It was a farcical conclusion to a very bad week for the former president. Earlier in the week, USA Today published a poll finding that Republican voters preferred Florida governor Ron DeSantis to the ex-president by a 2-to-1 margin, 56% to 33%. Early hopes among Trump die-hards that this result was “biased” were then thoroughly dashed on Wednesday, when the Wall Street Journal and CNN came out with polls showing strikingly similar results. In the Journal poll, DeSantis led Trump 52-38. CNN worded its questions differently, but found that Republican voters preferred a “different candidate” over Trump by a 62-38 margin. DeSantis was the most popular alternative.

It is a dangerous business to predict the political demise of Trump, who has been making pundits look stupid since he stepped onto the national stage. Few took him seriously as a candidate when he first declared in 2015, few believed he could defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and few believed he could come within a few tens of thousands of votes of re-election in 2020. But this time is different. Trump really is done. 

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By Joel Kotkin

Analysis of his political fortunes has always been somewhat distorted by the fact that he is universally loathed by the American media class — or at least those who exist outside the self-contained bubble of conservative media. How could people vote for such an obviously unfit candidate? Well, pundits said, because they were racists, or economically anxious, or conspiracy-addled lunatics in thrall to lurid theories about paedophile elites. Perhaps it was because the Left had become too woke and abandoned the working class. But, surely, the man was so ludicrous and criminal that the American people would eventually come to their senses and chuck him out. 

The truth was always a lot simpler. Most Trump supporters — aside from a numerically small but electorally important slice of Obama-Trump voters in the Midwest — liked him because they were Republicans and he was the Republican candidate. Recall that Trump won a plurality, not a majority, of the GOP primary vote in 2016, and that was against a fatally crowded establishment field — similar to what Bernie Sanders accomplished in 2020 before Barack Obama intervened to unify his party’s establishment behind Joe Biden. But the voters who backed other GOP candidates were not about to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, no matter what Trump did or said. 

Once Trump was the nominee and, later, the president, the most powerful force in American politics, negative partisanship, was there to do the heavy lifting. For most Right-leaning Americans, you could always tell yourself something along these lines: “Sure, Trump is a loose cannon with a complicated relationship to the truth. But I like his policies, the economy is doing great, the media is biased against him and exaggerates his flaws, and in any case, better him than a Democrat.”

Trump’s talent for polarising the entire political field made it easy for him to shore up Republican support. Whatever he did, good or bad, one could be sure that at least one prominent Democrat (and probably more than one) would respond with something so outrageous to the sensibilities of Republican voters that they would feel they had no choice but to support their man. 

Then, 2020 changed all that. There was, of course, the loss itself, the refusal to concede, and the debacle of January 6, although the latter meant more to voters who were already inclined to dislike him. The bigger problem for Trump was simply that he was no longer president. No more White House press briefings, no more Twitter account, and no more 24/7 Trump news cycle, despite the best efforts of CNN and the January 6 committee. Trump was, of course, still the most famous Republican in the country, and still beloved by most of the base — for a time. But for a man whose singular political genius was his ability to command attention and turn it to his advantage, being one option among many for 2024 — not to mention one with eight years of political baggage in a country where voters are notoriously fickle — was always going to be an uphill battle. 

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It took the midterms and their aftermath, however, to deliver the death blow. Everyone in the GOP knew that Trump had backed a number of bad candidates in winnable races, but in the last few months before the election, most believed the hype about an incoming red wave (I did too). But the red wave was fake news, and Trump candidates sank the GOP ticket in major swing states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump responded by lashing out against DeSantis, one of the few Republicans to make an impressive showing in an otherwise disastrous year. In 2016, he had ridiculed candidates such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and it had worked because voters believed in their hearts that they really were low-energy losers. Now Trump was the loser attempting to bully the winner, and the jokes weren’t funny anymore. 

The month and a half since the midterms has been one long, rolling disaster for Trump. Against the wishes of his advisors, he announced his reelection bid barely a week after the electoral bloodbath, earning the endorsement of only one senator. Rupert Murdoch abandoned him. His company was found guilty of criminal tax evasion in Manhattan. He hosted Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes in Mar a Lago; following a massive backlash, his camp was forced to claim that he had been tricked by the rapper’s entourage, only for Kanye to go on Alex Jones a few days later and sing the praises of Hitler. After the release of the “Twitter Files” — internal documents relating to the company’s decision to ban Trump after the Capitol Riot — Trump seemingly called for the suspension of the Constitution. By the time he announced the NFTs, it was hard not to wonder if even he had given up hope. 

