As a former long-time resident of Georgia, I still follow politics there closely, and filed this update on the governor’s race at New York:

In 2020, Georgia became the ultimate battleground state with a very close presidential contest and two Senate races that went into overtime and ultimately decided control of the chamber. The tradition continues this year with another close and crucial Senate race featuring incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.

But for aficionados of high principle and hardball tactics, the race to watch is the rematch of Republican governor Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams. Kemp is a hard-core conservative and veteran vote suppressor who survived a purge attempt by Donald Trump earlier this year, while Abrams is a nationally renowned voting-rights champion who came very close to winning four years ago in the most successful Georgia Democratic gubernatorial campaign of this century. The two pols represent polarized and evenly matched parties in a state that has turned from red to purple thanks to demographic change. Abrams has helped build a powerful coalition of Black voters aligned with white moderates in the rapidly growing Atlanta suburbs, and Kemp, the product of an older Georgia in the iron grip of exurban and rural conservatives, has fought her every step of the way. It’s likely Georgia is in the process of turning blue, but the peculiar forces in play in this midterm election could give the GOP a reprieve. It will probably come down to which party best mobilizes its base in November.

Without question, the Abrams-Kemp contest is a grudge match between candidates with a lot of history together. During and prior to their 2018 race, Kemp exploited his position as secretary of State to purge voter rolls and close polling stations aggressively, while running a savagely ideological campaign as a “politically incorrect conservative” backed by Trump. After his very narrow win, Abrams was so angry at his abuse of office that she refused to officially concede (though she did not contest his right to serve as governor).

The desire to eject Kemp from the governor’s office and a career-long goal of gaining either the governorship or the presidency impelled Abrams to pass up some tantalizing opportunities. She could easily have won a Senate nomination in 2020 to face David Perdue (Jon Ossoff ran instead and won), and no one batted an eye when she was spoken of early in the cycle as a possible presidential or vice-presidential candidate. After deservedly getting significant credit for building the voter-registration and vote-turnout machine that allowed Democrats to make such impressive gains in 2020, she was the uncontested choice for a second gubernatorial nomination.

Going into 2022, Democrats were looking forward to popping popcorn and enjoying a Republican civil war as Trump (infuriated by Kemp’s co-certification of Biden electors and his refusal to buy into MAGA election conspiracies) talked former senator Perdue into a primary challenge to the sitting governor. At first, Perdue looked formidable, but in the end, Kemp absolutely demolished him by nearly a three-to-one margin, carrying all of Georgia’s 159 counties. Indeed, Georgia Republicans under Kemp’s leadership administered Trump’s worst setbacks of the entire primary season, as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (hated even more than Kemp by MAGA folk) and two other statewide Trump targets won their races. The very size of the beatdown minimized any intraparty grudges as Perdue quickly endorsed Kemp, Trump kept his mouth shut, and Republicans united by respectful fear of Abrams closed ranks.

While the usual smears of Abrams as a hustler (a charge levied at all Black pols in the Deep South with no evidence deemed necessary) and an extremist (belied by her very mainstream platform) are a regular feature of the GOP campaign in Georgia, Kemp has drawn on assets beyond thinly veiled appeals to racism and sexism and a surprisingly united party. The state’s booming economy and burgeoning revenues have allowed Kemp and the legislature his party controls to enact voter-pleasing measures like tax cuts and a gasoline-tax suspension. He has also tried to blunt one of Abrams’s signature issues, Medicaid expansion, by obtaining a waiver from the Trump administration (and successfully defending it in court against efforts by the Biden administration to revoke it) in a small expansion of health-care services tied to work requirements. Kemp’s job-approval ratings have generally been above water, though not by much.

Abrams has supplemented her generally moderate 2018 platform by calling for legalized sports betting to help fund public-education improvements, building on the successful legacy of the late Zell Miller’s lottery-for-education initiative back in the 1990s. And she is definitely trying to capitalize on the backlash to the Dobbs decision by emphasizing her commitment to abortion rights and attacking the “heartbeat” law Kemp signed in 2019 and quickly began to enforce, banning abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and giving fetuses certain legal rights.

But while both candidates are pitching swing voters on their specific policy proposals, the contest is essentially a battle of base mobilization in a deeply polarized state. A recent poll of the contest by Quinnipiac made that clear:

“Republicans (98 – 1 percent) back Kemp, while Democrats (97 – 2 percent) back Abrams. Independents are split, with 50 percent backing Abrams and 48 percent backing Kemp.

“Nearly all likely voters (94 percent) who support a candidate in the race for governor say their minds are made up about how they will cast their vote, while 5 percent say they might change their minds before the election.”

