Oprah Winfrey departs after speaking on stage during the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Aug. 21, 2024. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Democrats have their opponents on the run now that Kamala Harris has become their party’s standard bearer. And they’re making no secret of it.

How can you tell?

Not because of the dollars pouring into the Harris campaign. Supporters will open their wallets for a lost cause if they get caught up in the moment.

And not because of the excitement that poured out of the Democratic National Convention this week. Activists drum up false enthusiasm even when their side faces crushing defeat.

Rather, you can tell top Democrats think the vice president is on her way to a promotion because of what they’re saying about themselves. A series of speakers at the DNC tried to give the impression Harris is a continuation of their legacy.

President Joe Biden not only portrayed the VP as an extension of his successes, he described picking her as “the best decision” of his lengthy career.

Hillary Clinton characterized Harris as her successor in the fight for women’s advancement. Clinton’s failed presidential bid in 2016 elevated Harris right up against the “glass ceiling” holding female leaders down. Harris just needs help pushing through the cracked surface.

The Obamas spoke as though their rivals still run the country. Hope was “making a comeback,” Michelle Obama asserted, after having been “buried too deep for far too long.” She didn’t even mention the sitting president. Her husband briefly thanked Biden, but then relegated him to the history books. Kamala was a kid with a funny name, like Barack, who would extend “Obamacare” reforms. Harris was picking up his torch.

To paraphrase an old saying: Failure is an orphan, but success has many parents. Those old pols want a piece of the action because they smell success.

But they’re flattering themselves. The Democrats look strong not because of continuity, but instead thanks to an aggressive makeover, one that distances Harris from the baggage of those who preceded her. Having far-left progressives mad at the Biden-Harris administration only made that transformation easier.

The Democrats began this year saddled with a dismal public image.

Like Biden, they were too focused on stopping Donald Trump, not enough on what they’d deliver. Harris, though, without being obvious about it, is campaigning more as challenger than incumbent. She promises to fight problems like inflation and illegal immigration that worsened on Biden’s watch.

Like Clinton, Democratic elites were viewed as aloof intellectuals, dismissive of the “deplorables” in middle America — a party of scolds, of buzzkills obsessed with the country’s imperfections. The Republicans were poised to be the party for “normies” who wanted to have fun, take care of their families, and feel pride in their country.

Kamala Harris with her toothy grin and oft-mocked laugh — aided by the GOP’s fearful negativity — managed to flip the script to become the candidate not of killjoys but of joy. Toss in running mate “Coach Walz,” former National Guardsman from Minnesota, and Democrats could lean into patriotism, family, and Friday Night Lights while dismissing the GOP as the party of “weird.”

If any politician on the DNC stage earned a right to claim co-authorship of the Harris-Walz rebranding, it might be Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. A series of DNC speakers, including Harris herself, echoed Beshear’s promise to look beyond political conflict and solve everyday problems that transcend party and ideology. Beshear and fledgling activist Hadley Duvall foreshadowed how Democrats could exploit abortion to become the party of freedom, the party of “mind your own damn business.”

Still, if I had to pick one DNC speaker who embodies the sales job Kamala Harris now needs to pull off — the person on that Chicago stage with the best claim for having passed a torch — she wasn’t a politician. My nomination goes to Oprah Winfrey, who didn’t even claim credit for Harris.

President Obama sought to represent not red states or blue states but united states. He seemed to promise a purple-state blend, yet the country plunged into division during the first two years of his leadership, and he presided over the half-decade collapse of the Democratic Party. That’s a legacy Harris must avoid.

Oprah, on the other hand, presided over a vast media empire for a quarter century. She united red and blue America into an audience as purple as the outfit she wore for her DNC speech. When I would call one relative of mine, a Southerner who hasn’t voted Democrat since Jimmy Carter, she always had advice handy from Oprah’s doctor or nutritionist. That’s the crossover appeal Harris must offer swing voters.

Obama would speak with the uplifting cadences of a preacher, but often his sentiments sounded more appropriate to the teachers’ lounge. He once pushed back against the idea of “American exceptionalism,” an unforced error that dogged him for years. Oprah showed no such qualms about embracing the country’s uniqueness during an interview before her DNC appearance. Only in America, she said, would her success have been possible.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, similarly, offered his family as proof that “America, uniquely, holds the promise of a place where everyone can belong.” Celebrating the best of America lets Democrats sound genuinely patriotic.

Unlike Obama, Oprah understood how to escape the false choice that often faces celebrities of African descent: between suppressing their race and letting their public image be dominated by it. Harris must repeat that trick, holding on to Biden’s white support while exciting voters of color who were drifting.

Polls suggest that Kamala Harris is pulling off the Oprah Gambit so far, especially in battleground states most likely to move this year.

Even if it persists, would that marketing success carry over to “flyover” states, such as Beshear’s Kentucky? Probably not.

To move en masse, voters usually need more than words. They need to see positive outcomes. At most, Democrats might hope for a clean sweep of the states currently in play, giving them a landslide Electoral College victory.

Still, they have a popular message. Trumpsters have signed over to them most advantages Republicans used to bring into a national election: law, order, patriotism, pride, freedom, the American Dream. If the Democrats can recruit candidates consistent with the new brand — avoiding the flaws of powerful Democrats who narrowed their party’s appeal — they might make gains in places previously thought unobtainable.

Ala Hassan speaks into a megaphone during a solidarity rally for Gaza on May 1, 2024, outside the William T. Young Library at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

Activism on behalf of Gaza’s Palestinian population made its way to Lexington last week, in the form of a rally near the University of Kentucky’s main library.

The modest crowd, estimated to number under 300, engaged in no violence, no vandalism, and no threatening behavior. No one faced arrest, nor did counter protestors accost them.

Rather than camping out indefinitely on the lawn, with all of the property damage such an encampment entails, participants communicated their message, then disbanded within a couple of hours — preventing no one else from enjoying use of campus (whether for learning, leisure or anything in between).

My description of the UK rally sounds extraordinary, compared to what’s appeared in the news and over social media about protest activity elsewhere. But it isn’t. It describes, more or less, what’s occurred in most communities where activists have sought to soften the U.S. government’s pro-Israel policies.

What’s extraordinary are the destructive (if not violent) protests that have taken place at a handful of elite institutions. Those isolated incidents loom large in the public’s mind because of biases in how information reaches us.

The camera lies

People tend to believe what they see, but because no device can capture everything taking place everywhere at every time, the camera necessarily lies.

At first blush, it might seem as though audiences are less vulnerable to manipulation than they used to be.

We no longer require a well-positioned camera crew — with lights blazing and film rolling — to see political events. Citizens now walk around with high-resolution cameras embedded in their smartphones. When something big happens, amateur videographers record it.

Nor are audiences dependent on what media organizations consider newsworthy. Almost anyone can be an amateur news producer thanks to social-media apps.

Nevertheless, we still witness political events secondhand, after filters determine which images reach our gaze. And political strategists know how to exploit those filters to create propaganda.

Preparing a presidential address, for example, might seem a simple matter of speechwriting. But viewers process images as well as words. A president’s handlers know that remote audiences will see everything in the camera frame, but nothing outside of that rectangle. So ample planning goes into shaping a speech’s backdrop. An “advance team” will populate the stage with loyalists who shout, clap, and wave flags. That entourage might be diverse, or instead heavy on laborers or soldiers, depending on the message the White House hopes to convey.

Image manipulation isn’t restricted to national politics. When Gov. Andy Beshear spoke at Kentucky’s fabled Fancy Farm last year, he didn’t arrive with just his wife and a memorized speech. Instead, to highlight Beshear’s popularity, Democrats trucked in a small army of activists from Lexington and Louisville. Their team wore matching T-shirts to stand out visually, with scripted cheers to stand out audibly. To ensure their visibility, team leaders (communicating over walkie-talkies) shepherded the student activists around the picnic grounds.

Protests rely on image creation and manipulation more than most forms of political activity. The challenge faced by protestors is to do something odd or disruptive — hoping to wake a dormant public — yet to do it in a way that wins sympathy and tilts the balance of power their way.

Orchestrating disruptive behavior has become easier with the proliferation of consumer electronics. Campus organizers can order materials, like tents and locks, online in bulk to support a demonstration. They can summon outsiders to bulk up their numbers or donate supplies.

Once organizers generate video that makes their cause look popular, social-media apps distribute the publicity to a wider audience. It can become a “trending” topic, so that social-media users are fed a steady diet of related content, amplifying the protest’s apparent scope and significance.

What’s harder for organizers to do is control messaging.

Like the traditional journalists they supplanted, online content generators carve up reality into bite-sized pieces of news. These news events — what one historian called “pseudo-events” — usually emphasize the angry, the ugly, the scary, the extreme.

With so many cameras roving around, risk is high that protestors (and counter protestors) will reveal their ignorance, their intolerance, their sense of privilege, their violence, maybe even their murderous impulses.

Such content “goes viral” and squanders sympathy.

An impression of prevailing violence

It’s easier than ever for activists to attract attention, but harder to ensure the attention is positive. We see both biases at work with anti-Israel protests supposedly “sweeping” American universities.

The “campus unrest” storyline exaggerates the turmoil, giving an inflated impression of both how dangerous campuses have become and how many students prioritize Middle Eastern politics.

At some elite universities, malevolent actors have exploited the discord as an excuse to unleash hateful impulses – including antisemitism (which Jewish Americans have good reason to fear).

Cameras zoom in on those protestors, especially violent or outlandish ones, ignoring what most students are doing outside the frame.

Berkeley’s oft-discussed pro-Palestinian encampment, for example, amounts to a relatively small group that’s erected tents in front of one administration building. Off camera, Berkeley undergrads go about their days much as they did last year: working, studying, socializing and consuming.

Strolling Berkeley’s campus recently, after end-of-semester partying, what I saw sweeping the campus was litter, not radicalism. A visitor to Berkeley this Saturday would have found more students on stage performing Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” than in the Spring protest camp.

Outside of such elite institutions, radical politics is an even lower priority.

In the days before UK’s rally, I noticed I hadn’t seen anything from the Bluegrass in a while, so I searched Twitter/X for “Kentucky.”?

