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College Towns Are Decimating the GOP

Once the home of stereotypical "country club Republicans" and the well educated, today's Republican Party is controlled by evangelicals - the least educated religious group in America - white supremacists and politicians engaged in a contest as to how far they can go to prostitute themselves to these ugly groups with whom the embrace of ignorance is a badge of honor. The result is that the Republican Party is pushing constant attacks on women's' autonomy, LGBT individuals and anyone doesn't look like or think like the party's knuckle dragging, racist and homophobic base.  The result has been a huge exodus of college educated voters and younger voters who as a whole are more racially diverse, more likely to be LGBT or LGBT allies, and better educated. As noted in prior posts, rather than attempt to broaden its appeal, today's GOP relies principally on gerrymandering and voter suppression to remain in power and lies of every nature.  The exodus from the GOP is particularly notable in college towns and educated suburban areas as laid out in a lengthy piece at Politico Magazine.  Here are article highlights:

Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers.

No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than anywhere else in the state. And the Democratic margin of victory that delivered control of the nonpartisan court to liberals was even more lopsided than usual — and bigger than in any of the state’s other 71 counties. . . . . The margin was so big that it changed the state’s electoral formula.

Dane County alone is now so dominant that it overwhelms the Milwaukee suburbs (which have begun trending leftward anyway). In effect, Dane has become a Republican-killing Death Star.

“This is a really big deal,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin. “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”

In isolation, it’s a worrisome development for Republicans. Unfortunately for the larger GOP, it’s not happening in isolation. In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college counties like Dane are flexing their muscles, generating higher turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.

One of those states is Michigan. Twenty years ago, the University of Michigan’s Washtenaw County gave Democrat Al Gore what seemed to be a massive victory — a 60-36 percent win over Republican George W. Bush, marked by a margin of victory of roughly 34,000 votes. Yet that was peanuts compared to what happened in 2020. Biden won Washtenaw by close to 50 percentage points, with a winning margin of about 101,000 votes.

Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now. . . . . even in reliably red places like South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins.

The American Communities Project, which has developed a typology of counties, designates 171 independent cities and counties as “college towns.” . . . uses three dozen different demographic and economic variables in its analysis such as population density, employment, bachelor’s degrees, household income, percent enrolled in college, rate of religious adherence and racial and ethnic composition.

Of those 171 places, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000 presidential election. Just seven flipped the other way, from blue to red, and typically by smaller margins. Democrats grew their percentage point margins in 117 counties, while 54 counties grew redder.

Many populous urban counties that are home to large universities don’t even make the ACP’s “college towns” list because their economic and demographic profiles differentiate them from more traditional college counties. Among the missing are places like the University of Texas’ Travis County, where the Democratic margin of victory grew by 290,000 votes since 2000, and the University of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, where the margin grew by 73,000 votes. The University of Minnesota’s Hennepin County has become bluer by 245,000 votes.

There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers, drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a combination of both.

What’s clear is that these places are altering the political calculus across the national map. Combine university counties with heavily Democratic big cities and increasingly blue suburbs, and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican Party’s reach.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’ voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities. But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing Democratic totals. And they aren’t addressing the structural problems created by the rising tide of college-town votes — students are only part of the overall phenomenon.

“The data sure seem to suggest younger voters are leaning much more Democratic in recent years and, perhaps more concerning for the Republicans, the GOP seems to be struggling more broadly with college-educated voters.

For much of the 20th century, the area surrounding Fort Collins, home to Colorado State University, was a Republican stronghold. . . . Today, however, after Biden won Larimer in a 15-point blowout in 2020, the real question: Just how deep is the county’s shade of blue?

The national realignment of politics along cultural and educational lines is also playing a role. Larimer ranks as one of the most educated counties in Colorado, which itself ranks among the most educated states in the nation. Even if newcomers aren’t registering as Democrats, many possess the traits associated with a Democratic voter profile — environmentally conscious, closely attuned to climate change issues, white and college-educated. As Larimer and the other high-population areas along the state’s urbanized Front Range corridor have drifted leftward, so has the state: Democrats now hold all the levers of power in Colorado, including the governor’s office and the legislature.