That’s a narrow band of persuadable voters in a race Qunnipiac called nearly even (with Kemp leading by two points) among likely voters generally.

Abrams is building on her renowned voter-registration and turnout efforts, along with those deployed (especially by Ossoff) in the 2020 Senate races to break a long Georgia Democratic losing streak in general-election runoffs that place a premium on turning out voters. Kemp’s backers believe they would have won those runoffs had Trump not discouraged Republican base voters by calling the state’s Republican-run election machinery “rigged.” They hope to match or surpass Democrats in getting out the vote in November.

Early in the cycle, it looked as if Kemp would benefit, like all Republicans, from a stiff midterm breeze favoring the GOP. That has, for the moment, all but dissipated, leaving these two very effective pols to slug it out in a relatively even landscape tilted just a bit by Kemp’s powers of incumbency. Unlike Kemp’s ticket mate the GOP Senate nominee Walker, who has been dodging debates with primary opponents and general-election rival Warnock all year (though he has finally agreed to one), Kemp and Abrams agreed early on to two televised debates in October. They certainly know each other’s strong and weak spots extremely well.

Kemp enters the home stretch as a very narrow betting favorite, but don’t count out Abrams, already the most successful Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate of this century, whose candidacy will likely generate the kind of enthusiasm that only people whose rights are endangered can show to their champion.

An old subject has arisen unusually often in this midterm election year, and I addressed it at New York:

The received wisdom from political scientists on candidate debates is that, outside the presidential arena where everything gets attention, they rarely have a significant effect. This is mostly because viewership of anything other than a presidential debate is typically limited to the kinds of political junkies who have already made up their minds. The exception comes when a candidate makes a serious gaffe in a debate (e.g., former Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s inexplicable brain freeze during her opening remarks in a 2010 encounter she nonetheless survived); the news media will cover it, and the opposing campaign will heavily publicize it. This is why front-runners tend to avoid or minimize debates, while candidates who are in danger of losing will relentlessly call for as many as possible to maximize the opportunities for lightning to strike.

But it’s clear that the debates over debates are assuming a bigger role than usual in the 2022 midterms. There are two key reasons: a breakdown in bipartisan understanding about when and where general-election debates occur, and a couple of high-profile contests in which it’s entirely possible that debates could be decisive.

As a CNN rundown of debates on debates shows, there are an unusual number of contests this year in which, for various reasons, candidates cannot agree on the timing, frequency, or format of a debate. Some states have such a strong tradition of revisiting a particular debate venue or host that the event just happens regardless of either candidate’s strategic needs. This is the case in the Florida Senate race, as CNN notes:

“In Florida, a statewide coordinator for the long-running “Before You Vote” debates, Ron Sachs, told the Orlando Sentinel on Tuesday that Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and his opponent, Democrat Rep. Val Demings, had committed to an October 18 debate to be broadcast in the state’s 10 major media markets. It is the only debate both candidates have reportedly agreed to so far, though neither has explicitly acknowledged that publicly.”

In these cases, noncompliant candidates risk the event’s taking place with just one participant. This leads to one of the hoariest traditions of them all: the compliant candidate “debating” an empty chair or a podium. It’s a bad look for the absent candidate and gives the attending candidate an extended free ad, assuming it’s televised. It may even matter in a very close race (as it appears to have done in Georgia’s 2020 Senate runoff between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue).

But there seem to be fewer and fewer of these must-have bipartisan debates these days. The trend accelerated at the presidential level earlier this year when the Republican National Committee flat-out banned participation in events organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates. The group had been jointly founded by the two major parties, but in this MAGA era of Republican politics, it has been deemed “biased.” Henceforth, presidential debates will be negotiated between campaigns that are busily hurling demands and insults at each other (if they happen at all).

This trend appears to be spreading to the sub-presidential level as well. The situation in Nevada’s very close Senate race, as reported by CNN, is typical:

“After Republican Adam Laxalt won the Republican Senate primary in June, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto agreed to three debates.

“Ignoring that trio of debates, Laxalt wrote on Twitter in August that he had instead agreed to two statewide televised debates hosted by local television stations and was continuing ‘to consider other debate invites.’ Laxalt spokeswoman Courtney Holland pointed to the Republican candidate’s previous comments, noting that Cortez Masto has not agreed to the two debates Laxalt proposed and accusing the Democratic incumbent of ‘hiding from her constituents.’

“’It’s clear Laxalt can’t defend his record and wants to avoid being held accountable on the debate stage,’ said Josh Marcus-Blank, a Cortez Masto campaign spokesman.”

