-backed political novice best known as the celebrity doctor from The Oprah Winfrey Show. While Oz, like all Republicans, has to deal with a hostile media, his big problem is that he’s been unable to shake the impression that he’s a wealthy carpetbagger with little organic connection to Pennsylvania. In a much-mocked video highlighted by the Fetterman campaign, Oz, who lived in New Jersey until recently, mispronounces the name of a Pennsylvania grocery chain before complaining that skyrocketing food prices are driving up the price of his wife’s “crudités”. And a recent attempt to attack Fetterman for sponging off of his parents ended up spiralling into a discussion about whether Oz owned ten homes or only two. (He clarified: two homes, ten properties.) With barely 12 weeks to go until the election, Fetterman has opened up a towering 11.5-point lead over his rival.

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But the Senate map looks bad for the GOP across the board. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has opened up a double-digit lead on the Trump-and-Peter Thiel-backed Blake Masters, who has been hammered for past comments calling abortion “demonic”. That might’ve been Republican boilerplate a year ago — meaningless red meat for Evangelicals and Catholics — but in a post-Roe world, voters are jumpy about what GOP politicians might do to abortion access once in power. And the other Trump-and-Thiel candidate, Hillbilly Elegy author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, is struggling in Ohio. The state went decisively for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, which should be great news for Vance. But polling in that race, while sparse, has tended to show Vance narrowly behind in a close race, and his campaign has struggled to raise money. A Yale-educated populist whose real constituency is among D.C. intellectuals, Vance has had trouble connecting with Ohio voters. He still has a decent shot to pull it out, but Ohio shouldn’t even be close.

A friend who’s reported on American politics for decades once told me that parties take a few electoral cycles to get the message the electorate is trying to send them. Democrats weren’t convinced to abandon McGovern-style, tax-and-spend liberalism until after getting thumped in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Republicans held onto the Bush-era synthesis of religious family values and neoconservative foreign policy through the defeats of 2008 and 2012, abandoning it only after their base decisively rejected it in the 2016 primary.

A few months ago, it looked as if the Democrats might be the ones about to receive the message that their current flavour of elite-driven progressivism was out of step with the country. That outcome is still possible: Biden is only marginally less unpopular than he was earlier in the summer, and reports of his revival carry more than a whiff of wishful thinking. And the Senate map favours the GOP, even if the candidates are weak. Today, however, it’s starting to look as if the American electorate could be gearing up to deliver a very different sort of message. Trump was defeated in 2020. It seems increasingly likely that his hand-picked candidates could cost Republicans a Senate majority in 2022. And with each new report coming out of Mar-a-Lago, he inches closer to declaring his candidacy for 2024.

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t take yet another Trump defeat to convince the GOP to move past the man. But we’re not living in that world, so something tells me that it will.

Suburbia’s significance in American politics was made obvious by last year’s midterms. The blue wave that saw Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives looked more like a tsunami in the suburbs. Republicans went into 2018 holding 69 suburban districts in the House — they ended the year with just 32.

The suburbs matter because, in contemporary American politics, density matters. Travel from a city centre to the country and as the landscape gets sparser, the politics get steadily redder, no matter what part of America you find yourself in. Will Wilkinson, of the Washington think tank the Niskanen Centre, argues persuasively that density is the factor to consider if you want to understand America’s divided politics: “There are really no red states or blue states. There’s compact blue urban density and sprawling red sparseness.”

And according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, population density becomes a stronger predictor of voting behaviour with every election that goes by.

That makes America’s suburbs the country’s decisive ideological battleground, the in-between zones between blue cities and red countryside that will decide the outcome. And if the suburbs matter, then they should be properly understood.

Curtain twitchers, desperate housewives, status anxiety and cul-de-sacs — this is what we think of when we shut our eyes and imagine the suburbs. This picture of stultifying conformity might have started with a grain of truth but has become a gross oversimplification.

