The ‘Shrinking Baptist Convention’ Is Doubling Down on the Culture Wars

NEW ORLEANS — No one could accuse the Baptists of excessive cheeriness. Or underplaying their challenges.

Over the clanking of silverware and the smell of breakfast sausages on the sidelines of a major gathering of Southern Baptists here, several hundred pastors and other churchgoers welcomed a roster of speakers ruminating on a “teetering” nation, “sexual insanity,” “all this trans stuff” and the specter that the country’s largest Protestant denomination was on a “road to insignificance.”

At the evening get-together in the same hotel ballroom — where attendees sipped on bottles of water in this humid city better known for imbibing more intoxicating beverages — they used even more apocalyptic language.

“We are living in dark and perilous times in America,” read the billing for a night with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “as our culture descends into a spiritual abyss ...”

Not long ago, during Donald Trump’s presidency, white evangelical Christians had taken comfort in the idea that their interests carried weight at the highest levels in Washington, in conservative Supreme Court appointments and otherwise. Even if it had taken some rationalization for them to get behind a thrice-married former casino owner who botched basic religious conventions and was eventually indicted for his alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star, the Trump years were good years for these Baptists.

“One of the things about President Trump’s administration, there were so many Christians involved,” an influential Texas pastor named Jack Graham told the crowd. “In the West Wing, you couldn’t walk very far without bumping into bona fide, born-again believers and followers of Jesus.”

Since then, it seemed that everything else, quite literally, had gone to Hell. As nearly 13,000 delegates, known as messengers, arrived here recently for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and side events like that evening’s gathering — hosted by Liberty University in partnership with the Conservative Baptist Network, a more conservative group — it was an open question if they could do anything about it.

The midterm elections had not produced the sweeping conservative victories Republicans promised. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the signature accomplishment of the religious right, had become a major liability for the GOP, contributing to losses in a series of elections. In December, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, signed legislation codifying same-sex marriage into law — with the support of 39 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate.

There was the transgender rights movement, which pastor after pastor complained they saw seeping into their pews. A panel conversation one afternoon entitled “Re-Forming Gen Z: Sexuality, Technology and Human Formation” drew such a large crowd that organizers turned away late-comers and a moderator was forced to combine what he called “a lot of questions related to gender and sexuality” into a few. They included how best to respond to a teenager who insists on a preferred pronoun and how to “navigate conversations with a teen who believes in God but also thinks that same-sex attraction is OK.”

And then there was the temerity of some Southern Baptist churches to allow women to serve as pastors, which had been the focus of feuding within the denomination.

“Things have changed in America,” Tim Wilder, the pastor at a church in Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, told me as we rode alone in a dark shuttle bus back from a day of meetings at the city’s convention center to a nearby hotel one night. “I believe we’re in an anti-Christian nation.”

The next day, at the meeting site, Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas, told me, “It’s almost like Christianity’s being attacked.”

Mathews, whose husband is a former pastor, said, “I think we’re getting closer to the end times.” And she was hardly alone in that assessment. On the sidewalk outside, a man named Beau Hill, from Lexington, Okla., passed out literature calling for abortion to be classified as homicide. Hill, who told me his daughter had “killed my first-born grandchild,” lamented what he called a “progressive slide” in the country.

“All we’re doing,” he said, “is trying to hold the line.”

The political significance of evangelicals’ ability to do that is hard to overstate — and also more acutely than ever in doubt. White evangelicals are a relatively small part of the nation’s overall population, about 14 percent. But they play an outsize role in the Republican Party, to which they have been fused since the days of Ronald Reagan.

In Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, more than 60 percent of caucus-goers identified as white evangelical or white born-again Christians in the last competitive nominating contest, in 2016. And in general elections, they are a central part of the GOP’s base. In 2020, about 28 percent of the electorate identified as white born-again or evangelical Christian. Of those voters, more than three-quarters went for Trump.

That’s the reason every major Republican presidential contender appeared the other day at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority 2023 conference in Washington, D.C., and why Sen. Josh Hawley, speaking at the event, was probably telling the truth when he said, “There is no future for the Republican Party without Christians.”

The problem for the Republican Party, and for the church, is that religious affiliation has for years been fading. In 2020, Gallup found church membership in the United States fell below a majority for the first time. The percentage of Americans who say religion is “very important” is down more than 20 points from when Gallup first asked about it in 1965.

It was lost on no one at the meeting here that the Southern Baptist Convention, still the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, lost nearly half a million members last year.

“The Southern Baptist Convention is officially a denomination in decline,” Chuck Kelley, a former president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, told me when we met in the lobby of the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Pulling from his bag a copy of the book he’d written, The Best Intentions: How a Plan to Revitalize the SBC Accelerated Its Decline, Kelley said the convention had “kind of turned away from evangelism to focus on the social issues.”

“Let me use a shorthand statement,” he said. “The Great Commission — going out after people who are lost, don’t have a relationship with God, baptizing the ones who respond and then discipling the people you baptize. And we have moved away from that. So, for the last four or five years, what has been the conversation at the Southern Baptist Convention?”

He ticked through some of the points of focus: A sexual abuse scandal that roiled the SBC, critical race theory, the role of women in the church and Trump.

“Not,” he said, “the Great Commission.”

When I asked him what kind of influence Southern Baptists could hope to have on elections anymore, he said, “We don’t matter as much,” repeated the line and added, “We’re getting smaller.”

That conundrum — that evangelicals seem to be both in decline and still enormously powerful in Republican politics — is what drew me to New Orleans for the Baptists’ annual gathering. The big topic of conversation — the reason messengers rushed to find seats in the convention hall and one man said to another, “We should have brought popcorn” — was whether to uphold the ouster of one of the denomination’s largest megachurches, Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., for having a female pastor. At a time that it’s losing membership, I wondered, why would the denomination kick out one of its largest and best-known churches for a practice that is commonplace in many mainline Protestant churches?

The convention’s basic statement of faith is clear on the subject: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” And the executive committee had voted earlier this year to expel Saddleback. But Rick Warren, Saddleback’s celebrity founder and author of the bestseller The Purpose Driven Life, had lodged an appeal.

Speaking into a microphone on the floor of the convention hall, his image beamed onto screens overhead, Warren told the messengers that Southern Baptists had historically “agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines in order to share a common mission.” If they agreed nearly 100 percent of the time, he asked, “Isn’t that close enough?”

From the echoing hall came a smattering of people responding, “No.”

Nearly everyone that I ran into felt that Warren’s church — while free to do what it liked — had no right to remain, in Southern Baptist Convention parlance, “in friendly cooperation” with the SBC. Stephan Albin, a pastor from Missouri, told me accepting Saddleback would be a “step in the wrong direction toward a more liberal way.” Laura Riley, who was running a booth at the convention for the group Moms in Prayer, said, “I don’t feel the need to be a pastor … In God’s word, he says that men are the head of the household.” And Lynn Meany, who teaches a Sunday morning class for adult women in her church in the suburbs of Memphis, Tenn., but who is not a pastor, told me, “I believe the Scripture says it should be a man, and I agree with it.”

Across the street, over lunches of Chick-fil-A sandwiches, conventiongoers heard from a panel of five church leaders — all men — who said they admired women who, depending on the speaker, had “great value” and were gifted as teachers or in leadership and, by no doing of their own, had been “turned into a battleground.”

But when it came to women serving as pastors, Juan Sanchez, senior pastor of High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin, said it was “a biblical authority issue,” the fudging of which “opens the door for us toward theological decline.”

When the vote was announced on the floor the next day, one of Warren’s advisers was waiting in a hallway upstairs at the convention center. His phone buzzed with the result: Warren’s appeal had been rejected 9,437 to 1,212.

It would have been inconceivable to think of Warren getting this kind of reception not so long ago, when gay-rights activists — not Baptists — protested Barack Obama’s selection of Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. But in today’s SBC, Warren seems as radical as a hippy.

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Warren said that because there are other Baptist churches with female pastors — exactly how many is unclear — “this is going to be an inquisition now, and it’s probably going to go on for 10 years.”

“We continue to be the ‘shrinking’ Baptist convention,” he said. “It’s not really smart when you’re losing a half million members a year to intentionally kick out people who want to fellowship with you.”

This was one of the arguments that Warren’s supporters had been making. On the sidewalk outside the convention center, I ran into Alaina Benedetto, a dental assistant and born-again Christian from New Orleans, who was passing out fliers supporting Saddleback.

“People like talking to me about Jesus,” Benedetto said. But then, pointing to the convention center, she added, “The way they go about it is limiting reach, not expanding it.”

If that sounds a lot like the more secular conversation going on within the Republican Party between moderates and hard-liners on subjects like abortion or Trump and his lies about the 2020 election, you wouldn’t be wrong. The GOP’s presidential candidates have won the popular vote only once since the 1990s, in George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. The nation’s changing demographics are working against the party. Moderates and independents fled the GOP after Trump’s election in 2016.

Rather than moderate, the response of MAGA diehards has been to focus on invigorating the base — which is what members of the Southern Baptist Convention seem to be doing, too.

The week they met in New Orleans, messengers not only refused to re-admit Saddleback and a church in Louisville, Ky., that had appealed their ejections for having female pastors, but they also approved an amendment to their constitution declaring churches have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture,” a measure that will continue to saddle the SBC with controversy before a ratification vote next year. Separately, it approved a measure condemning gender-affirming care.

“My impression,” said John Green, a longtime scholar on religion and politics and author of the book Religion and the Culture Wars, “is that they have gone further to the right.”

He said, “Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. On many other issues, they don’t feel like they’re getting their way. The new activism around transgenderism is deeply troubling to them. And what often happens in these sorts of situations is the activists double down, and they become more conservative, because in their perception, the stakes are now higher.”

When I put this to Albert Mohler, who is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville — and who spoke against Saddleback on the convention floor — he told me that the vote on Saddleback suggested something else entirely. If the messengers had cared only about membership numbers or influence, they might have invited Saddleback back in. What holding fast proved, he said, was that the Southern Baptist Convention “is not driven by a pragmatic organizational dynamic.”

While years ago, the controversy surrounding Saddleback “would have appeared science fiction” to Southern Baptists, Mohler said, “the pressures of a post-Christian age confront the Southern Baptist Convention with the kinds of decisions it never imagined it would have to make.”

Mohler told me, “There’s no joy in seeing numbers go down.” But he said, “I think it’s inevitable.”

Like many messengers here, he did not see it as all downside.

“We’re about to find out who seriously intends to be known as a Christian,” Mohler said. “I think there’s gain in this in terms of the clarification of what it means to be a Christian.”

Sitting outside a breakout room at the convention center, Mark Liederbach, a senior professor of ethics, theology and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Wake Forest, N.C., described it to me as a “sifting, or a sorting.”

On one hand, he said, the decline in church membership “saddens me because it probably marks a culture that’s moving further away from a biblical worldview, or a biblically informed worldview.”

But on the other, he said, people who “stick with their faith are actually going to probably be more committed to it, because of [the climate] becoming more hostile.”

