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The midterm electorate typically tends to be more male, white and conservative than in presidential years. But door-knocking this cycle, Jacobs said she has met many women who don't normally vote in midterm elections but answer the door eager to talk about the possibility of increasing female representation in Congress."They have done their research; they know who the candidates are," she said during an interview at a picnic table on Moonlight Beach. "They are excited to be voting for female candidates," she said, noting her focus on issues like affordable childcare, the link between gun violence and domestic violence, and the challenges confronting both women in the military in this veteran-heavy district.

Voters have also approached her after debates dispensing advice about her appearance, her hairstyle and demeanor -- telling her, for example, that she needs to speak slower or that her voice is too high. ("I get that one a lot," she says)."I think that's partially because I'm young, partially because I'm a woman, people do feel more comfortable coming up and giving me that type of feedback," Jacobs said. "It's also that the subconscious image of a leader in people's minds is a very specific thing. In some cases my voice sounds too high to them, because it's not a male voice. And I don't look like a leader to them. So part of it is explaining to them -- it feels weird because you haven't seen it before."

There has been little reliable public polling in California-49. A number of internal polls have shown Jacobs, environmental advocate Mike Levin, and Applegate, an attorney and retired Marine colonel, bunched together in second place. Several California strategists said they believe Paul Kerr, a small business owner and US Navy veteran who has sent several negative mailers about Jacobs' credentials, appears to be trailing that pack.

"She's been so supportive of us as this grassroots movement, and us as women," Shaewitz said. "She's so young, and some people see that as a negative. I look it as a positive. I asked her the other day 'How are you not tired?' and she said 'Youth.' She said, 'It's my generation that is being affected by these policies,'" Shaewitz recalled."Look at this tough race that she's in; people have asked her to get out of it for the sake of the Democratic Party, and she won't," Shaewitz said. "I have so much respect for that. She's 29. She could be doing anything."

There are eight Republicans on the ballot in the 49th, but Republican support appears to have consolidated behind Diane Harkey, who was endorsed by Issa.

the lawyer to the president of the United States claimed in court that the president can’t be charged with a crime while he’s in office — even if shot someone dead on Fifth Avenue.

Nine.That's the number of GOP senators who have not yet signed on to a resolution penned by Lindsey Graham to condemn the House's impeachment inquiry.

The move isn’t surprising given Biden’s cash situation (just $9 million in the bank as of Sept. 30), and given the paid Trump TV ads already hitting the former vice president.

That said, Barack Obama certainly accepted Super PAC help during his 2012 re-election bid. So did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general

Pete Buttigieg clarified a statement that he’d like to see more Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy, if he were elected president.

The Justice Department is moving its administrative inquiry into the Russia probe to a criminal investigation

He thinks Democrats are making a huge mistake in the campaign so far – by telling voters who they really are. The main candidates are veering too far left, he thinks, away from the disaffected Trump voters they will have to turn.

to Wilson, Democratic “policy is the enemy”, whether it concerns Medicare for All, gun control or women’s right to choose.

“Guys like me who still work on the Trump side of the fence can always turn it into something that is a millstone around their neck. It’s not even that hard. Elizabeth Warren produces a 600-page healthcare plan and my research geeks can’t find, I don’t know, 30 things in there that I can’t demagogue the hell out of? Because I can. Or the guys that are me now can.”

Away from the coasts and the college towns, Wilson contends, America is still a conservative place. Accordingly, Running Against the Devil contains a lot of what its author calls “tough love”, telling harsh truths and demanding Democrats put party purity aside

“No matter how much they want to talk about choice and reproductive rights, when you go into Catholic communities it is still a burden on them and they don’t have this ability to say, ‘Maybe rural Michigan isn’t the same thing as San Jose, California.’”

Wilson insists Trump’s defeat in the popular vote in 2016 – by nearly 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton – didn’t matter. Nor will it matter if Trump wins in the electoral college again. Them’s the rules, they ain’t changing soon and if a state doesn’t help paint the college blue, no Democrat should visit it for anything other than dollars.

“You’ve got to run where the game is played and fight where the fight is, which is these 15 electoral college swing states, and those states are not as woke and liberal as other parts of the country.”

“This isn’t rocket science. How did we Republicans elect guys in Wisconsin and Vermont and other places in recent years? We did it because we weren’t running them as national Republican figures. We helped elect a Republican governor in Vermont, four times. And you’re thinking, ‘Wow, Vermont, super liberal, how did that happen?’ Well, our guy was out there saying the Bush administration was wrong on climate change.