There are two crucial Senate races this fall in which proposed debates have assumed an outsize importance thanks to concerns about a candidate’s ability to function in that environment — or, for that matter, in the Senate itself. After almost comically misfiring on a number of fronts, Pennsylvania Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz seems to have settled on drawing attention to the stroke that his opponent, John Fetterman, had earlier this year, using multiple debate challenges as a means of questioning the Democrat’s fitness for office. At first, like most front-runners, Fetterman ignored the Oz campaign’s constant taunting. But amid signs that Oz may have reversed his candidacy’s downward trajectory, Fetterman has now agreed to participate in at least one debate on October 25.

An even more unusual debate over debates developed in Georgia, where Republican nominee Herschel Walker had seemed reluctant to debate, even though, unlike Fetterman, he is at best locked in a tight race. After refusing to commit to three separate debate invitations, Walker said this week that he will meet Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock on October 14. Walker is a novice candidate with multiple issues (including mental-health troubles, shady business dealings, and previously unacknowledged children) that he would just as soon not discuss in an uncontrolled environment. He successfully avoided debates and even interviews during his primary campaign and has made strange, incoherent comments on the campaign trail when not tightly scripted. Warnock, by contrast, is an experienced candidate and a minister who has been preparing and delivering Sunday sermons for most of his adult life. You can see why Walker wouldn’t want to take him on.

It’s possible that debate-shy candidates like Walker and Fetterman always intended to debate but wanted to lower expectations so that even a weak performance would seem like a vindication. Candidates who have the most to lose from a poor debate performance will work diligently to make sure they don’t matter much at all.

Here’s my take from New York on the very special House election in Alaska that concluded with a ranked-choice vote tabulation on August 31:

Alaska voters spurned a comeback bid by former governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and instead sent Democrat Mary Peltola to Washington to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House until January. Peltola will be the first woman and the first Alaska Native to hold the state’s one U.S. House seat, albeit temporarily. She’s the first Democrat in that position since 1973, when Republican Don Young, whose death in March necessitated this special election, first won the seat.

Peltola’s victory was made possible by Nick Begich III voters’ unwillingness to make fellow Republican Palin their second choice under the state’s new ranked-choice system. In the top-four primary on June 11, Palin finished first, Begich was second, independent Al Gross was third, and Peltola — who had a mere 10 percent of the vote — was fourth. But Gross soon dropped out, creating a top-three general election with Peltola drawing a lot of Gross’s supporters.

The general election took place on August 16, but the final results were only announced on August 31. Peltola won 40 percent, Palin 31 percent, and Begich 29 percent — eliminating him from the contest and reallocating his voters’ second preferences. In a special ranked-choice tabulation live-streamed by state election officials, it was revealed that only 50.3 percent of Begich voters backed Palin, while 28.7 percent supported Peltola and another 20.9 percent left the ballot line for a second preference blank. This gave Peltola the victory by a margin of 51.5 percent to Palin’s 48.5 percent.

Some observers will attribute the upset to the ranked-choice voting system itself, which Palin bitterly denounced as “crazy, convoluted, confusing” after her defeat was made clear. But while Gross’s withdrawal definitely ensured Peltola would make the final round, it’s not entirely clear things would have turned out differently with the traditional system had Palin won a Republican primary, then faced Peltola. A July poll from Alaska Survey Research showed Palin with a 37-60 favorable/unfavorable rating while relatively little-known former legislator Peltola rang in at 37-16. Peltola hit some progressive themes as a general-election candidate including support for abortion rights, ocean productivity, and food security. But as the Associated Press noted, she was able to rise above the fray as Palin and Begich pounded each other.

The winner has a uniquely Alaskan background, as CNN observed:

‘Peltola, who turned 49 on Wednesday, is the daughter of a Yup’ik mother and a Nebraskan father who had moved north to teach school and later became a bush pilot.

“She had spent a decade in Alaska’s House of Representatives, from 1999 to 2009, where she chaired the bipartisan “bush” caucus of rural lawmakers and overlapped with Palin, her leading opponent in the special congressional race, who was governor from late 2006 through mid-2009. Peltola later became a Bethel City Council member, a lobbyist and a salmon advocate as the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.”

Peltola’s authenticity may have subtly fed on resentment of Palin’s perceived abandonment of the state after Palin’s abrupt resignation as governor in 2009 following her failed national campaign, followed by a peripatetic political and pop-culture career mostly taking place in the Lower 48. Palin jumped into the House special-election race late (Begich had already been running against Young) and only gained steam when Donald Trump endorsed her.

For the moment, Pelota is a surprise addition to the Democrats’ fragile House majority from a very red state (Trump defeated Biden in Alaska by 10 points in 2020). It’s possible that Peltola’s service and the much higher name ID she will soon gain will make her a formidable candidate in November. In the regular primary for a full term in Congress (which took place the same day as the special general election), Peltola again finished first with Palin second and Begich third. A fourth candidate, Republican Tara Sweeney, was far behind, and, like Gross in the special election, she has indicated that she plans to withdraw. After losing the special election, Palin immediately vowed to fight on to November. “Though we’re disappointed in this outcome, Alaskans know I’m the last one who’ll ever retreat,” she said.

