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A jazzed turnout by the pro-Trump base is vital to GOP hopes of winning the House in the 2022 midterms. But there is also a chance that a flurry of fervently pro-Trump Senate candidates in swing states could damage the party's hopes of overturning the thin Democratic majority in the chamber.

In a key impeachment test vote this week, 45 GOP senators signaled that they plan for Trump to pay no price for inciting the most heinous assault by a president on the US government in history in the Capitol riot.

In another sign of the GOP's future course, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not censured by her party after CNN's KFile reported that she expressed supporting in recent years assassinations of Democratic leaders before she ran for Congress.

Greene, was rewarded with a plum committee assignment.

But in Arkansas, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is wearing her wars with the Washington media in her dishonest tenure as a badge of honor to appeal to the fervidly pro-Trump base in a gubernatorial run.

Remnants of the old GOP -- such as former George W. Bush aide Rob Portman -- who are unwilling to sign up to the unhinged populism that now drives the party of Lincoln have nowhere to go. The Ohio senator announced this week that he will not run for reelection.

And in Arizona, Oregon and Pennsylvania, anti-Trump Republicans such as Cindy McCain are being purged while Trump loyalists take prominent positions

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is now a CNN commentator, said on "The Situation Room" that the GOP needed to move swiftly against Greene and compared the failure of leaders to honor its values with the courage shown by detained Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

The warning cited the presidential transition "as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives" as potential catalysts for uprisings. Those narratives were pushed for weeks by Trump and his Republican enablers in Washington and still find a home in sections of the conservative media.

The former President has long enjoyed elevated approval ratings in his party that have protected him from the consequences of his unconstitutional power grabs and failures among Republicans leaders he bullied for years.

Still, a CNN/SSRS poll published just before he left office, found however that 48% of Republicans wanted to move on from Trump while 47% hoped that he would continue to be regarded as the leader of the party.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose presidential dreams were crushed by the former reality star in 2016, was long seen as the poster boy for a new, more optimistic and inclusive GOP. A career trajectory that now has him standing strongly with Trump and branding impeachment as all about "vengeance from the radical left" is an apt personification of the transformation Trump wrought in the party. It may also have something to do with chatter about a possible primary challenge from Ivanka Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was among the most distraught Republicans over the attack on his beloved US Senate incited by Trump in his effort to thwart the constitutional transfer of power to Biden.

Another key Republican figure, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who expertly engineered her exit from Trump's administration with the ex-President's blessing, has walked back her tame earlier criticism of Trump after the insurrection.

They joined a handful of others, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who have backed increasing the checks to $2,000.

While Democrats all support larger checks, they are unlikely to endorse a hasty overhaul of the legal shield currently in place for social media companies, especially measures put forward by Republican senators aimed at confronting what they believe is anti-conservative bias.

The House voted on Monday evening to increase the size of the checks to $2,000, daring Senate Republicans to either approve the heftier sum or defy Mr. Trump.

In signing the relief bill on Sunday night, Mr. Trump claimed in a statement that the Senate would “start the process for a vote” on legislation that would increase direct payments and pledged that “much more money is coming.”

Republican lawmakers in the House were visibly frustrated with Mr. Trump’s demand. Some of the president’s closest allies, including Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, voted against the measure, and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, complained on the House floor that the proposal had been “hastily dropped on us at the last minute” and wouldn’t assist those who needed it most.

Despite the fact that Fox News hosts have been relentlessly pushing bogus claims of voter fraud and questioning the legitimacy of the election, significant portions of the GOP base have decided that the network’s commitment to Trump has waned, and, therefore, it must be part of the anti-Trump conspiracy. “Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks!” chanted the MAGA faithful at last week’s march of dead-enders in Washington.

the strategy Fox has always used to maintain the loyalty of its viewers — telling them that every other news source is fatally infected with liberal bias — is now being deployed by those minor-league outlets against Fox itself.

If their critique is that Fox News is too establishment, they’re not wrong: From its founding in 1996, the network has always been equally devoted to the twin goals of making money and advancing the interests of the Republican Party. It represents and defines the center of gravity in the party, even as that center of gravity may shift.