Asked which Democrat is best suited for the fight, Wilson admits to being impressed by Warren’s willingness to work hard and how she champions the little guy. But he still goes for Joe Biden.

“I think it will be Biden because name ID is very powerful,” he says of the former senator and vice-president. “He is the one candidate who has shown the most ability to contrast with Trump in terms of a broader, bigger picture that isn’t just locked into what’s the hot flavor of Democratic messaging this year.

“He’s talking about that big American sense of unity and reconciliation and saying we’ve got to work with Republicans too.”

“There’s nothing in Joe Biden that scans as evil or dark or weird or out of touch,” Wilson says. “He can be a little goofy but that’s not bad, not the worst thing in the world right now

“I think neither Warren nor Sanders and certainly not Pete Buttigieg have ever had a breakthrough with African American voters sufficient to eliminate Biden’s advantage. And also, Biden’s got the secret weapon.

“If Barack Obama is free to get out there and do the campaigning that only he can do in American political life, I think that would be a meaningful lift for the Democrats.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a Super Pac named for the party’s greatest leader and meant to persuade loyalists away from a man many consider its worst

“You sometimes need hard men and hard women to do tough things,” he says. In that sense, the name of his project is fitting. Lincoln saved the union and ended slavery with all the guile and will of the most ruthless, when necessary the most dirty politician.

I am putting my ideological priors and my preferences aside, because I think that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. I’ll do anything I can to help ensure that he is not president for another four years.”

in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

Harrison is hardly the first candidate to raise extraordinary amounts of money against a red-state incumbent whom Democrats detest.

Harrison’s campaign is “completely organized, it’s extremely efficient,” says Amanda Loveday, chief of staff of Unite the Country, a pro-Biden super PAC, and former executive director for the South Carolina Democratic Party while Harrison was party chair. “It had to be flawless, and it has been. It’s purely based on energizing the base and reminding South Carolinians, no matter their political stature, what Lindsey has not done for them.”

Harrison has become a ubiquitous presence in the state, with ads blanketing the airwaves. He’s presented himself as a unifier and pledged to grow the middle class and protect health care.

Given Graham’s political straits, Harrison also happens to be in the right place at the right time. “It takes that sort of alignment for somebody with a ‘D’ after their name to have a shot at the top of the ticket in South Carolina, and I think he does have a shot,”

Win or lose, Harrison has created openings for other Democrats in the state by drawing national money to the state that’s trickling down to other candidates.

“The investment that’s being made at the county level, the state level, and then both caucus levels is going to transform the makeup of the Democratic party for at least 10 years,” says South Carolina state Rep. JA Moore.

Harrison’s campaign did not provide a total amount of money it has transferred to the state Democratic Party or other Democratic entities in the state, but a scroll through party receipts shows the Harrison campaign has passed along millions. If Democrats can flip five state Senate seats, for example, they could take outright control of the chamber, which has even higher stakes this year due to redistricting.

“All of the things that a normal campaign needs to have to win, we just never had those resources and we had to rely on a lot of volunteers. But now because of Jaime’s campaign efforts, it’s a new day in terms of Democratic infrastructure,”

“Lindsey’s always had some measure of difficulty with the Republican base,” says former Republican Governor and U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford. “I think when it comes down to actually pulling the lever between Lindsey, as much as they may not like him, and a Democrat, they’re going to go Lindsey.”

Other Republicans are similarly confident in Graham’s chances. “I’m not worried. Lindsey’s going to win. Senator Graham’s going to pull it out, he’ll win comfortably,” says Chad Connelly, former South Carolina GOP chairman. “The only reason the race was ever tight was money.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll of Florida released on Sunday showed Mr. Biden with the support of 54 percent of the state’s Latino voters, compared with 62 percent for Mrs. Clinton four years ago. He and Mr. Trump were basically tied among Hispanic men in the state

Mr. Biden is competitive among Latino voters, and could still win Florida based on his strength with educated whites.

But he would be in better shape, campaign aides privately acknowledged, if the campaign had reached out earlier to recruit infrequent voters and soften Mr. Trump’s support among Hispanic men in the state.

“The Biden people have done a good job in playing catch-up, but it is always the same, every cycle,” said Chuck Rocha, who runs Nuestro PAC, a pro-Biden committee that has raised $9 million for Spanish-language advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. “Everybody only does Latino outreach in the last couple of weeks of the campaign. That has to change.”

The coronavirus has also been an impediment, said Mr. Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development under President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Mr. Biden. “Latino voters like in-person contact,” he said.

Thanks to those funds, the Biden campaign has been able to increase its Spanish-language media buys in the closing weeks, with six-figure expenditures booked in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, a spokesman said.

