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If anyone tells you they know how the battle among congressional Democrats will be resolved, wish them a good day and walk away very quickly. They managed to pass an infrastructure bill in the Senate — with Republican support! — and are now in total disagreement on whether to vote on it in the House, not to mention what to put in a massive social spending bill, and whether one can pass without the other. There’s a chance that it could all fall through their fingers.

So the traditional reassurances that a party does not drag itself over a political cliff have no more weight than the assurances that the Congress will never permit the United States to default on its financial obligations, or that one of our two major political parties won’t work to undermine the results of the next election. We are simply in a different time and place (perhaps a darkling plain, where ignorant armies clash by night.)

It is, however, possible to trace the roots of the current Democratic disarray. It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of a central political truth, offered by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In turning her Conservative Party in a sharp rightward direction, she argued: “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”

In shaping their sweeping social spending legislation, with a putative price tag of $3.5 trillion, President Joe Biden and the Democratic congressional leaders have argued that this is what the voters chose last November. And polls do show broad support for universal pre-K, lower prescription drug prices and expanded health care, paid for by higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. In essence, the argument goes, “We won the argument and the vote and now it’s time to turn these ideas into law.” The problem is that the Democrats did not win the vote — at least, not in the sense that mattered, given the unique nature of our system of government. And Biden has not even won the argument widely enough in his own party.

The Democrats’ victory in 2020 came on the thinnest of majorities in Congress and largely on an anti-Trump campaign — without reaching any internal consensus on the specifics of a governing plan. With moderates opposed to key pieces of his social spending plan and progressives threatening to tank the accompanying infrastructure bill, Biden will have to quickly find a compromise that can salvage his agenda and prevent political disaster.

When progressives insist that the Democrats are in “full control” of the federal government — an assertion echoed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell as he disdains to help avoid a government default — they embrace a seriously misleading assertion.

After a dozen House losses last November, and with unified Republican opposition to the Democratic agenda, it takes just three defecting Democrats out of 220 to defeat a bill. The Senate, of course, is evenly split, and even that fact does not measure how frail the Democrats’ hold is; had Georgia Republican David Perdue won one-quarter of 1 percent more of the vote last fall, the Senate would now be in Republican hands.

Yes, Biden had a plurality of some 7 million votes; in a system with a national popular vote, that 4 1/2 point margin over Donald Trump would have represented a reasonably comfortable victory. But all of that margin came from just two states — New York and California — which is why his election came down to some 42,000 votes in three states. And Biden’s win provided no “coattails” to down-ballot Democrats. You can bemoan the anti-majoritarian features of the Electoral College, the Senate and the gerrymandered House districts in many states, but the fact is that as a blunt political fact of life, Democrats did not “win the vote” that would have insulated the party from a single dissenting senator or a small handful of House members.

Biden is hardly the first Democratic president to deal with the unhappy facts of political life in a federalist system. Even with 57 senators and more than 250 House members, Bill Clinton got his tax and budget proposals passed in 1993 by one-vote margins in both houses, and only after jettisoning key elements of his plan. (“I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans now,” he groused to his Cabinet in 1993). President Barack Obama had at one point 60 Democratic senators, but he needed every single one of them to overcome a Republican filibuster to get the Affordable Care Act passed, and that too was slimmed down to progressives’ dismay.

Trump was also a victim of this reality in 2018, when three defecting GOP senators — including, most dramatically, John McCain — defeated his attempt to repeal the ACA. That political implosion came in large part because Trump and his congressional allies could not agree on any plan to replace Obamacare despite years of vowing to do so once they gained power.

Is that an unfair analogy to today’s Democratic scrum? Didn’t Biden campaign on a pledge — reflecting popular opinion — to make the government an ally of the poor and middle class, and pay for it with higher taxes on the affluent?