Keep your eye on the likely 2024 presidential candidates — Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), as well as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — as they jockey for advantage and try to find the party’s key points of influence. Once they start appearing on Newsmax, claiming the election was stolen, and giving winks and nods to QAnon and other conspiracy theories, you’ll see how deeply the madness has penetrated the GOP.

Though many of the Republican leaders who were reviled by the tea party, such as former speaker John Boehner and former congressman Eric Cantor, are no longer around, the ones still in office remember well what it was like. And now they’re going to have to go through it all over again.

he Republican senators are shrinking before the eyes of the whole country. They are all becoming “liddle.” They know it. They feel it. They hate it. But they cannot stop it.

National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government. “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.

George W. Bush, who made his own leap, to Compassionate Conservatism. (You know somebody has made a paradigm leap when he or she starts adding some modifying word or phrase before “Conservatism.”) This was an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism.

am’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns

Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities.

The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods

The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

Most actual Republican politicians rejected all of this. They stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive

Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right, and overturned the Reagan paradigm.

Bannon and Trump got the emotions right. They understood that Republican voters were no longer motivated by a sense of hope and opportunity; they were motivated by a sense of menace, resentment and fear. At base, many Republicans felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodoxy — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.

Over the last three years, it’s been interesting to watch a series of Republican officeholders break free from old orthodoxies and begin to think afresh.

future is embodied by a small group of Republican senators in their 40s, including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse.

they start with certain common Trumpian premises:

Everything is not OK. The free market is not working well. Wages are stagnant. Too much power is in the hands of the corporate elites. Middle America is getting screwed. Finance capitalism is unbalanced. American society is in abject decline. If Reaganism was “Let’s be free,” the new mood is “Take control.

Economic libertarianism is not the answer. Free markets alone won’t solve our problems

We need policies to shore up the conservative units of society — family, neighborhood, faith, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just liberty.

The working class is the heart of the Republican Party. Once, businesspeople and entrepreneurs were at the center of the Republican imagination. Now it’s clear that the party needs to stop catering to the corporate class and start focusing on the shop owners, the plumbers, the salaried workers

China changes everything. The rise of a 1.4-billion-person authoritarian superpower means that free trade no longer works because the Chinese are not playing by the same rules

The managerial class betrays America. Many of the post-Reagan positions seem like steps to the left. But these Republicans combine a greater willingness to use government with a greater hostility to the managerial class.

From these common premises the four senators go off in different directions.

Hawley is the most populist of the group. His core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level — political elites, cultural elites, financial elites

The modern leadership class has one set of values — globalization, cosmopolitanism — and the Middle Americans have another set — family, home, rootedness, nation

Cotton has a less developed political vision but a more developed attitude: hawkishness.

Sasse is the most sociological of the crew. He is a Tocquevillian localist, who notes that most normal Americans go days without thinking of national politics. His vision is centered on the small associations — neighborhood groups, high school football teams, churches and community centers — where people find their greatest joys, satisfactions and supports.

over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the G.O.P. In the first place, that’s where Republican voters are

Government’s job, he says, is to “create a framework of ordered liberty” so that people can make their family and neighborhood the center of their lives.

Levin thinks the prevailing post-Trump viewpoints define the problem too much in economic terms. The crucial problem, he argues, is not economic; it’s social: alienation. Millions of Americans don’t feel part of anything they can trust. They feel no one is looking out for them.

“What’s needed,” Levin says, “is not just to expand economic conservatism beyond growth to also prioritize family, community and nation, but also to expand social conservatism beyond sexual ethics and religious liberty to prioritize family, community and nation

The Republican Party looks completely brain-dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page stands as a vigilant guardian of the corpse, eager to rebut all dissenters. The former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are staunch defenders of Minimal-Government Conservatism

there’s also the possibility that Republicans will abandon any positive vision and revert to being a simple anti-government party — a party of opposition to whatever Biden is doing.

Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism,

Second, the working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men.

None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people

We could be individualistic, anti-authority, daring and self-sufficient because on an elemental level we felt so damn safe.

Some nations grow up relatively spared from foreign invasion and the frequent devastation of infectious disease. Gelfand finds that these are loose nations: individualistic, creative but also disordered, uncoordinated and reckless.

Gelfand wrote a book called “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” We Americans have been rule-breakers, the classic loose nation.