Still, the party has seen some successes. The Democratic National Committee invested heavily in microtargeting Puerto Rican voters through the purchase of call lists in 2019, and Mr. Biden owes his surprising strength in Texas and Arizona to strong support from Latino voters.

Democratic officials say they expected that nine million Latino voters will have gone to the polls early by mail or in person, up from 3.7 million in 2016.

Democrats have also recently begun pouring money and resources into outreach efforts, with donors pumping $28 million into three independent expenditure groups aimed at increasing Latino turnout in the past two months.

The overall problem is rooted not only in the party’s inconsistent efforts to reach Latino voters, but also in the particulars of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign. It was a cash-poor operation that was focused on Black voters, a group long courted by the former vice president that turned out to be critical to his primary victory.

But much of the Democrats’ resources in the closing days is being devoted to providing basic voting information to registered Latino voters, rather than funding a deeper dive into the voter files to reach more voters, or a big effort to change the minds of wavering male voters, party officials said.

On Saturday, Veronica Escobar, the Democratic congresswoman from El Paso, spent 20 minutes on the phone with a young Mexican-American woman in Texas who was outraged at Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic and frightened by his rhetoric — and had no intention, whatsoever, of voting.

Democrats are relying on many Latino voters to go to the polls on Election Day, as they have tended to do in the past.

The New York Times spoke with more than 30 young Democrats from 17 states this week, ranging in age from 17 to 34. Most of them said they had voted for Mr. Sanders or planned to do so if he stayed in the race through their state’s primary. Some had voted for Senator Elizabeth Warren before she dropped out. Only two said they wanted Mr. Biden to be the nominee.

reluctantly vote for Mr. Biden

for the sake of beating President Trump, about a third said they would consider staying home or voting for a

But those plans, the young Democrats said, were not the solution to the generational gap among the candidates’ supporters; they were a cause.

Or else they need to die and we will create a new party ourselves.”

Mr. Biden needed to stop accepting super PAC money and endorse both “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal.

“The Republican Party has moved farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left, which leaves this huge vacuum, I feel, for younger people who actually want to be a part of a truly progressive movement,”

‘I won’t change anything to help progressive causes, really, but at least I’m not Trump.’”

While Mr. Sanders has actively engaged with young people, Mr. Biden has never given much indication that he is seeking their votes at all. At times, he has appeared openly disdainful or condescending toward them.

“Would I like a candidate like Bernie Sanders, who puts young people at the forefront? Of course I would. But young voters didn’t turn out in the primaries to support him. That’s our generation’s mistake. We can’t make that same mistake in the general election.”

“I worry, win or lose, that the party will learn nothing from this election and continue to dismiss the concerns and policy goals of the younger generation they rely upon,”

The twin Georgia races have swiftly taken center stage in American politics, with campaign visits by potential 2024 Republican candidates like Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and Vice President Mike Pence.

If both Democrats win the runoffs, they would pull the Senate into a 50-50 tie, which would give Democrats de facto control of the chamber because Kamala Harris, as vice president, would cast the tiebreaking vote.

Even the narrowest of Democratic majorities would considerably ease Mr. Biden’s path to confirming his cabinet picks, appointing judges and advancing his policies.

Political strategists say they cannot recall any modern time when so much was on the line in a runoff election in a single state.

Unrelenting waves of negative ads have already begun

“But what’s different is what you can’t see yet and you can feel: that the armies are being built, the resources are being stored up, you can feel the anticipation and excitement.”

Republicans are hoping to duplicate their turnout in rural and conservative-leaning areas, despite not having President Trump on the ballot to pull his impassioned supporters to the polls.

And Democrats worry that Black voters will not come out in the same numbers as they did this month — turnout in runoffs almost always falls sharply — and that white suburban voters around Atlanta, who rejected Mr. Trump so resoundingly, will not be as eager to deliver a Democratic Senate to Mr. Biden.

Some major Democratic donors, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, are downbeat on their party’s chances.

Yet those same donors said they were continuing to contribute to the Georgia contests because of the sheer significance of the outcome.

“The result of these two races is going to determine the majority in the United States Senate, which is going to determine the success or failure of the Biden policies in the next four years,”

But Mr. Trump’s continued refusal to concede has complicated that messaging, since it depends on accepting his loss.

Nationally, the Georgia races offer Republicans a chance to bring together both more establishment-aligned contributors, who were cool to the departing president, and pro-Trump financiers.

“The entire Republican ecosystem is working together to ensure the tables are turned.”

Democrats are hoping the political organization and movement created by Stacey Abrams, who nearly won her race for governor in 2018 by driving up turnout among the party’s base, will recapture that energy and especially help mobilize Black voters.