If Trump were still president, no doubt he’d be able to rally more support. But he’s only an ex-president, and one who seems more embittered and desperate by the day. Unlike in 2016, he only has one rival. And unluckily for Trump, DeSantis looks like a man who can win.

***

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To be sure, election anxiety is a real thing, and it can be difficult to avoid entirely. In a bygone era, I struggled with this. On the night of Trump’s surprise victory on November 8, 2016, what started as gallows humour transformed into sheer panic. My brother called me at midnight. “I’m not so much worried about us. I’m worried about mom and dad,” he told me. I started to tear up — the first (and last) time I ever cried about politics. Since my mother wears the headscarf, she is visibly and obviously Muslim in a way that I am not. And Donald Trump had spent the previous 12 months demonising Muslims, a relic of a time when Islam and Muslims had become something of a national preoccupation. In addition to his vaunted “Muslim ban”, Trump had expressed support for registering Muslims in a database and refused to disavow the internment of Japanese Americans.

I feel a bit sheepish for crying, not because men shouldn’t cry — they probably should, at least occasionally — but because no one should cry about an election. In a democracy, elections can be cause for disappointment and even anger, but they shouldn’t be an occasion for despair. As I discuss in The Problem of Democracy, to contest a democratic election is to know that there are no final victories, merely provisional ones. The worst thing about elections is losing, but the best thing about losing is that you live to fight another day — through the ballot box in the next election. It does require patience, however. It also requires that the losers come to terms with losing and think about how they might win. There is always hope, in other words. This doesn’t mean that things will get better, but it does mean that citizens, activists, and political parties have avenues of redress available to them.

Intellectually, I knew these things. By then, I had already become a firm believer in the notion that democratic outcomes — especially the ones that seem most threatening to us — must be respected. But in the heat of the moment, it was hard. It was a long night. My parents, who care about politics but care less than I do, went to sleep before Donald Trump altered the course of American history. They woke up to a new world. Yet when I spoke to my father that morning, he seemed oddly relaxed, taking it in his stride. He had grown up under an authoritarian regime. Because he had seen the alternative, he had an intuitive grasp of what made democracy — and specifically American democracy — strong. If enough Americans had voted for Trump, they must have had a reason for doing so. It was their choice, and what was democracy if not the right to make the wrong choice? This wasn’t the end of the world. There would be another election.

America muddled through then. And it has muddled through yet again.

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Could democracy have died, or at least begun dying? In politics like in life, anything is possible. But black swans, by their very nature, are extremely unusual occurrences. To preoccupy ourselves with them is to orient our politics around the least likely scenarios. As The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg and I discussed recently, apocalyptic rhetoric about democracy’s imminent death is the Democrats’ version of the “Flight 93” argument that America’s fate hinges on one election. That’s not to say that they are morally equivalent. But it is to say that they play on the same notes of overwrought existential dread.

Fear is a powerful emotion. It’s also a thrilling one. Might you be more willing to vote if you think America as you know it is about to end? Perhaps. I’m willing to concede that catastrophism serves a mobilising function in particular instances. However, one can easily imagine such rhetoric losing its incantatory power. Either way, if electoral mobilisation depends on perpetually framing politics as an existential battle — even if it’s not — then it’s hard to see how that level of intensity and angst can be maintained indefinitely.

As arguments go, “democracy will die if we don’t act” is also unfalsifiable. If the Democratic Party outperforms expectations, then catastrophists can say that they pre-empted the fall of democracy by spurring people to action. But if Republicans win, they can just as easily point to those victories as evidence that the threat remains. The easy resort to rhetorical alarmism also captures a certain way of thinking about politics. It treats language as a substitute for politics. For some, such an “angle” may be purely cynical, but once words are uttered with enough frequency, it becomes easier to believe them.

And they shouldn’t be believed. An argument about democracy’s imminent death is not an argument about facts. It’s an argument about something that, in a very literal sense, hasn’t actually happened yet. As it turns out, it’s challenging to engage in reasoned analysis about something that may or may not happen at some unspecified point in the future. The future, perhaps more than the past, is disagreeable. And if reasonable people can disagree on the future, then they can — and should — disagree on otherwise wild claims that we may be witnessing the end of America as we know it.

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Why I'm voting Republican

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For American democracy to have died after the Midterm elections, or for it to die in 2024, an unlikely confluence of several unlikely events would need to happen in a particular order and within a fairly narrow timeframe. In a country as large and unwieldy as ours, as evenly divided as ours, with as much separation of powers as ours, with enough federalism as ours, and with a media as vigorous as ours (against Republican overreach), the notion that democracy would die or even that it could was a nightmare. The good thing about nightmares is that you wake up from them.