In dozens of conversations with Baptists at the convention center and various venues around New Orleans, very few messengers brought up Trump or the 2024 election unprompted. That’s not because it wasn’t on their mind — it was, although somewhere behind the culture war issues of the day. They didn’t bring it up because their loyalty to whoever wins the Republican nomination is almost a foregone conclusion.

Whether Trump is their top choice in the primary remains to be seen. There are evangelicals who have serious reservations about him. Over several days in New Orleans, I ran into messengers who said they worry he is too much of a “lightning rod” to win a general election or who are “disappointed” with his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 — or with his blaming abortion for the GOP’s underperformance in the midterms.

"He's vain, vulgar, vicious and vindictive,” Al Jackson, a retired pastor from Auburn, Ala., told me.

Jackson, who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, said, “I think there’s a lot of buyer’s remorse among evangelicals.”

But even if there is, it isn’t clear that evangelicals will line up behind an alternative in sufficient numbers to turn the primary. Jackson told me he has given money to Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator polling in single digits. Mohler, without making an endorsement, told me he is “very interested in Ron DeSantis as a candidate.” Lots of conservatives are.

The complication with the idea that evangelicals might choose some alternative to Trump, however, is the same one the GOP ran into in 2016 and is staring down again in the runup to 2024: Without any agreement on an alternative, support for other candidates is splintered.

In a Fox News poll in May, Trump was beating DeSantis, the Florida governor and his closest competitor, 59 percent to 16 percent among GOP primary voters who identified as born-again or evangelical Christians.

Outside a hall full of booths advertising everything from discounted background checks to church bus services, interior renovations and pest control, Bill Taylor, a pastor from Byrdstown, Tenn., gestured to the crowd of people around him and said, “Many of them saw Trump as Messiah-like … Many of them were so Trump-focused that he became their sermon series.”

It makes sense. There is a feedback loop between Trump’s grievance politics — about the 2020 election, about the culture wars, about modernity in general — and the feeling among evangelicals that they, too, are under siege.

Speaking at Faith & Freedom, Trump yoked declines in religious affiliation in America — “religion is going down in terms of importance and popularity,” he said — to what he called a Democratic effort to “destroy religion.” And even if Trump’s tone is removed, the substance of that call and response between evangelicals and the GOP is unlikely to shift regardless of whom Republicans nominate next year. Not with DeSantis, a self-styled crusader against the “woke” left and perceived cultural offenses ranging from Disney to critical race theory and gas stoves. Even Scott, one of the more mild-mannered presidential contenders, issued a fundraising appeal following his speech at Faith & Freedom warning of efforts to “ban prayer in schools and locker rooms” while proclaiming that “restoring the Judeo-Christian values in America is one of my top priorities.”

In New Orleans, shortly after the Southern Baptist Convention concluded its meetings, I sat down with Bart Barber, a Texas pastor who had just been re-elected president of the SBC. Before the 2016 election, Barber had called Trump “a demonstrably evil man” but, like many evangelicals who were slow to embrace him, voted for Trump in 2020. When I asked if he would vote for him again in 2024, Barber demurred: “Who’s he running against? What are my other options?”

Barber said he doesn’t worry much about declines in church membership, given the “ebbing and flowing of people’s religious affections over the course of history.” He also said he’s less concerned about how people in his congregation vote than “the way that they treat other people who are voting differently from them in the upcoming election.”

I mentioned to Barber that I’d spoken with many messengers who felt evangelicalism more broadly was under siege.

“On the one hand,” he told me, “it is true that there are many movements in culture that not only see things differently from the way that evangelicals do, but also are actively trying to suppress the viewpoints of religious people.” He mentioned controversy surrounding Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and, more recently, to celebrate a gender transition.

“There’s definitely increased tension between some elements in society and evangelical belief,” Barber said.

However, he said, compared with other countries, “the difference here is we have jurisprudence that goes all the way back to the founding of this republic that has proven to be effective to protect the rights of people not only to hold their faith but to practice it.”

Down the street from the convention center, at the Liberty University and Conservative Baptist Network event, it was the practicing of faith in politics that Southern Baptists were getting at. And if declining membership was a problem, tempering their conservatism was not the answer.

Moderating a panel before a keynote by Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state, Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center, acknowledged the decline of what he called a “biblical world view” in America. But he also said millions of people who regularly attend church do not vote. Those people, perhaps, are reachable.

“The nation certainly was formed and founded by Christians,” he said. “It was shaped by the pulpit, and I think it’s going to take the pulpit to save the nation.”

Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, told pastors in the audience to make voter registration a “Christian citizenship effort in your church” and to go about “encouraging our people to run for political office.”

There are fewer of them than there were a year ago, but their fervor was undiminished. In the hotel ballroom that night, down the hall from a bar full of business travelers, the Baptists stood for the singing of “God Bless the U.S.A.”

“These are dark days, and we are in a spiritual battle,” Graham said. “We are in this fight for the glory of God, for the sake of our nation.”

‘The Label’s Actually Part of the Problem’

SAN FRANCISCO – One recent, drizzly afternoon, a standing-room-only crowd squeezed into Manny’s, a restaurant and meeting space frequented by politicians courting voters. Rep. Katie Porter sat on a softly lit stage in front of a brightly colored painting celebrating local housing advocates.

“Where’s the whiteboard?” someone in the audience called out.

Porter hadn’t brought her signature prop with her, but when the event got going, she and podcaster Kara Swisher discussed her use of it in congressional hearings to grill corporate executives about employee wages and the cost of drugs, a schtick that earned her a devoted following on social media. Then they went on to discuss other topics of concern to progressive Democrats, including the government rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and the influence of money in politics.

When the conversation turned to Porter’s U.S. Senate campaign, the reason Porter had come to Manny’s in the first place, Swisher tried to place Porter in a “lane.”

Was she running in the mold of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren? Or, after Porter pointed to her electoral success in California’s ancestrally conservative Orange County, did she “feel that you can reach out more towards the center” than her opponents?

“It’s not about a label,” Porter replied. “It’s about being able to talk to people about who you fight for … I think the label’s actually part of the problem.”

Scrunched into the audience beside a table full of mimosas at the back of the room, I wondered if Porter, a progressive fundraising juggernaut, former deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and former law student of Warren, the progressive giant and Massachusetts senator, felt that way about her own, “progressive” label, too.

As a state, California has become almost a caricature of the left’s war not only on Republicans, but on centrism in the Democratic Party. Progressive Democrats have been waiting for years for the state’s senior, centrist senator, Dianne Feinstein, to retire – so much so that the state party in 2018 had declined to endorse her reelection bid. Now that Feinstein has finally announced her retirement, the state represents an enormous opportunity for progressives to add to their still-small ranks in Congress, potentially for a generation or more.

California “is a beachhead for the progressive movement,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the Bernie Sanders-aligned advocacy group Our Revolution, told me. In a state that is such a “major player,” he added, the next senator should carry “a powerful progressive voice.”

But in the Senate primary, the earliest stages of the race have laid bare a more existential question for the progressive movement — less a matter of left versus center, as it was in the 2020 presidential primary, but a skirmish over who even qualifies as a progressive, and how salient that designation still is.

As a whole, the party has shifted further to the left than ever. Some traditionally progressive ideas — including a $15 minimum wage and tenets of the Green New Deal — are now mainstream. The proportion of Democrats who identify as “liberal,” as opposed to “moderate” or “conservative,” according to Gallup, now exceeds 50 percent — an all-time high.

“That’s the real dilemma or question mark for those of us in the progressive movement,” said Mark Longabaugh, an ad maker who worked on Sanders’ 2016 campaign. “Yeah, we’ve had a huge impact on the party’s positioning on policy issues, which is ultimately what we all care about. But at the same time, clearly, liberals, outside of a handful of recent victories, still don’t have the upper hand inside the party. Nor have we seized the big victories that it would take to implement those policies in some ways.”

If the 2020 presidential election was a setback for progressives, with Joe Biden defeating the likes of Sanders and Warren in the Democratic primary, three years later the movement may be suffering from something else entirely – the sheer number of Democrats claiming to represent the brand.

“Progressive,” said Lily Geismer, a history professor at California’s Claremont McKenna College who studies liberalism and the Democratic Party, has become a “catch-all,” used so heavily that in some ways “that term has lost its meaning.”

Off stage at Manny’s, behind a curtain in a closet-like room just big enough for two people to stand, Porter tried to answer my question. She told me that while she identifies as a progressive, most voters “don’t identify that way. Within the party, yes, but that’s not the electorate. So, you’re not going to connect with the electorate by saying, ‘I’m this.’”

Independents, she said, are a rapidly growing segment of the electorate for a reason. “Democrat and Republican are way better-defined terms than progressive or moderate or centrist or liberal or whatever these other terms are, and even those terms are kind of losing some of their purchase for people.” What’s they’re looking at, she added, is “what people are voting on, in a way that I think makes the label sometimes less important to people than what you’re doing.”

She told me, “I think these labels are not how people find their way to a candidate.”

If Porter is right about how voters feel about terms like “progressive,” you wouldn’t know it from the way the California Senate race is unfolding.

One of Porter’s top rivals, Rep. Adam Schiff, a former prosecutor and former member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, withdrew his application to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus last month, after progressives raised question about its timing and his credentials. Schiff now supports such progressive policies as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, and he has said, “I very much view myself as a progressive.” But next to Porter and the other main Democrat in the race, Rep. Barbara Lee, a progressive icon who cast the lone vote against the war in Afghanistan, Schiff might as well be Biden.

I went to see Lee in action at a meet-and-greet in Orange County a few weeks ago and met a progressive activist named Mary Carter who told me she’d “go anywhere for Barbara Lee.” When Lee arrived and sat down at the other end of a table from her, Carter said to her, “I love you,” to which Lee responded, “Love you back.”

Still, Carter told me she plans to vote for Porter, who is 49, instead of Lee, who is 76, because of “generational” concerns: “I’d like to have this seat for a few years.”

When I asked Carter about Schiff, her reaction was something else entirely. She laughed and said, “Fuck.” And then she showed me her phone, where she keeps a list of his past corporate donors. (Schiff’s campaign has said he will not take donations for this campaign from corporate PACs, though he has in the past.) Another activist at Lee’s event said Schiff should be forced to wear a “suit like a NASCAR driver” with company logos printed on it.

Amar Shergill, chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, told me that while Schiff “has been great on some issues … he routinely arrives late.”

“There’s a huge difference between being an advocate for progressive issues,” he said, “and being the last vote on a progressive issue.”

This opinion of Schiff isn’t unusual among progressive activists. When we spoke recently, Geevarghese shared with me the results of an internal, late-February survey of about 5,000 Our Revolution members in California. Porter and Lee, who was endorsed recently by progressive Rep. Ro Khanna, did about equally well, drawing 45 percent and 44 percent support, respectively. Schiff, among the Our Revolution membership, was running more than 25 percentage points behind.

