This story was first published in The New Yorker’s weekly Midterms 2018 newsletter. Want to get stories like this in your in-box? Sign up for the Midterms 2018 newsletter here.

There are just forty-eight days until the midterm elections. The primaries are finished, and the slate of candidates is set. Republicans are alarmed. Their own internal polling suggests that, on the so-called generic ballot for the House of Representatives, American voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by nine percentage points. Worse for Republicans, the same polling report, published by Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green, suggests that many of the Party’s own reliable voters have been so convinced by President Trump’s reassurances of a “red wave” to come in November, and so disdainful of media reports suggesting otherwise, that they have little urgency to vote. In Washington, D.C., the possibility of bad losses in the midterms has coaxed Republicans into a rush to confirm the deeply flawed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, lest Democrats take control of the Senate before an alternative can be found.

But the source of the Republican weakness runs deeper. Paul Ryan is leaving Washington, and his libertarian brand of conservatism has lost its vogue. Trump’s Presidency has been full of warlike gestures but devoid of strategy: having promised a politics that would elevate those left behind, he has crafted tax policies that favor the rich and a failed health-care plan that would gut protections for working-class Americans. And, having won by slim margins in 2016 in the upper Midwest, he has imposed an aggressive tariff program that has meant chaos for farmers, who are struggling to sell their products overseas. The Republican Party is out of ideas.

A few days ago, I travelled to Virginia to see what remained of the last ambitious Republican strategy: Steve Bannon’s nativism. After his ejection from the White House, last year, Bannon promised a “season of hell” for the Republican establishment, and toured the country recruiting candidates in the Trump mold, to remake the Party in the President's image. Some of those candidates declined to run, others lost primaries, and others succumbed to scandal, so there is now just one real Bannonite running for office: Corey Stewart, the U.S. Senate candidate from Virginia who is a champion of Confederate monuments, a hard-line immigration hawk, and a survivor of successive scandals linking him to white supremacists and anti-Semites. Stewart is a savvy politician, and as I travelled with him he was working to sand some of the rougher edges of his persona. But he has raised only an eighteenth as much money as his Democratic opponent, Tim Kaine, trails badly in the polls, and so struggles to draw audiences that I could often count his crowds on my fingers and toes: eighteen people at one event, eleven at another. Trump is the President, but the flame of his movement has dimmed.

Parties remake themselves by winning. Victories bring new talent to Washington. The Democratic primaries this summer were widely said to have moved the Party to the left, but the mechanism for this shift was a succession of charismatic young candidates, each presenting a different version of the Party’s future. There was the working-class pugnacity of Randy Bryce, in Wisconsin; the sunny millennial socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in New York; and the historic turn promised by two talented black progressive politicians in the South—Stacey Abrams, in Georgia, and Andrew Gillum, in Florida. These candidates’ base, and maybe the future of the Democratic Party, has hinged on the increasing progressivism of cities across the United States and the idea that the politics of Brooklyn are no longer so out of place in Atlanta, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, New Orleans, or Phoenix—and that a forthrightly progressive politics has a chance in the states where those cities dominate.

And that might include Texas. The signal campaign of this cycle has become clear in recent weeks: it’s the mammoth contest between the liberal congressman Beto O’Rourke and the conservative senator Ted Cruz, the runner-up to Trump in the 2016 Republican Presidential primary and the reigning genius cynic of American politics. O’Rourke, forty-five and at ease on a skateboard, has been campaigning for a year in the ecstatic mode, barnstorming small towns around the state and streaming videos of his rallies shot lo-fi at low angles, a Gen X flashback. “Betomania,” veteran reporters have griped, rolling their eyes, and even O’Rourke’s most devoted supporters might concede that there is a streak of the glib about his campaign. But Cruz, in his ascent, made Texas the site of a crusade, a fusion of libertarian fury with evangelical certainty, and so it is arresting to see—just six years later, at the same sites—a new movement forming around a similar zealous energy, but among young people this time, not old ones. Democrats are now favorites, if not certainties, to win the House. Their odds in the Senate are worse: they will need an upset or two to take control. Maybe one will come in Tennessee, and maybe it will come in Texas. Cruz and O’Rourke have scheduled three debates, which directly pit the last major grassroots movement in American politics against the coming one. The first debate is Friday night. I will be watching.