Goldstone is the author of the forthcoming "Not White Enough: The Long Shameful Road to Japanese American Internment."
In the wake of Herschel Walker’s stunning loss to Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s Senate runoff, Democratic Party professionals reacted very differently than their Republican counterparts, and those disparities in many ways epitomize the current state of electoral politics in America.
Democratic strategists, although exultant, recognized full well that Warnock’s victory was due in good part, perhaps primarily, to the quality of his opponent. While many on the left were proclaiming Georgia a purple state, the pros knew better. Georgia is still red as evidenced by Republicans’ clean sweep of the other statewide offices, with none of those races being close. Still, that Democrats had any chance at all was the result of a ferocious, years-long campaign to register and educate voters, many but not all Black, spearheaded by Stacey Abrams (who was not a beneficiary of her own efforts). In addition, Democrats made certain that their message was not so extreme as to alienate moderate conservatives in the cities and the suburbs. They even made modest inroads in rural areas, with Warnock specifically mentioning his work for farmers in his victory speech.
As James Carville said the night of the runoff, winning is about forming coalitions. Given the diffuse nature of the Democratic Party, that is their challenge. Democrats are the amoeba, an organism that has an outer boundary but no fixed shape. The party’s members range from the way-left Bernie Sanders and AOC to the almost-right Joe Manchin and now-independent Kyrsten Sinema, who remains closer to Democrats than Republicans. Getting them to agree on most policy initiatives is bruising, filled with invective, recriminations and accusations of disloyalty to basic party principles. To create effective coalitions, then, Democratic leaders must appreciate the need for the party to have some form, some outer boundary, within which compromise can be successfully fashioned. But that boundary cannot be so fixed, so rigid, that it forces one side or the other to defect, as Sinema’s decision to abandon the party label so aptly demonstrates.
Republicans have a different and likely more intractable problem. Their professionals knew exactly why they lost — an abysmal candidate forced on the party by the now-toxic Donald Trump. We must move on, many said. But that will not be easy. Walker was the candidate not because he was chosen in a back room by Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, but because he won the primary ... by a lot. Other disastrous Republican nominees, such as Dr. Oz, Blake Masters, Tudor Dixon, Kari Lake and dozens more, were chosen the same way. Had their opponents prevailed in the spring and summer, November would have looked far different.
But Republicans have been sliced in half. Like the earthworm, the half with the head will regenerate a tail and survive, but the half without the head will die. The question for their party is which side has the head. (A flatworm will fully regenerate if cut in half, which, if the metaphor holds, might result in a third party. That outcome would hardly be a boon to Republicans in either camp.)
If the head is on the Donald Trump side, party pros know that Republican primary voters will continue to choose candidates who flame out in general elections because the electorate in all but deep red constituencies have made it clear that Trump’s bombast is no longer enchanting. If, on the other hand, what in the current environment are considered mainstream Republicans — formerly the extreme right — try to take control of the nominating process, the Trump half will either rebel or stay home.
As we begin the 2024 election cycle, these distinctions may prove crucial. For all the vitriol directed by progressive Democrats at Sinema and Manchin, the party desperately needs them both to be re-elected if it is to have any chance of maintaining control of the Senate. Because Democrats did not cut themselves in half, Joe Manchin can return to West Virginia and tell voters not only that he is his own man but that he can wield far more power as an independent Democrat than can any Republican. Kyrsten Sinema can similarly flaunt her bona fides as an “independent” thinker who puts the needs of Arizona before blind party loyalty. (She may face a challenge from the left but only a centrist can win in Arizona.) Other Democrats under threat, such as Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, can make similar arguments, thus giving them a decent chance of re-election in Republican states.
The amoeba advantage goes far beyond the Senate. Republicans won 18 House seats in districts carried by Joe Biden compared to only five by Democrats who were victorious in Trump districts. If party leaders take the need to build coalitions seriously, they can easily reverse a sufficient number of those losses to win back the House in 2024.
While the Democrats’ task is arduous and painstaking to be sure, Republican leaders are faced with a far more daunting backdrop. The only way they can overcome what seems a fatal split in their party is to try to stitch the earthworm back together, to somehow find a way to nominate candidates who can win general elections without inciting the fury of Trump worshippers who would gleefully burn down the “RINO” house if Trump told them to.
Presently, the party hopes that it can pivot to Trumpism without Trump, in the person of, say, a Ron DeSantis. But while Florida’s governor might currently be receiving both breathless accolades and strong poll numbers, time will only tell if he is a genuine heir to the golden throne or merely a Trump du jour.
In 2016, Wisconsin's Scott Walker was also flying high as a young, hard-nosed conservative governor who had been resoundingly successful in a swing state. Walker was widely touted as the future of the party — until he was forced to perform on a national stage. He did not fare badly, certainly no worse than some of the dozen-plus other candidates, but nor did he send sparks through the Republican electorate. His presidential campaign ended up lasting two months. DeSantis might prove more effective and have more staying power, but those who are praying for a neo-Trump candidate need be aware that the actual Trump will likely be there to insult, belittle, and mock any would-be successor.
With what promises to be a brutal election season ready to begin, there are lessons to be absorbed by both parties. For Democrats, it is to embrace their amoeba-esque flexibility, to recognize they cannot win without it; for Republicans, it is to make sure the worm’s head is on their non-Trump half and then to put all their resources into regenerating the half they allowed Trump to cut off.
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.