To say nothing of its effects on politics, panic and fear are also bad for your health. They’re certainly bad for your relationships with other human beings. If you come to believe that your opponents are “fascists”, then they are no longer mere opponents. They are transformed into enemies who must be defeated. Being in such a state of alarm — and wanting to be alarmed — is probably a thrilling way to live, but also probably exhausting.

The highly-educated — particularly writers, intellectuals, and poets — are susceptible to this sort of political romanticism, which is why having the “right” education and the right information will not save you. After all, a well-educated, bored person is a frightening thing to behold, as Charles Fain Lehman recently observed. The political theorist David Runciman said of the romantics that “they want something, anything, to happen, so they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things”.

But you and I are not at the heart of things. Politics should not be anyone’s primary focus or vocation, unless, that is, your life literally depends on it. Since America is still a democracy, for all its faults, your life almost certainly doesn’t. That is something worth appreciating, at least for a moment. You are not a revolutionary — and you probably never will be.

If 21st-century politics is shaping up as class war, the American midterm elections have concretised a troubling facet of this political landscape: this class war is also a sex war.

Writing about the dynamic as a feminist is uncomfortable in the extreme because it’s difficult to do so without being accused of misogyny. This is not least because among the very online Right, there really is more than a tinge of misogyny to the term most commonly used to denote progressive-leaning Virtual women: AWFLs.

Coined by Right-wing commentator Scott Greer, AWFL stands for “affluent white female liberals”, and generally connotes not just the demographic but its perceived characteristic worldview — a mixture of progressive moral piety, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and unexamined class snobbery.

Whether or not you agree with this hostile evaluation, the AWFL class has been growing in relative power and influence for some decades. This is for wholly non-conspiratorial reasons: very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

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At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

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The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

Even the staunchly liberal New Yorker has worried recently that this constitutes a blind spot, while the far-Left Jacobin described the emphasis of New York’s Kathy Hochul on abortion rather than inflation as “girlboss politics”. Much was made of a WSJ poll last week, that suggested, albeit based on a small sample, that even white suburban women (an affluent demographic that overlaps with the derisive “AWFL” designation) were swinging against the Democrats based on economic concerns.

But results so far suggest that this swing, if it’s come at all, has been muted. And perhaps this makes sense. For the changing nature of work isn’t the only way this political bloc relies on technology for its ascendancy. For this group, it seems intuitively right to push for a world where sex differences are no longer politically important — to the extent of agreeing that a woman is anyone who identifies as such. It should come as no surprise that AWFLs are also the strongest supporters of trans rights: for this class, there are no obvious upsides to disturbing the idealist vision of men and women as interchangeable, or as a menu of body parts to be mixed and matched according to personal taste.

For knowledge-class progressive women, though, a still more central issue where tech and their interests converge is in the core material obstacle to workplace equality: the female reproductive role, including gestation, childbirth and breastfeeding. For the so-called “gender pay gap” is, in truth, a motherhood pay gap. Thus, for a chance to compete in the knowledge workplace on the same terms as men, women’s bodies also need tech support.

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So such women are structurally dependent on medical interventions to keep their bodies free from the rigours and long-term obligations of pregnancy, childbirth and dependent children. In other words: for AWFLs overall, abortion really is an existential issue. And making the midterms a referendum on that issue appears to have paid off. For suburban women, and indeed the electorate overall, it seems gas prices remain some way downstream of the tech-enabled reproductive “freedom”that knowledge-class Clinton feminists routinely frame as a precondition for personhood as such.

But it remains the case that material sex differences continue to matter a great deal among (for example) manual workers, mothers, athletes and incarcerated women — just as gas prices and other material pressures can often rank higher than abstract questions of “rights” — something that becomes more pressing the further you go down the socioeconomic hierarchy. We can guess at some of the emerging tensions in news that married men and women as well as unmarried men broke Republican – but unmarried women swung the other way by a whopping 37%. These fissures are not going to go away.

For now, the coalition between Clinton feminism, Virtual class interests, and the American electorate seems to be holding up, albeit with some creaking. But for how long? For “progress”, understood as the march of technology, has losers as well as winners. And when “progress” is routinely conflated with “feminism”, you can expect groups who aren’t doing so well under its auspices to take this at face value too – and blame feminists for their suffering. I can see no possible direction for this to take save a backlash that will likely spill far beyond the class at whom it’s really directed.

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A few days, ago, answering the question about women’s rights and gas prices, one young woman said: “Everything in the world has got significantly worse since we gave women the right to vote. So I honestly think we should just lower gas prices.”