A new book — Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs — argues that the stereotype of American suburbia misses an important part of the story. The post-War history of the suburbs tells of a road and housebuilding boom, cheap government-backed mortgages, and white flight from crowded and dangerous cities. All of that happened, but, as Hurley persuasively argues, there is more to the story of life on the fringes of American cities.

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Can America escape its dark past?

By Oliver Wiseman

While the suburbs are where millions have chosen to live out the conventional definition of the good life, they have also been the site of a surprising amount of social experimentation — a laboratory for religious sects, political cliques, urban planners and architects who have sought to radically redefine the American dream.

Consider, for example, the neighbourhood of Economy, outside Pittsburgh. Founded in 1824 by a German religious group called the Harmonists, it was intended to be “a city in which God would dwell among men, a city in which perfection in all things was to be attained”. Led by Johann Georg Rapp, the Harmonists were committed to an esoteric strand of Christianity that mixed Lutheranism with weirder ingredients, like the belief that Jesus was a “dual being, male and female at once” and a commitment to celibacy — not a recipe for long-term demographic success.

In the first half of the 20th century, Stelton, New Jersey, was the unlikely site of an Anarchist commune. The town was “bohemian, unorthodox” – and suburban. According to Hurley, “Steltonites didn’t hide their radicalism, raising the red flag on the water tower” after the November Revolution in Germany at the end of the First World War.

By night, the community’s far-Left factions would row furiously in an exhausting sounding participatory democracy. By day, children were taught in an anarchist school and the men and women of Stelton would head into New York for work, just like their bourgeois neighbours. “Upon a train your anarchist is inconspicuously dressed, unless it be that he is rather below the sartorial average of the suburban traveller,” reported the New York Tribune in 1919.

Concord Park, in Trevose, near Philadelphia, looked exactly like other 1950s suburban housing developments. But behind the orthodoxy of its manicured lawns and identikit “little box” houses was a radical mission: to build one of America’s first integrated housing developments.

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By definition, Hurley’s case studies are exceptions — but they don’t prove any sort of rule. Thankfully most Americans don’t want to join a celibate sect or an Anarchist commune. And yet they add up to a warning not to treat suburbia as a homogenous lump; or to dismiss it as a collection of uninteresting places in between. “Heading for the urban fringes to live by nonconformist values is a long American tradition, and one we can learn a great deal from today,” says Hurley.

Those behind the often eccentric attempts to build utopia on the outskirts understood something many miss: that the suburbs are where the American dream takes shape. Anyone who wants a say in the country’s definition of the good life should take the suburbs seriously. That is true of policymakers, politicians, urban planners and architects.

Hurley accuses many of the latter two groups of turning their nose up at the suburbs: “The design elite has alternately patronised or inveighed against suburbia for years, ever since the International Congress of Modern Architecture called the suburb ‘a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city’ in 1933.”

Belgian architect Leon Krier’s dismissiveness is unimprovably snobbish: “The suburb hates itself: it knows that it is neither countryside nor city and wants to conquer the world because it cannot be at peace with itself… The suburb strangles the city by surrounding it and kills the city, tearing out its heart. A suburb can only survive, it cannot live.”

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“What if we embraced that inbetweenness instead of condemning it,” asks Hurley, who wants to “celebrate the possibilities of standing on that threshold.”

After all, the suburbs are where most Americans have decided to call home, with around 60% of the country living in . That is a broad category, as Hurley puts it, including “semi-rural areas where strip malls nibble at farmland and those where tall towers loom over the city line. It encompasses McMansions and mobile homes, airports and light-industrial estates, landfills and parkland.”

As major cities continue to grow more economically powerful – and unaffordable – their commuter belts will only get more important. Policymakers should think again about restrictive zoning regulations that get in the way of building the suburbs Americans deserve.

And, rather than disparage the type of community that most Americans call home, the country’s planners and architects should delve into the suburbs’s surprisingly rich past as inspiration for a better future. After all, as Hurley puts it, suburbia is what we make it.