After the losses on Nov. 3, some Democrats said that focusing so publicly on their fund-raising successes had proved to be a distraction, as top fund-raisers like Amy McGrath in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina lost by large margins.

He has already raised $170 million since Election Day, much of it for a new political organization that can be used to pay for his political activities going forward. He has talked about creating a news media platform that could take on Fox News on the right and keep him part of the national conversation. And he will retain his Twitter bullhorn with 88.7 million followers allowing him to insert himself into any debate any time he likes, a powerful tool that no other defeated president has ever had.

The president’s flirtation with attempting a comeback has already complicated the plans for other Republicans who would like to step up, especially those who feel they owe some loyalty to him, like Vice President Mike Pence

A poll by Politico and Morning Consult last week found that 53 percent said they would vote for him in a Republican primary in 2024, with Mr. Pence at a distant 12 percent and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, at 8 percent. Ms. Haley and others drew 4 percent or less.

implausible even aside from advancing age. Among other things, he has to find a way to repay or restructure $421 million in debt and he may have legal troubles stemming from multiple investigations at the federal, state and local levels. He has privately been discussing pre-emptively pardoning members of his family before leaving office, not usually a selling point for a future political campaign.

“There’s a high-risk strategy here and I hope that the president doesn’t rush back into the campaign mode — which he wants to do before he gets well — until they tell him he’s no longer a danger to everybody else,” said Ed Rollins, an adviser to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump.

Doctors allowed him to leave for the White House, while acknowledging he hadn’t yet reached the critical seven- to 10-day window that doctors watch for with the coronavirus to see whether patients take a turn for the worse.

Mr. Trump did little to adhere to the narrative aides were hoping would emerge, one that would benefit him politically.

the president did not mention the hardship the virus had caused to others or that anyone had suffered greatly from it. Nor did he mention the White House staff members who had fallen sick.

“It appears the campaign hasn’t discussed their concept with their candidate,” said Brendan Buck, a former adviser to the former House speaker Paul D. Ryan. “You would hope someone who has been in serious health crisis would have a bit of an awakening, find a little religion on this, but he seems incapable of doing that.”

“After being released from the hospital, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed in personal terms how the virus impacted him — thanking those who helped him get back on his feet, committing to tackling the virus and balancing the challenges facing his country,”

it would not be clear until Oct. 12 whether Mr. Trump is over the hump of his virus.

Advisers continue to hold out the belief that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s challenger, could stumble, or that unforeseen events could intervene in the race.

Campaign officials said the expectation was still to resume presidential rallies before November, contending that Mr. Trump’s only real exposure to people at those events was on the plane, and the entourage traveling with him would be smaller because so many of his own aides are out sick as well.

“With four weeks remaining and nearly four million Americans already casting their votes, it’s awfully late to change perceptions about President Trump or his performance,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist.

“Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” Mr. McIntosh adds. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”

Examples of “failed” ads cited in the memo included attacks on Mr. Trump’s “handling of the pandemic, promotion of vaccines, praise of Dr. Fauci, insane government spending, failure to build the wall, recent attacks on pro-life legislation, refusal to fight woke issues, openness to gun control, and many others.”

“Broadly acceptable messages against President Trump with Republican primary voters that do not produce a meaningful backlash include sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,”

“It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump,” he adds, “otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”

Win It Back did not bother running ads focused on Mr. Trump as an instigator of political violence or as a threat to democracy. The group tested in a focus group and online panel an ad called “Risk,” narrated by former Representative Liz Cheney, that focused on Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. But the group found that the Cheney ad helped Mr. Trump with the Republican voters, according to Mr. McIntosh.

Insha Rahman, the vice president for advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, agrees, up to a point. Mr. McBride and the others are raising “unfortunately a fact of life for over two million Americans who are behind bars,” said Ms. Rahman, who has visited the D.C. jail several times and concurs that its conditions are inhumane, though no worse, she said, than detention facilities in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.

Still, she said, the privileges afforded the Jan. 6 pretrial detainees in their particular wing — individual cells, a library, contact visits, the ability to participate in podcasts — “are not at all typical.

“But I don’t want to call that special treatment,” Ms. Rahman said. “That’s the floor for what every incarcerated person in America should have a right to expect.”

Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment

Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.

“Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied

on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.

He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?

He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.

How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach

But something changed for Thiel in 2009

he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution

His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.

“There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz

Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias

He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200

The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian

he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.

A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

“I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss

Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic

Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”

he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”

“the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

besides, a different cause moves him far more.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.

Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.