The answer is a rousing: “it depends.” When the argument moves from the general to the specific, cracks in the Democratic base open. Democrats representing some of the “bluest” states want their affluent constituencies to be able to deduct their local and state taxes; for progressives elsewhere, that sounds like comforting the comfortable. Democrats from more purple districts argue that the more expansive parts of the budget bill are too much for their constituents to swallow. Progressives argue that with Democratic majorities in jeopardy next year, this is the one chance they have to put ambitious social legislation into law; centrists say the more ambitious proposals are what puts the majority in even further jeopardy. The one clear element about these fractious battles is that the paper-thin majorities in the House and Senate do not give Democrats anything remotely like the power they had in the days of the New Deal and Great Society (not to mention significant Republican support in those eras). The attempt to analogize to those days of social legislation amounts to historical illiteracy.

This is manifestly not an argument for abandoning ambitious goals. It suggests, by contrast, a last-ditch attempt to pass that infrastructure bill and a budget bill that reflects both a significant effort to make life less unfair and an honest embrace of what the politics of the moment will accept. It recognizes the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s aphorism that “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.” It argues for the kind of result that gives Democrats the only reasonable chance to waging a midterm fight where they will be weighed down by history and Republican perfidy in gerrymandering and voter restrictions. That chance lies in their ability to argue:

“We promised to repair the physical infrastructure of the country, to address the needs of rural America, to put government on the side of the poor and middle class. And that is what we are doing.”

That argument may not be enough to overcome the force of cultural resentments, or White House missteps, or the GOP assault on the vote. But without visible evidence of the Democrats’ core argument — without pre-K, some form of expanded heath care, some steps toward a fairer tax system — Democrats will go into next year with one or both hands tied behind their back.

If there is a chance for some compromise, Democrats would do well to heed the words of Obama as he looked back on the fight over heath care and the laments from the progressive wing about the compromises necessary to pass the bill.

“The carping,” he wrote in his memoir, “carried immediate political consequences for Democrats … by preemptively spinning what could be a monumental but imperfect victory into a bitter political defeat, the criticism contributed to a potential long term demoralization of Democratic voters — otherwise known as the ‘what’s the point if nothing ever changes?’ syndrome, making it even harder for us to win elections and move progressive legislation forward in the future.”

Republicans, Obama wrote, “understood that in politics, the stories too were often as important as the substance achieved.”

The lesson? Democrats not only have to come up with some unifying compromise, but with a “story” that centrist and progressives alike are willing and eager to tell: “We’re doing what we promised, your lives will be better, and not a single Republican helped make this possible.” There’s no guarantee that this will win them the argument and the vote next year. But what other chance do they have?

COLOGNE, Germany — On a warm evening in early September, Annalena Baerbock took the stage on a packed city square here. There were just over three weeks to go until Germany’s general election, which will take place on Sunday, and around 2,000 people had come out to see the progressive, pro-environment Green party’s first-ever candidate for chancellor. “You can feel the change here on Wilhelmplatz,” Baerbock told the audience, to cheers and applause.

As she spoke, four young girls toward the front of the crowd climbed a metal divider to get a better look at the candidate. Baerbock, energetic with microphone in hand, occasionally referred to them in her speech: When a handful of right-wing protesters started shouting, she reminded them there were children present, and during her Q&A session, she came over and answered the girls’ question about how to live a more climate-friendly life. Over the course of the rally, other girls wandered over from their parents until about a dozen stood there, grouped together near the stage, eyes turned up toward Baerbock.

These girls have an experience of politics American girls don’t: They have never known a country in which a woman didn’t hold the highest office in the land. For the past 16 years, Angela Merkel has been a steady hand at the country’s helm and arguably the most powerful woman in the world.

But in Baerbock’s candidacy, they’re also watching a real-time demonstration that even in Germany — a country often held up as a model for embracing and re-electing a powerful woman leader — sexism isn’t easy to root out of politics. It can be difficult even to disentangle the two.