It was only a survey of activists. But among them, the term “progressive” still carries significant weight, which was clear at Lee’s event in Orange County and in her campaign’s announcement that Khanna was supporting her: Khanna, a co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign, called Lee “the progressive leader Californians need right now,” while highlighting the lack of representation of Black women like Lee in the Senate.

Lee, in turn, promised “to always stand up for our progressive values.”

For progressives, Lee told me when we spoke on the phone, “the stakes are high.”

“When you look at what progressives stand for — universal affordable healthcare for all, decent housing, making sure poverty is eliminated, fighting for food security, making sure we fight to protect our democracy,” she said, “not only are these progressive values, these are values that most Americans embrace.”

In heavily Democratic California’s top-two primary, it’s highly likely that, barring an entry from a credible Republican, two Democrats will advance to a general election runoff — likely between Schiff and either Porter or Lee. Schiff has been endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and is widely expected to win Feinstein’s backing.

Before Lee spoke in Orange County, Richard Green, a former first vice chair of the Democrats of Greater Irvine, described the race as “a huge opportunity for progressives,” while Jenny Lynn, chair of the progressive group Feel the Bern OC, cast the race as one against “the establishment in California,” which she said “is fighting tooth-and-nail to make sure we don’t exist.”

“California and New York, they hold it down when it comes to progressive, real change,” she told me. “I feel that because California is such a powerful and large state, we should be setting an example, and we should be the ones leading the way.”

The problem for groups like Our Revolution and people like Lynn, who view California as a proving ground for the progressive movement, is that California voters — beyond requiring their statewide elected officials be Democrats — may not distinguish between those Democrats on narrower ideological lines.

One reason is that, for as completely as the Donald Trump era overhauled the Republican Party, the resistance to Trump from the left blurred some intraparty differences between Democrats. Schiff is known less as a moderate or a progressive than for his roles in Trump’s first impeachment and in the panel investigating the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In some ways, said Geevarghese, “’progressive’ and ‘Democrat’ have gotten conflated, in part because the anti-Trump movement was galvanizing, and no matter which side of the Democratic divide you’re on, establishment versus progressive, we came together against the threat of Trump-ism.”

Schiff, said Konstantine Anthony, the mayor of Burbank, Schiff’s hometown, “was on television every night for weeks, months. He was seen as the anti-Trump.”

Anthony, a socialist who is far to the left of Schiff ideologically and actually supports the “defund the police” movement, is nevertheless endorsing him. Citing Schiff’s support for Medicare for All and his swearing off of corporate PAC donations, among other policies, he said he regrets that among that activist class, “we do not allow people to learn.”

Schiff, he said, had become more progressive as his district evolved, while “our memories have gotten longer, and I feel like it’s to our detriment. We haven’t evolved to the point where we can forgive people.”

But the broader electorate may be more willing to overlook things — if they even cared much to begin with.

I asked Robert Reich, the video-making former labor secretary and Berkeley professor beloved by progressives, whether the term “progressive” had shifted meaning in the Trump era.

“My sense is that most voters are turned off by terms like ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal,’ just as they're turned off by ‘right-winger’ or ‘conservative’," Reich responded. “So much venom has filled social media and political commentary involving these terms —especially in the Trump era, when venom became acceptable if not actively encouraged — that politicians of all stripes are coming to realize they have to talk about specific things that people want or need, whether affordable child care and health care, or parental control over what's being taught in the schools.”

A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released in February, backed up that take. The poll showed Schiff and Porter leading among Democrats and independent voters with 22 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Lee was lagging with 6 percent, while nearly 40 percent remain undecided.

Perhaps more tellingly, when asked what candidate attributes mattered to them, fewer than half of Democrats and independent voters — 45 percent — listed being a progressive as very important. That’s far more than the 23 percent who list being a moderate as very important. But both responses were nowhere close to the more than two-thirds of Democrats and independents who said it was important that a candidate have a “willingness to negotiate and work collaboratively with others to get things done.”

“Honestly, you could hardly get a piece of paper between Schiff and Porter in terms of ideology,” Garry South, a Democratic strategist who has worked on statewide campaigns in California, told me. “For either of those two candidates to try to make some huge ideological gap between them, I think, will be a futile exercise at the end of the day.”

In San Francisco, Porter’s visit to Manny’s followed an earlier appearance by Schiff. Lee has been there before, too. The venue’s owner, Manny Yekutiel, a former Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, identifies as a progressive and runs the place as something of a salon, hosting dozens of Democratic senators, governors and presidential candidates. We, spoke on a couch at the side of the room while disco music played before Porter and Swisher arrived. “In general,” he told me, “I find that they are a lot more similar than they are different.”

I asked him if he thought the Senate contenders were all progressive Democrats.

“I guess it depends what your definition of ‘progressive’ is,” Yekutiel replied. “I think if you define it as a Democrat that is trying to fight for progress in this country and is a lion for liberal values, then yes,” he replied.

You could go beyond that — to make a distinction based on what he called “Capital P progressive,” such as membership in a caucus, he said. But at this point, he added, “I think those distinctions are kind of silly, honestly.”

Trump continues to suck the air out of the GOP primary

It wasn’t long ago that many Republicans believed the party might finally be ready to move past former President Donald Trump. Nikki Haley was running for president. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was embarking on a book tour, and a raft of other prominent GOPers were visiting early primary states.

But in the span of a week, the script for the earliest stages of the 2024 primary was written; and once again Trump was the axis around which it all turned.

“It’s Groundhog Day,” said Mike Madrid, the Republican strategist who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

While Trump’s approval ratings may be slipping and Republican voters tell pollsters they are willing to look elsewhere, a series of recent developments has kept the party fixated on him and the scandals that defined his time and office. Washington D.C. and the largest conservative news outlet have spent days reliving the Jan. 6 riot. And the specter of a Trump indictment in New York portends an early primary season spent relitigating his record.

“There’s no question he’s the giant in the middle of the room, and other people will define themselves in comparison to him,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster.

In recent days, Trump said he will “absolutely” stay in the race if he is indicted and that it would likely “enhance my numbers.” Far from distancing himself from the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — a general election liability with independents and pro-democracy Republicans — Trump has suggested pardoning some Jan. 6 defendants and recently collaborated on a song with some of them. More traditionalist Republicans winced at that — and again when Fox’s Tucker Carlson aired footage downplaying violence at the Capitol.

“Just reliving the worst moment of the Trump presidency is probably not exactly what the doctor ordered for 2024,” Ayres said.

For any other presidential candidate or any down-ballot Republican next year, said one Republican strategist granted anonymity to discuss the dynamics of the campaign frankly, the “huge risk” is that “we have to talk about Jan. 6 on the campaign trail.”

“God, I don’t want to be on this side of that issue,” he said.

The primary was always going to be, first and foremost, about the former president — who remains, despite his foibles, the frontrunner in the 2024 field. But after a less-than-red-wave midterm and the first few lackluster weeks of Trump’s campaign, it appeared he might not singularly set the terms of the debate. It was time for a “new generation,” Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, said when she launched her campaign. Republicans, said New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu — a potential candidate — would not choose “yesterday’s leadership.”

The problem for Republicans is that Trump is making it impossible to run anything other than yesterday’s campaign.

In Washington, Carlson’s relitigating of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol on Fox News forced Republicans to answer new batteries of questions about an event they’d been eager to forget — reminiscent of the Trump tweets they’d been forced, awkwardly, to respond to throughout his term. It sparked intraparty debates about whether the insurrection had, in fact, been essentially peaceful and led to accusations that those in the party who called it a dark day were ideological squishes.

Then came news that Trump had been invited to testify before a New York grand jury investigating his involvement in hush money payments during the 2016 campaign, raising the prospect of a bombshell criminal case that would again keep Trump as a central litmus test for the party: would fellow Republicans decry the prosecution or turn on the former president?

“Ignore it, deflect it all you want,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research and managing partner at the Arizona-based polling firm OH Predictive Insights. “This is, right now, going to be the Trump show … The oxygen is just going to be sucked out of the room focusing on Trump.”

The effects were already evident in the nascent campaign. In announcing last week that he would not run for president, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan pointed to Trump, saying he feared a “pile up” of low-polling candidates preventing an alternative candidate from “rising up.”

Vivek Ramaswamy — the wealthy biotech entrepreneur and longshot candidate — went the opposite way, diving right into Trump’s orbit. By mid-week, he was calling for “due process” for those arrested in the Jan. 6 riot.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, meantime, took his biggest swing yet at Trump, telling a crowd at the Gridiron dinner on Saturday that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6.”

Even DeSantis, who has largely sidestepped the former president, appears unlikely to avoid him for long. His visit on Friday to Iowa came with Trump right over his shoulder, with Trump set to follow DeSantis into the first-in-the-nation caucus state on Monday.

And then there are the potential candidates who, by virtue of their resumes, are already inextricably tied to Trump. Haley, Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were all part of his administration.

“It feels like candidates are trying to break away from talking about Trump, but keep getting pulled back in,” said Bob Heckman, a Republican strategist who has worked on nine presidential campaigns. “That’s all good for Trump for two reasons. One, it keeps him relevant, and two, I think it’s what he wants. He wants to be the center of attention.”

Trump's likely to stay there, too, as multi-candidate events pick up this spring — followed by debates in which Republicans will be pressed for commentary on the riot and other elements of his tenure.

Already, lanes in the GOP primary are constricting in ways that nod to Trump’s strength, with Hogan’s announcement serving as a tacit acknowledgement of the lack of room for any outspoken Trump critic. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who became the GOP’s most prominent antagonist of Trump, hastaken an appointment as a professor of practice at University of Virginia. Former Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial, became a president ... of the University of Florida.

In the GOP primary, said former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh — who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020 — “It’s going to be Trump, or it’s going to be the Trumpiest son-of-a-bitch out there.”

“That,” he added, “is what this base wants.”

In a normal reelection year for a sitting president, the opposition party would spend its primary at least partly focused on the incumbent — setting up a referendum on President Joe Biden in the fall. But as it was in the midterms in 2022 and, before that — in his own, failed, reelection campaign — the primary is unfolding as a referendum instead on Trump. Noble called it “the sequel, … 100 percent” about Trump. And his opponents, it appears, can do very little about it.

“The press likes him. He’s the story, he’s conflict,” said Beth Miller, a longtime Republican strategist. “How do you not continue to write about him, since all of those issues are still at the forefront.”

It’s possible, if DeSantis or some other Republican makes the primary competitive, that the singular focus on Trump will fade. Significant differences may arise between candidates on immigration, Social Security or any number of other issues.

It's also possible some other candidate will get in, appealing to what former Republican New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman called voters “who have been dissatisfied, who have moved to the independent column” and who “might come back if they saw a Republican they thought was viable and sane and a little more to the center.”

Asked if any names came to mind, however, she said, “No, not right now.”

Once an albatross around Trump’s neck, Jan. 6 is now taboo in the GOP primary

OXON HILL, Md. — Like most politicians considering a White House run, Ron DeSantis published a new book this past week, designed to frame him as an unapologetic truth teller, eager to tackle the hard issues of the day.