And it became immediately apparent that online Kentuckians weren’t focused on politics, Middle Eastern or otherwise. They were focused on their religion — by which I mean, of course, basketball. I had to wade through dozens of posts debating UK’s new coach before I finally found a tweet related to anything else.

No surprise that UK’s rally attracted modest participation.

Kentucky isn’t unique in this respect. Professors at other state schools have sought to convey the same message, including political scientists at institutions such as Illinois and Texas A&M. A Louisiana Tech historian asked his students if they were following the Columbia University protests; they “looked at me like I had nine heads.”

Bad news for Biden?

For politically aware Americans right now, campus unrest — as framed visually by cameras and rhetorically by social-media influencers — appears to be what literally everybody is doing or talking about.

Neither conservatives nor progressives want you to hear that campus unrest is more isolated than it seems.

Conservatives don’t want you to hear it because any perception university people are going crazy supports their narratives.

Progressives don’t want you to hear it because they sympathize with student activists — they want to believe protest is widespread — and, well, they’re out of touch and don’t realize how much campus unrest helps the right.

Such conflict within the Democratic Party’s core constituency would be bad news for President Biden, who’s already struggling with swing voters.

The good news is, the whole world isn’t really watching.

And by the time the general election kicks in, campus radicals no longer will be disrupting graduation ceremonies. They’ll likely have drifted off to summer break.

The May 21 primary elections for Kentucky's General Assembly are open to voters who are registered Democrats or Republicans. (Getty Images)

Briefly, ever so briefly, one man had me thinking that Donald Trump could win back the presidency.

He wasn’t a political scientist crunching data to unveil a Republican path to victory. It’s too early for election forecasts to be reliable.

Nor was he some Trump zealot spouting right-wing talking points while wearing a crimson Make America Great Again cap. Those yahoos are doing Trump more harm than good.

The guy who got me to wondering whether Trump might pull it off was a bus driver standing at the front of his vehicle, briefing passengers ahead of a cross-country trip.

Our driver was one part man of “quality” — crisp uniform, tight gloves, tidy mustache— and one part South Central Los Angeles swagger. Think a Samuel L. Jackson character without the swear words. And he was laying down the law on, as he called it, “my bus.”

The briefing our driver delivered would not have gone over well in the delicate confines of a faculty lounge. It would’ve gone over better at a Trump rally.

He started with a joke at the expense of non-English speakers. That wasn’t his last dig at immigrants, either (a perspective likely influenced by frustrations he and his colleagues had experienced trying to load passengers onto the bus efficiently).

He warned that the bus would be locked at one lengthy stop to prevent vagrants and the homeless from climbing on.

He described with relish the many horrors past passengers had performed in the lavatory, which he expected the source to clean up, and he described with disgust various sorts of misbehavior that had led him to jettison “knuckleheads” in the past.

By itself, this strongman speech might have said little about politics. But consider the context.

The bus didn’t actually belong to our driver. Like so many properties in the United States, it belonged to a foreign multinational that had purchased the carcass of a failed American business.

When that bus pulled from the station, we passed what I’ve seen in every American city I’ve visited: broken-down storefronts and filthy sidewalks strewn with derelicts in sleeping bags.

Most important, when the driver delivered that monologue, it was to a mixed-race audience of working class and working poor. These are the citizens supposedly so polarized — people of color anchoring President Joe Biden’s constituency and whites overwhelmingly in Trump’s camp — but they all appeared to be digging his politically incorrect stand-up routine, laughing and signaling their affirmation. “Speak it, brother!”

Those passengers might have disagreed sharply about when, if ever, America managed to be “great.”? Yet no one on that bus seemed to operate under the illusion things are great in Biden’s America now.

Not that this was any new discovery. I’ve been on the road a lot lately, and any time I wasn’t embedded in the comfortable world of affluent professionals — things are pretty sweet for them — I’ve witnessed that same pessimism.

Americans do see their nation in decline. And yes, they’d rather go back to being a better nation again.

What puts Democrats in a panic is that Biden, as incumbent, owns the status quo — while Trump currently has a corner on the MAGA market, and early pre-election polls suggest customers are willing to buy. Trump has been leading nationally, and he’s performing well in battleground states likely to decide the presidential contest.

To believe those polls, however, you’d have to believe Trump has made historic inroads among Hispanic and even African-American voters — the sorts of people scattered around me on that bus — because when analysts drill down to cross tabulations showing where Biden is underperforming compared to four years ago, minority respondents are the main reason Trump’s been killing it.

I still don’t trust those numbers, however much my bus driver and his audience gave me pause. Such crosstabs likely are failing to capture the true sentiments of young minorities, because they rely on relatively few people and the young adults who cooperate with pollsters probably aren’t representative of their generation.

Even if the polls are providing a reasonably accurate snapshot of the electorate, implications for Trump aren’t as hopeful as they might seem. Traditionally, partisans toy with casting protest votes or switching sides, but campaigning is an educational process that reminds them why they vote the way they usually vote, and these voters typically “return to the fold” as Election Day approaches. Trump’s effort should collapse unless he makes up the difference somewhere else.

Still, knowing that the incumbent president is in a decent electoral position doesn’t mean the broad-based unhappiness with Biden’s America ought to be dismissed as politically meaningless. Combine it with the fury against “Genocide Joe” seen among pro-Palestinian activists, and serious cracks are showing in the Democratic coalition.

What’s happening to the United States, in terms of immigration, prices, Big Business and Big Government … Those are not liabilities only among MAGA Republicans. America’s decline — the failure to protect the border, the laws that stack the deck in favor of big and bureaucratic institutions, the uncontrolled borrowing and spending and regulating that make it expensive to accomplish almost anything — are shaping daily life in a way that dismays a broad, multiethnic slice of the electorate.

Trump may not be able to get lightning to strike twice. He was a self-absorbed president who made both his office and the country smaller, weaker, pathetic. Voters have been there, done that.

But Democrats would be foolhardy to think that Biden’s reelection can buy them the time they need to consolidate political control.

White progressives act as though the future’s theirs, because Trump’s support base is dying off, while they’ve captured the hearts and minds of the young and the affluent. They’re ignoring the hardships, as well as the discontent, rising among voters who are not old, not all white, and not currently Republican.

I don’t see Americans tolerating national decline for long.

Soon, some political entrepreneur is going to craft the next vision to Make America Great (with or without the “Again” tacked on), because the hunger for it crosses political and racial lines. If the power brokers propping up President Biden are not going to be the ones to offer it, someone else will.

Berkeley's Sather Gate has been blocked during regular school hours for months, although the size of the protest crowd varies from day to day. This photo was taken March 12. (Photo by D. Stephen Voss)

Back in college, I authored an essay dripping with antisemitic rhetoric. Jewish Americans weren’t my target — I was frustrated with Israel — but you wouldn’t have known it from what flowed out of my poison pen.

Fortunately, I attended college before social media. Instead of someone leaking my words so they could go viral, the impact remained localized: I had to meet with a few professors, plus a Jewish member of the governing board, after which my apologies settled the matter.

Why confess now?

You might think my point is to condemn cancel culture, the impulse to destroy young people’s futures after they commit thought crimes. If I shed hostilities taught by my upbringing, surely students today might, too, if we let them mature?

But that can’t be the full lesson, because I didn’t feel such hostilities even back then. Nothing in my upbringing encouraged antisemitism. I’d been taught respect for Jewish Americans and sympathy for Jews abroad.

To comprehend this shameful event from my past, we need to dig deeper. But if you’ll accompany me on the journey, it puts in perspective antisemitism plaguing college campuses today.

Saving Jessica and Rebecca

New Orleans in the 1970s was awash with racism, but it mostly targeted African Americans. Once someone fell on the “white” side of the black-white divide, neither nationality nor religion mattered much to those who reared me.

To the extent Jewish people appeared in our lore, the narratives were favorable.

A Jewish politician represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate even before the Civil War.

A Jewish businessman was crowned first King of Carnival.

Because of the segregation characterizing more-traditional New Orleans social clubs, Jewish businessmen helped launch the Mardi Gras parades that came to define my favorite holiday.

As that anecdote indicates, Jewish successes in Louisiana weren’t always easy. But still, New Orleans held a reputation for being “one of the very best cities for Jews,” and I was taught pride in that.

Family influences reinforced that perspective. An aunt who explored our genealogy thought she’d identified Jewish (as well as Muslim) ancestors. She was tickled by the possibility, not distressed.

My mother would speak with reverence, not scorn or resentment, about the Jewish professionals who staffed our hospitals and owned some of the city’s key businesses.

I never met the owners of our corner drugstore, part of a local chain called Katz & Besthoff. But I knew K&B could stay open on Sundays because it was “Jewish-owned,” and thanks to my sweet tooth, those invisible men were heroes. When Grandpa showed up for Sunday dinner with one of their trademark purple bags, it almost always meant ice cream!

Less invisible were the entertainers shaping our cultural perspective. My mother filled the air with Barbara Streisand, while Neil Diamond was my father’s pick. I would watch Neil Simon with my folks, Woody Allen when alone. We identified so thoroughly with such artists, I didn’t realize they were Jewish celebrities until later on.

As for outside U.S. borders, I admit my perspective was uncomfortably condescending. Jews were sympathetic victims: Shylock and Jessica in “The Merchant of Venice,” Isaac and Rebecca in “Ivanhoe,” Anne Frank in that diary our sisters read. The Holocaust loomed large in our historical memory.

Still, such sympathy meant that — until the arrival of Star Wars — my childhood fantasies typically consisted of saving Jewish people. My favorite toy was a Guns of Navarone playset, which let me defeat gray-plastic Nazis over and over with green-plastic toy soldiers (presumably on their way to liberate concentration camps).

The racism starter kit

I hope it’s become clear how unlikely a candidate I was to be spouting antisemitic garbage. If anything, I felt an abstract fondness for Jewish people, and I’d never witnessed antisemitism in real life.

Yet, sitting alone at my word processor late one night, horrified that Israel was poised to execute a Ukrainian autoworker and struggling to express my feelings persuasively, I latched onto the sort of nasty images and phrases that antisemites had employed for generations.

I was called on the carpet afterward, and my initial reaction was not fear, but deep sadness and regret — the rotten way you feel when you realize you’ve said something hurtful to an old friend.