Virginia has followed a similar path. The American Communities Project lists 18 counties and independent cities as college towns there; nine of them have flipped from red to blue over the past 20 years. Just one, the city of Norton in the southwest corner near to UVA’s College at Wise, has flipped the other way — by less than 1,000 votes. Virginia’s governor is Republican, but like Colorado, the state voted Democratic in 2008’s presidential race and hasn’t looked back.

With their reputation for livability, college towns exert a magnetic pull that draws new residents from other states. Often, these new residents are fleeing more conservative locations, and their arrival has the effect of intensifying the liberal bent of the surrounding area.

“Everything the Republicans are doing now in this legislative session will come back to haunt them in places like Buncombe County,” says Democratic state Sen. Julie Mayfield, referring to a slew of contentious measures including a 12-week abortion ban and education policies that would make it easier to prosecute librarians and school employees for displaying materials deemed harmful to minors, pursued by the GOP majority in Raleigh, “just like what happened in Wisconsin.”

The overwhelmingly Democratic nature of the student vote, both in Wisconsin and elsewhere, has left Republicans struggling to respond. Just weeks after the Wisconsin court election, Cleta Mitchell, a veteran GOP election lawyer, gave a presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat calling for measures that would limit voting on college campuses.

According to the report, Mitchell focused on campus voting in five states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin. Each of them features large counties with significant university communities that have flipped from red to blue or are churning out ever bigger Democratic margins.

Rather that jettison unpopular policies and the culture wars, Republicans only real response is increased voter suppression, something that is not a sane long term strategy.

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Climate Collapse Could Happen Fast

So far this summer in America and many parts of the world has been marked by record heat, devastating once in a century or longer rainfall and other signs that the world's climate is relentlessly changing.   The Republican Party response: more denial and efforts to rescind spending on climate change issues and renewable energy. Indeed, many Republicans want to even slash spending for fixing America's crumbling infrastructure.  Yet, as a piece in The Atlantic reviews, we may be closing to tipping points where drastic climate change may be set in irreversible motion with cataclysmic consequences. Living on a tidal creek, I and others in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia know that sea level rise is real and is happening before our eyes, albeit slowly at the moment.   That could change if the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets melt.   The refusal of so many to face reality is mind numbing.  Here are article excerpts:

Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”

In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. . . . If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects—like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs—are likely to happen more quickly than expected. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.

Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf that impedes the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Although the ice shelf’s overall melt is slower than originally predicted, warm water is now eating away at it from below, causing deep cracks. At a certain point, that melt may progress enough to become self-sustaining, which would guarantee the glacier’s eventual collapse. How that plays out will help determine how much sea levels will rise—and thus the future of millions of people.

We may not even realize when we start passing points of no return—or if we already have. “It’s kind of like stepping into a minefield,” Armstrong McKay said. “We don’t want to find out where these things are by triggering them.”

Even before the climate gets to that point, we may face a dramatic uptick in climate-related disasters, says William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University and the lead author of a recent commentary on the “risky feedback loops” connecting climate-driven systems. There’s a sense of awe—in the original meaning of inspiring terror or dread—at witnessing such sweeping changes play out across the landscape. “Many scientists knew these things would happen, but we’re taken aback by the severity of the major changes we’re seeing,” Ripple said.

Although it may be too late to avert some changes, others could still be staved off by limiting emissions. LeGrande said she worries that talking about tipping points may encourage people to think that any further action now is futile. In fact, the opposite is true, Ripple said. “Scientifically, everything we do to avoid even a tenth of a degree of temperature increase makes a huge difference.”

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Will Gen Z Save Us From Trump and the GOP?

For many years now, I have argued that the Republican Party has no long term plan for expanding its base of voters and has instead focused on issues and policies that thrill its aging evangelical/white supremacist base yet are anathema to younger voters who will increasingly determine election outcomes. Instead of retooling its message and policies, the GOP as a whole has relied on gerrymandering and voter suppression - some have even called for increasing the age to vote - and attempts at authoritarianism.   As older voters - a key GOP demographic - die off, the rising generations, especially Gen Z which is more racially diverse, the least religiously affiliated, pro-abortion, and most likely to identify as LGBT or LGBT allies, may prove to be too much for the GOP's anti-democracy tactics to continue win the day.   Meanwhile, Democrats need to be fully aware of the policies and approaches to win these younger voters to support Democrat candidates and put the final nails in the coffin of today's increasingly ugly Republican Party.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this voting block that the GOP s ignoring if not actively alienating.  Here are column excerpts:

It’s easy to envision the 2024 presidential election becoming the third straight contest in which a veteran Democrat goes up against Donald Trump. Once again, the Democrat wins the popular vote but swing states are tighter. Could go either way — and has, right?