Perhaps this is just one voice. But perhaps it isn’t. If, as I fear, we’re just barely into the foothills of a new class war, and with it a burgeoning sex war, we can expect a great deal more of this from those ranged against the progressives.

Plenty of us – including plenty of knowledge-class women – don’t feel much sympathy for the lawn-sign political programme. But save on the fringes, few of us have any great wish to live through a vicious misogynistic backlash either. Feminists in this uncomfortable position urgently need a new language to describe and defend women’s interests outside AWFL feminism. If we don’t find it, I worry that in due course, political polarisation really will make us choose between gas prices and women’s rights.

During that span, Billy’s interventions in politics were purposely few (although he did openly support Richard Nixon over Roman Catholic John Kennedy). Above all, his priority was to remain neutral, so as to alienate none and reach many. His biographer Grant Wacker described him as the “Great Legitimator”, noting that Billy’s mere “presence conferred status on presidents, acceptability on wars, shame on racial prejudice, desirability on decency, dishonour on indecency”.

Billy died, at the age of 99, in February 2018, but he lived long enough to see his good work vanish. His ministry, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), is now ruled by his Trump-supporting, loud-mouthed, rabidly partisan son, Franklin Graham, whose name is synonymous with controversy in the United States — and, more recently, in the UK. The difference between these two men reflects how American evangelical Christianity has, like American politics, evolved — becoming more fractured and polarised.

Billy was the product of the consensus-building Fifties, when church attendance in the United States was actually rising and the battle for souls and donations, like the struggle against international Communism, was waged across party lines. An heir to the rambunctious, revivalist free-market tradition in American religion (the country has never had an established church, and the last state to financially support the Episcopalian church ceased funding it in 1833), Graham followed the example of the great 19^th century evangelists, Charles Grandison Finney and Dwight Moody. Both leapt on the technologies of their time — handbills and large outdoor revivals — to draw large followings; Billy had radio and television at his disposal.

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Franklin, by contrast, is a child of the late Seventies, when church attendance had begun to dip, and evangelicals became more radical. Young ministers such as Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell and televangelist Oral Roberts had begun to organise fierce opposition to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that women had a fundamental right to choose. It was opposition that increasingly aligned them — and their small but politically active congregations — with the interests of the Republican Party.

It’s not that Billy was uncontroversial. But his most talked-about interventions were always for the sake of unity, rather than division. Although a moderate in most respects, Billy, a native of largely conservative North Carolina, made waves during the late Fifties for welcoming black and white people alike to his revival events, at a time when many public venues in the American South were legally segregated. He also encouraged mainstream Protestants — Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians — to remain within their churches even after they absorbed his message of “accepting Jesus Christ as your personal saviour”. Knowing that curious “inquirers” would return to their churches with renewed enthusiasm, the leaders of these denominations were always happy to partner with Graham’s “crusade counsellors”, to promote his events and boost his attendance figures. Graham wanted to reach listeners, not sow discord within American Protestantism.

Most tellingly of all, Billy refused to join with ultra-conservative religious figures such as Falwell. He had no wish to tie BGEA to the culture wars of the Religious Right. If he ever lapsed into expressing the kind of social conservatism that the Christian Broadcasting Network might champion, he hurriedly recanted. After commenting in 1993 at a religious event in Ohio that AIDS might be a “judgment of God”, Billy retracted his words, stating a few days later that “to say God has judged people with AIDS would be very wrong and very cruel”. One of the myths about tolerance in America, tied to the myth of moral progress so popular here, is that the past is always benighted and bigoted compared to today. The story of evangelicalism in the United States, which played a key part in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century and women’s suffrage in the early 20th, proves otherwise. Billy Graham, in fact, represents the high-water mark for evangelical tolerance. His intolerant son has made sure of it.

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Unlike Billy, who graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois — considered the “Harvard of American evangelicalism” — and proceeded almost immediately into a star-studded career in preaching, Franklin took a more circuitous path to success. He dropped out of a Christian private school, and was later expelled from a small Christian college for staying out past curfew with a female classmate. After he finally graduated, instead of immediately working for BGEA, he became the president of Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian aid organisation. There, he came into his own as a prolific fundraiser.

A morally unimpeachable, thoughtful theologian he was not. But Franklin was representative of a new kind of Christian leader: the born-again crusader who could galvanise his own flock without building bridges outside of it. The parallels with politics are uncanny: where once Democrats and Republicans had fought for the voters in the centre, the stars of both parties have become more ideological and less accommodating since the turn of the millennium. Elections have increasingly favoured hardliners and zealots over bipartisan cooperators.