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, America has lost its sense of safety, the calm confidence that the future is ours, that our institutions are sound or even minimally competent.

if there was any shred of existential safety left, surely the pandemic has taken it away

We’ve had threats before, a few foreign incursions like in 1812, even pandemics when America was less just than it is today. But we’ve never had them smack in the middle of a crisis of confidence, a crisis of authority, plus social and spiritual crises all at once.

this is the first invasion of America

Welcome to life in the rest of the world.

most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.

If the old American creed grew up in an atmosphere of assumed security and liberty, the new one is growing up in an atmosphere of vulnerability and precariousness.

In this atmosphere, economic resilience will be more valued than maximized efficiency. We’ll spend more time minimizing downside risks than maximizing upside gains

The local and the rooted will be valued more than the distantly networked. We’ll value community over individualism, embeddedness over autonomy.

the American identity that grows up in the shadow of the plague can have the humanity of shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the precariousness of life and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long struggle against an invading force.

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I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.

“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”

Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”

“Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”

Every fourth summer, a presidential nominating convention gives occasion to appraise a party for its ideas, its principles, its vision for governing

Ronald Reagan’s party wanted to end the scourge of communism and slay the bureaucratic dragons of Big Government.

George W. Bush’s party aimed to project compassion and fortitude, educating poor Americans and treating AIDS-stricken Africans, while simultaneously confronting the advance of Islamic terrorism.

However flawed the policies, however unsuccessful their execution, a tone was set in these parties from the top-down.

Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman

“John Adams was an ornery guy, but he believed in his ideas. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, he certainly didn’t live up to the ideas he espoused, but shoot, at least he talked about them. Nowadays, it’s just regression to the lowest common denominator on everything.

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture sloganeer—“Build the wall!” “Make America Great Again!”—rather than a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition

None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)

When I called one party elder, he joked that it’s a good thing Republicans decided not to write a new platform for the 2020 convention—because they have produced nothing novel since the last one was written

The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.

Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters concede Buck’s point in this regard

The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.

This is not a party struggling to find its identity. This is a party in the middle of a meltdown.

The verdict I’m rendering here is both observable in plain sight and breathtakingly obvious to anyone who has experienced the carnage up close.

Most of the party’s governing class sees perfectly well what is going on. They know exactly how bad t

hings are and how much worse they could yet be

these Republicans rue their predicament but see no way out of it. Like riders on a derailing roller coaster, they brace for a crash but dare not get off.

Having written the book on the making of the modern Republican Party, having spent hundreds of hours with its most powerful officials in public and private settings, I cannot possibly exaggerate the number of party leaders who have told me they worry both about Trump’s instability and its long-term implication for the GOP

There’s a reason Lindsey Graham called Trump “crazy,” a “bigot” and a “kook” who’s “unfit for office.” There’s a reason Ted Cruz called Trump “a pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” There’s a reason Marco Rubio observed that, “Every movement in human history that has been built on a foundation of anger and fear has been cataclysmic,” and warned of Trump’s rise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side, pretending the petting zoo next door is comparable to the three-ring circus on your front lawn.

The rest of the right-wing universe—conservative media, think tanks, activist organizations, financial networks, civic groups, voters themselves—has largely gone along for the ride, and for the same reason: “What about the Democrats?”

What all of these incidents and so many more have in common is that not a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people.

The spectacle is unceasing

Unsavory fringe characters have always looked for ways to penetrate the mainstream of major parties—and mostly, they have failed. What would result from a fringe character leading a party always remained an open question. It has now been asked and answered:

Some in the party have embraced the extreme, others in the party have blushed at it, but all of them have subjugated themselves to it. The same way a hothead coach stirs indiscipline in his players, the same way a renegade commander invites misconduct from his troops, a kamikaze president inspires his party to pursue martyrdom.

That is precisely what will be on display at this week’s Republican convention—martyrdom, grievance, victimhood.

It’s not that America won’t hear from serious Republicans who have real substance to offer, people like Senator Tim Scott and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. It’s that these two, along with the remnant of other sober-minded Republicans, are the new sideshow at a time when the old sideshow has moved to center stage.