But as the work came under scrutiny, reviewers pointed out something missing. The Florida Governor had nothing to say about one of the most consequential political moments of the past few years: the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

They shouldn’t have been surprised.

If any subject is verboten in the early stages of the Republican presidential primary, it’s the insurrection that once served as a defining point in 2024 frontrunner Donald Trump’s career. Whereas Republicans once talked openly about it being disqualifying for the former president, today it is little more than a litmus test in GOP circles of a candidate’s MAGA bona fides. None of them want any part of it.

For a primary candidate, said Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, going after Trump for Jan. 6 is “a huge risk.”

The Jan. 6 avoidance is not just in DeSantis’ book. Mike Pence, the former vice president and likely presidential candidate, is preparing to resist a grand jury subpoena for testimony about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, seeing only political landmines in testifying. Nikki Haley, asked on a podcast recently if she would describe the riot at the Capitol as an “insurrection, a riot, or a coup,” went instead with a more banal — and safer — description: “a sad day in America.”

In the primary, said Dave Carney, a national Republican strategist based in New Hampshire, “I don’t think January 6th will come up, period.”

The insurrection wasn’t always destined to be taboo in GOP primary politics. In the immediate aftermath, the riot appeared to provide an opening not only for Trump’s loudest critics in the party, but also for more mainstream, otherwise-Trumpian Republicans seeking to distinguish themselves from him ahead of 2024.

It was Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, whoonce said she was angry and “disgusted” with Trump and told Republican National Committee members that his “actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.” Pence made his first post-presidential break with Trump by declaring that he and Trump might never “see eye to eye” on the insurrection. DeSantis once openly criticized “the rioting and disorder” at the Capitol.

“The calculation was that this is clearly indefensible, he’s not going to have a place in the party going forward,” said one Republican strategist and former congressional aide. “That clearly hasn’t happened … January 6th is advantageous for Trump in a Republican primary now. Nobody’s going to hit him on January 6th.”

The advantages for Trump, if they do exist, were in plain view at the gathering of conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference. At the yearly confab — held this year outside of Washington — some attendees wore their connection to Jan. 6 as a badge of honor and found sympathetic ears.

Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt — the protester shot and killed by Capital police at the riot as she tried to break down a door inside the building — appeared on set with Donald Trump Jr. outside the convention’s main stage. There were two booths in the CPAC exhibition hall focused on Jan. 6 defendants. And it was standing room only for a breakout session at the conference titled: “True Stories of January 6: The Prosecuted Speak.” Speakers included Jan. 6 defendants Brandon Straka, Simone Gold, West Virginia legislator Derrick Evans, John Strand and Geri Perna, the aunt of Matthew Perna, who died by suicide after pleading guilty to four charges related to the Capitol riot.

In the halls, it wasn’t unusual to bump into people who were protesting on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. Deborah Gordon, a retiree from Maryland, said it was “disgusting” that politicians didn’t talk about Jan. 6 more. “I was there,” Gordon said. Bruce Cherry, the chair of Seminole County Republican executive committee in Florida, said it was important to reelect Trump “to pardon those people.” Melissa Cornwell, who attended CPAC from Beaumont, Texas, called Jan. 6 a “non-event,” adding that the “real insurrection” was the riots that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020.

If anything, the tone and tenor of the conference suggested that Republican presidential candidates may feel pressure from corners of the base to talk about Jan. 6 in positive terms — and rally to the defense of people arrested following the riot.

“I can tell you that just interacting with a lot of the activists here, there is concern that the violations of protocol and civil rights around the Jan. 6 issue haven’t gotten sufficient attention from the Congress, and that’s really a matter for us in the House majority more so than 2024 candidates,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said on the sidelines of CPAC.

Already, the Trump world attacks on potential 2024 contenders for not being sufficiently supportive of the Jan. 6 protesters are coming. Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist and influencer close to the Trumps, said others who could seek the nomination have shown they “don’t care” about Jan. 6 defendants “because they’re going to lose out on the Wall Street money, they hate Trump and his base.” Bruesewitz himself was summoned by the Jan. 6 committee but reportedly pleaded the Fifth when asked to testify about the events on that day. He once said he would help pay for the legal defense of accused Capitol rioters, while Trump has suggested pardoning some Jan. 6 defendants and even collaborated on a song with some of them.

CPAC has grown increasingly aligned with Trump, making it difficult to assess how representative its gathering is of broader Republican politics. Indeed, last August, the conference featured a fake jail cell where a convicted Capitol rioter sat, fake cried, and prayed with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Still, the crowd assembled there was full of precisely the kind of hardline activists critical to presidential contenders in a GOP primary.

In the broader GOP ecosystem, even more moderate Republicans see little upside in mentioning the riot.

“I’m not trying to downplay January 6th and how terrible it was, but really, a lot of us just want to move past this guy, right?” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who worked on George W. Bush's 2004 campaign. “We want to move past him, and move past the awfulness, which culminated on January 6th. That was the peak of Trump awfulness.”

But Graul added that anyone running to be the GOP standard-bearer understood the calculations that come with it.

“We’re still in this stage where if you’re running for the Republican nomination, you’re going to need to get votes from people who voted for Donald Trump,” he said.

Indeed, polls show that there just isn’t much of a constituency in the GOP primary for anyone criticizing Trump on Jan. 6. More than two years after the riot, the share of Republicans who disapprove of Trump supporters taking over the Capitol building has fallen to 49 percent, from 74 percent in 2021, according to arecent Economist/YouGov poll. And even if Republicans didn’t like what they saw that day, a majority of them don’t blame Trump.

Two years ago, Walker said, Jan. 6 was worthy of condemnation. He said so at the time. But it makes no sense for presidential candidates to be talking about it now, he added, when most people have moved on.

Anymore, he said, “Nobody cares.”

Natalie Allison contributed to this report.

What It Looks Like When the Far Right Takes Control of Local Government

WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The agenda for the Ottawa County governing board’s most recent meeting here last week listed, among other issues, a roof repair and resurfacing contract, a budget calendar that needed setting and, from IT, a request to hire one more employee.

They were terrestrial concerns. But over the course of a meeting that ran more than four hours, public speaker after speaker in three-minute increments were debating something else entirely, something far more spiritual — to what extent their government should, or should not, pursue Judeo-Christian values.

As snow dusted the streets outside the county building in this conservative, deeply religious swath of western Michigan, lots of people spoke in favor. They warned of the “tyranny” of mask mandates, the “sexualization of our children” and the “unhinged caterwauling fascists” of the left. One woman thanked the commissioners “for trying to bring our freedom back,” while a man read to them from Isaiah: “Be not dismayed, for I am your God … I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

It's been going like this in Ottawa County since last month, after an upstart band of far-right Republicans unseated seven more traditionalist Republican incumbents, seizing a majority on the 11-member board. The hardliners, members of a group called “Ottawa Impact,” had signed a “Contract with Ottawa” promising to “respect the values and faith of the people of Ottawa County” and to “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations.” They’d pledged to “recognize our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage and celebrate America as an exceptional nation blessed by God.” At candidate forums inside a Baptist church not far from the county offices here, they’d talked about their faith.

Roger Bergman, the sole incumbent Republican commissioner the group failed to oust, had attended one of those forums last year, and as he sat in the audience, he grew concerned. But even Bergman, who at 76 has decades in local politics, wasn’t sure what it would all mean when it came time for a new, far-right majority to actually govern.

That is, until they took office last month, and havoc broke out.

In their first meeting, the new board members adopted a series of measures that changed things in Ottawa County. They fired the county administrator and replaced him with John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official, Christian missionary, failed congressional candidate and election denier who once suggested women should not have the right to vote. They ran out their corporate counsel. They closed the county’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion. They picked for their new public health officer — pending state approval — a safety manager at an HVAC service company who, during the Covid pandemic, suggested ivermectin and neti-pots instead of social distancing and masks. And they rewrote the county motto.

No longer was Ottawa County “Where You Belong,” but, rather, “Where Freedom Rings.”

“Oh, my God,” Bergman said when we met last week, after a commission meeting where a young man in a hoodie, Caden Hembrough, thanked the board majority for standing against “forces of darkness.”

Bergman said, “It’s becoming more and more evident that these people are Christian nationalists.”

Nationally, the most Trumpian, right wing of the Republican Party had been a disaster for the GOP in November, with hardliners losing in competitive states like Pennsylvania and Arizona and underperforming in House races elsewhere. Those candidates’ inability to attract moderate Republicans and independents was a big reason the midterms defied expectations, resulting in a less-than-red-wave year. In Michigan, a swing state, it was the same story. Democrats not only held onto the governorship but flipped the state Legislature, gaining full control of state government for the first time in 40 years.

But if the GOP paid a price elsewhere for its rightward drift, it didn’t here, in a county that Donald Trump carried by more than 20 percentage points in 2020. In this predominately white county of about 300,000 people, the entire election last year was functionally over after the primary. What remained was an object lesson in what happens when the far-right runs the enterprise.

It’s still government. But its meetings can look a lot more like a cross between MAGA rally warm-up acts and a Christian revival.

On the day I visited last week, Ken Schwallier, an apple grower, went to the microphone to thank the new board for “reversing” what he called “a long trend in our country falling away from our constitutional past.”

“We’re part of something new,” he told the commissioners. “It’s a grassroots effort that I’m glad to see here. We don’t see it very many places, but I hope it starts here and grows across the country.”

Bergman sat through the meeting, his gaze fixed on the lectern and his left hand on his chin. He considers himself plenty Christian. A former mayor of the county seat, Grand Haven, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, he’d helped to start a church himself. On his biography on the county website, he’d counted his own blessings from God.

This, he said, was different.

I asked him how, exactly. Earlier this month, the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution had estimated, based on a recent survey, that more than half of Republicans nationally either sympathized with or adhered to views of Christian nationalism, a worldview shaped by the fusion of Christian messaging and American identity. It wasn’t exactly hiding in the corners of American public life.

When the words came to Bergman the next day, he texted me: “The phrase I was looking for yesterday,” he said, “was ‘They have chosen to weaponize Christianity.’”

For anyone who’s endured a county government meeting or flipped past one on public access TV, it may not strike you as the likeliest place for a spiritual crusade.

It wasn’t in Ottawa County, either, before Covid. When I met with Doug Tjapkes, a former newsperson who once owned a local radio station, at the church where he plays the organ every Sunday, he told me that for years he’d tried to hook his listeners on county government, and “no matter what I said or did or editorialized, I couldn’t get much interest.”

But public health mandates related to the pandemic infuriated a group of parents who complained — and litigated, unsuccessfully — about “government overreach” in schools. They formed Ottawa Impact, recruiting a slate of candidates to run against the commission’s Republican incumbents. And they broadened their concerns from public health to a wholesale overhaul of how the county was being run. At one forum last year, at the Lighthouse Baptist Church in Holland, Sylvia Rhodea, a co-founder of Ottawa Impact and, now, vice chair of the county commission, described the election as one that “will decide whether we are going to save America, and that starts local.” America, she said, is a place of opportunity “built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.” The office of diversity, equity and inclusion, she said, was promoting “woke ideology.”