But you have to figure that Republicans unhappy with Palin losing a House seat that the party controlled for 49 years, and looking at her unfavorability numbers, may be tempted to consolidate their support behind Begich to give Peltola a stronger challenger. How the two Republicans behave toward each other and what national Republicans frantic to win the seat do to boost the odds of victory may do a lot to determine the outcome. But at the moment, Mary Peltola’s political future looks a lot brighter than Sarah Barracuda’s.

With so much of the political landscape in a state of flux right now, it’s time to think very positively for a minute, as I did at New York this week:

Veteran ex-Republican pol Charlie Crist was chosen by Florida Democrats to take on the very menacing Governor Ron DeSantis. I had some thoughts at New York about Crist’s apparent strategy.

Former and would-be future Florida governor Charlie Crist is famously one of the sunniest people in politics. In a classic profile of the perma-tanned ex-Republican and ex-independent candidate during his first gubernatorial run as a Democrat in 2014, Michael Kruse marveled at the authenticity with which Crist uttered cringeworthy pandering remarks:

“One of the guests [at a political event] asked, ‘Governor, do you ever have bad days?’ And he answered, ‘It hardly ever happens! How can you have bad days? We live in Florida!’”

Now that Crist is taking on the powerful and aggressively abrasive culture warrior Ron DeSantis, Kruse wondered earlier this year if such an upbeat politician was mismatched in a contest that seemed to call for maximum confrontation:

“[T]he way Crist is running is a bet. That people are exhausted of the nonstop politics of conflict. That what they want really is to dial down the volume and the vitriol. And that almost all Democrats will vote for Crist and almost all Republicans will vote for DeSantis but that enough of the people somewhere in whatever’s left of the middle will vote because of this for Crist.”

But the day after Crist easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary over the more hard-edged Nikki Fried, he seemed to strike a new and somewhat startling tone:

That doesn’t sound very sunny, does it? But if you listen to his full remarks, he follows this dismissal of DeSantis supporters with an appeal to a broad coalition of voters:

“I want the vote of the people of Florida who care about our state: good Democrats, good independents, good Republicans.”

This echoes his primary-night attack on DeSantis: “Guys, this is simple. Governor DeSantis only cares about the White House, he doesn’t care about your house.” So Crist is indeed continuing the “bet” that he can contrast himself with DeSantis precisely over their stark differences in temperament, focus, and perhaps even authenticity.  At the same time, he’s drawing that contrast with a degree of passion that should satisfy Democrats who want to wage war on the man they fear as Trump 2.0, a coldly calculating authoritarian who knows exactly how to stimulate the fears and hatreds of his MAGA base while keeping the trains running on time. By calling out MAGA voters as snakes in the Garden of Eden that is his beloved Florida, Crist can perhaps have it both ways.

But it’s a gamble. Politicians hardly ever publicly write off voters. For a “legendary retail pol” (as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti recently called Crist), it must be actually painful. Yes, there aren’t nearly as many swing voters today as there were as recently as the 1990s, and boosting base enthusiasm has become the touchstone of candidate messaging lately, particularly in low-turnout midterm elections. Still, condemning your opponent’s supporters as incorrigible while appealing to members of that opponent’s party is tricky (though perhaps Crist, a former Republican, can present himself as a role model). You can be sure that Team DeSantis will take full advantage of Crist’s “don’t want your hateful vote” comment to rile up MAGA voters and tell potential defectors from his coalition that Democrats are the ones who are being hateful and divisive.

Over the course of a general-election campaign, however, it will be hard for anyone paying attention to view Crist as a hater. He will likely convey the sense that he is sad more than angry at what DeSantis is doing to Florida and wants to do to America from sea to shining sea. It’s as likely to work as any other strategy, as this is a midterm where Democrats are at a disadvantage and Florida is trending Republican.

Took me a while, but it finally hit me that the anti-democratic tone of contemporary Republican politics has deep and disturbing roots, so I wrote about it at New York:

One of the maddening things about Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen” is that no proof of election fraud seems required to sustain the lie. Among the former president’s supporters, election denial is practically an article of faith; it relies more on conspiracy theories and mistrust of Trump’s enemies than any demonstrable facts. That’s why Trump can blithely assert not only that he won the 2020 election but that it was a historic landslide. The underlying assumption is that elections in the United States are now illegitimate. So why bother engaging with democracy at all if it produces patently “wrong” results?

