There’s been a lot of coverage of the effort to recall Gavin Newsom, but not much analysis of other recall drives in the state, and why they are so numerous. I tried to remedy that at New York:

Like a slow-motion riot, the effort to force California governor Gavin Newsom into a special recall election has dominated political headlines in the Golden State for months. Facilitated by a conservative judge’s decision to give petition-gatherers a 120-day extension in the time allowed to reach the required 1,495,709 signatures needed to trigger a recall, the recall drive succeeded, though the date of the special election (probably in November) will be determined after a few more legal requirements in the process have been satisfied.

But as the Los Angeles Times reports, Newsom is hardly the only target of 2021 recall drives in California:

“During the first five months of 2021, active recall efforts — those in which an official step has been taken — have targeted at least 68 local officials in California, according to a Times analysis. The total has already surpassed the number of local recall attempts seen during four of the last five years in California.”

Most of the targets are Democrats, and COVID-19 restrictions are the most important motivator — however, this recall fever has struck both big cities and rural counties, and a wide range of discontents are at play. Of course, these factors are not unique to California. Here’s why recalls have become so popular in this particular state.

Recalling elected officials in California is relatively easy

Nineteen states provide for the recall of state elected officials, alongside 30 states that allow local jurisdictions to provide for their own recall elections. Rules vary widely, but California is distinctive in that it (a) does not require any particular rationale for demanding a recall, and (b) has among the lowest thresholds for triggering recall elections. The Newsom recall, for example, needed validated signatures from 12 percent of the number of voters in the last election for the office in question. In Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin, the threshold is 25 percent of voters in the last election. Some states link the threshold to the percentage of registered voters (e.g., Montana, which requires signatures of 10 percent of the number of registered voters in the last election for the office).

The thresholds for recall of local elected officials vary in California according to the size of the jurisdiction, but they are quite low (10 percent of registered voters) for the larger cities and counties, and some are provided for in local government charters that are not subject to state law.

Legal requirements aside, there is a political culture in California encouraging recall drives that assumed a whole new prominence after the successful effort to remove Governor Gray Davis from office in 2003. At any given movement, there are recall petitions circulating aimed at a large number of elected officials, even though most never succeed.

The backlash against COVID-19 restrictions in California was especially intense and not limited to conservatives

For various reasons, including often-clumsy state management of public-health policies and confusing local rules, the backlash against pandemic-related restrictions in California seems to have been unusually intense. One prominent recall target, Ventura County supervisor Linda Parks, has galvanized a lot of local frustrations, notes the Times:

“’People were sitting at home and feeling impotent,’ said longtime Thousand Oaks resident and retired high school receptionist Karen Meyer. Meyer now often spends weekends at a small folding table in the parking lot of a local Target or DMV, asking passersby if they’d like to sign petitions to recall Parks in Ventura County.

“The recall organizer faulted her county supervisor for hewing too closely to Newsom’s pandemic directives and not doing enough to save local businesses.”

Recall fever in California may have also been specifically fueled by Newsom’s terrible mistake in attending a maskless indoor party for a prominent donor and lobbyist at one of the state’s most exclusive restaurants (the Napa Valley’s French Laundry). This contributed to perceptions that elected officials administering pandemic restrictions were hypocrites who were cavalier about damaging the livelihoods of barbers and hairdressers and small businesses, and the freedom to worship of churchgoers — complaints not limited to members of any party or ideology. And the particularly strong and ideologically diffuse anti-vaxxer movement in California likely strengthened the backlash against the entire anti-COVID-19 effort.

But as in other parts of the country, anger at school boards for lengthy shutdowns of in-person instruction transcended party and ideological groupings, with the California teachers unions getting blamed for particularly inflexible state and local rules. The likely successful effort to force recall elections for three members of the local school board in ultraliberal San Francisco cannot be explained as a Republican or conservative gambit; even progressive voters and elected officials objected to the board’s focus on renaming schools to get rid of marginally objective names rather than reopening them when possible.

California’s GOP sees recalls as its best shot at fighting an overwhelming Democratic advantage

While all the recalls cannot be dismissed (as many Democrats have tried to do) as GOP or right-wing stunts, there is no question that California’s very weak Republican Party has relied on this type of ballot “protest” more than its counterparts in states that aren’t as dark blue. Republicans haven’t won a statewide election in California since 2006. Democrats hold and show no signs of losing supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature. And traditional Republican strongholds like Orange County are now intense battlegrounds (won by Democrats in 2018, and partially won back by Republicans in 2020, in very close elections).