Baerbock was an early contender in the election, leading her two main rivals for several weeks in the spring — an unprecedented feat for the Greens, who have never before had a real shot at the chancellery. Since then, she has come under unrelenting attack for a series of off-the-trail missteps, including revelations of plagiarism and resume inflation, while male rivals have more easily sidestepped their minor scandals. She has also been the target of frequently gendered disinformation attacks, one of which featured her face photoshopped onto a naked woman’s body with a caption implying she was a sex worker. Along the way, Baerbock has faced more familiar examples of sexism, such as questions about whether she can balance the chancellorship with being a mother.

The Greens are now polling at 16 percent, behind the center-left Social Democrats and Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, and Baerbock is effectively out of the chancellor’s race. Baerbock herself has avoided speaking too explicitly about sexism in the campaign, though others close to her have been vocal on the subject. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine this month, she mentioned the connection but was cautious about blaming the attacks on gender.

“There are always going to be moments when, especially as people run out of real arguments, they hit below the belt — we know that about campaigning,” Baerbock said. “But in this election, there’s also been an element of hate and smear campaigning, that’s been exacerbated by social media, at times gender-based.”

Her candidacy has left German political observers wrestling with the question of just how open-minded Germany actually is when it comes to women leaders. Baerbock might be the second woman to run for Germany’s top office, but she’s the first to experience the post-Merkel climate for female politicians seeking the job. It’s a contradictory environment in which a female candidate is no longer a historic first and embracing gender is far more culturally accepted — but in which the winner will preside over a parliament that is still more than two-thirds male, more skewed than many of Germany’s European neighbors. And, at least for Baerbock’s supporters, it’s hard not to look at the substance and tone of the attacks on her and detect very different treatment than her rivals.

“One can’t say that Germans don’t trust a woman to do [the job of chancellor]. We had a first example,” said Franziska Brantner, a member of parliament from the Greens who led the party’s campaign in the state of Baden-Württemberg earlier this year. “But still, a female candidate is getting different attacks — and on a different level — than male counterparts.”

Female politicians in Germany are disappointed, but not surprised, that a country that has broken such a visible gender barrier still has so far to go.

“You would think that, with a female chancellor leading the government, things would have steadily improved for women in politics,” said Sawsan Chebli, a state secretary in Berlin’s city government who is running for the Bundestag as a Social Democrat. “I wish that were the case.”

In many ways, Baerbock is exactly what Merkel wasn’t: She’s young (just 40 years old), running on a platform of structural change (Merkel leads one of the two major centrist parties), and has openly embraced being a woman and mother (the chancellor has, until recently, largely avoided discussion of gender).

When Merkel first ran for chancellor in 2005, she faced her own uphill road: Ascending the ranks of the male-dominated CDU, she was referred to as “Kohl’s girl,” a reference to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel’s mentor and predecessor as party leader. She’s gotten questions about her clothes, and critics have implied that as a woman without children she doesn’t fully understand the lives of mothers and families. Even the well-known nickname often applied to Merkel, Mutti (or “mother”), has sexist undertones.

The difficult atmosphere Merkel has confronted might help explain why women’s representation hasn’t advanced as much as some hoped during her 16-year tenure. She chose early on to strategically downplay her gender, and likely calculated that for a leader of the conservative CDU, becoming a vocal champion of feminist politics would be a liability.

Just 31 percent of the members of Germany’s parliament are women, which is higher than the U.S. Congress (27 percent) and the global average (25 percent) but lower than many of Germany’s European neighbors. Four years ago, the percentage was actually higher — 37 percent — but dropped when the heavily male, far-right Alternative for Germany party won seats in 2017. In executive positions, women are far rarer: Just 9 percent of Germany’s mayors are women, and women lead only two of the 16 federal states.

Only since Merkel announced that she wouldn’t seek a fifth term has she begun to speak more openly about gender and feminism. In 2019, in a rare long-ranging interview, she discussed the challenges of being a woman in politics (“I wear the same blazer four times within two weeks, the letters start pouring in,” she said) and the need for gender parity in public life, which she said “just seems logical.”

And earlier this month, she finally used a word that remains loaded in German politics: “Yes, I’m a feminist,’” Merkel said for the first time.