This question lurks behind the MAGA movement’s growing hostility to democracy, not just to Democrats. In his discussions with grassroots Republicans in the election-denial stronghold of Arizona, New York Times reporter Robert Draper found that the old John Birch Society battle cry that America is “a republic, not a democracy” is on many tongues:

“What is different now is the use of ‘democracy’ as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-‘democracy’ sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.”

The identification of conservative political causes as synonymous with Americanism isn’t new, of course. But it’s turning from a rhetorical device to an actual creed whereby the enemies of right-wing political success are deemed enemies to the country itself. This line of reasoning lets MAGA politicians and activists justify any means of resistance, including the often-threatened “Second Amendment remedies.” Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, minces no words in hurling anathemas at Democrats and those who collaborate with them, as Draper notes:

“They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: ‘It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.’ A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: ‘These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, ‘America — dark days lie ahead for us.'”

With the very existence of America at stake in every election, does it really matter whether you can prove the “evil” people broke the rules in each individual case? Probably not. And that helps explain why election denial is still flourishing in Arizona. When the state’s bizarre 2020 election audit dragged on for many months and proved nothing that simply led to more assertions that Democrats and RINOs were suppressing the truth. Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of State, has summed up the Arizona GOP’s illogic by arguing that the burden of proof should be borne by those who consider legitimate elections legitimate:

A former GOP operative told Draper the particular susceptibility of Arizona Republicans to this sort of madness (aside from a tradition of extremism dating back to Barry Goldwater) may be attributable to a huge retiree population prone to conspiracy theories:

“’These are all folks that have traded in their suit pants for sweatpants,’ he said. ‘They’re on the golf course, or they’re in hobby mode. They have more than enough time on their hands. They’re digesting six to 10 hours of Fox News a day. They’re reading on Facebook. They’re meeting with each other to talk about those headlines. And they’re outraged that, ‘Can you believe that the government is lying to us about this?’”

But there’s clearly something else going on in Arizona and the nation that is deeper than the spread of disinformation. Hostility not just to government but to our democratic system of elections has been growing on the right for quite some time. It was evident during the Supreme Court coup of Bush v. Gore and the contempt Republicans expressed for the 2000 Democratic popular-vote victory. It was more fully manifest in the nasty right-wing reaction to the election of Barack Obama, whose legitimacy as president was regularly challenged and whose social and economic policies were attacked for allegedly redistributing resources from “deserving” taxpayers to undeserving poor people. The feeling on the right that democracy had broken America was expressed perfectly by Obama’s 2012 challenger Mitt Romney in his infamous remarks deploring the ability of the “47 percent” of Americans who owe no net income tax to vote themselves government benefits.

The ideological vanguard of the anti-Obama tea-party movement were the politicians and opinion leaders who dubbed themselves “constitutional conservatives,” typified by Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann, and Ted Cruz. They held that conservative policy prescriptions were embedded in the Founders’ design for America and were eternally binding, regardless of the contrary wishes of democratic majorities. And the absolutism of the constitutional conservative belief system was typically strengthened by Christian nationalist views. An increasing number of conservatives seemed to believe that small government, gun and property rights, and conservative cultural totems like homophobia and fetal rights were handed down by the Founders with the explicit blessing of Jesus Christ. In this scheme, democracy is a strictly circumscribed means for choosing stewards of these inflexible traditions, never to be traduced without dire consequences for the republic.

Donald Trump and his followers took constitutional conservatism to its next level: an aggressive creed mixing libertarian hostility to government with reactionary cultural views, all wrapped in the super-patriotic rhetoric of American greatness. Today’s MAGA-dominated GOP is a perfect playground for people like Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, the Arizona Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate whose campaign Thiel has bankrolled. Thiel proclaimed in 2009, as the tea-party movement began to rage against Obama’s election, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” A few years earlier, Masters said, “People who support what we euphemistically call ‘democracy’ or ‘representative government’ support stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.”

This authoritarianism in the name of liberty and godliness certainly seems counterintuitive, but it’s extremely useful as a political weapon. Anyone utilizing the democratic process to promote alternative policy visions is deemed un-American, and their successes are dismissed as illegitimate. Or as Trump put it in August 2020: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” That could mean fraudulent ballots, or it could mean allowing immigrants who should have never been admitted to America to vote, or it could mean an election controlled by the 47 percent who expect something for nothing. Any democratic process that fails to affirm the righteous views of Trump and his supporters must be “rigged.”