But things are very different this time, and here’s why: The candidates might not be changing — but the electorate has.

Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters.

Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.

Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.

And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.

Similarly, though not as drastic, we have seen a 7 percent increase in voter registration among under-30 voters since Gen Z joined the electorate. In midterm elections, under-30s have seen a 20 percent increase in their share of the electorate, on average, since Trump and Gen Z entered the game.

Gen Z voters say their motivation is not a party or candidate. It is, instead, strong passion on one or more issues — a much more policy-driven approach than the more partisan voting behavior of their elders.

That policy-first approach, combined with the issues they care most about, have led young people in recent years to vote more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age — as recent elections in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin have shown.

In last August’s Kansas abortion referendum, for example, women under 30 turned out at a rate of 41 percent and helped win the contest. A similar Michigan abortion referendum brought youth midterm turnout to 49 percent — and 69 percent of voters younger than 30 voted to put abortion rights protections in the state constitution compared with just 52 percent of voters 30 and older. Michigan voters elected Democratic majorities in both state houses for the first time in years, and reelected their Democratic governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

About 48 percent of Gen Z voters identify as a person of color, while the boomers they’re replacing in the electorate are 72 percent White. Gen Z voters are on track to be the most educated group in our history, and the majority of college graduates are now female. Because voting participation correlates positively with education, expect women to speak with a bigger voice in our coming elections. Gen Z voters are much more likely to cite gender fluidity as a value, and they list racism among their greatest concerns. Further, they are the least religious generation in our history. No wonder there’s discussion in some parts of the GOP about raising the voting age to 25, and among some Democrats about lowering it to 16!

There are lessons — and warnings — here for both parties. For Republicans, the message is obvious: Listen to the voices of this soon-to-be-dominant group of voters as you formulate your policies on climate, abortion, guns, health care, inclusion and everything else. Unlike some older voters, they are listening to what you say — and to how you say it. Change your language and style from the unmitigated male id of “Never Back Down” and “Where Woke Goes to Die” to words of community, stewardship, sharing and collaboration.

There are stark messages for Democrats, too. Meet young voters where they are: on social media, not cable news. Make your messages short, funny and somehow sarcastic yet authentic and earnest at the same time. Your focus should be issues first, issues second, candidates third and party identity never.

We suspect both campaigns know most or all of what we have written here. Habit might prevent them from acting on it, but they have these numbers. In one of life’s great ironies, the group that doesn’t know it is young voters. They think of themselves as ignored, powerless and marginalized in favor of big money and shouting boomers. But over the next year, they’ll figure it out. Gen Z will tire of waiting for Washington to unite to solve problems, will grab the national microphone and will decide the 2024 presidential race.

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Will Trump Finally Face Accountability?

As regular readers know, I despise Donald Trump, an individual I find repulsive on many fronts, not the least of which is his abject immorality and self-absorption.   That a majority of evangelicals and congressional Republicans continue to support and even fawn over him underscores the moral bankruptcy of both groups.  For years in New York and since gaining the White House in 2026, we have witnessed an endless cavalcade of wrong doing on Trump's part with so far no real accountability for the lengthy list of crimes and misdeeds.  Now, with Trump apparently having received a target letter from special prosecutor Jack Smith's team investigation the January 6, 2021, insurrection and related efforts and conspiracies to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, the odds have belatedly improved for Trump to finally face legal accountability.  The outcome remains uncertain and the lies Republicans are engaging in to depict Trump as a victim of the FBI and Department of Justice are as obscene as Trump himself.  Yet, just maybe Trump will be indicted and the judicial system may bring accountability that the political arena has failed to do given Republicans craven self-prostitution to Trump and the incredibly hideous MAGA base of their party.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at where the nation finds itself.  Here are highlights:

Though Donald Trump has sometimes been called “Teflon Don”—a label that connects not just to his own name but to his modus operandi—the truth is not that he has escaped consequences for everything, just his most egregious behavior. He has lost defamation cases, his company got dinged for tax evasion, and he has been charged with byzantine business crimes. But his biggest sins—especially trying to steal the 2020 presidential election—have gone unpunished.