That Merkel has become more comfortable opening up about the topic may be a sign of the changing times. Baerbock, by contrast, speaks on the campaign trail about being a mother to two young daughters, and spent much of a recent debate performance discussing policies to lift up women in Germany.

But the Green candidate has confronted a challenge that Merkel, who still doesn’t have a Twitter account, didn’t have in 2005: online hate speech and disinformation attacks that experts say are often gendered and disproportionately target women.

Baerbock has been hit by an especially high amount of disinformation, according to studies by the German Marshall Fund and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, from Russian state-backed sources as well as from inside Germany. Some of these attacks play on preconceived notions about the Greens, like the false claim that the party wanted to ban housepets to reduce carbon emissions. But other attacks have been distinctly sexist: One image that made the rounds online featured Baerbock’s face photoshopped onto a naked female body with the caption, “I was young and I needed the money.”

Michael Kellner, the Greens’ campaign manager, has spoken out about the disproportionate challenges Baerbock has faced due to her gender. “As an experienced campaign manager, I can tell you that this spread of hate and lies affects women much more than men,” he told Die Zeit in June.

Female candidates from across Germany’s political spectrum are familiar with online abuse. Earlier this year, the magazine Der Spiegel found that 69 percent of female parliamentarians in Germany had experienced “misogynistic hate,” and 36 percent described physical attacks on themselves or on their office or home. Similarly, the European Academy for Women in Politics and the Economy recently found that female mayors in Germany experience significantly more harassment.

This comes as Germany, like other countries, is grappling with an overall rise in hate speech, fueled in part by the AfD — a party which, like similarly-minded politicians in the U.S., continually pushes the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable speech.

Wiebke Winter, a 25-year-old Bundestag candidate from Merkel’s center-right CDU, said that overall, Germany’s political scene has become more welcoming to women because parties like hers recognize they need to be more representative of the population as a whole.

But after a recent TV appearance where she discussed her role as her party’s new adviser on climate issues, her Twitter account was flooded with hateful attacks. “I really don’t know why,” Winter said in an interview. “I think I broke too many clichés at once: I’m a woman for climate in the CDU, and that’s not the story that people want to tell.”

The online harassment was one thing, but when someone started burning her campaign posters close to her home, she contacted the police.

Chebli, the SPD party member in Berlin, travels with police protection due to the volume of credible death threats she’s received. In Chebli’s case, multiple factors make her a target: She’s not just a woman, but also a Muslim daughter of refugees who speaks openly about racism in Germany. “Women who have a voice, who are visible, who defend themselves — these are the ones who are most often affected,” she said. “What happens online isn’t detached from what happens in analog life.”

Many of the online attacks targeting Baerbock are examples of what the German Marshall Fund calls “sexualized subversion of credibility” — playing on gender stereotypes to enhance existing concerns about a female candidate’s competence and trustworthiness. Baerbock took a number of hits that undermined her credibility in voters’ eyes, and her candidacy never fully recovered.

After a near-flawless campaign rollout in April, Baerbock’s party shot to first place in the polls. She appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel, posing confidently with her hands on her hips, projecting the assuredness and ease that her opponents (both middle-aged white men) were lacking at the time. But the Greens’ numbers began to decline after a series of unforced errors. First, German media reported that Baerbock hadn’t disclosed supplementary income from her party. Then, evidence emerged that she had inflated parts of her resume and plagiarized numerous passages in her book (she has since apologized for the plagiarism, promising to add more accurate citations).

Baerbock’s missteps quickly became the defining narrative of her campaign: “Not even a quarter [of Germans] still believe Baerbock!” read one headline from the tabloid Bild.

But while Baerbock’s allies acknowledge the campaign’s errors, some believe gender bias is subtly amplifying an existing narrative of incompetence and inexperience. Both her rivals, the CDU’s Armin Laschet and SPD’s Olaf Scholz, had minor plagiarism scandals of their own; while neither was as extensive as Baerbock’s, those revelations made far fewer waves and haven’t defined their campaigns in the same way. And some of the more serious scandals the two male candidates have faced, whether Laschet’s failure to distance himself from an ultraconservative candidate in his party or Scholz’s involvement in a major tax-evasion controversy, also had less of an impact. (On Thursday, my POLITICO colleagues marveled at how Scholz had survived multiple scandals, calling him the “Teflon candidate.”)

