But it’s hard to tell if the Republicans captured the South, or the South captured the Republicans. The moderate and/or Northern wing of the party has withered. It once produced lions like Jacob Javits of New York, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Richard Nixon of California, and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire. Today, of the 22 senators from the West Coast and Northeast, only one—Senator Susan Collins of Maine—is a Republican.

There’s another recent parable in the politics of white grievance that the national GOP would do well to take to heart as it seeks to adapt to broader demographic shifts in the country. In 1994, California Republicans—most notably Governor Pete Wilson—leaned hard into an anti-immigrant platform. They embraced Proposition 187, a successful ballot measure that aimed to curtail state services for undocumented immigrants.

This was a dramatic reversal of GOP tactics. It seemed smart at the time, as Wilson coasted to reelection in 1994. Reagan’s America had appealed to Hispanic voters, and Reagan himself signed a landmark reform law that granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants in 1986. In 1988, I went door to door in Orange County, California—then the home of Republican conservatism—with two young Reagan-era congressmen, Representatives Dana Rohrabacher and Christopher Cox. They targeted, and were warmly welcomed by, Hispanic and Asian American working families, homeowners, and small businesspeople. They bonded with such supporters over shared family values and conservative beliefs about work and opportunity. Back in Washington, Republicans like conservative strategist and anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist strove to secure their allegiance, and that of other ethnic groups like Muslim Americans, in the years after Reagan left office.

But Proposition 187 was a wake-up call to California’s slumbering Hispanic community that it needed to get politically active—and it signaled just as strongly that the Democrats were more welcoming than Republicans. The anti-immigration movement was different from an environmental referendum or a tax cut—it was about taking things away and hurting people because their skin was darker, their accent was different, and their parents came from another place.

There is no bigger prize in presidential politics than California, with its 55 electoral votes and trend-setting culture and economy. In the late twentieth century, as Republicans put Californians on all but two national tickets from 1952 to 1984, the state went Republican in nine of 11 presidential elections that preceded Proposition 187. Since 1992, and the advent of anti-immigration politics, it’s gone to the Democrats in every single election.

There are signs that Texas, due to changing demographics, may be the next Electoral College giant to turn from red, if not to blue, then at least to purple. The notion that Texas is competitive is, for Democrats, a potential harbinger of broader shifts in the electorate: No Democrat has been elected to statewide office in Texas since 1994; no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since Jimmy Carter.

It’s not outlandish to think that the Texas electorate could change dramatically this year. Though former Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke ultimately lost the Senate race against Republican Ted Cruz in 2018, he came within 3 points of upsetting the incumbent, and Democrats nurture hope that Texas may follow in the steps of Virginia—where another bookend of the Confederacy has traveled from red to purple to blue. Turnout in the Democratic primary was up, the state and national parties are targeting half a dozen suburban congressional districts, and two of every five Texans is now under 30. At the very least, a competitive Texas will force Republicans to spend money in defense of their base, instead of carrying the fight exclusively to the Great Lakes battlegrounds.

Given such opportunities before, however, the Democrats failed to capitalize. Historians may give Obama high marks for navigating out of the worst parts of the 2008 financial crash, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and his dignified and ethical performance as president. But presidents are politicians, and in the politics of succession, Obama failed miserably.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean had a 50-state strategy to build the party’s grassroots organization and to mount competitive races throughout the country. In his first term as president, Obama made scores of trips to the swing states he would need for reelection: Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado. He was a fixture in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But by my count, over his eight years as president, he visited Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Arkansas, and South Dakota but once. He went twice to South Carolina, twice to Oklahoma, and just three times to West Virginia and Alabama. He went to Utah once, Idaho once, and Wyoming not at all. He visited Texas 15 times, but generally for fundraisers.

The result was predictable—and devastating to the party’s longer-term standing and organizing efforts. On Obama’s watch, the Democratic Party lost a dozen U.S. Senate seats, 13 governorships, 816 seats in state legislatures—and the White House to Donald Trump.

Obama’s election seemed, for an interlude, to have borne out the old abolitionist axiom that the arc of the moral universe bends slowly, but it bends inevitably toward justice. The 2008 financial crisis gave the Democrats control of the White House, House, and Senate, and they did great things with that power: saving the U.S. auto industry, passing the ACA, expanding Medicaid, and making the tax code fairer.

But Democrats are generally better at palliatives—at easing your pain than at curing the malady. The archives of the Clinton presidency, of Robert Reich’s Labor Department, and leaders of Congress like Ted Kennedy are filled with forgotten plans for worker retraining programs and other remedies for globalization and the decline of American manufacturing.

The Democrats supported two booming sectors—finance and tech—but many of the big donors in both industries favored free-trade deals like NAFTA, and the low wages brought by legal, and illegal, immigration. Obama’s cool was an asset as he campaigned for the presidency during the fall of 2008. His advisers—mostly Wall Street types—waved him off any response to the crisis that might frighten fellow investors, let alone come off as populist. The Tea Party Republicans exploited that lapse. He may well have done better, in the larger political picture, to have thrown a few bankers in jail.

It is difficult to say what Trump would have done, had he been in the White House in that chaotic season when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed and the other Wall Street investment banks seemed next. With the arrival of the coronavirus, we may now find out. The front pages carry warnings of recession—and Trump has mostly sought to stave off that specter with a series of tax cuts and Fed rate cuts aimed at calming a jittery investment sector.