But then I wanted to understand how I had misrepresented myself so badly. How had I stumbled onto rhetoric employed by the same villains I’d spent my fantasy life combatting?

That shame turned into a fascination with prejudice and racism, launching my career as a scholar studying cultural politics. It’s no coincidence my earliest research focused on former Klansman David Duke.

One thing the study of racism taught me is how adaptable such a centuries-old evil can be.

It doesn’t matter that Americans express positive feelings toward Jewish people. Doesn’t matter if they’re sincere.

Antisemitism sits lurking in the cultural background. Once anger or fear or frustration arises, however justifiable — once those emotions seek expression — they find an easily available (and potentially deadly) toolkit of insults, prejudices, and even conspiracies to exploit.

Antisemitism works the way people (perhaps fallaciously) view drug dependency: Society might stop abusing it, but it’s still addicted, and new stresses can cause a relapse.

Like many who study ethnic conflict, therefore, I’ve been troubled by the rise of antisemitism in the 21st century, and appalled at the hostility toward Jews openly expressed by many campus progressives since October.

Nowhere have those forces been more visible than UC Berkeley, which I’ve visited multiple times during my research sabbatical. Activists have been allowed to create a hostile environment for Jewish students, as symbolized by the long-running obstruction of Berkeley’s famed Sather Gate — at times, even I’ve thought it wise to avoid the area — and culminating recently in violent attacks.

There, as elsewhere, the excuse is that Jewish victims crossed some unacceptable line. If they’d kept their heads down — or, better yet, condemned Israel — then well and good. Expressing kinship toward the Jewish state, though, means paying a price for being on “the wrong side of history.”

It’s not about racism. It’s about foreign policy.

Yeah, right. When you’re part of a mob besieging a campus talk, shattering windows and trying to break down the door — when you reach the point of throttling schoolmates or slapping them and strutting afterward — it doesn’t matter where you started. It’s become about indulging hatreds.

If antisemitic rhetoric is a drug, I guess you could say I tried it once in college and didn’t like it. But on elite campuses today? The kids are tripping on it hard. It’s past time to worry about an overdose.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden last debated on Oct. 22, 2020 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images)

Americans have become accustomed to picking the lesser of two evils when we vote. Political participation these days is as much about keeping the other side out of power as it is about getting our picks into office.

Still, many were holding out hope that this year’s contest for Leader of the Free World might offer something more uplifting than a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Most Americans did not think Biden should run for reelection.

Most Americans did not think Trump should try to regain his old job.

And most Americans yearned for a viable third choice.

But from the beginning, all indications were that, if the two men refused to step aside, the party nominations were theirs for the taking — and as we head into the multistate nomination battle known as Super Tuesday, both are poised to seal the deal.

As incumbent, Biden faced no serious competition. A few Democrats with national stature took the early steps needed to seek his job — including governors in California, Michigan, and Kentucky — but they were understudies waiting in the wings in case their star exited the stage. None tried out for the leading role, and the president predictably upstaged the extras who’d stuck around until after the curtain rose.

Trump is out of power and — after underperforming in three straight federal elections – Republican leaders had grown tired of all the losing. So the former president did have to fend off a minor mutiny.

But grassroots Republicans didn’t join the uprising, instead helping Trump dispatch his rivals with ease (perhaps including, indirectly, the one prominent GOP powerbroker openly in conflict with Trump, Mitch McConnell). Trump crushed the last serious dissident, Nikki Haley of South Carolina, on her home turf, and while she’s limping along, he’s likely to deliver the coup d’etat next week.

Nor does a compelling third option seem likely to arise.

The No Labels organization teased voters with hopes for a draft pick to be named later, allowing commentators to divert themselves by cycling through a parade of political mavericks who might fit the bill. But the position hasn’t been staffed. Instead, the main third-party option available to voters also is a repeat: the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

Even this year’s one big novelty — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — relies on the familiarity of his last name. The expensive Super Bowl commercial supporting him was a literal rerun from uncle JFK’s 1960 presidential bid, with the nephew substituted in. Kennedy is polling relatively well, but even if that support doesn’t erode (as generally happens with independents), his candidacy hasn’t tipped the scales.

Absent some kind of unexpected shock, we’re stuck with what few Americans wanted: a Biden-Trump rematch. November’s menu will be dominated by leftovers, supplemented by a few side dishes unlikely to feed the masses.

Why didn’t “majority rule” win out on this question? Mainly because no single majority existed. The people calling for Biden to step aside did not overlap much with those decrying another Trump run.

Most partisans were content with their own banner carrier, preferring to stick with the devil they knew.? They just hoped the other side would forfeit.

But while it might be obvious to partisans that their guy is the lesser evil, they’re going to have a harder time convincing everybody else. The Biden-Trump matchup might have been inevitable, but the outcome is not: The two essentially are tied in current polling.

Experts will be quick to reject early polling numbers, pointing out that they’re not usually reliable forecasts of what happens in November. But they’re being too dismissive, because it’s not usual to have two presidents duking it out.

Moving the electorate will be tough because voters have been inoculated against negative campaigning. They’ve been saturated with criticism of both men for years and already hold low opinions of them. Biden’s approval numbers are rock bottom, and Trump’s negatives are off the charts.

At the same time, both presided over the country for years, and it’s still here, battered but not broken. So when campaigners trot out the usual end-of-the-world rhetoric for what will happen if the other side’s villain occupies the Oval Office next January, voters are likely to shrug it off.

To win, party activists must accept that however obvious the rightness of their cause might seem to them, swing voters do not view the rematch the same way.

This will be harder for Democrats, because of the revulsion toward Trump that’s been cultivated in progressive circles (what conservatives call Trump Derangement Syndrome). Progressive commentators are struggling with the reality that most Americans aren’t automatically on board — a state of denial that goes beyond trying to dismiss pre-election polls.

Leaving aside Biden’s struggles within his own coalition, two big issues are hurting him: inflation, and the perception he’s too elderly to continue. With both concerns, the initial activist impulse has been to shoot the messenger.

Why are voters concerned about Biden’s age? Because “the media” keep harping on it. As though voters aren’t seeing and hearing the president regularly.

Why are voters angry about the economy? Because “the media” won’t publicize claims that wages are rising faster than prices. As though Americans aren’t managing their own finances.

This sort of elitism is what put Trump in the White House the first time.

The good news for Democrats is that Biden has pivoted toward the inflation issue, trying to limit the damage.

Groceries aren’t part of the price comparisons economists use to figure out how families are doing, but regardless of whether we’re running up credit-card debt or switching to cereal for dinner, it’s grocery-aisle prices hitting our pocketbooks every day. So to coincide with the Super Bowl, Biden released a video complaining about how snacks have suffered from “shrinkflation” — the hidden increase in prices caused by product sizes diminishing.

But blaming “corporate greed” can only go so far. When voters think the economy’s misbehaving, as they believe now, the president and his party suffers. The Biden White House needs to keep tacking into those headwinds.

The sooner party activists accept that they’re flogging a product that makes most Americans unhappy — that the real shrinkage bothering voters is in the stature and competence of their political leadership — the more likely they’ll be to win the dreaded rematch.

Zombie entertainment, the non-comedic sort, portrays a constantly threatening setting, like this 3-D generated apocalypse, that demands toughness and favors strongmen. It’s a Trumpian fantasy. (Getty Images)

You can tell a lot about a people from the monsters they use to frighten themselves.

During the height of the Red Scare, Americans feared a communist conspiracy taking over the world — converting their friends and neighbors, staffing U.S. institutions with secret enemies. So their entertainment was filled with extraterrestrials who could mimic humans.

Notably, some of those monsters — such as the “body snatchers” and “The Thing” — reappeared just as the Cold War between Communist Russia and Reagan’s America was about to heat back up.

The late 1980s brought new threats: the scourge of drugs, the AIDS epidemic, contaminated needles. Who better to scare and entice Generation X than vampires – a monster that symbolizes corruption of the blood and stands for appetites that, once fed, might prove irresistible? The vampire genre rose from its coffin.

Trying to identify a monster who embodies the Trump Era gets tricky, because so many things frighten Republicans today.

I don’t solely mean that GOP politicians whip up fears, because Democrats do that, too.

I mean: You should take pity on any conservatives in your life, because they occupy a world much scarier than where everyone else lives.

People who see the world as a hostile place are more likely to lean rightward. Show a video with something lethal, like a snake or spider, and conservatives focus more on the threat. Make a loud noise; they’re more likely to react. Show a yucky photo and their gag reflex kicks in faster.

With so many fears and aversions to encapsulate, it might be tempting to give up on identifying one creature that haunts Republican nightmares – instead settling on a show like “Supernatural,” which sent brothers Sam and Dean careening across the flyover states to battle a rapid rotation of beasts.

But no, one monster did enjoy special cultural resonance leading up to Trump’s presidency: Zombies!!!

It began with a handful of surprisingly popular zombie movies during the Bush years. The Resident Evil franchise — which combined infected former humans with a sinister deep-state conspiracy — also kicked off then, reaching its “Final Chapter” immediately after Trump’s inauguration.

Most obviously, “The Walking Dead” first aired in 2010 and achieved the height of its popularity ?before Trump’s election.

Created by two Kentuckians and overwhelmingly popular in culturally conservative areas — most notably Appalachia — that show’s central characters were a lawman, a redneck hunter, and a former housewife. Threats included a former high-school staffer, a collectivist artist and, amusingly, a Center for Disease Control scientist.

Zombie entertainment, the non-comedic sort, portrays a constantly threatening setting that demands toughness and favors strongmen. It’s a Trumpian fantasy.

View today’s GOP as though it’s fending off a zombie apocalypse, and disparate policy initiatives suddenly fit together. It’s only partly a tongue-in-cheek observation to note that conservatives see zombies all around them.

A zombie horde shambles toward the southern border, carrying foreign diseases (like drugs and terrorism) with them. Let’s build a wall and send troops!

City-dwelling zombies clamber on top of each other, colors blended until they’re a uniform gray, making metro areas dangerous as they satisfy soulless hungers. Let’s dispatch more cops and militarize them! Let’s make it easier for property owners to run them off and root out their hives!