“Annalena Baerbock obviously has to meet stricter standards than her competitors,” the writer Tanja Dückers argued in a column for Deutschlandfunk.

Petra Weißflog, head of the Greens in the eastern city of Cottbus, said things have improved for women in politics since she first ran as her party’s lead candidate in Brandenburg in 1994. But she can’t help feeling the party’s male co-leader, Robert Habeck, would have been treated differently than Baerbock.

“These small faux-pas that happened with Annalena, they weren’t her fault: That was her advisers, who didn’t vet things as carefully as they should have,” Weißflog said. “I think if these things had happened to Robert, everyone would have simply said, ‘Well, he’s a very busy man.’”

For advocates of women in politics, the questions about Baerbock’s credibility highlight a familiar difficulty: how to distinguish legitimate scrutiny of a candidate’s competence from what they see as unfairly heightened expectations for women.

The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which studies the challenges women face running for office in the United States, has found that voters tend to assume men are qualified but need more evidence to believe the same of a woman — especially when she is running for executive office.

Amanda Hunter, the foundation’s executive director, says this dynamic makes it doubly difficult for Baerbock, who is already facing questions about her qualifications for the job due to her lack of executive experience. “Attacking a woman’s qualifications is a tried and true tactic in a campaign, because it can be very effective,” she said. “So the allegations of plagiarism, for example, or whether or not she inflated her resume — those chip away at the assumption that she is competent, which is already a weak spot for women.”

Watching Baerbock’s campaign try to recover from real political stumbles while grappling with whether the reaction had a gendered element, I was reminded of the spring of 2015. Back then, I covered Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign for National Journal, including the unfolding scandal over Clinton’s private email server. The server was a substantive problem that also exacerbated an existing narrative about Clinton — that she considered herself above the rules — just as Baerbock’s issues have underscored her youth and lack of experience.

Of course, Clinton was one of the most experienced presidential candidates in recent memory and a well-known, highly polarizing figure long before her campaign. Baerbock, meanwhile, was a political newcomer when she became the Greens’ co-leader in 2018 and, unlike Clinton, is running on a progressive platform advocating fundamental change. Her party proposes investing massively in climate infrastructure, phasing out coal years earlier than the current government planned and raising taxes on high earners, among other initiatives.

Still, the sense that smaller scandals are cumulatively having an intangible, yet undeniable, impact on a female candidate’s chances feels remarkably familiar.

Baerbock nodded to the parallels in her conversation with POLITICO Magazine: “It’s a phenomenon that we’ve already seen in the latest U.S. elections,” she said.

Verena Duden, a Greens supporter in the northern city of Kiel, said after a party rally this summer that she did see a gender element to the way Baerbock’s credibility had tanked.

“The mistakes happened, that’s not a question,” she said. “But I think … in politics, people react much more aggressively to women. Especially in social media, where you don’t have to use real names to express yourself, I really have the feeling that there really is a difference.”

Despite the hurdles female German politicians face, one thing has certainly improved since Merkel’s first run in 2005: Openly discussing gender-based discrimination and abuse is far more accepted.

When Winter was attacked on Twitter, she was heartened by the support she received. “Many other people jumped on top of it, even from other parties, which I really appreciate — from the Green Party, from the Social Democrats, from the liberals,” she said. “So many people called and asked me how I was.”

Taking audience questions toward the end of her rally in Cologne, Baerbock was asked, “How do you deal with people who insult you?” There were a few knowing chuckles from the audience as Baerbock considered her answer.

“That’s a very good question,” she said seriously. “How do I deal with it when people attack me? I have a very, very amazing party. And I have so many people who say, ‘That’s not how we should speak to each other.’”