But we know what Trump did on the outside of power, striving to get in. Exploiting nativist fears, calling for black protesters to be beaten up, Trump was able to ignite latent feelings—to “activate long-standing sentiments,” as Sides and his fellow authors put it—that other groups were getting favored treatment over white Americans. Already Trump and several prominent conservatives are starting a similar scapegoating campaign around the coronavirus crisis, making it appear to be the handiwork of sinister geopolitical rivals in China and North Korea.

Such efforts have a long-standing pedigree in American politics, especially on the right. “Trump tapped into beliefs, ideas, and anxieties that were already present and even well established within the party. His support was hiding in plain sight,” Sides and his colleagues wrote. “The importance of economic insecurity was most apparent when economic sentiments were refracted through group identities. Worries about losing a job were less strongly associated with Trump support than were concerns about whites losing jobs to minorities.” The authors call this “racialized economics.”

Can Trump make this tactic work again? Will rank scapegoating suffice to dispel Trump’s responsibility for an economic downturn on his watch that critics are saying he’s exacerbated via his negligent preparation for the coronavirus pandemic?

We’ll know the answer by November. There are two kinds of elections, says Tad Devine: change elections, and referenda on incumbents. “Last time out was a change election. It is all about Trump this time,” says Devine, the chief strategist for the Sanders 2016 campaign.

“The president is vulnerable. Look at his reelect number—the percentage of people who will vote for another term. That is the one that fascinates me. He consistently has not been able to reach 50 percent—while the number of people who say they will absolutely, under no condition vote to reelect him is 50 percent or above.”

“On the other hand,” says Devine, “the guy is ferocious. He has no boundaries—including that which got him impeached—using his office for his political advantage. And he has enormous financial resources this time.”

Gathered around the long oval table, munching on chips and veggie sandwiches in a noontime political science seminar, a dozen of the brightest students at Vanderbilt University were asked to name the most important challenge confronting their generation.

Was it Islamic fundamentalism? Mass shootings? Global warming? Donald Trump?

No. These were all concerns, but the biggest threat to their happiness, these fourth-year students said, was maintaining their humanity in the face of sweeping technological change.

They jostled to offer examples: Employers buying robots to replace human workers. Truth challenged by counterfeit imagery. Smartphones wrecking their attention spans. Estrangement from the natural environment. Social media sites that harvest and sell their thoughts, robbing them of privacy. Internet pornography recasting desire. Political discourse twisted by bots and trolls. Commercial apps mining online sessions and using the findings to manipulate their longings.

How would they seek to meet these challenges? They shrugged and shook their heads. It was all so overwhelming. Technological transformation seemed ungovernable.

Trump “has no boundaries—including that which got him impeached—using his office for his political advantage. And he has enormous financial resources this time.”

March has brought us verities, data, and a plague—together with a new set of questions that are already reshaping the 2020 campaign. How many Never Trump Republicans will stay home, or pull the lever in their voting booths for Democratic candidates in November? Will black and Hispanic and Asian American voters be motivated by their distaste for Trump to turn out on Election Day with the zeal they displayed in the Obama years? Will the chaos in the stock market caused by the coronavirus crisis rouse formerly complacent voters who had otherwise been disinclined to change horses in Washington? Are we headed for a recession that will, as in 2008, bring white voters back into the Democratic fold?

Even as a referendum on Trump and his presidency, the 2020 election will say much about the future—about the prospect of deep and abiding change. And, in the actions of younger voters on Election Day, we will likely get a strong sign of whether Trumpism is an aberration, or a new and permanent addition to our politics.

So far, the auguries are mixed. In the opening round of contests, Biden was quite weak among Democrats under the age of 45, as the website FiveThirtyEight notes, and he finished with single digits among them in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

This is not yet cause for despair among Democrats. Other candidates have bounced back from such showings. In 2016, Clinton lost to Sanders among young voters in New Hampshire by even greater margins than Biden lost to the Vermont senator in 2020. She went on to beat Trump in the popular vote in the fall in part because voters under 30—percentage-wise—were her strongest backers, handing him a 20-point defeat.

For Democrats, the problem with younger supporters is not their allegiance, but their commitment. Many can’t be bothered to vote. Those voters under 30 who went for Clinton by a huge margin made only 13 percent of the electorate.

Even in 2008, when Obama ran a campaign of hope pitched at a growing demographic of younger voters, senior citizens were three times more likely to vote than voters under 30.

Some Sanders backers have warned that the senator’s younger voters will stay home in November if the senator should lose the nomination fight, and if his left-leaning platform is dismissed by the party establishment.

Devine, the 2016 Sanders strategist, isn’t so worried. “I think there is always a concern that people who feel strongly about a losing candidate will stay home,” he said, “but I don’t think it will be anywhere where it was last time. People want to defeat Donald Trump.”

Joel Benenson, who was a Clinton pollster and strategist in 2016, agrees with his former rival. Stock in Sanders is overvalued, he says. “When Obama ran against Hillary [in 2008], they were both 100,000 or so shy of 18 million votes” in the Democratic primaries. “In 2016, Hillary got 17 million votes, and Bernie got 13.5 million votes.” This year, Sanders has failed to expand his 2016 coalition. “Where is the revolution?” Benenson asks.

Meanwhile, activists in the party’s progressive wing have seen, in the first three years of Trump, the price of failure, or apathy, in November. “The second time around, people won’t feel so cavalier,” said Benenson. “The stakes are high because of Donald Trump. If he gets elected to a second term because they sit out the general election—well, that’s on them.”