How ballot-based issue protests and recalls work together for California Republicans was illustrated by the successful 2018 recall aimed at Orange County Democratic state senator Josh Newman for voting in favor of the same gas tax increase that Republicans were trying to repeal via a statewide ballot initiative. The recall succeeded while the initiative failed, and Newman won the seat back in 2020. But linking the pol to the grievance was probably a good idea.

Republicans in California are currently dramatizing their law-and-order messages by attacking allegedly weak-on-crime elected officials. In California, two particular objects of conservative ire, San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon, are facing recall efforts. How else can Republicans spend their time in such overwhelmingly pro-Democratic jurisdictions?

In the suburban San Diego city of Carlsbad, an even more basic partisan and ideological fight is under way as right-wing talk-radio personality Carl DeMaio (who is also active in the Newsom recall effort) is leading a recall drive aimed at city councilwoman Cori Schumacher, a former professional surfing celebrity being targeted for a variety of ideological sins. She is also the object of ire for a particularly unhappy and influential group of restaurant owners. This particular campaign shows how COVID-19 grievances are merging with other, and sometimes unrelated, complaints to fuel a pretty clearly conservative purge effort aimed at a Democratic elected official in contested turf.

But will any of these recall efforts succeed?

Probably some will, though the big one, against Newsom, is likely to fail so long as public-health and economic conditions continue to improve and Democrats stay united in supporting him. Some Republican recall backers may yet regret putting so many eggs in the recall basket, and some voters angry about lockdowns and school closings may get over it. But in California, a recall drive is never more than a shout away.

Ran across an article from ten years ago about the ubiquitous Sarah Palin, and it got me thinking, as I discussed at New York:

While mulling one of the great political media questions of 2021 — Will Donald Trump soon fade from sight, and what will we write about if he does? — I ran across this Joshua Green quote in The Atlantic published exactly ten years ago: “It’s hard to escape Sarah Palin. On Facebook and Twitter, cable news and reality television, she is a constant object of dispute, the target or instigator of some distressingly large proportion of the political discourse.” I remember now that it was at about this period that liberal journalists often taunted one another for writing lazily about Palin on slow news days, just as they did with Trump more recently.

After a lot of speculation that she would run for president in 2012 produced no news-sustaining sensation for St. Joan of the Tundra, she began to fade into the background. When she produced a late pre-Iowa endorsement for Trump, it didn’t keep Ted Cruz from winning the state. And for obscure reasons (possibly her poorly timed criticism of a tax-subsidy deal to bribe the Carrier air-conditioning company to keep a plant open in Indiana), she was one of the few early Trump validators who never got rewarded with anything. Soon she began to fade from sight with episodic reappearances that were almost shocking in reminding us what a big deal she had been (including, last year, her appearance as a dancing Mama Grizzly on The Masked Singer and a weird Instagram post hinting at a 2022 challenge to Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska).

Palin’s quick descent into oblivion gave pundit Peter Hamby hope earlier this year that Trump may do a similarly quick fade:

“It’s already getting dark out there for Mister Trump. Without the presidency, he already commands much less of our mindshare than he did only a few weeks ago. Like Palin, Trump himself will recede over time, even if the damage he has inflicted on our political culture remains. The media has started to search for the next ambassador from Crazytown, the next ratings grab.”

While Hamby may ultimately be correct, it won’t happen right away, it seems. Arguably, the grip of the 45th president and his lies on the Republican Party is even stronger than it was when he finally left office, even though he has been widely “de-platformed” and is only now beginning to resume his signature rallies. And even those who think his staying power is limited generally no longer think the GOP will resume some sort of innocent pre-Trump trajectory; at best, we will be dealing with Trumpism, if not Trump, for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps the best way to understand the Palin-Trump comparison is not as back-to-back comets doomed to flame out quickly but as one shocking figure in touch with some powerful grassroots dynamics being superseded by another with better skills and perfect timing. As I said when Palin endorsed Trump in 2016, “[I]n many respects, the Trump campaign is the presidential campaign Palin herself might have aspired to run if she had the money and energy to do so.” The people who cheered the amateur Palin didn’t need her much anymore when the professional huckster showed up in national politics.