When, in 2000, Franklin was finally appointed CEO of BGEA, he wasted little time moving the organisation in a direction more consistent with the work of his contemporaries on the Religious Right. Billy Graham could win souls by the millions, but he could not secure Congressional votes by the dozens; younger evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed could, thanks to their hand-in-glove relationship with the Republican Party. As political science professor John Hicks wrote in 1996, this was a strategic decision with profound consequences: it gave evangelicals access to a network of support to influence elections and public policy decisions.

Franklin, however, thrived by continually provoking clickbait headlines. Following the 9/11 attacks, he declared that Islam was “a very evil and wicked religion”, and supported the resulting war in Iraq. Where his father might have recanted, Franklin doubled down in the face of criticism from more mainstream religious leaders, who pressured the Army into disinviting him from its National Day of Prayer at the Pentagon in 2010. “True Islam can’t be practiced [in the United States],” he told CNN in 2009, “because you can’t beat your wife or murder your children.” When asked by CNN in 2010 about Barack Obama’s religious background, he replied that “the president’s problem is that he was a born a Muslim”.

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In a 2005 interview about his son’s provocative comments, Billy made it clear that he didn’t approve: “Let’s say, I didn’t say it.” But he didn’t face the same challenges as his son. It is growing secularism that explains Franklin Graham’s shift away from his father’s nonpartisan approach. Like any actor in the marketplace of ideas, Franklin is keenly aware that his market, unlike his father’s, is shrinking. The religiously unaffiliated, or the “unchurched”, now account for a quarter of all Americans — a trend noted in Robert Putnam’s seminal work Bowling Alone, and which has only intensified in the past half-decade. Nowadays, 27% of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, and another 18% as “neither religious nor spiritual”. Aware of the partisan nature of his support and increasingly unable to grow the size of his flock, Franklin needed to motivate those who remained to donate, advocate, and vote on his behalf.

And so, he leaned into his divisiveness. In 2014, he — like Pat Buchanan, Rod Dreher, and a number of other American conservative leaders — praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for passing tough anti-gay legislation. More recently, he publicly chastised openly gay Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg during his 2020 presidential campaign. The same year, despite growing racial diversity among American evangelical Christians, he denounced Black Lives Matter and posted on Facebook that police shootings could be avoided through “respect for obedience and authority”. His followers, who back most of the same policies he does to a greater or lesser degree, recognise that Franklin speaks for them. If anyone doesn’t, Franklin told The Atlantic in 2017, they can “talk to God about it”.

His rhetoric, and appeal, is Trumpian. So it’s hardly surprising that Franklin explains in the same interview why he chose to hitch BGEA’s fortunes to those of Trump: “He did everything wrong… and he became president of the United States.” There’s “no question,” for Franklin, that God must therefore have been supporting Trump, a much-needed “Christian voice in office”. Throughout the ex-President’s two campaigns for office, Franklin included a few minutes of political material in each of his sermons, often opening by discussing how abortion is murder, how same-sex marriage is a sin, and, most importantly, how the increase in secularism will result in godless Communism.

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Recent research has found that the increasing percentage of Americans who identify as atheist or agnostic do indeed have a clear political affiliation: they make up 20.6% of Democrats, up from 11.8% in 2008. (In Republican ranks they constitute a mere 4% now, up slightly from 3.3% in 2008.) Not only that, but these atheists and agnostics are more likely than evangelicals to donate to political campaigns, attend political meetings, put up political signs, and attend political protests. Billy Graham devoted his entire career to pulling such people back into the fold. Franklin, by contrast, has focused on maximising the value of the devout audience he has left — even as Republican politicians focus on preaching to the converted rather than reaching across the aisle.

On Saturday, Franklin tweeted: “I loved this country, and I cannot vote for candidates or the party that supports abortion, defunding our police, or open borders.” In today’s midterms, many “too-close-to-call-elections” could turn on votes from either the Religious Right, who would agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment, or the growing minority of unchurched, who are likely to be disgusted by it. The irreconcilability of these two groups warns of further polarisation downstream. But some thinkers, such as Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, have argued that religion could again have a unifying role in the future of the American polity. It would take a great unifier like Billy Graham, not a sectarian divider, to achieve such a lofty goal. For now, American Protestantism, once considered the ecumenical moral bedrock of the nation, is diminished and enmeshed in party politics — and the America bound together by “common things”, for which Billy Graham so earnestly preached, remains an unrealisable fantasy.