Joe Moss, the group’s other co-founder and, now, chair of the commission, said, “There is a mighty force at our back, and everything that we do, we are doing for the glory of God.”

That’s not Christian nationalism, John DeBlaay, a member of the local Republican Party’s executive board, told me following the board meeting last week It’s just “everyday family people” who “value our faith, our family and our freedom.”

Still, he said, “For the first time in my life, I could honestly tell you it is like a good versus evil fight that’s going on in the world right now.”

The fallout has seemingly come from everywhere. In an email to the board, the county’s outgoing attorney warned that firings of multiple senior county officials would jeopardize the county’s bond rating, saying, “stable counties don’t fire their corporation counsel and administrator.” The county’s top health official, Adeline Hambley, is suing members of the board. And in a letter to the county last week, Dana Nessel, the state’s Democratic attorney general, said she had reviewed dozens of complaints about the board’s behavior at its first meeting, in January, in part related to whether board members had made personnel decisions before being seated, and behind closed doors. Though the state had not determined the board violated open meeting laws, she said, “the alleged conduct of certain commissioners is the antithesis of transparency and good governance.”

In The Holland Sentinel, it’s been headline after headline, like “Christian nationalism is gripping the nation – has it arrived in Ottawa County?” or “Ottawa County’s prospective health officer has no experience. Here’s why that could be a problem.”

And then there are the hourslong public comment sessions at the board’s regular meetings. There are supporters, and there are critics — people who call the board members “fascist,” or “troglodytic.”

“Right now, I’m looking at the face of a theocracy,” one man said to them last week. Karen Obits, a Democrat who said she has supported traditionalist Republicans in the past, told me she was struggling as a Christian to understand an approach to government that she said smacked of “Christo-fascism.”

Later that night, over pizza in Grand Haven, I asked Field Reichardt, a longtime observer of politics in the county, what he thought was going on.

“This is a microcosm of what is happening nationally — the changes that are threatening American democracy,” said Reichardt, a Grand Haven businessperson who worked on the presidential campaigns of George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Pete McCloskey, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, a family friend. “This Christian nationalist movement truly frightens me.”

Reichardt, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a centrist Republican in 2010 before leaving the GOP and becoming an independent last year, said, “They think they are doing God’s work, and they truly believe it. They are beyond right-wing. They are Proud Boys-ian. Clearly, that’s what they are, when they refer to diversity, equity and inclusion as being ‘divisive.’”

We were sitting not far from Tjapkes, who was at the bar with his grandson. He’d been thinking about how big a story this was, and earlier had drawn a comparison to a lengthy strike at an industrial plant in Grand Haven in the 1960s.

But, he told me, “This is deeper.”

“There’s a spiritual dimension here that’s really concerning to me, because every time I hear all this stuff, I think my Lord’s taking a kick in the teeth again,” Tjapkes said. “This isn’t Christianity. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it isn’t the Christianity I know.”

He said, “I think it’s deeper than just political.”

The ascendance of the far-right in Ottawa County is not an isolated case. It happened in Shasta County, Calif., a red enclave in an otherwise blue state. Conservatives across the country have been making runs at school boards.

The problem for hard-liners is that, in general elections in more moderate districts and states, their brand of Republicanism has difficulty traveling.

On the morning after the meeting last week, I met with Steve Redmond, the president of the Ottawa County Patriots, over breakfast not far from the county board’s offices.

His group, which began as part of the tea party movement, had organized the forums at the church where Ottawa Impact candidates spoke last year. His group’s banner hung from the lectern.

The Ottawa Impact movement, said Redmond, who is 75 and has been involved in Republican politics for decades, was a “natural response” to Covid restrictions. It was a “parental rights movement,” he said, not a Christian nationalism.

“Most of them are conservative. They vote Republican. Many of them supported Donald Trump. Most of them are practicing Christians, and their faith is very important to them,” Redmond said of the Ottawa Impact board members. “Yes, in their meetings, they bring up scripture and other things. That’s kind of who they are. But I don’t think they’re trying to create a totalitarian Christian county. I think they’re simply trying to create good governance.”

The one Ottawa Impact-backed board member who agreed to speak with me, Jacob Bonnema, told me the same thing.

“I believe that this new board wants to promote family values and freedom for everyone in Ottawa County,” he said. “It is being mistaken and misreported to be only for some, rather than for everyone, and I resent that accusation.”

Bonnema told me he believed conservative government “is exportable.” However, he told me, “It needs to be done correctly.” He worried “proper processes” weren’t followed at the board’s first meeting, which he missed — an opinion that has put him at odds with some of Ottawa Impact’s most fervent supporters.

Redmond, meantime, had more of a political concern.

For the conservative movement, he said, Ottawa Impact’s takeover of the county board “could end up being counterproductive if they don’t find a way to govern well, dot the I’s, cross the T’s, follow the protocols and resolve some of the current critiques.”

He called it all “very resolvable.” But there is a risk, he said, if the board cannot cool things down.

“They risk having so much of a pushback that some of them would get primaried in two years,” Redmond said. “And even worse, if they didn't get primaried, it will set the stage for the Democrats to come in and take over, and that would be a real disaster.”

Ottawa County is so heavily Republican that’s probably a long way off. But the county is one of the state’s fastest-growing, and change isn’t inconceivable.

Paul Hillegonds, a former Republican speaker of the Michigan state House from Holland, told me that “when you look at the statewide election results, it’s clear there are a lot of disaffected Republicans, and more Republicans voting independently, and I think we’ll see more of that in Ottawa County, I’m guessing, if the party continues to move in the direction it’s going.”

And every indication is that the party is going to. In Lansing over the weekend, the state Republican Party selected Kristina Karamo, an election denier who lost her race for secretary of state last year, as the party’s new chair. And in Ottawa County, Republicans supportive of Ottawa Impact are already privately discussing primarying members the group backed last year but who have since questioned some of their actions, including Bonnema.

This came up during the board meeting last week, after Walter Davis, a retired college professor who had promised to speak at every commission meeting for two years as a form of protest, told the board he had to break that promise on the advice of his doctor. He couldn’t afford to get his blood pressure up.

“It turns out being around you is injurious to my health,” he said.

During a break in the meeting, in the lobby, I watched Bonnema approach Davis and put his hand on his arm.

“I’m sorry we won’t be hearing from you,” he told him. “I find you interesting, even if we disagree.”

It was an unusual, if basic, moment of collegiality in an otherwise disagreeable room, and I mentioned it to the man I was speaking with, a resident supportive of the new board. He wasn’t offended by Bonnema’s gesture of goodwill, but he wondered how long he would be around, anyway.

The far-right had taken over the board once. There was a good chance it could reshape it if its elected officials fell out of line.

As Bonnema walked back into the board room, the man standing beside me said, “He’ll be primaried.”

The DNC Thought It Killed the Iowa Caucus. It's Not Dead Yet.

WATERLOO, Iowa – On the day the Democratic National Committee voted to strip Iowa of its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, a former congressman named Dave Nagle thumbed through a Rolodex full of faded contact cards at his desk on the seventh floor of an old department store building here.

Frost clung to the windows. Nagle knew what was coming. In Philadelphia, where the DNC met, everyone was writing Iowa’s obituary. And when the vote went as expected, his wife, Debi, who was following the proceedings on Twitter from the next room over, came to the door.

Nagle sighed.

“So,” he said, looking up from his desk. “It’s a war.”

For half a century, Iowa had gone first in the presidential nominating process, a fluke of the calendar that revolutionized the modern White House campaign. It was in Iowa that Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, catapulted himself to the presidency in 1976, demonstrating that even a relative nobody could make a name for himself here. The result was a quadrennial spectacle in which presidential candidates crammed into every corn- and soybean-sprouting inch of this small, rural state, transforming Iowa into the presidential campaign’s biggest stage.

But Democrats nationally had for years been tiring of Iowa, which had fallen out of step with the party’s diversifying base. Demographically, Iowa was too white; politically, it was becoming too red. President Joe Biden wanted to drop Iowa and put South Carolina first in the nominating process, and the outcome seemed inevitable.

Unlike in New Hampshire – whose early primary also was being pushed back, and where Democrats were protesting loudly — Iowa never looked like it had much of a leg to stand on. Democrats here had been embarrassed by a botched caucus in 2020, in which the flubbing of the presidential preference count was so severe that the Associated Press could not even declare a winner. They had few allies in Washington, and even fewer after the midterm elections, in which Democrats were swept out of all but one statewide executive office, auditor. Biden, if he runs for re-election as expected, is not likely even to compete here.

“It’s a wasteland,” one Democratic strategist told me. Iowa, he said, is one not-unlikely step from “becoming Idaho.”

Even in Iowa’s home-state media, it seemed as if the battle was over. “Iowa Democrats Lose First in the Nation,” read the ticker on one local TV broadcast. Said another: “Caucuses kicked.” Iowa’s loss of its favored spot on the nominating calendar had seemed like a forgone conclusion for so long in Iowa that the Des Moines Register’s front page account — “Dems drop Iowa from ’24 leadoff spot” — didn’t even run above the fold.

But between the lines in all of that coverage, there was a sign that Iowa might not take the loss of its early caucuses lying down.

The casting off of Iowa, Democrats here said, would damage the party’s standing with white, rural voters in the Midwest – the kind of people Democrats had ceded to Donald Trump in 2016. In carefully worded statements, Iowa Democratic Party officials expressed an openness, at least, to hosting an unsanctioned caucus in the state, ignoring the national party calendar and pressing forward on their own.

In Waterloo, perhaps the most unfortunately named city to wage hostilities from, Nagle was overtly calling for exactly that.

Early on the morning of the DNC vote, he had leaned against a bench on his porch at home while his wife fed deer out back a mix of protein pellets, apples, carrots and corn. He pulled a news story up on his phone about how the caucuses were coming to an end.

“Physically, it hurt,” he said. “I put 40 years into this thing, and to have the president of the United States toss us under the bus. I felt like he’d walked into my own house and told me to leave.”

The national party, Nagle said, was abandoning the Midwest, acting as if “rural America’s gone.”

Scott Brennan, a member of the Democratic National Committee and former chair of the Iowa state party, told me when he got back from Philadelphia that between the Mountain and Central time zones, “they’ve turned a vast swath of the nation into flyover country.”

But Nagle didn’t think Iowa was done yet. He’d driven to the office with his wife. He took a phone call from a local reporter while we spoke. And then he walked across the hall to smoke a Marlboro Light in a storage room, looking out through a small window over Waterloo.

Forty years ago, Nagle had been chair of the state Democratic Party when it prevailed in a dispute with the DNC over a proposal to change the calendar. National Democrats had wanted Iowa to change its date then, too, and Iowa said ‘No.’”

“It’s the same,” he told me, when I asked him how this year’s disagreement with the DNC compared to that one. “We’ll go, and they’ll get mad.”