As part of a new typology of America’s warring tribes (and warring narratives of the country’s past, present, and future), the journalist George Packer has a very clear understanding of the relationship between these two champions of “Real America.” Years before Trump perfected his pitch to an aroused and fearful base rooted in non-college-educated white residents of small towns and exurbs, Palin was on the 2008 campaign trail saying this: “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit … and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us.”

Palin channeled the authentic fury of the white working class toward allegedly freeloading minorities and the supercilious overeducated elites aligned with them, united in the person of Barack Obama, “a Black professional who had gone to the best schools, who knew so much more than Palin, and who was too cerebral to get in the mud pit with her.”

But Palin was flawed and, above all, premature. “John the Baptist to the coming of Trump,” says Packer, alluding to the New Testament prophet who prepared the way for Jesus. So she was soon to fade, not because the impetus to her fame had subsided but because she herself was no longer necessary or sufficient to the savage cause she represented:

“Palin crumbled during the [2008] campaign. Her miserable performance under basic questioning disqualified her in the eyes of Americans with open minds on the subject. Her Republican handlers tried to hide her and later disowned her. In 2008, the country was still too rational for a candidate like Palin. After losing, she quit being governor of Alaska, which no longer interested her, and started a new career as a reality-TV personality, tea-party star, and autographed-merchandise saleswoman. Palin kept looking for a second act that never arrived. She suffered the pathetic fate of being a celebrity ahead of her time.”

But the resentments that fed the careers of both Palin and Trump haven’t subsided at all. For a good while now, America hasn’t worked for “Real Americans,” and they blame educated elites and their minority clientele for ruining it. Restoring this often-imaginary white Eden won’t happen overnight, but in the meantime, the thrill of terrifying the class-race enemy with the hobgoblin of a crude, vengeful leader who “tells it like it is” can be a satisfying blood sport. Palin was good at it, Trump is better, and Lord help us if the true master of this brand of politics is still waiting in the wings.

Much as we all want to see congressional action on voting rights while Democrats control the White House and Congress, it’s time to consider a Plan B, as I noted at New York:

In all the projections of what Congress might accomplish this year, there’s no subject on which Republican obstruction is more powerful and fateful than voting rights. And amid widespread angst over state-level voter-suppression measures enacted at the behest of both threatened Establishment Republicans and delusional MAGA folk alleging massive if never-documented fraud, partisan gridlock may actually be hardening.

The two pieces of voting-rights legislation currently moving through Congress are certainly long overdue. The For the People Act (HR1 and S1), which has passed the House twice, would establish national standards for voting, elections, and representation across a wide range of issues, from rules for absentee ballots to gerrymandering to the financing of congressional campaigns. On a parallel track, the narrower John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act aims to reverse the Supreme Court’s demolition of the pre-clearance provisions that prior to 2013 would have subjected voting and election-laws changes (like the ones Republican-controlled states are racing to enact) to advanced review and possible cancellation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The For the People Act is pending in the Senate, where it has 49 co-sponsors (every Democrat other than Joe Manchin). The John Lewis bill is still under development in both Houses, as Democratic lawmakers work on a formula for pre-clearance to replace the one the Supreme Court struck down as “outdated.” But all 50 Senate Democrats, plus Republican Lisa Murkowski, favor it (perhaps with modifications; Manchin wants to require pre-clearance in all 50 states).

Unfortunately, it will take every Democrat plus ten Republicans to get either bill through the Senate, and that seems 100 percent impossible for S.1 and maybe 95 percent impossible for the John Lewis Act. Many Republicans plausibly argue that S. 1 goes far beyond voting rights into areas like campaign-finance law that are wildly controversial. There’s no legitimate reason for GOP hostility to the most basic version of the John Lewis Act, which restores the VRA to what it was when it was unanimously extended by the Senate (with support from President George W. Bush) in 2006. But at a time when Donald Trump and his allies are lashing Republican legislators everywhere to restrict voting opportunities, few Senate Republicans are going to risk a primary challenge for valuing voting rights over “election integrity.”