Pushing back a bit against the popular idea that Liz Cheney’s landslide loss in Wyoming was a pyrrhic defeat she will soon avenge, I argued at New York that it marked a point of no return for Republicans that Democrats must understand:

In the end, despite a sizable financial advantage and support from Democrats, and notwithstanding stern lectures to voters by her still-terrifying father, two-term congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming lost her seat in the U.S. House. While Cheney was recently seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, serving as the party’s third-ranking House leader, the race wasn’t close. The Associated Press called the race for Trump endorsee Harriet Hageman early in the evening; she now has a 37-point lead over the incumbent, with 95 percent of precincts reporting.

Even before primary voters delivered their verdict, there were voices far from Wyoming predicting that Liz Cheney would rise again, perhaps as a challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In fact, it’s reasonably clear that anti-Trump Republicanism died its final noisy death with her defenestration from the House GOP leadership and then her ignominious defeat back home. She will continue to have a distinguished role in the fight against Trump by virtue of her vice-chairmanship of the House select committee on January 6. But those proceedings are being ignored, if not denounced, by virtually all GOP elected officials, and her abject defeat back home is a pretty clear sign that anti-Trump Republicanism has no future.

The alternatives to Trump 2024, if any actually emerge, will be from the ranks of those who have at least partially surrendered to him: toadies like Mike Pence, who defied the president for a single day; post-Trump Trumpists like Ron DeSantis, who promise to continue his extremist policies and his hateful rhetoric; former anti-Trumpists like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Nikki Haley, who are determined never to cross him again; and anti-anti-Trumpists like Mitch McConnell and a big portion of the conservative commentariat, who clearly despise the 45th president but understand he is now the spirit animal of their party and what now passes for conservatism.

What is most poignant about Cheney’s fall isn’t so much its precipitous nature — though it’s now difficult to remember that Kevin McCarthy was defending her and her lofty leadership position for a while even after her impeachment vote. No, what makes her demise important is that she represented not just the “Republican Establishment,” but the hard-core conservative movement whose conquest of the party was consummated when George W. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, took power in 2001. It’s amazing to see Republicans who imposed the triune orthodoxy of economic, national security, and cultural conservatism on a once-diverse GOP dismissed as RINOs. They never saw a tax cut too irresponsible to support, a defense budget too high to increase, or an abortion too innocent to prohibit, and when they went to sleep at night they dreamed of “entitlement reform” to take down Social Security and Medicare. That’s no longer enough to be considered conservative or Republican if it is not accompanied by personal submission to Trump, along with savage anti-democratic sentiments and hatred of the opposition, the media, the “deep state,” the Swamp, and once-bipartisan causes ranging from voting rights to immigration reform.

The ancien régime of conservative Republicanism as we knew it not so very long ago expired with Liz Cheney’s congressional career on August 16.  Perhaps someday the old faith will be revived. But for now the Republican elephant is wearing a red hat and none dare question its stampeding direction and ear-shattering Trump-eting.

Aside from having major implications for individual rights and perhaps for the Democratic Party, the current abortion fight may also affect the future of individual politicians, one of whom I wrote about at New York:

Vice-presidents of the United States are captive to their boss’s interests and the assignments they are willing to delegate. This has been particularly true of the current vice-president, Kamala Harris. She’s in the shadow of a generally unpopular president who has at best a shaky grip on his own party (most Democrats hope those negative characterizations of Joe Biden will soon be out of date, but they remain accurate right now). And as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti recently explained, Harris has been unlucky with the thankless jobs Biden has given her:

“Her popularity started sinking when she first visited Central America and appeared dismissive of a suggestion that she visit the border. Behind the scenes, she was worried the assignment to take on the migrant crisis was a clear political loser … Her other top priority — voting rights — was no less publicly frustrating when the administration’s preferred legislation predictably failed in the split Senate. Some close to her wonder why she didn’t muscle her way into leading more popular projects: implementation of the COVID-relief-bill spending or, later, the infrastructure package.”

But now Harris’s luck may have finally turned: She is emerging as the Biden administration’s chief champion of abortion rights at a time when they are uniquely in danger and when Democrats everywhere are seizing on the issue as a potential game changer in 2022 and beyond. It’s an issue that fits her far better than it does the president, an old-school Irish Catholic politician who until mid-2019 opposed federal funding for abortions and could not bring himself even to say the word abortion. Harris is an entirely credible and consistent advocate for reproductive rights, as the Los Angeles Times noted:

“Taking command in the battle over abortion’s future, now largely being fought in the states and as an issue in the November election, comports neatly with Harris’ political résumé, touching on her experience as the first woman elected to the second-highest post in the nation and as a former California attorney general and U.S. senator with a longstanding interest in maternal health.”

