Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
I call our current political environment “Primaryland.” What happens in the primaries will determine our direction as a nation. The general election merely makes that direction official. This is why we all need to plan our trip to Primaryland in the 2022 election cycle. Primaryland is less fun than Disneyland and more difficult to navigate, but it’s our responsibility to engage. Our children are depending on all of us to stand up for democracy. This year, it means voting in the primaries.
In modern usage, being primaried has meant that an extreme candidate will run in the party primary to knock out a moderate elected official, usually someone who has cooperated across party lines. And this phenomenon has increased the gridlock, toxic polarization and separate realities between the two political parties. As survival instincts among elected officials kick in, they move to more extreme views and are less willing to compromise issue positions. Why? To keep winning re-election. To be re-elected, they have to survive their party primary. Fewer than 20 percent of eligible voters in 2018 voted in the primaries, while everyone else waited for the general election. If we skip the primaries this season, we limit our choices in the general election.
Now add in redistricting and the polarization is further increased. Following the intentionally disrupted 2020 census, every state has gone through a redistricting (or gerrymandering) process. The number of competitive congressional elections has decreased from 14 percent to 10 percent. If you live in a non-competitive district, like me, the real race is in the primary. Remember, 90 percent of congressional districts have been gerrymandered to be “safe” for one party or the other. This is not an exercise of whimsical fancy. It’s math.
The action for 2022 is in the primaries. The exhausted majority needs to show up.
Because I live in a safe Democratic district, I will have the most influence in the Democratic primary. If you live in a safe Republican district, the primary is where the choice will be made for who represents you in Congress.
I want my choice to be for the better candidate — not the lesser of two evils, as chosen by the more extreme primary voters. I’ve been an independent voter since I was 18, and this year will be the second time I have declared a party to vote in the primary. The first time was in the 2016 presidential primary. And I’m mad as hell that I have to register with a party to have my vote counted where it matters most.
It takes work for citizens to figure out when primary elections are being held (they are different for every state) and when to change our registration (deadlines vary by state, too). For instance, here in Maryland, I have 21 days before the primary election on July 19, 2022, to affiliate with a party and have my vote counted for Congress. On top of that, I have to submit an original signature, meaning a visit to the county clerk or mailing in the updated registration form — to arrive three weeks before primary day. Every state has its own laws, so you have to put in the work.
Of course, it’s not easy to find the data, change your registration and then change it back. But it is our duty and responsibility to be the most effective voters we can be. And that means taking the extra time, researching all the steps and verifying registration status, per state instructions. It’s the fastest way to stop the crazy in our politics.
There are so many barriers to voting, we will need dogged determination to make it through this election cycle. Will you join me in this dogged level of determination?
State by state primary dates are listed here.
State by state registration deadlines are listed here.
Please note that many registration changes will require an original signature. Allow time to walk or mail it in. Then continue to check online to ensure your voter registration has been updated. Verify, verify, verify.
No one wants to take the time out of our busy schedules with our jobs, families and other obligations. Think of it this way: Voting in the primaries is like buying insurance. We don’t want to pay for it, and hope we never have to use it. But when we pool our resources and need help, insurance is our best friend. Our nation needs us to pay the premiums by showing up in the primary elections.
Think of the cost if we do not. Our government is on life support. Our politics are poisoned. Will our inaction put democracy in hospice? Or might we start a rehabilitation process that only citizens can provide?
Long term, I’ll keep working to open primaries and better voting processes like ranked-choice or approval voting. But for now, we have a flawed system that can be navigated with tenacity. If democracy is important to you, I hope you’ll vote in the primary. It’s our best hope.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.