Ron Brownstein has forcefully argued that defeating attacks on the franchise is a life-or-death matter for Democrats, meriting the extraordinary remedy of taking the filibuster off the table for voting-rights legislation (if not for everything):

“With the congressional calendar dominated by President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending proposals … activists are expressing concern that neither the administration nor Democratic congressional leaders are raising sufficient alarms about the threats to voting rights proliferating in red states, or developing a strategy to pass the national election standards that these groups consider the party’s best chance to counter those threats.”

In a closely divided country where Democrats are clinging to power in Washington, new voter-suppression laws (in tandem with present and future GOP control of state-election systems) could help Republicans gain a decisive advantage in the next couple of election cycles. But Joe Manchin’s outspoken opposition to any sort of filibuster reform — explicitly including a carve-out for voting rights — makes the urgency of this fight a little beside the point. No threats or blandishments aimed at Manchin can likely overcome the simple fact that he represents a state that gave Donald Trump 69 percent of its vote in both 2016 and 2020. And opposing filibuster reform is an easy and mandatory vote for Republican senators, even those who are open to heresy on other subjects.

So what are voting-rights advocates, including the president and most other Democrats in Congress, to do? Sure, they can scale back S. 1 to make it less obviously objectionable to Republicans, but at the risk of alienating Democratic constituencies, and without necessarily winning a single GOP Senate vote. Or they could (and probably should) launch a very noisy effort to shame Republicans for blocking the John Lewis bill — but even alleged GOP voting-rights supporters can always find some whataboutism excuse (ballot harvesting! Unsupervised drop-boxes!) for demanding a different kind of legislation.

In The Atlantic, David Frum looks down the likely road to defeat for voting-rights legislation in this Congress and finds a “Plan B” that is unsatisfying but perhaps all that’s left:

“Taking decisive action to fill the 80-odd federal judicial vacancies with pro-voting judges followed by turbocharging enforcement efforts at the Department of Justice may seem only second-best compared with new legislation. But if new legislation cannot be enacted, then second-best will have to do.”

Frum is alluding to the power of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to launch its own litigation against voter-suppression measures under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is still intact. Under the leadership of the distinguished and newly confirmed Civil Rights Division chief Kristen Clarke, such litigation could indeed be “supercharged.” But while the Biden administration can strengthen pro-voting-rights elements of the federal judiciary to give its Justice Department some wins, Clarke and other voting-rights advocates will still being dealing with conservative-leaning courts, led by a Supreme Court that is more conservative than it was when it weakened the VRA eight years ago.

Indeed, the author of that Shelby County v. Holder decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, is now in many respects to the left of the Court’s center of gravity. And the Supreme Court will soon rule on a fresh challenge to Section 2 of the VRA that could make it harder for Clarke or any other litigant to successfully show the discriminatory effect of voting- or election-law changes.

If all else fails, of course, and state-level Republicans continue to violate voting rights, Democrats could use outrage over these developments to energize their own voters and simply overwhelm the barricades erected by legislators. Brownstein thinks that may be Team Biden’s Plan B already:

“Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, ‘I think our feeling is, show us what the rules are and we will figure out a way to educate our voters and make sure they understand how they can vote and we will get them out to vote,’ the official told me. Through on-the-ground organizing, ‘there are work-arounds to some of these provisions,’ said a senior Democrat familiar with White House thinking, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.”

It is entirely true that no one knows what the impact of voter-suppression laws will be on the ground, particularly with respect to provisions that make voting much more inconvenient without blocking it altogether. Some analysts are convinced that Republican legislators don’t know what they are doing, or are simply reacting to Trump’s demands for assaults on voting by mail (a voting method that Republicans utilized in the past at least as much as Democrats). But Democrats hoping to out-motivate Republicans in the 2022 elections are betting against the decided evidence of history, in which the White House party almost always loses ground in midterms. And it won’t take much in the way of losses for Republicans to regain control of the House if not the Senate, and shut down prospects for voting-rights legislation for the foreseeable future.

This news I discussed at New York was mostly of interest to those of us who were politically active in the 1990s, though then again, some gimmicks never die.

We all understand that Donald Trump wants to maintain control over the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, which means he has to find some way to keep himself in the spotlight during the 2022 midterm elections.  For assistance with this effort, he is consulting the all-time reigning huckster of such symbolic endeavors, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose 1994 “Contract With America” earned all sorts of undeserved credit for the GOP conquest of the House that year. Politico has the eye-rolling story:

“With an eye toward winning back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump has begun crafting a policy agenda outlining a MAGA doctrine for the party. His template is the 1994 ‘Contract with America,’ a legislative agenda released ahead of the midterm elections in the middle of President Bill Clinton’s first term. And, as a cherry on top, he’s teaming up with its main architect — Gingrich — to do it.”