It’s also worth noting that the women most immediately and harshly affected by the anti-abortion legislation racing toward enactment in red states are people of color, Black and Asian American women like Harris. And although many other federal and state Democrats will command a portion of the bright spotlight on this topic, Harris uniquely can call on the unparalleled megaphone of the White House, which reaches all states with highly diverse abortion landscapes. Per the Times:

“’We need a leader on this. No one knows who’s the head of Planned Parenthood,’ said Montana state Sen. Diane Sands, an abortion rights activist since the 1960s and one of many Democratic lawmakers and advocates who have met with Harris in recent weeks.”

Most of all, the abortion-rights battle offers Harris something her 2020 presidential campaign lacked: a passionate constituency with national reach, as the Washington Post observes: “She faces considerable pressure to show that her political skills have improved since that effort, which collapsed before a single primary vote was cast.” Yes, she has the famously combative “KHive” Twitter army ready to throw down on her behalf at a moment’s notice, but she could use a showing of excitement in the non-virtual world of left-of-center grassroots activists too. No issue is more starkly partisan than abortion post-Dobbs; within the Democratic Party, there is no real downside to pro-choice militancy.

What would really benefit Harris politically, of course, would be evidence that the abortion issue can stop or significantly mitigate the red wave so many Democrats fearfully glimpse on the horizon of the November elections. If abortion rights turn out to be not simply an energizer for the Democratic Party’s progressive base but a wedge issue that can bring back the suburban gains and heavy youth turnout of the 2018 midterms, it could help give Harris’s prospects a significant boost.

This development for Harris couldn’t arrive at a better time. Biden’s rapidly approaching 80th birthday is very likely to revive pressure on him to retire at the end of his first term. At this point, even though Harris is the heir apparent as vice-president, it’s unclear whether she has enough political juice to head off powerful rivals for the 2024 nomination. Nothing would make her more powerful as a presidential contender than to have not just Biden’s blessing but a reputation for fighting on an issue of crucial importance to progressive politics and the people it aims to represent.

After a sudden period of long-stalled legislative activity, I took a look for New York at the possible midterm election payoff:

Not that very long ago, Joe Biden’s job-approval rating seemed chronically and endlessly depressed; the Democratic-controlled Congress couldn’t get anything done; and all the indicators for the 2022 midterm elections looked terrible for the party, in part because its own voters were deeply disappointed with the lack of legislative productivity and a perceived absence of presidential leadership.

Now, in a series of legislative victories highlighted by the Schumer-Manchin budget-reconciliation agreement (now known as the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA), Senate Democrats are suddenly walking tall, as Punchbowl News noted:

“Senate Democrats have put together an impressive resume this summer, most especially during the last two months. The CHIPS Plus Act, PACT Act, Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO, gun control and reconciliation were all passed in this period, a number of them with big bipartisan majorities. All in a 50-50 Senate.”

Assuming the House finishes action on the IRA later this week, it’s quite the late-innings home run, complete with a rebranded title that shows Democrats at least trying to address what has been the dominant issue of the midterms: inflation. Along with the Kansas abortion-rights referendum on August 2 that shows that Democrats may have an issue of competing significance to both swing and base voters, the landscape is most definitely getting brighter for Democrats. And though Biden and his party probably had little to do with it, they will get credit for falling gasoline prices if they continue to drop.

In an interview with Politico, Biden’s pollster John Anzalone used a gambling analogy for the turnaround. “We put our last silver dollar in our slot machine and came up big,” he said. “And they were sitting there with a stack of chips and are down to just one. The turnaround is unbelievable.”

Spin aside, things are clearly looking better for Democrats, but the question (other than uncertainty over the future direction of crucial economic indicators) is whether midterm losses are already baked into the cake. After all, with the exception of George W. Bush in the immediate wake of 9/11, every president going back to the 1930s has lost ground in his first-term midterm election. Even very small House and Senate net losses would flip control to Republicans. And while a yearlong downward drift in Biden’s job-approval rating has now been replaced with small gains, it’s still dreadful at the moment: 39.6 percent in the averages at both FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics. At this point in 2018, Donald Trump’s RCP job-approval average was 43.4 percent, and his party was on the way to losing 41 House seats. Then, too, the “direction of the country” right-track, wrong-track ratio was 41-51. Now it’s 20-73.

Sure, Democratic base voters unhappy with earlier legislative misfires may now have a sunnier outlook on the party’s congressional candidates. That, along with the growing anger at conservative Supreme Court justices and anti-abortion Republican state officials, could certainly improve Democratic turnout. But Republicans will likely retain an advantage of core swing-voter concerns that are unlikely to go away by November 8, as Senator Marco Rubio suggested in a taunting floor speech on the IRA over the weekend:

“There isn’t a single thing in this bill that helps working people lower the prices of groceries, or the price of gasoline, or the price of housing, or the price of clothing. There isn’t a single thing in this bill that’s gonna keep criminals in jail. There isn’t a single thing in this bill that’s going to secure our border. Those happen to be things that working people in this country care about.”