Big institutions to which citizens are vulnerable — government, corporations — are staffed by inflexible and heartless zombies, bound by rules that ensure nothing gets better. “You can’t even get a human on the phone.” Let’s elect an unpresidential president who ignores the rules and shakes everything up!

Conservatives teach their children, including their daughters, traditional values. But when they’re sent off to school, teachers infect them with a progressive virus that makes them part of the zombie hive. They lose their faith, their self-control, their gender, their identity — returning home uncommunicative (if not hostile), hypnotized by flashing smartphones as they sullenly shovel food into their mouths.

So let’s help keep kids out of public schools! Let’s limit funds for education, try to control teachers and librarians! Let’s ban TikTok and confiscate student phones! Let’s politicize school-board elections and encourage school prayer!

Zombies want nothing except to eat. So maybe that explains the conservative inclination to starve programs that feed people, not just food stamps but also free school lunches and even a program intended to improve nutrition for pregnant Women and Infant Children.

And conservatives envision streams of zombies who know little about government — they vote for Democrats, after all — mindlessly casting ballots (or passively allowing their ballots to be “harvested”) on behalf of the wicked conspirators who set this apocalypse off in the first place.

So their impulse is to make voting harder. Aren’t zombies less likely to surmount small barriers? And in places where Democrats dominate, let’s make elections nonpartisan so it’s harder to cast a brainless party-line vote.

That’s where Republicans lose the plot.

Until now, my zombie analogy has just been a playful way to represent a sad truth about the culture war. Whether progressive or right wing, ideologues view their positions as obviously correct — and so morally superior that opponents must be mindless, soulless, or both.

But at least the policies conservatives usually pursue to combat “zombies” have some hope of beating back their rivals. They’re not irrational.

The same cannot be said for voting restrictions, such as the attempt to gut what remains of early voting in Kentucky or the ongoing effort to make elections in Louisville nonpartisan.

Interfering in Jefferson County’s election rules is unlikely to help conservatives. As I explained to town leaders in Hopkinsville recently, when they brought me in to summarize research on nonpartisan elections, they rarely prevent party-based voting. Usually, a light hint or two is sufficient for almost everyone to identify the “Democratic” candidate and vote accordingly.

To the extent going nonpartisan keeps voters from following their herd, expecting Democrats to struggle reflects an outdated conception that their side relies on, well, zombies.

Listen to what campaign workers out in the field are saying. They’ve never seen Democratic voters so attentive, so fired up (or so networked by smartphones and social media).

Look at the numerous disappointments Republican politicians have suffered since 2018. Educated voters are switching sides.

Note the consistent Republican underperformance in special elections, most recently New York’s.

It’s grassroots Republican supporters who have become listless, unfocused, and unmotivated. Making it harder to participate, such as by hiding who the GOP’s candidates are, just increases the odds their party is the one like a dead man walking.

Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift after the Chiefs secured a spot in this year's Super Bowl. Their romance seems tailor-made for audiences longing to escape to Hallmark towns where every day is Homecoming or Christmas Eve, writes political scientist Stephen Voss. (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

A cold war between men and women has been reshaping the political world for most of this century. Americans may be aware of it like never before, though, for a silly reason: The political battle of the sexes recently bled over into the world of entertainment.

Anybody with the slightest exposure to pop culture knows by now about the budding romance at the center of the firestorm. It’s a love story tailored for celebrity-obsessed masses, uniting a record maker with a record breaker.

Our heroine? Pop star Taylor Swift, the singer/songwriter who has dominated music charts since first becoming a country sensation in 2006.

Her beau? Burly American football player Travis Kelce, “tight end” for a team marching relentlessly to the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship.

Images of Swift wearing her Kansas City Chiefs regalia, joyously celebrating her boyfriend’s successes on the gridiron — he just broke the record for most passes caught during the playoffs — have saturated the media. And so has the gossip.

Guess what? Last game they kissed! On camera! And within range of a hot mic, she uttered those fateful three words: “I love you.”

It doesn’t sound like the beginnings of a political drama. It sounds more like the ending to a romantic comedy, served up for audiences longing to escape to Hallmark towns where every day is Homecoming or Christmas Eve.

But political it nonetheless became. After the power couple became an item, cultural discourse grew ugly (and “gendered”): grumbling about the attention given to the woman in the box seats, snide asides about how little her teenybopper fans understood football.

The drama then turned into farce: Former President Donald Trump’s supporters have begun fretting that the union might be staged, a ploy intended to keep him from returning to the Oval Office. Maybe they’ve been crowned as celebrity royalty because their bond unites the powerful media kingdoms of music and sports — setting up the pair to sing President Joe Biden’s praises and pass him a game-changing reelection endorsement?

I don’t want to dismiss those concerns entirely. However unlikely the conspiracy theory, those Trumpian fears reflect an important truth: Entertainers come about as close to nobility as Americans tolerate. (Trump himself warmed up the electorate by playing a leader on “The Apprentice.”) “TayTay” has amassed a generation-spanning legion of loyal fans, not all from Democratic families. Biden would benefit immensely if hordes of Swifties warmed to his job performance.

Still, voters mostly tune out entertainers who weigh in during election season. Swift herself tried intervening in one race, on behalf of a Tennessee Democrat running for Senate, but her endorsement fell on deaf ears.

So no, the best evidence for the GOP’s struggles with female voters cannot be found among conservative influencers grousing about Taylor Swift.

Clearer evidence of the political battle of the sexes, however, was circulating around the same time the Chiefs nailed down their Super Bowl berth. The Survey Center on American Life released a report analyzing political differences between young men and women, and what they discovered was a yawning divide.

Few will be surprised to hear that women lean toward Democrats while men lean toward the GOP. That Gender Gap has been around for generations, documented by extensive research (including work by my colleague, Tiffany Barnes). Just it’s getting bigger.

More surprising is who’s causing the gap to widen. The usual complaint is that many Republicans have become extremists, which might suggest boys drifted ideologically.

Not so. American girls have been swinging leftward fast.

Young men, like generations before them, mirror the leanings of their families. They pick up partisan loyalties from parents, much as children pick up religion — and although they’ll occasionally switch sides if something updates their preferences, that happens rarely.

But young women are dramatically more liberal than they used to be, much more liberal than men. Republican families have been losing their daughters in droves.

Why? Liberals focused on the U.S. scene blame the loss of abortion rights, noting (correctly) that abortion has helped Democrats win in unlikely places and assuming (perhaps faultily) that female voters are the reason.

Or they’ll pin the blame on Trump. Even before his 2016 presidential victory, he faced accusations of misogyny, and the conservative culture warriors following in his wake commonly exhibit hostile sexism.

Conservatives, meanwhile, want to blame biased university professors — noting (correctly) that college-educated women are most likely to wind up on the left and assuming (perhaps faultily) that they were still conservative by the time they first enrolled.

Those explanations are too parochial. The political battle of the sexes is not a U.S. story. The chasm between young men and women is a global rift. In some countries, women have shifted politically, while in others it’s men, but the gender gap widened across the post-industrial world.

It isn’t even primarily a political story. Yes, men and women differ in their political leanings, but that’s just a symptom. The disease pulling young people apart operates at a deeper level.

The world has undergone profound cultural changes — likely due to the rapid proliferation of communication devices. This uncontrolled experiment on the young has produced all sorts of side effects that we barely understand.

Generation Z takes fewer chances. They hang out less with friends, interact with fewer people. They’re more likely to report feeling lonely, anxious and depressed. Most of these pathologies are stronger among girls.

Young women are more likely than their elders to feel as though they’ve been disrespected by men. And, to isolate the most-stunning claim from the new study: 30% of young women identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or “something else.”

How could electronic devices have led to so much turmoil? One hypothesis is that they made it possible — even easy — for boys and girls to occupy drastically different cultural spaces. It’s not a gender “gap” to bridge, but a gender partition to tear down.

Considered that way, maybe it becomes clearer why the relentlessly public relationship between a rich athlete and a rich musician could have struck such a nerve. Their romance symbolically unites a stereotypically masculine sport with music celebrated for expressing feminine consciousness, inviting a diverse audience into the same cultural arena.

That’s about the closest thing to a ceasefire in the battle of the sexes that we’re likely to find.

An election official talks to a voter on primary election day, May 16, 2023, at the Scott County Public Library in Georgetown. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

I believe that former state Sen. Charles Booker, the progressive who sought to challenge Mitch McConnell in 2020, fell short in his quest for the Democratic nomination due to progressive election reforms.

And while those changes have been scaled back dramatically, I believe that conservative efforts to eliminate the remnants of those policies would hurt conservative candidates in the future.

How’s that for a double irony?

Progressive reforms hurt the progressive

My belief that Booker should have won might seem bold: He lost the 2020 primary by approximately 15,000 votes, earning 42.6% support versus Amy McGrath’s 45.4%.

Yet that primary took place at the height of the pandemic, at a time when Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams had agreed to implement a laundry list of temporary policies typically favored by progressives:

• The state accepted votes up to three weeks before the end of the race (called early voting).
• Early votes could be cast in person, or voters could request absentee ballots on demand (called no-excuse absentee voting).
• Absentee voters could submit ballots by post (called voting by mail), or by feeding them into thinly supervised receptacles (called drop boxes).
• If voters insisted on waiting until Election Day to weigh in, most counties offered one centralized voting center, staffed with experienced election administrators able to resolve most hiccups.

Progressives endorse such policies because they make voting remarkably easy.

Democrats have a self-interested reason for desiring heavy turnout: Conventional wisdom holds that non-voters tilt their way. If so, eliminating the friction that keeps citizens from mobilizing would pump up Democratic vote totals.

Still, the push for broader participation isn’t purely cynical. Progressives emphasize equality (if not equity) with what can feel like religious zeal. Expanding participation fits with that core value.

So why would Kentucky’s pandemic policies, rooted in progressive interests and ideals, hinder the candidacy of a progressive — one who relied on support from the same citizens supposedly empowered by the rule adjustments?

Because reforms do not necessarily work as intended. They might not bring equalization, and sometimes they backfire. Both happened with Booker.

Booker promised to help people “from the hood to the holler,” but realistically, his candidacy depended on two constituencies: wealthy progressives and voters of color.

Shuttering local precinct stations hurt Booker with the latter. Compared to their co-partisans, Black?voters tended to vote on Election Day, so making it harder indirectly suppressed Black participation.