Apparently, two other veteran hucksters, Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows, are in on the project. But for the moment, words like “agenda,” “policy,” and even “document” should be put in quotes, and anything suggesting that Trump is working on actionable ideas should be rigorously fact-checked. After all, the 45th president knows as much about policy thinking as a three-toed sloth knows about the Critique of Pure Reason. And I suspect he’s reaching out to Gingrich not because of the former speaker’s thin reputation for intellectualism but precisely because Newt won that reputation by skillful packaging and marketing of poll-tested slogans that were policy adjacent.

Yes, the Contract With America included some specifics like Congress applying its laws to its own operations, a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, and congressional term limits. But it excluded plenty of top-tier Republican legislative proposals that weren’t terribly popular, and it batched loosely connected policy bites under catchy headlines like “The Take Back the Streets Act” (random provisions conveying a get-tough-on-crime attitude) and “The Senior Citizens Fairness Act” (really just eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits).

As the involvement in the effort by word-meister Frank Luntz suggests, the meta-message of the contract was the idea of a contract and hence “accountability.” Beyond that, the details were largely disposable. It reflected Gingrich’s own identification with the idea of ideas more than with actual ideas. And the attribution of the 1994 victory to the contract is undercut by (a) the fact that the contract wasn’t unveiled until late in the cycle, (b) the Republican victories in Senate and state elections that had nothing to do with it, and (c) the many other factors contributing to the “Republican Revolution,” including redistricting, Democratic retirements, and a long-overdue reckoning for the party that had controlled the House since 1954.

The alleged genius of the contract (and of Gingrich) was also refuted more than a bit by the travails of the GOP in power. Newt’s great nemesis Bill Clinton was easily reelected two years later, and four years later Republicans became the first non–White House party since 1934 to lose House seats in a midterm election, leading to Gingrich’s forced resignation as speaker (and as a House member).

But at this stage of their careers, neither Gingrich nor Trump is likely thinking long-term. Both men went off the rails into extremism during the past decade: Gingrich in preparation for a failed 2012 presidential bid and Trump more successfully in 2016 and 2020. You do wonder how savage and culture-war-centric the new contract, which will supposedly have America First thematics, could wind up being. Gingrich offered some thoughts:

“’It should be positive,’ Gingrich said. ‘School choice, teaching American history for real, abolishing the 1619 Project, eliminating critical race theory and what the Texas legislature is doing. We should say, ‘Bring it on.’”

“Gingrich said it shouldn’t be expected until closer to the midterm elections because ‘the world keeps changing and evolving.'”

Yeah, and so do polls. But hey, there’s nothing more substantive, is there, than “abolishing the 1619 project”? Unless it’s combating “voter fraud,” which I am sure Trump will insist upon.

Expect the worst when these two frauds get together.

The more we look at Joe Biden’s job approval ratings, the more it looks like the continuation of a pattern, as I explained at New York:

One of the regular themes of poll watchers during the Trump presidency was the remarkable stability of this very unstable man’s job-approval ratings compared with every available precedent. Two days after he left office, an NBC News analysis put it all into perspective:

“Former President Donald Trump’s time in office is over. He’s been impeached twice and banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. But if his presidency was a roller coaster, his approval ratings were not.

“Trump left office with steadier approval ratings than his most recent predecessors, an analysis of NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling data from January 1993 to this January shows. Trump’s approval rating remained within the same 9-point range for his entire presidency: 47 percent at its highest in October 2018, and 38 percent at its lowest in October 2017.”

Barack Obama, by contrast, had a 21-point “band” of approval ratings, which in turn was vastly less volatile than George W. Bush’s 62-point variation between highest and lowest ratings. Trump’s numbers were so uncannily consistent that every time we all wondered if they were finally about to change for better or for worse, instead they lapsed back into moderately underwater territory. It adds to the weirdness that this politician — who was elected president in 2016 despite a terrible favorability ratio (significantly exceeding in disfavor his unpopular opponent) — came very close to winning a second term despite never posting a net-positive job-approval rating in the polling averages.