Similarly, the problem for the party isn’t that the aforementioned complaints are entirely without merit. It’s that they form no part of a broader construct on which voters can be sold. This continues to be the bane of the GOP’s existence: The party is so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for.

“I think I have brought tremendous strength back to the party,” the president told me last year, arguing that previous GOP leaders lacked the stomach for gruesome political combat. There is no denying Trump has transformed the party from a country club debater into a barroom brawler. But to what end?

“Our central mission is to stand up for America. It’s to say loudly and proudly that we choose America. When I go around talking to Texans every single day, what I hear is that they’re proud of this country. And they want us to fight for this country. That’s what ties it all together for Republicans,” Roy said. “The people I talk to—even the ones who maybe get a little frustrated with the president—they look at him as someone who fights for this country.”

Roy is as close to a plainspoken conservative Republican as there is in Congress. I was curious to know how he would define today’s GOP.

The problem for Republicans is that most of the fights they’re picking nowadays are futile at best and foolhardy at worst. NASCAR? Confederate flags? Goya beans? Face masks? To the degree any of these issues move the needle politically, Republicans are on the wrong side of them. What’s worse, there is no connective tissue. There is no focus to the GOP’s incessant appetite for fighting. That’s how they wound up with Trump in the first place

“The GOP has been here before with John Birchers and it didn’t end well,” said Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has been a vocal if terribly inconsistent Trump critic. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, but it’s got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.”

To be clear, these grifters aren’t just shady party operatives and obscure congressional candidates. They are some of the president’s closest allies, people like Matt Gaetz,

If there is one principle driving Republican politicians today, it is that traditional American values—faith, patriotism, modesty, the nuclear family—are under siege

what’s fascinating to observe is the shift in priorities and proportionality. What was once a source of annoyance and frustration for one sect of the party, social conservatives, has turned into the dominant life force for the GOP

The good news for Republicans is that “grievance politics,” as Sasse describes it, continues to be highly effective in motivating their base. The bad news? It has diminishing returns when it comes to the many millions of persuadable voters in the middle. It’s also especially difficult for an incumbent party to sell grievance to the masses, as it amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of powerlessness.

Instead of downplaying the social upheaval, treating it as a fleeting phenomenon that will pass with time and promising better days ahead, they are highlighting it at every turn, claiming it’s a sneak preview of Biden’s America when it is, factually speaking, the feature presentation of Trump’s America.

The pressure is now entirely on Trump. And he won’t have much help

leading Republicans won’t be speaking on behalf of their party this week. Kasich already defected, endorsing Biden during a dramatic speech to the Democratic convention. And neither Romney nor Boehner nor either of the Bushes would speak even if asked. From what I’ve been told, none of them plan to vote for Trump this fall, and the chief reason they won’t say so publicly is they fear it would diminish their influence over the party moving forward.

A Republican collapse this fall—Biden wins the White House, Democrats flip the Senate and hold the House—would trigger a reckoning within the GOP every bit as sharp as the one associated with Obama’s takeover of Washington in 2008. If that occurs, much of the party’s pent-up irritation with Trump (which often masks long-simmering disgust with themselves) will spill over, and the efforts to expunge this ugly chapter of GOP history could commence with stunning ferocity.

There is no guarantee of this, however. Trump claims an intensity among his following that stacks up against any leader in American history. (“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luntz said. “It’s like Elvis and the Beatles wrapped up in one.”

Overlooked is the real possibility that Trump could win. That Biden has not built a runaway lead despite enormous advantages—chief among them, the president’s poor playing of a terrible election-year hand—speaks to the effectiveness of Trump’s slash-and-burn mentality

“I actually find it kind of reassuring. With [George] McGovern in 1972, it was a colossal wipeout with a hugely mistaken candidate who was completely out of step with mainstream public opinion. Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter, an honest-to-goodness progressive, wins,” Brooks said. “I mean, Richard Nixon gets tossed out of office for blatant corruption. Everybody’s heading for the hills saying, ‘I never voted for him! I’m not a Republican!’ And six years later, Ronald Reagan wins and then gets reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. These things can heal really, really fast.”

owever long Trump remains in office, whatever damage he does to the GOP, Brooks believes it will be temporary. It’s the “fundamental truth” of a two-party system, he said, that coalitions are constantly shifting, parties are continually renewing, politicians are eternally looking for ways to adapt and survive.