Some counties located their vote centers far from the neighborhoods where many Black voters live. Chances of voting decline the farther one lives from a polling station. Citizens with inflexible work schedules or who lack reliable transport will feel the impact keenly.

Such obstacles to Black voting took dramatic form in Jefferson County, Booker’s home base. Louisvillians snarled in traffic after work could not reach the voting center in time, which left them banging on windows after the deadline. A judge kept the station open for an extra half hour, but we’ll never know how many Booker supporters gave up and turned around — or decided against tackling the burdensome journey in the first place.

Affluent professionals, though, love voting by mail — convenient given their (often desk-bound) occupations. Should have helped Booker, right?

No, that’s where the “early” comes in. Booker’s support rose rapidly in the waning days of the primary, thanks to his prominence during Black Lives Matter protests.

Had everyone been obligated to cast votes at the end of election season, progressives caught up in BLM revivalism could have swung Booker’s way. Instead, because reforms let voters jump the gun — some contacted local party officials later, vainly trying to switch their early votes — the primary did not capture their ultimate preferences.

We’ll never know exactly how much support premature voting cost Booker. And because the potential votes Booker lost are uncountable, I cannot prove pandemic-era reforms defeated him. But they surely hurt.

Conservative retrenchment might hurt conservatives

Still, some conservatives in the General Assembly failed to learn caution from how election-law changes backfired in 2020. Now, they want to undermine some lingering reforms that, in the future, ought to help their party.

Back during the pandemic, conservatives did not miss that Adams was embracing rules preferred by Democrats. Adams faced some backlash, but he defended the adjustments as a necessary response to COVID-19 — and the pandemic’s end allowed Adams to evaluate the experiments he and Beshear had conducted.

Legislation Adams supported afterward rolled back most pandemic-era options for casting a ballot, while retaining some of the better reforms.

Voters still get to vote the weekend before Election Tuesday. As long as they’re willing to take the necessary steps, they still get to vote absentee without excuse. And while counties generally do not force everyone to vote at the same place, they were allowed to drop down to a smaller number of voting stations where the process could be handled efficiently.

Regrettably, Adams now finds himself feuding with Republicans who still think Kentucky’s election laws are too permissive. Newly filed legislation seeks to make absentee voting rare and end what’s left of no-excuse early voting.

I respect the underlying sentiment expressed by the bill’s sponsor, Sen. John Schickel: “Election Day is a very special day. It’s not something that should be taken on casually.” Still, restricting no-excuse early voting to just one weekend seems a modest accommodation to the difficulties faced by working Kentuckians with busy Tuesdays.

What’s amusing about Schickel’s bill is that it’s likely to hurt his own party (and not only due to voters being miffed about the added inconvenience). Heavier turnout might help Democrats nationally, but that hasn’t been true in Kentucky for a while. Even nationally, Republicans are struggling to turn out their historic supporters.

Lower-status white people have flocked to the GOP in the Trump era, and they’re the sort of voters most likely to be deterred by restrictive voting rules.

So while tightening election rules further might seem consistent with conservative interests and ideals, Republicans would be wiser to stick with the Adams-backed compromise. Inflexibility might well keep more Republican voters on the sidelines in coming elections, hurting conservative candidates.

A voter approaches the Morton Middle School polling site in Lexington, Nov. 7, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

In politics, perception often becomes reality.

Nowhere is that saying more appropriate than with legislative elections. Candidates viewed as likely to win attract volunteers, endorsements, and campaign contributions – and maybe extra news coverage – all of which increases the chance of victory.

Once candidates start generating buzz, voters take them seriously. They’ll draw bigger crowds at campaign events, making it easier to spread a winning message. Voters look more closely at the candidate’s literature when it shows up in the mail, figuring they’ll need to make a choice at some point.

Self-fulfilling prophecies work the other way as well. Seemingly doomed campaigns wind up underfunded, understaffed, and ignored by the bigshots who might’ve been able to turn the tide – ensuring that candidates remain dead in the water.

Note, though, that in either situation – the candidate who seems unassailable or the candidacy that seems hopeless – voters get final say. Sometimes they’ll deliver a surprise.

Dark-horse candidates periodically win office despite starting with shoestring budgets. They campaign with little more than a truck and a box of donuts, but it’s the right place and right time for what they’re selling. Perhaps the most-famous recent example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who took down an entrenched congressional Democrat to become a national star.

For every victorious longshot, a seemingly unbeatable candidate loses. Tea Party upstarts, including Rand Paul in Kentucky, turned back a slew of establishment candidates in 2010, and by 2014 had torn down key Republican legislators, including a House leader.

That’s the beauty of democracy: Reality can shatter perceptions.

But voters need a choice. Perception necessarily becomes reality when only one name appears on the ballot.

Judging from the list of candidates who so far have filed to run for General Assembly, citizens across Kentucky may find themselves with no choice this year.

As I write these words, only 28 of the 100 House seats and only 3 of the 19 Senate seats currently have at least one Democrat and one Republican listed. That could improve, but we’re running out of time: Jan. 5, today,? is the filing deadline.

Pickings are especially slim on the Democratic side. They haven’t yet posted candidates for a majority of seats.

Question is: What to make of this dearth of Democratic contenders?

It might seem a tragic mistake. Democrats are fresh off a successful effort to retain the governor’s mansion, despite Republicans holding a supermajority in both legislative chambers. As a result, communities across Kentucky currently have GOP legislators, yet they’re willing to elect a Democrat under the right circumstances.

The temptation would be to fight battles on all those fronts at once, hoping for lucky territorial gains. If Democrats neglect to fight everywhere, doesn’t that mean they’re forfeiting the game?

No. If Kentucky Democrats are serious about party building, taking baby steps in 2024 is wise.

Having a presidential race at the top of the ballot means Republican voters who sat out the governor’s race will show up this year, anchoring GOP incumbents. An off-year election like 2026 should be more promising.

More important, party building requires patience.

Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection just two months ago. Even if his slam dunk forces Democrats to reconsider where they can claw back assembly seats, such optimism hasn’t had time to catalyze a regrowth.

Good candidates rarely spring up on their own like weeds in a backyard. Strong candidacies need to be cultivated, like a treasured plant – a process in which political parties, and sometimes interest groups, play an essential role.

That’s especially true for the minority party in a politically lopsided state. Democrats no longer have a farm team that can feed candidates organically into the political system. Waiting for candidates to sprout will result in a thin crop and – because it’s often seeded by activists at odds with local values – one destined to wither.

The KDP needs to be looking for people outside of politics, business leaders or teachers respected in their communities who happen to be Democrats but wouldn’t consider running for office unless prompted.

Active recruitment is essential if Democrats want to field a diverse slate. Women are less likely to run without encouragement – partly because they view politics as a man’s game, partly because they tend to underestimate their own electability.

Ideally, Democrats don’t simply approach potential candidates with encouragement, but instead offer a credible support package. Running for office is daunting, and campaigns with real potential flounder if they lack the right resources at the right time.

No one can do more to promote Democratic revival than the popular governor who just won reelection, Andy Beshear. I don’t have the space to discuss all the ways a governor can make a difference, but money is key.

Beshear showed that he can raise buckets of cash to protect his own position. Now that he’s visible on the national stage, having won in a Trump-leaning state, Beshear needs to show he can succeed at fundraising on behalf of his party.

Until Democrats can do the hard work of party building, they’re wise to focus on a handful of especially promising districts.

Looking at where Democratic contenders have appeared, it’s possible the KDP is doing exactly that. Kentucky’s House includes nine districts where both parties should have at least a 1/3 raw chance of winning (judging from an updated analysis of the sort I conducted for Kentucky’s redistricting case). A Democrat has filed for all but one of those contests so far.

Democrats also have filed to run in districts where, although the odds are worse, a Democratic victory still would be within the realm of possibilities due to how abortion politics has upset old voting patterns.

We’ll see how many of the Democratic challengers end up being viable, whether they receive the sort of support from Beshear and the KDP they’d need to win. But simply based on numbers, Kentucky’s Democrats haven’t forfeited. They’re taking it slow, as they should.

UPDATE: As expected, a number of Democratic filings came in on the last day, making the numbers look even better for Kentucky Democrats than where they stood at the time this column was submitted. At least one Democratic candidate has filed to run for every House district with at least a 1/3 raw probability of Democratic victory, and Democrats also filed in 29 districts where the partisan tilt was even worse.

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, left, testifies before the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee, Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington, D.C. Also testifying, Liz Magill, who subsequently resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania; Pamela Nadell, professor at American University, and Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

“Hey, I’ve got some news that might interest you.”

The reporter’s voice was chipper, friendly, as though intending to tell me I’d won something. Except he’d called on a Sunday. When journalists are working that shift, it’s rarely a positive sign.

He said, “You were plagiarized by the president of Harvard!” Or something to that effect.

His revelation came as no surprise. I’d already received an email announcing the same thing. Still, hearing the words spoken aloud made my stomach churn.

I knew Harvard University President Claudine Gay back when we were graduate students there, initially serving as her “teaching fellow,” then working in the same lab. Claudine was a genuinely nice person, rare in elite academic programs, and I thought highly of her. Gay’s stumbles in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack already had puzzled me — so I dreaded the idea she might face another scandal, let alone one that roped me in.

“Gay’s dissertation contains paragraphs from a paper you wrote with Bradley Palmquist, but she didn’t credit you.”

That made matters worse. If Gay had copied a successful project, I might have felt gratified. This paper was the opposite: a humiliation I’d rather forget. I’d poured hours into that work, at a time when my children would have loved more attention, yet we’d never managed to submit the research for publication.

Learning what Gay had borrowed added insult to injury. She didn’t piggyback on my familiarity with Louisiana politics or my coauthor’s quantitative knowledge. Instead, she mimicked a minor part of our paper — one paragraph and fragments of another — explaining methods developed by someone else. It was the statistical equivalent of checking the oil before taking a car out for a drive.

Depressing. Those plagiarized words are destined to become the most widely read paragraph I’ll ever write. Yet they were rubbish, unimportant to our research and to Gay’s. If intellectual-property theft can be represented by picking someone’s pocket and keeping hundreds of dollars, this was like thoughtlessly grabbing a nickel or ballpoint pen off my desk, figuring I wouldn’t miss it.

