What I Saw on the Dreary Road to 2024
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When I began reporting my “Road Trip” series earlier this year, the idea was to explore how Americans’ stew of anxiety and fervor about our nation’s politics was reshaping the two political parties, not in Washington, but at ground level — at local board meetings, or small gatherings of party officials. In churches, at polling places and radio stations. In the living rooms of people’s homes.
In 2023, the country was coming back from a pandemic. Inflation was easing and, by most accounts, the economy was in pretty good shape. But if there were reasons to be optimistic, they weren’t registering in polls. And they definitely weren’t registering with the people I met.
It didn’t matter if they were Democrats or Republicans or independents. If they were young or old or Black or white. Nearly everyone I spoke with is talking about politics — and framing their motivations for the next election year — around a feeling of loss, and distress about what they’re going to lose next.
For the Republicans I spoke with, the sense of loss was often inward looking — not just about the economy or the Democratic president or the “radical left,” but about what their own party is becoming. In Arizona, where Republicans were still cheering Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, I watched the state Republican Party fill a megachurch where a combat Vietnam veteran suggested censuring insufficiently faithful Republicans by duct taping them to trees in a dog park “so the dogs can pee on them.” At a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, a retired teacher told me, “I think we’re getting closer to the end times.” And in Michigan, where a group of hard-line Republicans seized control of a county board, a local party official said he felt, for the first time in his life, that “it is like a good versus evil fight that’s going on in the world right now.”
Democrats’ uneasiness is no less real. When the election cycle began, Democrats weren’t exactly pining for President Joe Biden to run for a second term, and they’ve been shaken by polling suggesting Trump could beat Biden next year. From New Hampshire to California and everywhere in between, I ran into Democrats who felt overlooked by the Democratic Party, especially progressive Democrats, who are preparing to choke down another presidential election next year. They agonized over what was happening in the broader culture — “To a certain extent, we live in a land of idiots,” Tommy Hoyt, a Democratic lawmaker from New Hampshire, told me — and they worry intensely about the loyalty even of some of Biden’s most reliable voting blocs.
These are some of the ground forces that are shaping party politics before they reach the national level. But they aren’t abstractions — they are people. And one by one, the thoughts and emotions that drive them will determine what the country looks like after our national elections in 2024.
There’s little reason to think Americans’ outlook will become less grim in the coming months. Few people, polls suggest, are looking forward to the likely rematch between Biden and Trump. And the way the race is shaping up, the throughlines will be dark. Trump, indicted on charges of trying to subvert the last election, is calling his opponents “vermin” and promising not to be a “dictator … other than Day One.” Biden is casting the race as a contest against a former president “determined to destroy American democracy,” and his campaign has begun to compare him to Adolf Hitler.
Next year, people won’t just be airing grievances, they’ll be forced into a conscious trade-off between what they want and what’s available. The decisions they make will have enormous consequences for government. But they’ll also chart a course for the parties that we still organize our politics around, refining what it means to be a Republican or Democrat or, as a growing number of Americans are deciding, to leave the party structure altogether.
As this series heads into 2024, here’s a visual look back at some of the places and some of the people I met over the past year.