I thought of Sharif while in Georgia this weekend, trying to get to grips with the Senate race between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. People outside the state seem incredulous that anyone in their right mind could vote for Walker, a former football star whose personal history is littered with the sorts of scandals that, while not so shocking for ex-NFL players, would normally sink a Senate candidate — abortions for multiple mistresses, a parade of illegitimate and unacknowledged children, gruesome domestic violence allegations, and claims that he once threatened a shootout with Texas police. According to a Quinnipiac poll from mid-October, a majority of Georgians agree that Walker is “not honest” and “does not have good leadership skills”.

And yet, polls in the state remain deadlocked, with the latest average from RealClearPolitics showing Walker leading Warnock by a margin of 1.5%. Everyone, it seems, agrees that Walker is a flawed candidate and a flawed human being, and that Warnock, a well-spoken preacher with a penchant for funny campaign ads, is charming and relatable. The result is that this is a remarkably “clean” campaign, at least from the Republican side — there is little effort to convince people that he is “suitable” for office. Voters know that Walker is a bit of a joke. But the GOP is asking them to ignore Walker’s personal characteristics and focus on the pure, friend-enemy core of partisan politics: do you want the Senate to be controlled by Republicans or Democrats? On the strength of this issue alone, Walker might win.

That’s because Georgia, despite having two Democratic senators, is still a Republican state. For at least a decade, Democrats have been hoping that migration into the Atlanta metro area, which has nearly doubled in size since 2000 and now accounts for more than half of the state’s population, would turn Georgia purple if not blue. That has been happening — the white share of Georgia’s electorate dropped from 68.7% in 2004 to 52.7% today — but not quickly enough. Donald Trump won the state handily in 2016, and it took the chaos of 2020 — the coronavirus pandemic, the “racial reckoning”, Trump’s alienation of affluent white suburbanites, and especially his instigation of an intra-Republican civil war in Georgia between the November 3 election and the January 2021 Senate runoff, which induced his supporters to stay home — for Democrats to eke out two Senate victories by margins of 1% and 1.8%. Before Walker won the Republican Senate primary, Warnock’s seat was expected to be one of the easiest for the GOP to recapture in the midterms.

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Added to which, our national electoral environment massively favours Republicans. As a general rule, the president’s party does poorly in midterm elections, even under relatively popular presidents. Biden is not popular, and the issues the election is being fought on all benefit the GOP. Inflation hit double digits in Atlanta this year, higher than the national average, and the city had more homicides in 2021 than in any year since 1996 and could end 2022 with even more. Asked about the most important issues facing the country, 36% of Georgians said cost of living or the economy, 14% said immigration, and 6.8% said crime. By contrast, the top “Democratic” issues were “threats to democracy” at 17%, guns at 10%, and abortion — widely expected to doom Republicans among college-educated women — at 5.2%.

It is a testament to Walker’s weaknesses as a candidate, and to Warnock’s relative strengths, that the race is close at all. I was in Athens, Georgia, on Saturday for the Georgia–Tennessee football game — the place Walker became a star, and where his name and college number hang on the inside of the stadium — and even there, signs of Walker the politician, as opposed to the player, were few and far between. I counted, easily, three dozen people wearing pins and stickers for Brian Kemp, the incumbent Republican governor, but most laughed or declined to speak to me when I asked about Walker. “He’s a Republican,” shrugged one woman in a Kemp pin who declined to give her name. I finally found a group of young white men wearing Walker pins, but when I asked for their thoughts on the race, they told me, in a vaguely aggressive manner, that voting was a private matter and that I shouldn’t be walking around asking those sorts of questions.

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Walker’s critics, on the other hand, were happy to talk. A black man in his early 30s named Rashad, who said he’d already cast an early ballot for Warnock, told me bluntly that he suspected Walker had brain damage from CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that’s known to affect football players. Keith, a middle-aged white man working in corporate communications in Atlanta, told me that Walker could hardly string a sentence together and was clearly being used as a puppet. “You’re not even voting for him, you’re voting for whoever is controlling him. The whole thing is an embarrassment to the state of Georgia.”

For Georgia Democrats, the race largely comes down to voters like Keith — suburban moderates whose distaste for Trump and the Trumpian elements of the GOP helped deliver surprise victories to Warnock and Jon Ossof in 2020. There is constant talk of “ticket-splitting” — the hope is that enough independents and Republican-leaners will vote for Brian Kemp for governor but choose Warnock for Senate, or else vote third-party. In my parents’ own leafy Atlanta suburb, a Republican stronghold that flipped to the Democrats in 2018, and where the average home price exceeds $660,000, I counted perhaps a dozen houses with Warnock yard signs. There were a few for Kemp, but only one that I saw for Walker. Warnock radio ads urged listeners to vote for the candidate with “good moral character”, even if they didn’t agree with him on every issue — a concession to the fact that many of these voters would probably prefer a Republican senator in policy terms.