I considered refusing interviews, but the story wasn’t going away and maybe I could help. Check out the Harvard Crimson’s in-depth coverage of the scandal, and consider how the section about me would have sounded if it ended before my input.

Instead, I cooperated with every interview request — fielding multiple calls from the New York Times, Boston Globe?and Chronicle of Higher Education. The message was simple: Yes, Claudine Gay technically plagiarized me, but what she copied was trivial material. I was not victimized. I deserved no retribution.

To use the “p” word seemed harmless. My entire career, I’ve been teaching students it’s wrong to do what Gay did, and I expect most writing teachers have done the same. Readers wouldn’t need me to tell them it was plagiarism once they saw my paragraph and hers side by side.

Just last year, I chastised a student for similar copying. What I wrote seems prophetic:

“Understand that you cannot use whole sentences from people — and also cannot use longer sections of someone else’s writing, organized the same way as their paragraph but with perhaps a trivial word change or two … Later on in your career, especially if you’re successful, it could cause a scandal of the sort that periodically hits public scholars.”

Some of Gay’s other defenders, however, apparently thought they could help by obscuring the meaning of plagiarism. My simple willingness to employ the word made news.?

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, known for turning “CRT” into a household acronym, exploited that opportunity. Because I called Gay’s paragraph “technically plagiarism,” he grouped me with two “esteemed academics” actively criticizing her use of their work.

I had to push back, given this one-sided characterization. I tried for a boring reply, hoping it would serve his tweet as a footnote noticed only by those who knew me.?

No such luck. Rufo amplified my response at prime time the next day. Approximately 1.8 million devices eventually encountered it, sending me down a rabbit hole that was the most eye-opening part of the adventure.

I found myself surrounded by an electronic lynch mob calling for Claudine’s head — with the most vocal participants furious at me for supporting her.

Some amused me, because they dismissed my stance with ignorant assumptions.

• “You care more about Gay’s progressive politics than about truth.” Right, that’s why I supported the Kentucky GOP’s redistricting case?
• “You want to stay on Harvard’s good side.” When’s the last time anyone at Harvard tried to boost my career?
• “You want to avoid getting on the diversity office’s bad side.” You mean the office already considered hostile to white males?
• “A student who did the same thing would be expelled.” No, at most schools, penalties for minor plagiarism are light.

But I don’t use the phrase “lynch mob” casually. Some replies were more sinister, giving vent to racial resentments against Claudine Gay, as well as against me because I wouldn’t help string her up — including posts from accounts with racially charged names or with user descriptions that referenced white supremacy.

Even more remarkable were the sexual insecurities on display. Donald Trump’s support always had roots in hostile sexism, but scholars and social critics have noted the rise of an incel (or involuntary celibate) culture that goes beyond race or political ideology. If you want a window into that particular underbelly of U.S. society, try scrolling through the reactions I received.

Gay was targeted not solely for race, but as a “strong woman of color” (and, some assumed fallaciously, a lesbian). Meanwhile, I was a traitor to my sex for standing by her. I was emasculated, a Beta male, a cuck. It was like turning a publishing house over to sixth-grade bullies.

I don’t know whether Claudine Gay’s presidency will survive the accumulating accusations. Leaving aside my part, I can’t judge whether it should.

I also don’t know where life might have taken me if I’d faked some moral outrage, giving those 1.8 million Twitter accounts more of what they wanted to hear. A syndicated column? A book contract? Maybe that’s the prize the reporter was hinting I’d won, were I willing to claim it.

I’m certain I wanted no part of that parade, though. Better to leave it having defended a former student, “a sadder and a wiser man” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798).

And I’ve won in a smaller way. Before this scandal, only a hundred people had opened our unpublished paper from a site called ResearchGate. Now that number’s past 3,000. Scandal attracts more attention than scholarship.

Students at Carter Traditional Elementary School in Louisville on Jan. 24, 2022. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

Kentucky inaugurates a governor next week.

He’s the same guy who has served in that office for the last four years, so it might seem silly to indulge in pomp and circumstance when nothing is changing. But as Americans learned the hard way after 2020, having an election end peacefully — having voters who supported the defeated candidate accept their loss — cannot be taken for granted. A peaceful election is worth celebrating.

Usually, an inauguration offers little role for the vanquished. The loser’s job is to concede defeat on Election Night and then fade into the background, his attacks on the winner ignored and his proposals forgotten. Voters rejected his message, so why should the winner care what he said? Why should anyone? Normally, elected officials can toss the loser’s platform into the dustbin.

But Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s education proposals should not be rejected so cavalierly. Cameron and his teacher wife, Makenze, publicized an ongoing catastrophe in public policy: the slippage that students suffered, and continue to suffer, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And their campaign offered a comprehensive Catch-Up Plan intended to target that shortfall.

Voters may have been unpersuaded by Cameron’s attacks on Gov. Andy Beshear’s COVID policies, but that doesn’t mean they think the kids are alright. Perhaps they simply didn’t believe Kentucky’s educational problems could be blamed on Beshear?

The tragedy, after all, stretches well beyond Kentucky’s borders. Multiple analyses show that students across the United States lagged badly during the COVID era, especially in mathematics. And however poor U.S. schooling might have been during the pandemic, slippage was worse in many other countries.

So learning loss isn’t a uniquely Kentucky problem traceable to Beshear. It isn’t even unique to the United States. Having to suspend in-person learning set young people back across the globe.

The pandemic’s ravages were not limited to short-term learning loss. Like it or not, public schooling delivers more than just reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. One of the most-basic lessons that students learn in school is how to be successful students — and evidence suggests that the COVID cohort lost (or perhaps never picked up) habits needed to thrive educationally.

Some students never returned to regular schooling. Among the students who did, absenteeism has spiked since the pandemic. However hard it might be to teach students in a modern classroom, it’s even harder to teach students who aren’t present at all. And spotty attendance causes a teacher’s logistical hassles to increase exponentially, hurting educational outcomes even for students who do show up.

The children of the pandemic are in danger of becoming a lost generation, educationally speaking.

Beshear offered his own education-policy platform during the gubernatorial campaign. Even if it had some chance of passing the GOP-dominated General Assembly, though, it lacked the problem-solving focus of Cameron’s. Big-ticket items included raises for pretty much everyone in the school system, universal pre-kindergarten, and shoring up educator pensions. Parts of the plan, such as the promotion of Social Emotional Learning institutes, seemed guaranteed to turn off Republicans.

However advisable Beshear’s proposals?might have been, he offered few direct remedies for the pandemic’s damage, relying mostly on generic educational improvements to do the trick.

The same cannot be said of Cameron’s targeted plan. Cameron did want to hike pay for teachers, who have fallen behind financially because of inflation, but much of his package grappled with learning loss: money for tutoring, for reading intervention, for rewarding experienced teachers and enticing former teachers back into the classroom.

It’s probably unrealistic to hope that Beshear will take pages from his opponent’s playbook, even though he can do so now without seeming to validate Cameron’s criticisms. Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman showed little enthusiasm for the catch-up proposal, and the education industry naturally prefers their costlier plan.

Still, jumping into the driver’s seat on educational reform, and helping guide a bipartisan package through the legislative process, would be a great way for Beshear to maintain his national prominence. Americans are concerned about education policy. And now that Beshear’s guaranteed a second term, Kentucky’s GOP leaders have less incentive to throw up roadblocks just for the sake of foiling him.

The more-interesting question is whether Republican leaders in the General Assembly would see Cameron’s Catch-Up Plan as a way to deliver for their constituents. Cameron’s proposal may have failed to launch him into the governor’s mansion, but it stood out from much of his campaign rhetoric — because instead of offering red meat for the right wing, it apparently drew on the insights and policy recommendations of prominent education experts seeking to reform public schools.

A level-headed approach to repairing public education — one that pays special attention to the pandemic’s lost generation — might not be a politician’s straightest path to prominence. But if Beshear wants to show he can work across party lines, and if Kentucky Republicans want to show that they’re ready to govern, then a legislative package that delivers much-needed pay raises to teachers in exchange for reasonable school reforms might be the safest path.

Kentucky’s a conservative state, so many government policies can be a hard sell. But education policy has long been an exception to that rule. Mainstream Republicans usually embrace government investment in schooling, because unlike many domestic programs, public schools do not try to impose equality of outcomes. Public schools seek to create equality of opportunity, a goal shared across much of the ideological spectrum.

So Kentucky’s Republican supermajority should keep alive the Catch-Up Plan promoted by their party’s gubernatorial nominee, despite his loss at the ballot box. And once Gov. Andy Beshear finishes his victory lap next week, he should consider adopting some of his opponent’s education proposal as his own.

Because if Beshear and the Republican General Assembly can figure out a mutually agreeable way to help the pandemic generation catch up, rather than leaving them behind, there should be plenty enough political credit to go around.

Senate President Robert Stivers sponsored legislation seeking a study of Kentucky higher education. (LRC Public Information photo)

“People like me have no say in government. They don’t care what we think.”

Such skepticism has long been a popular excuse citizens give for not voting. But if you doubt elections matter, pay close attention to the abortion debate in Kentucky — because Republican leaders have been singing a different tune since it became clear Democrat Andy Beshear would cruise into a second term as governor.

Heading into this year’s elections, most ambitious Kentucky Republicans embraced the full pro-life policy package. That meant a lot more than just cutting off abortion access after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a relatively popular restriction challenged unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme Court.

To toe the pro-life line in Kentucky meant defending a “trigger law” that went into effect after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Kentucky law bans abortion entirely — making no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, and giving doctors little leeway when trying to protect a pregnant woman’s health. They’re among the nation’s most-stringent abortion restrictions, but Republicans were unenthusiastic about softening them.

Admittedly, a few did try. State Rep. Jason Nemes sponsored a bill last legislative session to allow exceptions for rape and incest. We’ll never know how popular the proposal was, though, because it died in the Committee on Committees. Republican leaders blocked it from coming up for a vote.

Why risk alienating anti-abortion activists, who’ve historically been critical to the GOP coalition? Failing to keep pro-lifers happy not only could prevent politicians from climbing the career ladder, it might cost them their jobs if more-conservative candidates chose to “primary” them. Policymakers cannot have a positive impact, on abortion or anything else, if they lose.