Biden probably wouldn’t come to Iowa for the caucuses, anyway, if his re-election is uncontested. In 2028, the state would be sitting there for any candidate who saw an opening and was willing to buck the DNC.

Nagle, who will turn 80 in April, stubbed out his cigarette in a trash can on the floor.

“We only lose it when we give it up,” he told me. “And we’re not going to give it up. I hope.”

Nagle’s office is a couple of hours’ drive from Des Moines, where at the Des Moines Marriott, once described as a “‘Star Wars’ Bar Scene for journalists covering Iowa Caucus,” no one complained when I asked the bartender to switch the TV to the local news. But in February of the off year and with no presidential contenders in the immediate vicinity, no one was paying much attention to the plight of the caucuses, either.

A woman visiting from out of town told me she wasn’t “following that.” And even among home-staters, it isn’t clear there will be a mass uprising if the caucuses go.

In a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll in October, just 53 percent of Iowans said it would be best for the country if Iowa holds its nominating contest first, down from 69 percent in 2015. And Iowa Democrats were far less likely than Iowa Republicans — who will still hold their 2024 caucuses here first — to care. Just 44 percent of Iowa Democrats thought the state should go first.

It isn’t just the politically uninformed who feel this way, either.

Not far from the Marriott, at the bar he owns across the street from former President Barack Obama’s old state campaign headquarters, I was speaking with Jeff Link, a veteran Democratic strategist, about the caucuses one recent afternoon when friends of his started dropping by.

There was Steve Logsdon, the owner of Lucca, a mainstay for candidates and reporters, who, when asked if he sensed the caucuses were done, didn’t pause for a second.

“Oh, yeah,” he told me.

“Of course, I want it here,” Logsdon said, but “it’s pretty white here, and pretty rural.”

“As a strategy for Democrats,” Logsdon said, it made more sense to start in a more diverse state.

Then came Loyd Ogle, a lawyer and owner of a cocktail lounge in town, who said, “From a local perspective, sure it’s really sad to see this happen.”

However, he said, given “all the money that campaigns pour into an [early] state — voter registration and everything else … it kind of makes sense” to go somewhere more competitive.

Iowa, he said, is “going meat red … going the way of Kansas.”

John Deeth, who runs a Democratic political blog in Iowa City, told me, “Frankly, there are a lot of people who like having [presidential candidates’] cell phone numbers and like feeling important, and they, I think, are the ones who are embittered by this.”

“A lot is lost,” he said. “I mean we’re not talking about just losing who votes first. Everything about the way Iowa Democrats have done business for the last 50 years has changed. The whole model of organizing was based around that ‘first’, and now we’ve got to build a new model.”

He added, “But it’s inevitable that this is going to happen, because we are in too weak of a position to prevent it.”

It was Biden, the sitting president, after all, who proposed that South Carolina go first — no skin off his back after finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire in the 2020 primary, before a primary victory in South Carolina resurrected his campaign. The DNC would move South Carolina to the front of the line, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada, then Georgia and Michigan, a state that has its own share of rural voters.

At the bar, Link shook his head.

It's true that Democrats don’t find much support in rural areas. In the 2020 election, Biden carried the nation’s cities and suburbs but lost rural America by 15 percentage points. But in a competitive state — and Iowa is bordered by two of them, Minnesota and Wisconsin — even marginal differences in the rural vote can tip an election. A rural Democrat in those states, or in Pennsylvania or Michigan, can see just as well as an Iowan where Democrats are or aren’t holding their early primaries, and draw judgments from that about where the party’s priorities lie.

Link, who has studied voters who flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016, said, “It’s not only our presidential interests that would benefit, but it would certainly make it easier to maintain a Senate majority if we could do somewhat OK in a rural state.”

“Nationally,” he said, “Democrats think that we should write off certain parts of the country and double down on other parts” — the latter being urban centers and their diversifying suburbs, the former being rural, white, non-college educated swaths of the country where Democrats have been losing in recent years.

For Iowa Democrats who care about preserving an early caucus, one significant problem is that there aren’t as many of them in elected office as there once were to get upset about it. Trump beat Biden in the state by more than 8 percentage points in 2020. In November, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds beat her Democratic challenger by nearly 20 points, and Republicans hold every U.S. Senate and House seat here.

There’s Nagle and Brennan and the state party chair, former state Sen. Rita Hart. And there are concerned Democrats like Link. In the run-up to the DNC meeting, Nagle and two former leaders of the Iowa Republican Party had held a news conference at the state Capitol to rally public support for the caucuses.

But it’s been 30 years since Nagle left Congress. No one here — on the issue of the caucuses, at least — has the White House on speed dial.

Following the DNC vote, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the DNC, went on MSNBC for a victory lap. The party’s new nominating calendar “looks like the Democratic Party, and it reflects the diversity of America,” he said. For 50 years, he said, Iowa and New Hampshire had been the “one-two step” in the process, and “we are just changing that.”

It may not be that straightforward. New Hampshire party officials say they can’t comply with the new calendar because it conflicts with a state law. For Georgia to hold an earlier primary, it will require the cooperation of Republican elected officials there.

That uncertainty has left Iowa in something of a holding pattern. As Brennan told me, “Nothing is settled.”

In a prepared statement issued the day of the DNC vote, Hart, like her counterparts in New Hampshire, raised the issue of state law, saying it “requires us to hold precinct caucuses before the last Tuesday in February, and before any other contest.” But there’s a lot of gray area there. Those caucuses could be limited to more routine party business. Or, as Nagle is suggesting, the party could run them as an unsanctioned, full-blown presidential contest, risking losing delegates or other punishments from the DNC.

When I asked Hart about it last week, after she returned from the DNC meeting in Philadelphia, she said, “We do have a bit of flexibility here.”

Regarding the prospect of a rogue caucus, she said, “We are certainly open to that conversation.”

There’s another, longshot possibility, too. It’s not hard to imagine the party acquiescing if it was offered a later date on the early-state calendar — not the first nominating contest, but one of them, if Georgia or New Hampshire falls out of the early state window.

“Iowans are practical people, right?” Hart said. “We’re willing to work with people.”

In a bid to make some headway with the DNC, Iowa Democrats proposed dramatically changing their caucuses, a process that traditionally required voters to spend long evenings in church basements or gymnasiums to express their preferences. The arcane procedure had come under criticism from Democrats who worried it disenfranchised voters with jobs or children or less than a full evening in the middle of winter to devote to the task.

Instead, in filings with the DNC, Iowa Democrats proposed a vote-by-mail process. They emphasized the ability in Iowa of lesser-known candidates to make an impression in a small state, as Carter had, without requiring wheelbarrows full of money. And, cognizant of their electorate’s relative lack of diversity, they noted the success of Obama, a Black man, Hillary Clinton, a woman, and Pete Buttigieg, a gay man, here.

The national party does have some incentive to work with Iowa. That’s because Republicans will be caucusing here first in 2024 as usual, an extended campaign that will draw enormous media attention that Democrats will not want to be entirely cut out of.

The DNC could send messengers to Iowa to counter Republican talking points without sanctioning their own caucuses here. Still, there haven’t been any signs from the DNC that it would welcome Iowa back into an early state spot, and few people here are counting on it.

The calendar change was a “mistake,” said Tom Miller, Iowa’s longtime Democratic state attorney general who was defeated in November. “They’ve thrown out rural America.”

But, he told me, “They seem to be set in their ways.” Unlike years ago, Miller said, the DNC has “more power, and they have more allies.”

“They have pretty much everybody against us and New Hampshire,” he said.

The result is that Iowa Democrats — and especially caucus stalwarts like Nagle — have been backed into a corner.

“Just duck this time,” Nagle said. Biden almost certainly won’t campaign in the state. But it’ll be an open primary four years later.

“We’ll go in ’28,” he said.

And if sanctions from the DNC, including the loss of delegates, results in candidates not competing that year, so be it. Some year, a credible Democratic candidate — perhaps trying to appeal to rural voters, or to anti-Washington sentiment — might see Iowa as Carter did, as an opening.

One recent morning in Des Moines, Link offered to drive me around to see some old caucus sites. We walked into the hotel where Hillary Clinton conceded defeat to Obama in the caucuses in 2008. We drove up to the Val Air Ballroom, site of the “Dean scream,” and past Jeb Bush’s old Iowa headquarters, which is now a Pilates studio. At the Iowa State Fair, snow piled up in the parking lot in front of the giant slide and tables were stacked inside a vacant Bud Tent. Nearby, an RV show was going on.

I suggested to Link that the idea of Iowa keeping its early caucus date in 2024 seemed a bit like putting a terminal patient on life support.

It was 13 degrees out, and Link took a more optimistic view. The more accurate description, he said, was that the caucuses would be “hibernating.”

In an open primary in 2028, he suspected, a candidate like Kamala Harris, the vice president whose own presidential run didn’t even make it to Iowa in 2020, might follow the DNC’s prescribed calendar and spend her time in South Carolina or whichever state the DNC chooses to go first that year.

“But if it’s the next Bernie [Sanders], who gets dismissed by the establishment but catches fire and has the ability to raise funds online?” he asked. “Who knows?”

AC/DC was playing on the radio. Link turned his Cadillac SRX back towards town. So long as the state doesn’t surrender its position on the calendar, he said, all it really would take is the right candidate.

Iowa, Link said, needed a candidate — if not a party — who understood it.

He said, “We need a new Jimmy Carter.”

Dianne Feinstein's extremely awkward, very uncomfortable exit from the political stage

LOS ANGELES — Several of her House colleagues are already running for her Senate seat. She isn’t raising real money. And it’s so widely assumed that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is on her way out that Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, felt free this week to publicly endorse a would-be successor — if Feinstein retires.

An extreme awkwardness has fallen over California political circles, where virtually everyone is acting as if Feinstein is done, but without her explicitly saying so. It’s the electoral equivalent of clearing the dessert from the dinner table as one guest sits there, nibbling at the main course chicken dish that had been served hours prior.

“God bless her,” said Garry South, a Democratic strategist who has worked on major statewide campaigns in California. “But the most pathetic part of politics is when somebody doesn’t know when it’s time to leave.”

Feinstein, the longest-serving Democrat in the Senate, is in the midst of one of the most uneasy codas to a political career. Her extended pre-departure has, for many of her fellow Democrats, turned into an abject lesson in the perils of hanging on.

“She’s still the state’s senior senator,” said one longtime Democratic strategist in California. “And they’re dancing on her [political] grave.”

The oldest member of Congress at 89, Feinstein has for decades been a fixture in Democratic politics here. But as the electorate in California shifted, her brand of centrism fell out of step with her party’s progressive base — so much so that the California Democratic Party in the 2018 primary declined to endorse her reelection bid. She ran and won handily anyway.

More problematic for Feinstein has been the persistent questions about her health. Even Democrats sympathetic to the senator have been reading headlines about her cognitive fitness to serve. The stories about it pop up with such regularity now that they no longer elicit the shock value of the early versions, when publication of such matters seemed to be violating some unwritten code of D.C. conduct.