“Healthy parties need to build coalitions around a shared vision that speaks to all Americans,” Sasse told me. “Our current course is unsustainable. We’ve got a hell of a rebuilding ahead of us, whatever happens in November.”

"It's not to say I agree with every investigation, but I think we can certainly do both," said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican up for reelection this fall, referring to acting on a pandemic response as well.

And Johnson, Graham and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa have all requested Grenell and Attorney General William Barr declassify documents from the Obama administration related to the FBI's Russia probe and its prosecution of Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. On Thursday, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, didn't rule out getting involved in looking into the matters either "to the extent they involve oversight over intelligence activities."

"I do think that there should be repercussions: What exactly they are depends on where the facts are," Paul said. "I do think it's wrong for people to abuse their office to get business for their kids. ... It doesn't look good."

Asked if he would object if the committee began to target Hunter Biden more directly, Romney said Thursday: "That will be determined in the light of the particular circumstances that will be presented."

The chairmen leading the investigations say they are conducting legitimate oversight. They argue their probes aren't about trying to damage Biden but rather about holding accountable the officials who went after Trump and his associates.

Asked about the appearance that the probe is political, the Oklahoma Republican said: "Everything in this place is political. There are a series of questions there aren't answers to at this point."

The senators' probes have been fueled by disclosures from the Trump administration after Barr directed a review of the Flynn case, which prompted the Justice Department to move to drop the charges that Flynn previously pleaded guilty to. The administration has declassified numerous documents relating to the Flynn case in recent weeks, including a list from Grenell of more than three-dozen Obama administration officials who made "unmasking" requests during the Trump transition and could have been provided foreign intelligence reports that identified Flynn.

Trump and his campaign have used Biden's presence on the list of officials to attack the former vice president on the issue. "Americans have a right to know the depth of Biden's involvement in the setup of Gen. Flynn to further the Russia collusion hoax," Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement shortly after the unmasking documents were made public.

"It's clearly designed to find out what happened to 'Crossfire Hurricane,'" Graham said, referring to the name of the FBI probe, pushing back against the accusations of launching a political investigation.

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.

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism.

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.

That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator

According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian

What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.

a small but respected niche of academic research has been laboring over a question, part political science and part psychology, that had captivated political scientists since the rise of the Nazis.

How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?

They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders.

a button is pushed that says, "In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."

Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.

. The country is becoming more diverse, which means that many white Americans are confronting race in a way they have never had to before.

If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.

But political scientists say this theory explains much more than just Donald Trump, placing him within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American politics. More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.

This study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.

Feldman, a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, believed authoritarianism could be an important factor in American politics in ways that had nothing to do with fascism, but that it could only reliably be measured by unlinking it from specific political preferences.

Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

Trump's rise. And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian politics meant for American politics. Was Trump just the start of something bigger?

In the 1960s, the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values — a position that naturally appealed to order- and tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed, authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where their concentration gave them more and more influence over time.

Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated."

This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque.

Ever since, political scientists who study authoritarianism have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and on how they align with everything from demographic profiles to policy preferences.

People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.

when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.

a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

This theory would seem to predict the rise of an American political constituency that looks an awful lot like the support base that has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to propel Donald Trump from sideshow loser of the 2012 GOP primary to runaway frontrunner in 2016.

If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?

The second set asked standard election-season questions on preferred candidates and party affiliation. The third set tested voters' fears of a series of physical threats, ranging from ISIS and Russia to viruses and car accidents. The fourth set tested policy preferences, in an attempt to see how authoritarianism might lead voters to support particular policies.

If the research were right, then we'd expect people who scored highly on authoritarianism to express outsize fear of "outsider" threats such as ISIS or foreign governments versus other threats. We also expected that non-authoritarians who expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump. This would speak to physical fears as triggering a kind of authoritarian upsurge, which would in turn lead to Trump support.

We asked people to rate a series of social changes — both actual and hypothetical — on a scale of "very good" to "very bad" for the country. These included same-sex marriage, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and American Muslims building more mosques in US cities.

If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct, then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.

Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a high school education also came close.

people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.

More than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters. More than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians.

People whose scores were most non-authoritarian — meaning they always chose the non-authoritarian parenting answer — were almost 75 percent Democrats.

this is not a story about how Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus. It's a story of polarization that increased over time.

Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.

Over the next several decades, Hetherington explained to me, this led authoritarians to naturally "sort" themselves into the Republican Party.

It is not for nothing that our poll found that more than half of the Republican respondents score as authoritarian.

Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare1.

among Republicans, very high/high authoritarianism is very predictive of support for Trump." Trump has 42 percent support among Republicans but, according to our survey, a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians.

Trump support was much lower among Republicans who scored low on authoritarianism: only 38 percent.

But that's still awfully high. So what could explain Trump's support among non-authoritarians? I suspected the answer might lie at least partly in Hetherington and Suhay's research on how fear affects non-authoritarian voters,

Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats. For instance, 73 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians believed that terrorist organizations like ISIS posed a "very high risk" to them, but only 45 percent of very low-scoring authoritarians did. Domestic threats like car accidents, by contrast, were much less frightening to authoritarians.

A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.

that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.

That's important, because for years now, Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep Americans safe.

Republican voters have been continually exposed to messages warning of physical dangers. As the perception of physical threat has risen, this fear appears to have led a number of non-authoritarians to vote like authoritarians — to support Trump.

But when establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio try to match Trump's rhetoric on ISIS or on American Muslims, they may end up deepening the fear that can only lead voters back to Trump.

pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.

This could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of traditional gender roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of the faces on TV. Or it could be any changes, political or economic, that disrupt social hierarchies.

What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in societ

Authoritarians were significantly more likely to rate almost all of the actual and hypothetical social issues we asked about as "bad" or "very bad" for the country.

an astonishing 44 percent of authoritarians believe same-sex marriage is harmful to the country. Twenty-eight percent rated same-sex marriage as "very bad" for America, and another 16 percent said that it’s "bad." Only about 35 percent of high-scoring authoritarians said same-sex marriage was "good" or "very good" for the country.

Non-authoritarians tended to rate same-sex marriage as "good" or "very good" for the country.

The fact that authoritarians and non-authoritarians split over something as seemingly personal and nonthreatening as same-sex marriage is crucial for understanding how authoritarianism can be triggered by even a social change as minor as expanding marriage rights.

A whopping 56.5 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians said it was either "bad" or "very bad" for the country when Muslims built more mosques. Only 14 percent of that group said more mosques would be "good" or "very good."

The literature on authoritarianism suggests this is not just simple Islamophobia, but rather reflects a broader phenomenon wherein authoritarians feel threatened by people they identify as "outsiders" and by the possibility of changes to the status quo makeup of their communities.

This would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them.

Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration and other factors. The president is a black man, and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to authoritarian concerns.

the loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that is not the point.

mportant political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.

It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.

Since September 2001, some media outlets and politicians have painted Muslims as the other and as dangerous to America. Authoritarians, by nature, are more susceptible to these messages, and thus more likely to come to oppose the presence of mosques in their communities.

, it helps explain how Trump's supporters have come to so quickly embrace such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in which social threats are perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.

authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.

Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies: Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism

What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality

The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.

There was no clear correlation between authoritarianism and support for tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year, for example. And the same was true of support for international trade agreements.

he way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage.

That's why it's a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won't let "political correctness" hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.

Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.

If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.

ust look at where the Tea Party has left the Republican establishment. The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and chaotic.

Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.

the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.

It will become more difficult for Republican candidates to win the presidency because the candidates who can win the nomination by appealing to authoritarian primary voters will struggle to court mainstream voters in the general election. They will have less trouble with local and congressional elections, but that might just mean more legislative gridlock as the GOP caucus struggles to balance the demands of authoritarian and mainstream legislators. The authoritarian base will drag the party further to the right on social issues, and will simultaneously erode support for traditionally conservative economic policies.

Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.

The chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and sends millions of refugees spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term, if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to be a majority over the coming decades.

t will be a GOP that continues to perform well in congressional and local elections, but whose divisions leave the party caucus divided to the point of barely functioning, and perhaps eventually unable to win the White House.

For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.