I saw this terror of pro-life groups firsthand when a UK alum working with one of the statewide Republican campaigns visited my office last spring. Kentucky was halfway through primary season, with little real movement in anyone’s standing, so my former student was curious whether I had ideas for how a candidate might break from the pack.

Rather than bore readers with the many fruitless suggestions I offered — unlike voters, political scientists are right that policymakers rarely care what we think! — I’ll jump to the proposal I saved until the end because it was most obvious. “I know your candidate cannot take a pro-choice stance. But a Republican could stand out by promising to smooth the trigger law’s sharpest edges.”

My visitor’s eyes widened. “No way could I convince the campaign to endorse rape and incest exceptions. The right-to-life people would have our heads!”

“Okay,” I replied. “But maybe your candidate could support an exception to protect the health of pregnant women? Make it a pro-life message, pointing out that women also have a right to life that current law jeopardizes. Or pitch it as the smart way to protect abortion restrictions, because failing to respect pregnant women’s medical needs increases the risk of a hostile court decision.”

My former student shrugged. “Not happening. Maybe in the general election. Don’t hold your breath.”

That was then. This is now.

The change started before last election. Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s staunch culture-war platform was hurting him with swing voters.

Beshear hammered Cameron on abortion, releasing a pair of attack ads that — if we’re to believe his campaign manager’s victory tour — influenced voters more than anything else thrown their way. Cameron tried to walk back his position, but the result was a muddle and Beshear exploited that weakness in debate.

The Republican candidate to replace Cameron as AG, meanwhile, openly endorsed reversing parts of the ban late in the campaign.

Pressure to do something surely has grown since Election Day. Beshear trounced Cameron among voters who split their tickets, and abortion politics ranks among the best explanations.

Beshear’s support closely tracked the 2022 vote against Amendment 2, which would have protected the trigger law. When I look specifically at where Beshear exceeded typical Democratic outcomes, it’s the same counties that helped nix that amendment.

So Republicans ought to be worried about abortion. If Democratic state-legislative candidates can muster even a pale shadow of Beshear’s statewide support, they’d make a significant dent in the GOP supermajority.

Meanwhile, pro-lifers should have lost their aura of invincibility. Turnout fell miserably short in the communities that anti-abortion groups and allied churches once mobilized. If the Right to Life people cannot get their constituency excited about stopping a Democratic governor, maybe they won’t be so effective at mustering votes against independent-minded Republicans?

Leaders in the GOP caucus now say they might consider a bill to roll back the most-draconian abortion restrictions. Good for them. My previous Lantern column talked about how Democrats could replicate Beshear’s coalition, but if Republicans move back to where the voters are, the Democratic path to victory gets harder.

That said, maybe it’s time for GOP leaders to look beyond abortion and ask why they find themselves once again on the horns of a dilemma: whether to block legislation opposed by right-wing activists, or let it move forward so vulnerable Republicans can show support for it. Because they’ve been here before with sports betting and medical marijuana.

Party leaders are forced to roll the dice on these political calculations for a reason. Compared to rules operating in many states, the General Assembly makes it easy for leaders to block legislation, even when it’s supported by a chamber majority.

That gatekeeping authority is a source of power, but it comes with a price. It means that if Republican leaders want to give members of their supermajority flexibility to cast votes pleasing to the folks back home, on abortion or other controversial issues, they need to accept responsibility for letting legislation advance — which can anger bill opponents.

Better that Republican leaders give up the power of obstruction and open Kentucky’s legislative process. Yes, sacrificing some clout might let Democrats pass an occasional bill, when they’ve settled on something popular. But it also would protect the diverse supermajority that keeps GOP leaders in power, letting suburban Republicans cast a few socially liberal votes when necessary, while those from Eastern Kentucky could document their economic populism occasionally.

Adopt minor reforms, in other words, and the power of Republican leaders might never have been safer.

And, as an added bonus, maybe letting through more popular legislation would convince voters that they do have a say in government.

Gov. Andy Beshear and his father, former Gov. Steve Beshear, left, celebrated last year on election night. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

When Democrat Andy Beshear won the 2019 gubernatorial contest, election observers both inside and outside Kentucky passed off his success as a fluke.?

Usually, they didn’t even give Beshear credit for his own victory. Instead, they attributed Beshear’s win to his opponent, combative Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. Beshear won because Bevin was “a jerk.”

Now Beshear has scored himself a second term of office, this time fending off a challenger with an upbeat, almost Reaganesque disposition little like Bevin’s. But that hasn’t stopped commentators from treating Beshear’s victory as another unearned gift from the opposition.

Some progressives apparently want to believe that Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s loss reflects the politics of race, either Cameron’s or his handling of the Breonna Taylor investigation, while Republicans prefer to focus on weaknesses in Cameron’s campaign, which I’ve seen called uninspiring, undisciplined, underfunded, and (by Donald Trump) polluted with “the stench of Mitch McConnell.”

Even when pundits grant that Beshear’s success in a pro-Trump state might have had something to do with Beshear himself, they usually emphasize superficial advantages he exploited. They credit Beshear’s apparent niceness: Supporters, after all, call him Andy. They credited Andy’s initial success to name recognition built by his father Steve, who governed the commonwealth for two terms prior to Bevin. Now they’re crediting the son’s renewed success to the “incumbency advantage” — that is, to the simple fact of already being governor.?

Those explanations may contain elements of truth, but it would sell Andy Beshear short to treat the state’s last two gubernatorial elections as happy accidents for the Democratic Party, or to attribute his success to some kind of inexplicable magic wrapped into the Beshear name.

Dismissing Beshear’s success in this way is more than just unfair to him. Treating Beshear’s win as a fluke means treating it as the pathetic last gasp of partisan competition in Kentucky. That sort of pessimistic thinking can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as ambitious young politicos avoid the minority party, as potential candidates for that party decide not to run, and as campaign contributors decide to invest their limited funds elsewhere. It can do damage to the health of the commonwealth’s party system.

Democrats have won four of the last five Kentucky gubernatorial contests not because of accidents, but because the Beshears put together a meaningful and potentially durable coalition that other Democrats could replicate.

Beshear’s victory is meaningful for future Kentucky elections because he performed so well among the sort of educated voters who historically backed the GOP.

A common national storyline has been to tie Beshear’s victory to abortion rights, a reaction to Kentucky’s stringent abortion restrictions triggered by the fall of Roe v. Wade. Yes, abortion was a flashpoint this year, but the effect of culture war politics in Kentucky has not been a one-time thing.

When Beshear ran for governor in 2019, the Democratic Party already was making headway among voters in the suburbs and “exurbs,” and he outperformed other Democrats there. So they didn’t suddenly swing to Beshear to defend abortion. They’ve been moving leftward since the GOP hitched its star to Trump and political conflict started revolving around identity issues.

The Beshear coalition can be durable because voting behavior is sticky.

When pundits bat around stories for why an election turned out the way it did, they almost always focus on what changed. That’s the “newsworthy” angle. But if I’m trying to guess how Beshear performed in a county in 2023, and I’m only allowed a single piece of information to help guide my guess, what I want to know is: How did Beshear perform there in 2019? That four-year-old pattern is more predictive of Beshear’s vote share than a slew of more-recent numbers, including 2020 support for Donald Trump.

Give voters similar choices, and most people will vote the same way even if four years have passed. That’s why communities consistently back candidates from the same party: Usually each party offers products similar to ones they’ve sold before. Beshear in 2023 was much the same candidate offered to voters in 2019, and voters responded similarly to him each time.

Voters may depart from past patterns if, looking back on a leader’s performance, they see the politician in a new way. (Political scientists call it “retrospective voting.”) In that sense, Beshear was not giving voters exactly the same choice in 2023, because he’d run up a track record leading the state through crisis after crisis. The Beshear product came with the same name, but it had more brand loyalty attached to it after a term in office and he outdid his previous victory.?

Political payoff from Beshear’s job approval appeared most dramatically in the flood-ravaged counties of Eastern Kentucky, where voters abundantly rewarded his efforts to assist them. But electoral benefit from the Beshear administration’s work likely extended beyond the impacted region, as voters heard how Beshear was rebuilding the disaster area. More broadly, the Beshear record on energy issues allowed Andy to outperform most Democrats in coal counties.

This is the incumbency advantage, yes, but it’s one that’s earned, not automatic — and potentially replicable if other Democratic politicians accrue trust with voters while working their way up the political career ladder.

So I’m more optimistic about Democratic Party prospects in Kentucky than are pundits who treat Beshear’s victories as accidental. The Beshear coalition is meaningful, and has the potential to be durable if the Kentucky Democratic Party fields the sort of candidates who can tap into it. Replicate Beshear’s pattern of support, and Democrats not only will win statewide offices, they’ll approach parity in the statehouse.

But success is far from guaranteed. Democratic politicians may not show the patience needed to build up voter trust by working hard on bread-and-butter issues. They might not be able to resist the temptation to harp on hot-button controversies, the way progressive activists push Democrats to do. A culture war strategy will serve Democrats in a conservative state no better, and likely worse, than it has served Republicans seeking the governorship.

Part of the crowd — and signage — awaiting the arrivals of Andy Beshear and Daniel Cameron for their Oct. 23 KET debate. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)

Last time I went to the grocery in Lexington, one of the stock clerks began tailing me. He held his distance at first, keeping me in eyesight but not approaching, until I started browsing an out-of-the-way clearance rack. Then he made his move.

“You’re that UK professor, right?” He asked the question furtively, as though we were two spies meeting under flickering lamplight. “Stephen Voss?”

I admitted my guilt.

“Let me ask you something.” He said it under his breath, and didn’t wait for my nod. “Is Andy Beshear going to win the governor’s race?”

Sigh. After such suspenseful buildup, his query was a letdown. Nine times out of ten, it’s the first one I get after someone learns I’m a political scientist. “Who’s going to win the next election?” National journalists who’ve been calling me for the last few months to discuss the governor’s race approach the topic in fancier ways, but usually what they want to know boils down to the same horse-race question: “Is a Democrat really going to win reelection in Kentucky?”

Of course, if being a political scientist meant I’d been issued a crystal ball along with my diploma, I might be able to satisfy these interrogators. But that’s not how science works.