Feinstein’s office has long batted down such talk, saying she has her full faculties and remains utterly capable of executing the job of senator to the nation’s most populous state. Still, it’s a long way from the days of Harvey Milk or the “year of the woman” when she and Barbara Boxer became the first women elected to the Senate from California in 1992. Heck, it’s a long way from 2019, when Annette Bening was portraying her as an anti-torture, Bush administration-fighting crusader in the political drama “The Report.”

In California, Democrats are left looking for signs that she, too, sees that the show is coming to a close. That includes even those supporting her.

After Feinstein this week reported raising less than $600 in the last fundraising period, one of her small-dollar donors, a Carlsbad, Calif., man named William Betts, said, “I have some automatic payments in there that are still ongoing.”

“I would much prefer a younger candidate, certainly anybody from Gen X,” he said. “My preference is that she retires.”

Much of California would appear to be ready for that. In a Berkeley IGS Poll taken about a year ago, Feinstein’s job approval rating in the state hit an all-time low of 30 percent. An October measure by the Public Policy Institute of California put her approval rating higher, at 41 percent among likely voters, but still underwater.

“There hasn’t been much that’s been said in terms of her recent leadership that’s been positive,” said Mark Baldassare, director of the poll. “It really has been a while since I’ve read or heard glowing remarks about her.”

Still, he said that if he was polling on the Senate race now, he would include her.

“Until further notice,” he said, “she’s the senator.”

But almost everyone else in California, it seems — some more gently than others — is preparing for her not to be. Pelosi, before issuing her conditional endorsement of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said that if Feinstein does seek reelection, “she has my whole-hearted support.” But no politician puts out that kind of statement if they expect her to. Schiff and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) are already running. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), has told her colleagues she plans to. Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is giving consideration to the race.

The already declared candidacies, in turn, have ignited a scramble among eager Democrats downstream from them to announce campaigns for their soon-to-be-open House seats.

“It seems like all of them are handling it professionally, and honoring Dianne,” said Bob Mulholland, a veteran Democratic strategist and former Democratic National Committee member.

Even if the rush to fill a chair that Feinstein still occupies is, collectively, “pretty tasteless,” as one Democratic strategist described it, it may be hard to fault politically. The California primary will be in March of 2024 — just more than a year away — and candidates will need to raise tens of millions of dollars to compete in the state’s enormous media markets.

“What’s sad about this is that she’s always been somebody you didn’t dare mess around with,” the strategist said. “And it looks like that’s just gone.”

Already, Schiff is raising money and Porter, with her whiteboards out, is bringing in cash too. At her first campaign event, in Northern California last month, she told the crowd it’s time for “a fresh new voice” in the Senate.

For her part, Feinstein has hardly batted an eye at the spectacle surrounding her, even if the pre-announcement announcements run counter to what Boxer adviser Rose Kapolczynski called “a long tradition of deference.”

“The senator has said on a few occasions the more the merrier,” a Feinstein spokesperson said. Of Feinstein’s own timeline, she told Bloomberg News that she’ll announce plans “in the spring sometime.”

“Not in the winter,” Feinstein said. “I don’t announce in the winter.”

If she does announce her retirement, it may dramatically shift the opinion her constituents have of her. Politicians are often more popular when they go.

“There will be all the usual retrospectives about her career and her groundbreaking moments, and gun control and abortion and Harvey Milk and all of that,” Kapolczynski said. “There’ll be an afterglow. Once you announce you’re not running again, you get an afterglow from the voters.”

That will likely come no matter when Feinstein makes her announcement. And after 30 years in the Senate, some Democrats say, she has clearly earned the right to make her plans on whatever timeline she likes.

“I think she’s been a great senator, but you know … the writing’s been on the wall all for a while,” said Steve Maviglio, a former New Hampshire state lawmaker and Democratic strategist in California. “I think she wants to bow out on her terms.”

The State Where the GOP Would Rather Lose Than Change

PHOENIX — In a megachurch where the Arizona Republican Party met over the weekend to chart its course following heavy losses in the midterms, a package of resolutions was up for consideration, including one to censure Republican officials involved in running past elections.

The question on the floor was how.

Stepping to the microphone in the sanctuary, a man who introduced himself as a combat Vietnam veteran suggested that the way the party censures politicians — a punishment previously slapped onthe late Sen. John McCain, his widow, Cindy, former Gov. Doug Ducey and former Sen. Jeff Flake, among others – was insufficient for the times.

Instead, he said, “We should duct tape people to a tree in a dog park, so the dogs can pee on them. And then, when they’re there for a few hours and they have to crap in their pants, they can wallow in their own shit.”

Take pictures of them, he said. When I reached him later by phone to make sure I understood, the veteran, a man named Mark Del Maestro, told me the point is “public humiliation.”

On stage, Tyler Bowyer, a conservative activist and Republican national committeeman, deadpanned that Robert’s Rules of Order would let the body “censure anyone however you want.” But, he said, tongue in cheek, “I don’t know how much duct tape we have here.”

What he didn’t mention was that the way things are going in the Arizona GOP, it would need a lot.

In Washington, the lesson many Republican political professionals expected their party to draw from a less-than-red-wave midterm was that the most hard-right politics of the Trump era were weighing them down – that general election voters were tiring of election denialism and, if not Donald Trump himself, his grievances about the 2020 election. Many high-profile candidates the former president rammed through the primaries last year lost in November, and in Arizona, the wreckage was particularly severe.

Kari Lake, a former TV anchor and one of the GOP’s most prominent election deniers, had become such an electrifying candidate that she was compelled to tamp down speculation about a vice presidential run. But then she lost. So did the hard-liners running for U.S. Senate, state attorney general and secretary of state. For too many independents and moderate Republican voters, they were a turn-off.

Arizona was a “perfect political science experiment” for the GOP nationally, Stan Barnes, a former state lawmaker and Republican consultant in Arizona, told me.

“We had the best candidate in anyone’s lifetime in Kari Lake, and she had the Republican wind at her back,” he said. “Yet, Kari lost. And I think the post-mortem is, you can’t stand on, ‘The whole system’s corrupt’ and ‘Elections are stolen’ as a platform for why people should vote for you.”

He said, “No matter what you or I think of the reality of it, if you want to win the election and you want to change things, it’s not the way to win.”

Yet denialism and its attendant conspiracies animate a large swath of the Republican Party — still. And if Arizona is any example, it suggests that a not insignificant percentage of the national electorate is determined to run the same doomed experiment again in 2024.

Inside the cavernous Dream City Church, where a conspiracy movie about the 2020 election called “The Deep Rig” premiered in 2021, and where the GOP now gathered in early 2023, there was no reckoning with midterm losses, at all.

Addressing the rank-and-file, the outgoing state party chair, Kelli Ward, said, “Things at the party are going great.”

In “Ultra MAGA” hats and pins that read “Don’t California My Arizona,” about 2,000 convention-goers streamed into a sanctuary with red and blue backlighting and large screens flanking the stage. They wanted audits of the last election, or the one before that, or of the state party’s finances itself. Some complained about voting machines, including those Arizona Republicans had used themselves that day to elect the new party chair, Jeff DeWit, a former state treasurer and former Trump campaign chief operating officer.

Upstairs, an activist DeWit defeated, Steve Daniels, was sitting alone in the balcony with his unsubmitted ballot on the floor beside him. “Machines are fraud” he’d printed over it by hand in black ink.

Yet if it’s hard to hold your own elections when election denialism is your thing, DeWit was such a consensus choice that his victory was never really in doubt. It’s the elections Democrats won that the assembled Republicans assembled still have problems with. The party rejected a proposal to accept the results of the 2020 election and “not belabor or try to overturn old elections, but work to win upcoming ones.” It rejected a proposal to honor John McCain for being a "dedicated Arizona statesman and a lifelong Republican who embraced bipartisanship." And it voted by a large margin to censure Republican elected officials in Maricopa County, including Stephen Richer, the county recorder, and Supervisor Bill Gates, for their part in overseeing previous elections.

Distinct from procedural disputes about voting ID or mail voting, majorities of Republicans in poll after poll still adhere to Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged. In the more than two years since Trump lost, as allegations of fraud have repeatedly been shown to be unfounded and nonfactual, it persists as an article of faith—– more an assertion of a belief that Democrats could not possibly have beaten them, even if they did.

In the courtyard, Sally Kizer, who, with her husband, Carl, started a tea party group in Yuma County, told me Lake “was robbed.”

The election “stinks,” said M.J. Coking, a state committeewoman from Chandler.

“Throw out the election and run it again,” said Chad Moreland, a Republican in an American flag blazer.

There were things Republicans could do better, they were sure. They could raise more money or run more sophisticated turnout operations than they had last year. A candidate like Lake could learn to “pivot” more effectively for a general election audience, one strategist told me.

But these were tactical concerns. There was no reason for a more wholesale overhaul if — as nearly everyone I came across maintained — Republicans didn’t really lose.

Trump, Coking told me, is “the only one who can fix anything.”

She said, “I’m waiting for marching orders.”

For true believers, said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in the state, “it’s this whole chicken-and-egg thing. Did we lose the election because of denialism, or did Democrats fix the election?”

It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true, he said. “How do you combat that?”

Like many more traditionalist Republicans, Marson had thought the party’s losses in November might result in some introspection. But he wasn’t counting on it, anymore.

At this point, he said, “the party may have to die to be reborn.”

When I visited Arizona just before the November election, it seemed to many political observers of both parties that Lake might win the governorship and that if American democracy fell apart — no small consideration, after 2020 and the riot at the Capitol — it would probably happen here first. Lake had said she would not have certified the 2020 election, and she was hedging on whether she’d accept the result of her own race — only “if we have a fair, honest and transparent election.” Republicans were camping out in front of ballot drop boxes. Near one, masked men in tactical gear were seen.

When Lake lost, it didn’t take long to find the reason.

In an analysis of the vote in Maricopa County, where a majority of Arizona’s votes are cast, a group of elections experts, including Benny White, a former data analyst for the state Republican Party, found Lake and other hard-right candidates had turned off thousands of voters who otherwise leaned Republican. In the governor’s race, about 40,000 voters who favored Republicans in other races on their ballots did not vote for Lake; about 33,000 of them actually voted for the Democrat, Katie Hobbs, instead.

At least part of the reason so many Republican-leaning voters defected, White told me, was Lake’s insistence on feeding the base’s addiction to election denialism.

“All of that is nonsense for the most part, but it’s very hard to discredit it,” he said. “Once people begin to think in those terms … it gets ingrained in their thinking about things, and it’s hard to dissuade them with facts and logical presentations of actual records.”

He said, “I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I have to deal with reality most of the time, and it just, it confounds me.”

One problem is that losing may not be enough to shift the perceptions of conspiracy-minded Republicans. If anything, it may make it harder — not easier — for them to let go.

Last month, the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research released polling by Echelon Insights, a Republican firm, that showed Republican voters had become more confident in elections administration nationally than they were following the presidential election, especially when asked about elections in their home states, where 82 percent overall said they were run well. But in states where Republicans lost significant races — like Arizona — fewer Republicans expressed confidence in the process. In Arizona, just 56 percent of Republican voters said they were confident about how elections here were run.

