On Sunday night, at a debate between Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis, the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively, for governor of Florida, the moderator, CNN’s Jake Tapper, asked DeSantis if he thought that Donald Trump was “a good role model for the children of Florida.” DeSantis meandered in his answer, first trying to explain the joke of a bizarre campaign ad he made this summer, which featured him reading “The Art of the Deal” to his infant son and encouraging his toddler daughter to “build the wall” with blocks. He then pivoted to Israel, saying that Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem was the right move. “To me, when you give your word, and you follow through with it as an elected official, that is the model that we’re supposed to do,” DeSantis said. Tapper then directed the same question at Gillum.

“I’m confused by the question,” Gillum said. “How did we get to Israel?”

“The question was whether or not he thinks Trump is a good role model for the children of Florida,” Tapper said.

“That’s what I thought originally. I got confused,” Gillum said, breaking into a smile. “So, no, he’s not. Donald Trump is weak, and he performs as all weak people do—they become bullies.”

Much of the debate was like this, with Gillum projecting confidence, and DeSantis resorting to the old politician’s trick of answering not the questions he’d been asked but the questions he wished he’d been asked. This is how the race in Florida has gone, more broadly, with DeSantis trying to figure out how to respond to Gillum’s surprisingly strong candidacy.

With Election Day two weeks away, Democrats are expected to take control of the House. But the Party’s chances at taking the Senate look bad. There are simply too many tough races in too many tough states. At the same time, though, the Party’s gubernatorial nominees are looking good in several states—including Wisconsin, Iowa, and Georgia—where the incumbent is a Republican and where Trump won in 2016. On Monday, I talked with The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who has covered the Florida race, about Gillum’s campaign and the other Democrats making strong bids for governorships this year.

“In the primary, Gillum was able to win an upset by basically running to the left of the field in ways that Florida Democrats had just not done in a generation,” Wallace-Wells said. Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, embraced policies like Medicare for all and a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, in a state where Democrats had traditionally run as centrists. “What DeSantis has been trying to do in the general-election campaign—where Democrats are much more fired up, where Gillum’s crowds are much, much larger—is to pin Gillum to those positions,” Wallace-Wells said. “To attack him as an ideologue, as a socialist, as a clone of Bernie Sanders.” DeSantis’s profile—he is a young, talented politician who has already served six years in Congress; he is a former military prosecutor and a graduate of Harvard Law School—seemingly had him well positioned for this gubernatorial run. But Wallace-Wells argued that the way Republicans, and congressional Republicans in particular, have lined up behind Trump in the past two years has constrained DeSantis. “One of the things we saw last night is that, while he was prepared to make an ideological case against the left, he was not prepared to explain how he differentiates himself from the President,” Wallace-Wells said. “He was not prepared to describe how he’s been a leader.”

There’s another dynamic that Wallace-Wells and I talked about, one that has influenced the type of gubernatorial campaigns with which Democrats have found success this year. In the 2016 election, Trump’s victory in much of the upper Midwest was a surprise—but only in the context of Presidential politics. Six years earlier, in 2010, the Tea Party had swept Republicans into power in state capitols across the region, and kept them there. This year, though, there are signs that the grip of the Tea Party may be loosening. These gubernatorial races may turn less on Trump and his Presidency than on whether an entire political era is ending. “Democratic candidates like Gretchen Whitmer, in Michigan, Tony Evers, in Wisconsin, and even Fred Hubbell, in Iowa, are running very directly against the underfunding of basic services by Republican legislatures and governors,” Wallace-Wells said. In addition to running in defense of the Affordable Care Act, or against the Republicans’ tax cuts for the wealthy, he added, “Democratic candidates are running on campaigns of literally repairing broken highways.”