Science can pinpoint a pattern. For example, pre-election polls usually underestimate GOP support in Kentucky, often by large margins (partly for the same reasons they underestimated the Republican winner’s strength in Louisiana last week). That’s a possible source of hope for Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who has consistently trailed Beshear. Polls badly missed a Republican gubernatorial victory here in 2015, so maybe they’re doing it again.

Science can document changes. For example, white professionals have abandoned the Republican Party in the years since Trump’s victory and the fall of Roe v. Wade. That’s good news for Gov.? Beshear, who needs a strong showing in the affluent Golden Triangle region of the state to overwhelm a lopsided Republican tilt almost everywhere else.

Science can seek explanations. For example, the timing of the Democratic Party collapse in Appalachia leads me to attribute it, more than anything, to stringent energy regulations enacted by President Obama, which his opponents successfully vilified as a War on Coal. That’s decent news for Beshear, because Kentucky Democrats have been able to avoid the full force of coal country’s rejection of the national Democratic Party (as Beshear himself did in 2019).

Science can help us understand processes. For example, although election reformers usually treat the decision whether to vote as personal, based on how individuals balance the costs and benefits of turning out, political scientists have long known that participation is heavily influenced by organizations – such as parties or interest groups – that invest resources to whip up citizen engagement. That’s great news for Beshear, who (unlike the resource-deprived Democrat crushed in Louisiana) has a massive amount of cash available to mobilize supporters.

Science can puncture myths. Two examples spring to mind. One is the myth that undecided voters break for the challenger. Another is the myth that low turnout helps Republicans. Both would be good news for Cameron, except research doesn’t support either rule of thumb. Low turnout likely helps Democrats in Kentucky, especially when their candidate enjoys high name recognition and an enthusiastic base – so Cameron is the one who should have his fingers crossed that Kentuckians will show up for the off-year election.

All the things science permits — identifying patterns, documenting changes, testing explanations for why the world behaves as it does, puncturing myths – can be useful when issuing forecasts. But knowing how the world generally works doesn’t allow an analyst to say with certainty how it will behave in a single instance, leading to wishy-washy predictions that confuse and frustrate laypeople.

I might estimate Republican chances of taking the governor’s mansion this year to be worse than a coin toss, given my application of research to the current context, but I won’t be betting the house on it. If your meteorologist tells you there’s a 45% chance of rain, that doesn’t mean it won’t rain. It means bring an umbrella.

Another thing about scientific research frustrating to laypeople is that sometimes it can even support conclusions that end up being wrong – especially when probing new developments, such as the spread of an unknown virus.

We have such a disease infecting the body politic now: an especially virulent form of partisanship that has spread from political leaders to the citizenry over the last 30 years. Political scientists are still scrambling to catch up with this political polarization, as new data on the contagion keep rolling in.

A recent snapshot of the fevers roiling American politics comes from Project Home Fire, based at the University of Virginia. Their survey released last week documented so many symptoms of democratic breakdown among both Democrats and Republicans — willingness to suppress civil liberties, endorsement of violence against opponents, even an openness to splitting the country — that I wouldn’t know how to pick highlights. The nation is sick.

One pessimistic conclusion to emerge from scientific research about this polarization is that officeholders no longer have much hope of keeping their jobs by converting voters. The incumbency advantage, as it’s called, has eroded away because Americans are so driven by their party identification – especially their hostility toward the other party – that trying to win us over by doing a good job is useless.

But the great thing about science is that, even when wrong, it can fix itself based on new information. This year’s gubernatorial election should force political scientists to reconsider how much leaders can benefit from trying to please skeptical voters, even those who initially might seem deplorable.

Beshear started the campaign season, and he heads into the Nov. 7 election, with some of the highest job-approval ratings of any governor in the nation. Should he retain his post – heck, even if he narrowly loses among such a pro-Trump electorate – he’ll at least have shown that Kentucky voters are more persuadable than outsiders have been assuming.

In December 2022, a month after Republicans won the U.S. House, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, right, spoke to the media alongside recently ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, at the time minority leader. Now Scalise and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio are competing to succeed McCarthy as speaker. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Almost as soon as Kevin McCarthy lost his position as speaker of the U.S. House, attackers pivoted their artillery toward Majority Leader Steve Scalise, an obvious candidate to replace him. Scalise’s detractors loaded their cannon with the same ammunition fired at him nine years ago, when Scalise sought to become GOP whip, and it exploded like scattershot over social media once McCarthy gave up on retaking his post.

The attack trending on X/Twitter went something like this:

“Scalise describes himself as ‘David Duke without the baggage.’ He’s associated with Duke & attended a white-supremacist conference.”

And here’s my fact check on that narrative: It’s partly false, broadly misleading, and insofar as it’s supposed to make Scalise sound distinct from his Republican competition, entirely unfair.

Before justifying those conclusions, though, I offer a warning. Normally when I analyze politics, I do so objectively as a nonpartisan scientist with a moderate outlook. This time, my perspective is firsthand.

I covered student government at Louisiana State University when Scalise cut his teeth as a novice politician. I worked in the Louisiana statehouse during the rise of David Duke, a former Klan grand wizard once pictured protesting in a Nazi uniform. Duke registered Republican so he could win a suburban state House seat, then ran for U.S. Senate in 1990 and governor of Louisiana in 1991, both times winning among white voters but losing the election.?

?I covered Duke’s campaigns as a reporter, watched his legislative career as a Democratic aide, and analyzed his voting support as an academic.

So what’s wrong with the Twitter mob’s accusations?

Let’s start with Scalise’s “association” with Duke. Here’s the tangible connection: Duke campaign manager Kenneth Knight lived in Scalise’s neighborhood, and they were on friendly terms. That’s it. No record of Scalise and Duke meeting, sharing a stage, or being in the same organization. No record of Scalise praising Duke. When asked, Scalise condemned Duke’s bigotry.

By that standard of guilt, I may have more personal association with Duke than Scalise. At least one close friend and one distant family member held posts in Duke’s campaigns, and I once rode in a car with just Duke and his driver. (I had ambushed Duke in a parking lot to make sure he didn’t dodge a scheduled Q&A with USA Today, and he offered me a ride back to my car.)? Those indirect ties didn’t stop me from infuriating Duke’s inner circle, though. Struggling to capture the fascist overtones of Duke’s campaign launch, with the full-throated chant of “Duke, Duke, Duke” coming from a massive arena crowd, I fixed on the music playing when the candidate emerged on stage — pointing out that the composer, Richard Strauss, held a position under the Third Reich. It was, perhaps, an unfair dig: Americans know the tune as the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme.

What about Scalise’s alleged “appearance” at a racist conference organized by Knight, Duke’s campaign manager? The same guy treated as credible when describing their friendship suddenly becomes untrustworthy when denying this allegation. Knight, corroborated by his ex-girlfriend, says Scalise appeared at an unconnected neighborhood-association meeting earlier in the day.

Who’s considered more believable than the conference organizer on this question? An author for the Klan-affiliated Stormfront, writing under a pseudonym, whose piece called Scalise’s presentation part of the conference. Not even this disreputable character, though, managed to dredge much racialist content from the legislator’s policy talk.

Making the accusations “mostly true” gets weirdly convoluted:

“Scalise accepted a shady acquaintance’s invitation to speak briefly about domestic policy before a civic association in a hotel that he should have known would host a white-supremacist conference later that day.”

Lacks zing. But it’s the story reputable news outlets have reported.

Finally, what about the claim Scalise “describes” himself as like Duke? Using present tense is deceptive, because even if true, the story dates back to the mid-1990s.

The charge is that young Scalise described his platform as similar to Duke’s during a personal conversation with fellow LSU alum Stephanie Grace. Grace, a reporter, apparently neither recorded nor published the statement. Instead, she trotted it out many years later, “going from memory,” when Scalise rose in Congress.

I knew Stephanie, and don’t question her truthfulness. But the phrase is a distant recollection from a novice reporter, one horrified by Duke; it cannot validly be considered a Scalise quotation. We have no way to evaluate the words Scalise used, let alone what else he might have said to clarify them. It’s an accusation without evidence.

Of the attacks against Scalise, this one strikes me as most unfair. Having studied Duke and his supporters, I can tell you that what Duke was promising in the early 1990s differed little from what Republicans say today — and if Scalise stands out, it’s only because he’s from Duke’s turf and aware of the similarities.

David Duke was astonishingly good at parroting Reagan/Bush conservatives. (He did occasionally lift the hood, such as at a press conference when he shot back at a hostile reporter, “Are you Jewish?”) Duke drove both journalists and the establishment GOP bonkers because his campaign rhetoric sounded so normal. They struggled to make the case he should be repudiated, much as reporters flail today when trying to advertise Donald Trump’s flaws or Republicans stumble when facing oddball primary candidates.

The one thing Duke’s critics could throw at him was “the baggage,” his awful past. But it wasn’t working. One reason is, we didn’t have much to offer at first: a few lines on his proverbial resume. To document Duke’s outlandish racial ideology, I spent hours in a dusty library basement photocopying broadsheets from his National Association for the Advancement of White People. Eventually, the baggage caught up and Duke’s star fell. His entry in the 1992 Republican presidential nominating contest flopped, even in the Deep South.

The other reason attacks on Duke’s past failed, though, is voters wanted to hear about the present. Duke spoke for lower-status whites who lacked a voice. Until mainstream politicians figured out a way to represent that constituency, it would be open to demagogues with Nazi sympathies, Klan affiliations.

Eventually, the political system delivered by transforming the GOP. It started with Ross Perot’s Reform Party constituency, which Newt Gingrich helped Republicans capture. The Tea Party Movement accelerated the process, followed by Trump — who may embody Duke stripped of the racist claptrap. The post-Trump GOP now dominates among those alienated middle-class workers, while bleeding educated suburbanites.

The latest incarnation of Trump Era Republicanism is the congressional Freedom Caucus, some of whom helped pull down McCarthy. Ironically, the founding chair of that group was not Scalise, but his Trump-endorsed rival for speaker, Jim Jordan.

Given the current state of the GOP, exactly what sin did Scalise commit? It was having the wisdom to sense, and the foolishness to articulate in an unguarded interview, where his party was headed.