On a call with reporters, I asked David Becker, the group’s founder and executive director, if there was one state more than others that he worried about election denialism in the run-up to 2024.

“Yeah,” said Becker, a former attorney in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. “This is not going to shock anyone, but Arizona.”

In the wake of the 2020 election, it was the site of the farcical “audit” that served as a destination for election truthers from across the country. Now, it is where Lake is still refusing to concede, appealing a failed legal case to overturn the results of her unsuccessful midterm campaign.

“The election denialism,” Becker said, “has really taken hold.”

It’s easy to read too much into a party gathering. State conventions attract the most fervent members of a party — the kind of people who not only know who their state party chair is or what resolutions they’re passing, but care. Most voters don’t.

But what Republicans saw unfolding in Arizona last year was something close to a convergence of the hard-right politics of its convention-going class with its primary electorate. This was no longer the party whose fringe loathed McCain but couldn’t stop him from winning primaries in which non-activist conservatives cast ballots, including in 2016 against Ward. In Lake, they found someone who could beat the traditionalists — in her case defeating a credible centrist candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson. Even after losing the general election, she remains at the center of the Republican universe here.

The reason for her appeal was evident on the night after the convention, when a large crowd of supporters wedged into a swelteringly hot room and spilled out into the lobby at a golf resort in Scottsdale for a campaign-style rally for Lake. One of her warm-up acts referred to her as a “winner.” And Lake, while she was on stage, took a call from Trump, who despite a slumpy start to his 2024 campaign is still a frontrunner to win the nomination. When Lake brought up Richer and Gates, the two Maricopa County officials the party censured, the room responded with jeers.

Gates was expecting the censure. Election deniers, he told me when I met him for coffee the day before the state party convention, “control the institutions of the Arizona Republican Party.”

Before he gained a national profile for his resistance to election disinformation in Arizona — so much so that that he was forced to leave his house temporarily, and with a security detail, following the midterms — Gates had been part of the institution, too. He started a teenage Republican club at his high school with Republican Gov. Jan Brewer’s son Michael in the 1980s. He went on to serve as a precinct committeeman and a state committeeman in the party. But now he was a pariah in party circles.

He told me, “They call us the establishment. We are literally not … Within the party, they’re the institution. We are now on the outside looking in.”

He said, “I thought after losing all these races, we would have a reckoning. But it’s going in the opposite direction.”

Over and over at the state party convention, Republicans suggested they were aware of the splintering in their party. When Rep. Paul Gosar, the far-right Republican, led convention-goers in the Pledge of Allegiance, he asked them to “particularly emphasize the word ‘indivisible.’” DeWit called Democrats the party’s shared, “real enemy.” And in the courtyard, Tim Rafferty of Riders USA, a gun rights group promoting a rally in Arizona a few weeks later, said there had to be something Republicans could do to win over “normals” — if not the members of the party often derided as “Republicans in name only,” or “RINOs,” the “many people in the [political] middle.”

“That’s a tough nut to crack,” he said.

The condition of the party, said Mac Rojo, a state committeeman, is “tenuous, because we have too much infighting.”

But Rojo, a retired sheriff’s detective who was walking two Maltese-Chihuahua mix dogs into the church in a stroller, said the solution was not for Republicans to moderate — or to let the 2020 election go. There was the practical point that Republicans, in his view, were losing elections they’d really won. And then there was the moral argument — the party’s responsibility to “fight evil” in the Democratic Party and the elections that put them in power, which he thought of as crimes not unlike “if somebody shot their mother or raped their daughter.”

It’s possible that a Republican might come along — either a presidential nominee or a candidate for statewide office in 2024 — who could appeal to Republicans like Rojo, and to more moderate members of the party, as well. DeWit, the party chair, might be evidence of that. Rojo was wearing a DeWit sticker on his shirt. DeWit was widely viewed as the most palatable candidate to traditionalist Republicans. But he also had Trump’s endorsement and appeared at the Lake rally — “all the proper credentials to be the mayor of Crazy Town,” as one Republican strategist put it to me.

DeWit, said Marson, is “absolutely not crazy,” just “crazy-adjacent.”

That might be a winning formula for candidates for public office, too. It will almost have to be to survive a Republican primary here. But it is a difficult line to walk in a party that has not gotten over 2020. Or, now, 2022.

“That’s where it gets complicated,” Barnes told me. “I think folks that want to lead the party going forward, perhaps even folks who want to run for office, are trying to have it both ways. They don’t want to let go of the fervor that they find in audiences that react to the smashmouth, America First rhetoric.”

But that fervor comes at a cost that party leaders appear to be contemplating. “These are not dumb people,” he said. “I think someone’s going to break out and start changing that personality of the party so that it goes back to attracting the majority in Arizona.”

When I asked him who that might be, he replied, “I don’t know. There are seven million people here. We’ve got to have somebody.”

For now, even after losing, it’s Republicans like Lake. Inside the convention hall, cheers went up when she was referred to as “the legitimate governor,” while traditionalist Republicans like Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell were loudly booed.

For Del Maestro, there was a mix of laughter and applause.

Del Maestro, who made the local news in 2020 when he said at a rally that he didn’t want to “have to shoot” anyone again, said he made his duct tape proposal at the convention in an effort to “lighten it up” inside. The laughter in the room suggested he’d succeeded. The whoops and applause suggested they liked the idea, even if they weren’t serious about it. Someone told him afterward, he said, that it would be illegal to tape someone to a tree without their permission — that law enforcement officers would view it as kidnapping.

Still, he told me, there’s what’s legal and there’s what “you can get away with.”

“It’s like, who’s counting the votes?” he said.

“If you did that a couple of times,” he said, “the RINOs would go away.”

Governors to voters: The state of our nation is bleak, except under me

If you’d sat in the Wyoming statehouse as Gov. Mark Gordon issued his State of the State address last week, it may have seemed as if the end times were near.

Not only had the “misguided” energy policies of the Biden administration “cost our nation dearly these past two years,” the Republican governor said, but “this winter, there are families in America – the richest and most advanced country in the world – living under a very real threat of freezing in the dark.”

“Leaner times appear likely,” he said. “Economic uncertainties,” he added, “may conspire against us.” But Gordon did have one exception to the Armageddon he was describing: He and his state were doing a bang-up job.

“The state of Wyoming,” Gordon said, “is strong, and her future is bright.”

Across the nation in this season of inaugural and State of the State addresses, the sense of looming catastrophe is seemingly everywhere. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat and chair of the National Governors Association, suggested the “notion of the American dream is harder to achieve for too many people.” In Idaho, Republican Gov. Brad Little pointed to “flashing red lights in the economy” and accused Washington, D.C. of “driving America towards an economic cliff.” And in South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem saw misery coming both from Washington, where “our Constitutional freedoms are under assault,” and in grocery stores she said she’s visited in recent months, where she said about a quarter of the shoppers she’s seen in line have had to put something back because they couldn’t pay for it.

The remarks may reflect both the Republican instinct to play up down times with a Democrat in the White House and the Democratic instinct not to boast too hard under the same circumstances. But they also come at a time when inflation has begun to recede nationally, the job market remains robust and unemployment is at a 50-year low. Like the seasoned pols they are, the governors made a point of offering some self-aggrandizing carve outs to their forecasts of doom.

Specifically, they — and their state alone — are doing it right.

“In a world increasingly marked by chaos, Iowa’s strength and stability stand out,” said Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor of Iowa.

Or perhaps the stand-out state is New Jersey, which Murphy said is “not just a model for our nation, but is leading our nation.” Or it’s Ohio, which Republican Gov. Mike DeWine maintained is having a “moment.” In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, channeled Mark Twain: California “lights out the territory for the rest,” the governor said, “molding the character of the nation.”

Such swagger from ambitious heads of state is nothing new. But for years, the contrasts that governors drew with one another were largely on economic lines: boasts about job creation, unemployment rates, or businesses that they were able to lure to their state.

The response to the coronavirus pandemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the ascendance of cultural wars in the Donald Trump era, has added another dimension, highlighting the power of governors and their divergent ideologies. The inaugural or state of the state address is now, more than anything, a place to shadowbox.

In her State of the State address last week, Noem, a potential presidential or vice presidential contender, held South Dakota out as “the freest state in the nation,” while New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, in his fourth inaugural address, asserted that his state during his tenure had “become an island of freedom surrounded by, frankly, highly taxed and highly regulated states.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, cast his state as the place “where woke goes to die,” to which Murphy, in his State of the State address, responded, “I’m not even sure I know what that means.”

It’s not just the nation’s highest-profile chief executives getting in on the crowing, either. It may be news to most, but Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, is aware of “jealousy” about his state, “because now, all of a sudden, we’re the diamond in the rough that they missed.”

“We’re in a never-before-seen era of contrast between red and blue states,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “What state you live in has become a subtext for what your politics must be, and I don’t think that was ever really true until the last six years or so.”

Covid, he said, “has thrown an accelerant on the way governors have presented their states. It became more a point of contrast – open or closed, mandate or no mandate, pro-vaccine or vaccine skeptic. There were very few governors who played it down the middle.”

The governors’ addresses have not been without some introspection about what could improve within their geographic boundaries. In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, pointed last week to the relatively high rates of smoking and obesity in his state, where “our life expectancy in Indiana has declined in recent years.” In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the newly-elected Democratic governor, warned of “potential catastrophe that will happen in just a few months” if lawmakers do not address an education funding cap, while noting the state is facing a “drought unlike anything in modern times.”

In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, after a closer-than-expected election, warned that inflation was harming Empire Staters. “And on top of that,” she added, “how do you pay the monthly rent, or the mortgage? It’s just so overwhelming for our families.”

That reality-telling may be a reflection of what audiences expect to hear in a year where some two-thirds of Americans say things in the country generally are off on the wrong track and economists think a recession is likely. But it is also the rhetorical prerequisite to what each governor really wants to say.

“You have to show people that you live in a reality-based world, or anything else you say isn’t going to be taken seriously,” said Julie Roginsky, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Murphy. “Then you can position yourself as the messiah who’s going to fix it.”

And the head of state speech is where that positioning gets done.

"What we’re doing in South Dakota is reverberating across this country and around the world,” said Noem.

“Ohio is truly the state of opportunity in this whole country,” said DeWine.

“I believe we are the greatest state in this nation,” said Hobbs.

“Our state’s success has been nothing short of extraordinary,” said Little.

In some states, exceptionalism may simply be preordained.

In Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee said, “ambition and audacity are both embedded in our state’s DNA.”

Or as Newsom put it, “It’s in our genes.”

Mathew Littman, a Democratic consultant and former Joe Biden speechwriter, said “this is a relatively new thing, this battle between states.” And it ignores the reality that many trendlines in America — how the economy is doing, or crime — are subject to national forces and broadly shared by states. In the end, Littman doubted how much most people care.

“It doesn’t really affect anybody’s day-to-day life,” he said.