“The absolute most important thing,” she added, “is that you’re not alone.”

Rick Hasen isn’t getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close.

Germany has voted, and the big remaining questions are what the makeup of the next governing coalition will be and who will succeed Angela Merkel. As chancellor for a record 16 years, Merkel helped guide Germany and the European Union through the financial crisis, the influx of migrants in 2015, Brexit and four years of transatlantic estrangement under Donald Trump.

Merkel’s successor remains unknown, though the Social Democrats’ Olaf Scholz appears the likeliest bet right now. But even with the chancellorship and the coalition up for grabs, the results provide some important clues about the future of Germany’s foreign policy. The transatlantic defense alliance is likely to encounter some trouble in the coming years, but more cooperation on new challenges like China might be on the menu.

In the United States, supporters of the traditional transatlantic relationship, centered on NATO, may be disappointed by the coalition that is likely to emerge. But for those interested in a new transatlantic alliance, focused on the United States and Europe countering China together, the outcome could be good news. The two smaller parties that will make or break any German coalition — the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) — are inclined toward a stronger stance against China, which Germany under Merkel’s “Grand Coalition” of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SDP) was more hesitant to take. Whatever the makeup of the new coalition, expect a livelier debate in post-Merkel Germany about taking a tougher line on China.

The coalition will most likely be made up of three parties — something Germany hasn’t seen since the 1950s. With the Greens and the FDP definitely included thanks to strong performances on Sunday, what’s unclear is which party will lead the government. The most likely outcome is a “traffic-light” coalition (so named because of the signature colors of the three parties that would comprise it) led by Scholz’s SPD, Sunday’s narrow winner, with the Greens and the FDP as partners. The “Jamaica” coalition (whose three parties’ colors resemble the black, green and yellow Jamaican flag) would be the same, except led by the CDU; this combination is less likely because of the CDU’s poor showing. The Greens and the FDP, therefore, have significant maneuvering room as the SPD and CDU jostle to get them on their side.

Merkel’s CDU left last night’s elections with its worst result ever, coming in second with only 24.1 percent of the votes. This makes it unlikely to lead the next government, which is bad news for supporters of the traditional transatlantic alliance. A CDU-led government would have largely guaranteed the continuation of the old-style U.S.-European relationship, centered around NATO and relying on German participation in collective defense and political arrangements. The CDU sees itself as the party of the Bundeswehr (Germany’s military) and supports NATO’s goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense.

The SPD, on the other hand, is much less explicit on this, noting more cryptically in its election manifesto that “only with a well-equipped and modern Bundeswehr can we fulfil our tasks as a reliable partner in Europe and NATO.” The Greens, even more outspoken, reject the 2 percent goal completely. Germany has long presented difficulties for traditional defenders of NATO because of its struggles to meet military spending targets — something that will likely continue under a center-left coalition.

Most notably, an SPD-led “traffic-light” coalition would be more skeptical of the longstanding nuclear-sharing arrangement between the United States and Germany. The next German government will be tasked with a critical decision: whether to replace the country’s aging Tornado aircraft, which are certified to carry U,S. nuclear bombs and ensure Germany’s participation in NATO’s nuclear-sharing program. The U.S., unsurprisingly, has long been pushing for Germany to replace the Tornados, and a failure to do so would be a major blow to the traditional transatlantic setup. But nuclear weapons are extremely unpopular in Germany. With the aircraft scheduled to be retired in 2024, there is little time to find a replacement. If none is procured, there is a real danger that Germany sleepwalks out of nuclear sharing. This would call into question NATO’s backbone — its nuclear umbrella.

The CDU is the only party in the upcoming coalition talks that explicitly supports nuclear sharing. The SPD, FDP and Greens instead emphasize the long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons. A CDU-led Jamaica government would likely move to acquire new aircraft, but an SPD-led government might not.