Now we are five months into the Biden presidency, and guess what? The new president’s job approval ratings, while higher than Trump’s, are also very — in fact, historically — stable, as Harry Enten observes:

“A lot has happened since Biden took office: We’ve seen a failed impeachment trial, a major economic and coronavirus relief package signed into law and the continuation of a mass vaccination campaign leading to more than 60% of adults with at least one a Covid-19 shot nationwide.

“All of this has happened — and the national political environment has remained stagnant. It’s almost as if no event seems to really change public opinion.”

Biden’s approval rating today is pretty much the same as it was a month ago (54%). It’s the exact same as it was at the beginning of his presidency (53%). Any movements can be ascribed to statistical noise.

Some of us (myself included) have wondered if the contrast between the fairly dramatic real-world developments that occurred early in Biden’s presidency and his virtually unchanging approval ratings reflected his deliberately low-profile approach to governing. But it was pretty hard to ignore the fact that partisan polarization best explained the actual numbers, as I noted last month:

“The most striking thing about Biden’s approval ratings is the degree of partisan polarization. It’s off the charts, according to Gallup data. When I wrote about this a couple of months ago, the partisan gap in Biden job approval was a record 87 percent (98 percent approval among Democrats, 11 percent among Republicans). The March Gallup numbers put the gap at 86 percent (94 percent approval among Democrats, and 8 percent among Republicans). These are more extreme splits than we saw under the exceptionally polarizing Trump, and they make the partisan atmosphere under George W. Bush and Barack Obama look like Edens of consensus.”

At some point, you wind up wondering with Enten if no event seems to really change public opinion. That would suggest that Americans have become so tribal in their partisan preferences that neither the turbulent Trump nor the placid Biden — nor anything either of them is doing or undoing — can shake people out of their allegiances. Indeed, I expressed a similar suspicion back in 2019 that wound up predicting the outcome of the 2020 race more than any of my election forecasting:

“My guess is that the narrow band of favorability and job approval numbers for Trump is just another testament to the partisan polarization that made it possible for him to win in 2016, despite his unpopularity. He cannot fall too far, even when he’s behaving in his signature beastly manner, because Republicans will sustain him …

“There are circumstances under which he can transcend his many handicaps by demonizing his opponent, revving up the MAGA people, and taking advantage of an Electoral College system which does not weigh popular votes equally.”

The events of January 6 finally created a bit of a drop in Trump’s popularity among Republicans, but he seems to have quickly recovered that ground and reestablished himself as the boss of his party at both the rank-and-file and elite levels. What matters most, in the long run, is not whether Republicans remain loyal to Trump personally, but whether the partisanship and extremism he represents remain politically cost-free to those emulating his example. There’s abundant evidence it is.

So the temptation for today’s and tomorrow’s Republicans is to let no demagogic opportunity to “energize the base” go unexploited in order to goose partisan turnout the way Trump clearly did. The natural anti–White House trend in midterm elections, reinforced by the Republican advantage in redistricting, is extremely likely to award the GOP with control of the U.S. House in 2022, and with more than its share of battleground state victories in gubernatorial, secretary of state, and legislative contests, leaving the party in good shape for a 2024 comeback with or without Trump as the vengeful candidate of a militant and happily extremist MAGA base.

There are still some swing voters out there to be captured. But as both the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns illustrated, a strategy of demonizing the opposition can simultaneously energize the base and sway the undecided with a lesser-of-two-evils appeal.

There are obviously reciprocal lessens for Democrats in this tale. Any fears that pursuit of a too-ambitious agenda by Biden and congressional Democrats will hurt the party in 2022 are probably misplaced; Democrats are likely to lose some ground in the midterms with either a timid or an audacious governing strategy, so they might as well get as much done as possible. And, ironically, the fact that Joe Biden the Fighting Liberal has the same exact level of popularity as Joe Biden the determined bipartisan centrist may show that a more progressive successor would do just fine, or perhaps better, if she or he could mobilize the Democratic base more effectively.

It appears more and more likely that America is in a perilous moment at which the zeal of our two warring tribes matters more in determining the nation’s fate than the identity of its leaders or even the consequences of their policies. That’s not the “new normal” of the Biden presidency most observers had in mind, but it explains a lot.