That too is spin, of course, but the point is that GOP talking points really don’t have to change in light of the IRA’s passage.

The best empirical news for Democrats is the trajectory of the congressional generic ballot, the midterm indicator that has had the most predictive value in the past. As recently as June 13, Republicans had a 3.5 percent advantage in the RCP averages for this measurement of congressional voting preferences, with the expectation that the margin would widen as voting grew near. Now the generic ballot is basically tied (Republicans: 44.7 percent, Democrats: 44.6 percent). Historically, the party controlling the White House loses steam late in the midterm cycle, but at the moment, Biden’s party does seem to have some momentum. And in the national contest where Democrats have most reason to be optimistic, the battle for control of the Senate, Republicans continue to suffer from candidate-quality problems that could lose them seats they probably should win in a midterm. John Fetterman keeps maintaining a solid lead over Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania; this race is for a seat currently held by the GOP. And in Georgia, Raphael Warnock continues to run comfortably ahead of Herschel Walker even before the frequently tongue-tied former football great reluctantly faces the highly eloquent incumbent Democrat in debates.

There is no way to know, much less factor in, late-breaking real-world developments that might affect the trajectory of these and other midterm contests, whether it’s unexpected economic news, a change of direction in the Russia-Ukraine war, or an official 2024 candidacy announcement by Trump that reminds Democrats that the wolf is still at the door. Typically, voting preferences form well before Election Day, and early voting will begin in September in some states. At present, FiveThirtyEight gives Republicans an 80 percent probability of controlling the House next year and Democrats a 59 percent chance of holding the Senate. These numbers are better for Democrats than those we saw in June and July, and that’s grounds for gratitude.

Always on the lookout for a new wrinkle on ancient battles, I drew attention to a recent legal development at New York:

Though the constitutional law of “religious liberty” is a murky field, we are all accustomed to hearing anguished claims from conservative Christians that laws requiring them to provide or pay for reproductive-health services or treat LGBTQ employees and customers equally are an unacceptable violation of their beliefs. Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the federal right to an abortion, it’s clearer than ever that the Christian right and its Republican allies are aiming to construct a system where they are free to live their values as they wish, regardless of the impact on others.

But as a new lawsuit in Florida shows, what’s good for the conservative goose may also be good for the progressive gander. A group of religious officials are arguing in state court that the new anti-abortion law enacted this year by Florida Republicans violates their right to religious expression. The Washington Post reports:

“Seven Florida clergy members — two Christians, three Jews, one Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist … argue in separate lawsuits filed Monday that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state’s new, post-Roe abortion law. The law, which is one of the strictest in the country, making no exceptions for rape or incest, was signed in April by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), in a Pentecostal church alongside antiabortion lawmakers such as the House speaker, who called life ‘a gift from God.’”

The plaintiffs in these suits most definitely want to rebut the idea that forced birth is the only authentically “religious” perspective on abortion services. After all, as United Church of Christ minister Laurie Hafner explains, the anti-abortion cause has little biblical sanction:

“Jesus says nothing about abortion. He talks about loving your neighbor and living abundantly and fully. He says: ‘I come that you might have full life.’ Does that mean for a 10-year-old to bear the child of her molester? That you cut your life short because you aren’t able to rid your body of a fetus?”

The legal theory in the lawsuits focuses specifically on the counseling of pregnant people and their families that clergy engage in routinely, and that under the new Florida law may be treated as the illegal aiding and abetting of criminal acts. Hafner’s suit alleges that this violates both federal and state constitutional rights, along with Florida’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (a 1993 federal “religious liberty” law):

“The dramatic change in abortion rights in Florida has caused confusion and fear among clergy and pregnant girls and women particularly in light of the criminal penalties attached. Given her general duties and work as a Pastor, Plaintiff intends to engage in counseling regarding abortion beyond the narrow limits of HB 5 and, therefore, risks incarceration and financial penalties.”

It’s unclear how this argument will fare in the courts. Conservative judges may stipulate that anti-abortion laws impinge on religious-liberty rights that are nonetheless outweighed by the state’s “compelling interest” in fetal life. But at least, for once, the judiciary and the public will have to come to grips with the fact that many millions of pro-choice religious Americans passionately oppose what is happening to our country in the name of “life.” During the run-up to this week’s resounding “no” vote on a constitutional amendment removing any hint of abortion rights in the state’s constitution, a Presbyterian Church in Kansas displayed a sign that read, “Jesus trusted women. So do we.” This was likely an allusion to the “Trust Women” motto of the famous Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, who in 2009 was assassinated in the foyer of the church in which he was serving as an usher. His legacy lives on in houses of worship and now in the courts.