On China, however, a traffic-light government could be more outspoken in a way that aligns with the tougher stance the United States has been taking. All German parties have over the last few years readjusted their view of China, and this process is ongoing. But under Merkel, much to the U.S.’s dismay, Germany did not take especially strong positions on China, partly due to economic concerns and partly due to a lack of urgency on the matter.

The SPD itself is not considerably more hawkish on China than the CDU. However, the two smaller parties that performed historically well Sunday — the Greens and FDP — take a more critical stance towards China, as well as Russia. Both parties emphasize human rights and international law, and support grassroot democracy movements. And while they seem to guaranteed to be part of either coalition, they could get more of a voice if the SPD runs the government: The CDU, at least under Merkel, had a reputation for subduing its coalition partners.

It still won’t be easy for any German coalition to work more closely with the U.S. against China. Although a clear majority of Germans believes the U.S. is in a new Cold War with China, only 18 percent believe their country is part of that conflict. And in a 2019 poll, a large majority of respondents said they would prefer to remain neutral rather than align with Washington in a hypothetical Sino-American conflict.

Is the future of the U.S.-German relationship about Europe, and the traditional arrangements by which the U.S. has helped to guarantee European security? Or is it about China, and creating a more unified transatlantic position towards it?

For President Joe Biden, the ideal answer is probably “both.” But “both” may not be on offer this time round, because the transatlantic alliance is changing, and so are Germany’s politics. For those eager to see the pivot to Asia continue, the almost guaranteed inclusion of the Greens and FDP in a future government is likely good news. Although a Germany that’s more critical of China will not automatically align with the U.S. and might aim for independent European positions on the matter, it makes the discussion easier. On the other hand, the likely exclusion of the CDU from government will make it harder to maintain the longstanding defense arrangements in Germany that the transatlantic relationship has relied on.

The Biden administration, for its part, should welcome a more China-skeptic turn in Germany’s governance. But the U.S. will also need to be prepared for more difficult discussions about whether Germany wants to keep playing a strong role in NATO’s collective defense apparatus — as well as about what, exactly, a common U.S.-German approach to China will look like.

The cable news networks ought to be sheepish about the wall-to-wall coverage they gave to Gabrielle Petito. In early summer, she was a 22-year-old pharmacy tech road-tripping across America with her fiancé Brian Laundrie, posting the highlights on Instagram. By September, she was a national story, her body having been discovered in a Wyoming campground, and suspicion settling on Laundrie, whereabouts unknown.

As the Petito killing mystery went large, it quickly fed back on itself: Her story became the subject of media self-flagellation by the very outlets that were covering it. “In a seven-day period … Petito had been mentioned 398 times on Fox News, 346 times on CNN and 100 times on MSNBC,” the Washington Post‘s Jeremy Barr reported, in a story that questioned the saturation coverage while the Post also steadily added to the drumbeat. The New York Times interspersed its own Petito coverage with some Petito-coverage-shaming, noting that Petito had gotten disproportionate coverage for being young, blond and white. When Black or brown women disappear, the press doesn’t apply itself to the story overtime, both newspapers pointed out — a sentiment reiterated by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones on CNN’s Reliable Sources, and by MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

It’s true: Whiteness is one key to the missing woman story’s prominence. Gwen Ifill put a name to this nearly two decades ago, dubbing it “missing white woman syndrome.” The pull of stories like Petito’s goes beyond whiteness, though, and it’s much older than the waves of wall-to-wall missing-woman coverage that sweep across cable news every year or two.

The maiden in peril is an American staple — and has been for almost two centuries. In our now-mythic past, the prospect of white pioneer women being hauled off to an unknown netherworld by the continent’s Native people stirred our fear. (The victims, for their part, were expected to resist and die rather than submit.) The formula, then as now, was to portray women as helpless victims forever in need of rescue. And the stories had a habit of going viral long before that term existed.