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But it seems increasingly likely that distaste for Biden and frustration with the state of the economy will be too much for Warnock to overcome. Over the summer, Democrats and many in the media entertained the idea that some combination of the Dobbs abortion decision, the January 6 hearings, and a brief bump in Biden’s approval ratings might save the Democrats from a wipeout. But in recent weeks, the mood — and the polls — have shifted hard toward the GOP. Once-tight races have turned into apparent Republican blowouts, and once-lopsided Democratic leads have become tight races. A story broke late Friday about how Democrats in New York are bracing for a potential loss in the governor’s race — a race that Andrew Cuomo won by more than 23% in 2018. In Georgia’s governor’s race, Kemp, a fairly generic Republican without any of Walker’s personal problems, went into election weekend leading Democratic media darling Stacey Abrams by 7.6%.

The major problem is that for all of Walker’s flaws, voters are angry at the Democrats for a whole host of reasons, and none of the Democrats’ messaging — which has largely focused on abortion and the dangerous extremism of the Republicans — is responsive to this anger. The chances are that Walker will win, and if he does, it will be because of people like the young, suburban Atlantan I spoke to who said, frankly: “Walker probably has an IQ of about 60. But at least he’s not a Democrat.”

Thirty-two years later, with the 2022 midterm elections looming, these attempts to promote civic engagement have changed their medium but not their message. Youth voter turnout is still seen as a matter of national urgency — only half of people under 30 voted in the most recent presidential election — and multiple organisations are now attempting to follow the Rock the Vote model to lure them to the polls. This brings us to a slick music video entitled “No Voting, No Vucking”, which was released last week. In it, rappers Trina and Saucy Santana narrate the story of a young black woman who matches with a promising-looking man on the dating app BLK. There’s just one, critical red flag: he doesn’t vote!

This relationship, per the video, is a non-starter: like the song says, no voting, no vucking. (At the risk of stating the obvious, the word “vucking” is phonetically indistinguishable from another, naughtier word.) This withholding — combined with plenty of no-holds-barred dancing — is enough to get the gentleman in question to change his ways. The song ends with an exchange of looks at the ballot box, then cuts to a shot of the awestruck man falling back on a bed, naked from the waist up.

Even by the standards of American raunch culture, this video is extraordinarily racy given the subject matter. (Consider the lyrics: “Don’t stop now, stuff my ballot box again.”) There is erotic cackling, lascivious lip-licking, gyrating bodies and sexual innuendo — but also whatever the opposite of innuendo is, as in the moment when Trina commands the listener to “gerrymander this coochie”, a turn of phrase that manages the remarkable twin achievements of being massively unsubtle while also making no sense. The fact that the audience cannot fail to get the message does not change the fact that the message is embarrassingly reductive.

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Predictably, both the marketing of the video and the initial reaction to it focused on its racial (or, perhaps, racist) valences. On the Left, writer Thomas Chatterton Williams lamented the “outrageously insulting sense that this kind of childishness is the authentic way to reach black audiences with political messages”. He has a point: there seems to be an assumption within the awareness-raising machine about what drives black Americans to vote. In 2020, there was a “Get Your Booty to the Polls” campaign featuring scantily-clad strippers and a cringe play on words (polls = poles, get it?). Much has also been made by critics of an apparent partnership between the makers of “No Voting No Fucking” and When We All Vote, a get-out-the-vote organisation founded by Michelle Obama, although the nature of the relationship is unclear. (Within the BLK app, engaging with the video will take users to the When We All Vote registration portal, but the organisation released a statement denying that they were at all involved in its production.)

On the Right, meanwhile, Rod Dreher denounced the video as “filthy”: “There are no depths of depravity too low for progressives.” The video’s evident partisan leanings — implicit in the message is that the target audience will not just vote, but vote blue — also led to much griping about the impossibility of a Right-wing group ever creating a similar advertisement. It’s true that GOP attempts to reach young voters tend to be savaged by Dems for being clueless and, in any assortment of ways, bigoted; a Republican ad implying that black men need to be lured to the polls with promises of sex would almost certainly be met with outrage.

Ah, but wait: this is not depravity, the Left countered, but culture! In response to Dreher’s tweet, actor Wendell Pierce (one of President Obama’s top fundraisers in 2012) replied: “You must know that this message comes directly from the Greek comedy of Lysistrata by Aristophanes, where the woman of Greece refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands until they end their wars. No depravity here. Ancient story.”