In 1897, it was a wealthy young Boston woman, Betsy Stevenson, whose unknown whereabouts transfixed the press. Like many stories, hers went national thanks to the news wire services of the day. (She was found a decade later performing in a New York theatrical production.) In 1909, the New York newspapers went wild when a 13-year-old named Adele Boas vanished during a shopping excursion with her mother. (Turns out, she ran away.) In 1910, 25-year-old New York heiress Dorothy Arnold disappeared and set off a nationwide search. The New York Times covered the Arnold story day after day and returned to it periodically over the years when unidentified bodies were found. False sightings — Boston! Philadelphia! Muskogee! — streamed in from wherever a newspaper picked up the mystery. When Arnold’s mother died in 1928, the unsolved disappearance was still newsworthy. “It was the really great search of the age,” United Press reported, “one that did much to develop modern newspaper ‘police’ coverage.”

The scandal-mongering “yellow journalists” of the 1890s designed the storytelling templates modern newspapers and cable networks still rely on, the endangered-girl trope being a primary one that drove whole campaigns. Publications in New York and elsewhere stumped against prostitution by portraying young prostitutes as victimized “white slaves.” William Randolph Hearst went beyond covering maiden-in-peril news to actually making it when his very yellow New York Journal broke an 18-year-old Cuban woman named Evangelina Cisneros out of jail during the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. Missing women were good business outside journalism, too: 1914’s serialized The Perils of Pauline silent films (produced by Hearst), placed a young, attractive heiress in dangerous jams and then extracted her.

Those circulation-hungry tabloid barons were scratching at something we can trace back to Greek myth. The drama of the maiden in peril awakens in us archetypal patterns seeded for centuries by culture, history and literature. It’s a story we can’t stop listening to, or reading, or clicking on. Never mind why Rapunzel got locked away, it’s simply enough for the purposes of the plot that she’s being held against her will. The same goes for the evil fairy who renders Sleeping Beauty comatose, for Darth Vader, who imprisons Princess Leia, and for the evildoers who kidnap Buttercup. Even when the Gone Girl abducts herself in Gone Girl, her abduction and implied peril is enough to move the plot. The abductions of Liam Neeson’s (movie) daughters have managed to prop up his entire late career.

So when journalists picked up their laptops and video cameras to report the disappearance of Gabby Petito story, they surely knew from experience that they would get scolded for telling the story. But they also knew from experience that the vast majority of their audience would lap it up — and if they didn’t serve extra helpings, other outlets would.

Shouldn’t it be a story, you ask? Abduction (and, in this case, possible relationship violence) are real issues, of course — but it’s worth noting that neither the press nor its audience is all that interested in those issues per se. Missing men don’t rate breathless, Petito-style coverage unless they’re celebrities, nor do missing women who have exceeded their child-bearing years. (As a sociobiologist might argue, society invests more deeply in the fates of fertile women because they are essential to the survival of the species.) When deciding which stories to pump up, the press may not consciously pick women of the young and white variety, but the roster of stories in the decades before Petito fits a clear pattern: Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Polly Klaas, Natalee Holloway, Lori Hacking, Robyn Gardner, Mollie Tibbetts, Michelle Parker and others. These cases obviously deserved some coverage, but at any given time thousands of young adults are missing. You’d have to do some fancy gymnastics to rationalize why so much journalistic firepower is concentrated on a few white women.

Besides tapping our psyches, the missing woman story endures because it’s the kind of story that reliably pulls in readers and viewers even when there is no news to report. Since Petito’s body was found, the story has gone on as media outlets have manicured their competing timelines of her disappearance and murder and continued their coverage of the search for her at-large fiancé. We’re not in Natalee Holloway territory yet, but we’re getting there.

Will all that scolding force some self-examination? Don’t count on it. The chances are slim that the press will control its appetite for the genre, or even acknowledge the cultural origins of its cravings. The next time the networks flood the zone with a missing maiden story, console yourself with this: It’s only a fairy tale cable news loves to tell itself.

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The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi took his own swing at the damsel trope in 2018. Send fairy tales to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts love to tell my Twitter feed nighttime stories. My RSS feed would have you know that the original version of Sleeping Beauty is darker than the darkest Cormac McCarthy.