With respect to Pierce, “depraved” actually seems like a good word to describe a society in which women could neither vote nor own property; this “ancient story” would have almost certainly worked out differently if the women of ancient Greece weren’t treated like second-class citizens by their government. And defending this trope on the grounds that it’s a classic elides the weirdness of its ubiquity in a society built on equal rights, where “No Voting, No Vucking” is not just an ancient construction but one in perpetual use by contemporary culture warriors. Lysistrata took place in a milieu in which sexual withholding was the last resort of women who would have killed for the kind of power today’s Western women enjoy, yet sex strikes remain an ever-present spectre in the American feminist political discourse, in a way that makes our British counterparts in their “Never Kissed a Tory” T-shirts seem almost quaint.

The notion of sex as a political weapon for Left-wing women has been prevalent for at least as long as the notion that Republicans, with their hostility to gender equality and reproductive freedom, are engaged in a War on Women. By this logic, women must necessarily be Democrats — and must also necessarily have the power (or perhaps the responsibility) to extort the votes of less-enlightened men by any means possible.

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The call for political change via sexual blackmail had its most recent resurgence after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Outraged women vowing sex strikes caused “abstinence” to trend on Twitter (the irony of this was not lost on conservatives). But this was only the latest iteration of a conversation that has been a fixture of the landscape since at least 2010, when it took the form of earnest questions as to whether cross-political pairings were even possible — questions which have since been answered with increasingly shrill iterations of the word “no”. The message is abundantly clear: a good feminist does not sleep with Republicans, or date them. Is your boyfriend a Trump voter? Dump him. Your husband? Divorce him. This is a war, ladies: which side are you on?

For a group of people who ostensibly believe in female agency and empowerment, the feminists preaching political sex strikes seem to miss several key points. For one thing, sexually blackmailing men into the voting booth does not guarantee that they’ll pull the lever for your preferred party, a problem to which the “no vucking” video seems particularly oblivious. One of the most closely-watched midterm elections is the Georgia governor’s race, in which Democratic hopeful Stacey Abrams is beginning to flail due to a marked lack of support from black men, who prefer the (white, male) incumbent. And the longtime Left-wing belief that racial and ethnic minorities can be relied upon to vote blue by default is beginning to look like dangerous overconfidence: the party has been haemorrhaging Hispanic voters in states like Florida and Texas.

But more broadly, the women willing to abstain from sex on political grounds are vastly outnumbered by women who feel no compunction about schtupping Republicans — because they want to, because they don’t care about politics, or even because they’re Republicans themselves. And with Democrats now facing the consequences of their pandemic policies, which included closing schools and forcibly masking toddlers — policies which were deeply and disproportionately disruptive to the lives of women in Left-leaning areas — it’s hardly guaranteed that the majority of women will support Dems this year.

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Meanwhile, despite the apparently widespread conviction that men can be led to the voting booth by the promise of sex, there are plenty of men for whom this sort of sexual manipulation is in itself a red flag. For every woman who has a personal policy of trying to sexually blackmail her partners into voting for her preferred candidate, there’s a guy whose personal policy is to avoid sleeping with self-advertised partisan lunatics — and the fragmentation of the dating landscape along party lines means that it’s only getting easier for people to match exclusively with those who share their political views. It’s not unusual for liberal users to filter matches by not just party affiliation but Covid vaccination status; meanwhile, Right-wing singles are gravitating to new apps designed just for conservatives. At some point, the question arises as to whether women passionately progressive enough to barter their bodies for their politics would even encounter Right-wing (or politically agnostic) men at all, let alone have the opportunity to sexually extort their votes.

But completely separate from being illogical, the calls for sex strikes — gendered as they are — are deeply and despicably sexist. This is something more than a gag T-shirt that says “WILL SUCK DICK FOR SOCIALISM”; it’s a slickly-produced political message that dresses up sexual quid pro quo as a form of feminist civic engagement. Here is a portrait of a world in which women are at once utterly Machiavellian yet completely neutered, in which sex is something they use but never desire, in which the physical act of love exists purely as a means to an end, and in which sexual availability is the ultimate (if not only) power a woman has in her arsenal. It’s a new riff on the old (and inane) notion that men have sex because they want sex, while women have sex because it helps them get something else: social status, a romantic commitment, a reassuring sense of their own desirability.

In this view, women are too something — smart, or cool, or elevated, or sophisticated — to feel anything so embarrassing as sexual desire, especially for that basest of creatures, the human male. In this view, in other words, women are not exactly people. That is, yes, an ancient story. But as a model for women’s lives in the year 2022, it’s not an especially good one.