That pattern could break soon. Trump issued a statement this morning saying that he received a “target letter” from Special Counsel Jack Smith of the Justice Department Sunday night. He said Smith gave him four days to report to a grand jury investigating Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Such letters are usually a prelude to an indictment. . . . some media outlets have confirmed with other sources that Trump received the letter, and the news meshes with what was already known about Smith’s investigation.

If it’s reasonable to assume that Trump is indeed likely to be charged with crimes related to January 6, that still leaves big questions. Most important of them is what crimes those might be. Rumored possibilities include fundraising violations, the old prosecutorial workhorse of wire fraud, and even insurrection—an extremely rare charge, but one the House committee investigating January 6 referred to the Justice Department.

Smith could choose to make a broad case against many participants in the paperwork coup, which would be a more complicated case but would be likely to net convictions, or he could focus more narrowly on Trump or a small cadre of aides, which could be a simpler case but would be even more politically incendiary.

Trump finds himself in legal trouble in jurisdictions across the country . . . . These cases can be plotted along two axes: probability of conviction and seriousness of crime. A crime is a crime, but the Manhattan case is relatively small potatoes, and some legal observers think the prosecution’s legal theory is dubious. The documents case is not only very serious—it concerns some of the most sensitive materials for national security—but the facts are relatively straightforward and damning for Trump. The Fulton County case is serious, in that it touches on the attempts to subvert the election, but also limited to actions in Georgia; handicapping the odds of the conviction there is challenging.

But a potential federal case related to January 6 might be the most important one. The offenses could hardly be more serious: Trump sought to thwart the will of voters, first by legal and political schemes and then, more desperately, by force. No president has ever attacked the basis of American democracy so directly; even Nixon’s misdeeds pale in comparison.

In layman’s terms, Trump is obviously guilty. Everyone watched him claim he’d won an election he didn’t. They listened to him pressuring officials including Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger to find votes for him. They heard him incite the riot on January 6. His actions were bad enough that the House of Representatives impeached him, and a majority of senators, including some Republicans, voted to convict—though still short of the two-thirds required for a conviction.

Yet something can be plainly true in common parlance and still be challenging or impossible to prove to a jury. “You and I know it, it’s not a secret, but proving it beyond a reasonable doubt, in a court of law, with admissible evidence, in a contested hearing, is a lot harder,” the former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig told me earlier this year.

Political sensitivities are unavoidable, too. No matter what Smith might indict on, it would be unprecedented. Trump would be contesting the charges in the midst of an election. His lawyers are already seeking to push any trial in the documents case out past the 2024 election, and if he were to win, he would likely be able to order the Justice Department to close the case against him.

All of these factors mean that no one can confidently predict a conviction, much less incarceration. But a target letter related to January 6 would be one of the first concrete steps toward holding Trump accountable for his offenses against the United States.

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Why We Should Politicize the Weather

It is just mid-July and already in 2023 America and the world have experienced extreme weather events that in the past would have been once in a decade or more events if even that frequent yet are now quickly becoming annual events.   Meanwhile one political party, namely the Republican Party, continues to claim that climate change isn't real or that it's not really that bad or, as a final fallback, that doing anything about it is too expensive or impossible. Some of the denial is based on a reliance on political contributions from the fossil fuel industry while some comes from the GOP's embrace of ignorance and science denialism on a host of issues that range from climate change to even sexual orientation.  Anything that offends the most ignorant and diehard elements of the GOP base (not to mention conspiracy theory lunatics) must be rejected out of hand.   Yet temperatures are still rising and in the coastal regions many of us see first hand the reality of rising sea levels.  Sadly, rather than face and work to address a crisis facing the world, Republican politicians and candidates prefer to stoke the culture wars hoping to induce working class whites to vote against their own economic interests and sow hate and division.  A column in the New York Times argues why the weather needs to be politicized.  Here are highlights:

After officially beginning his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed the issue aside: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”

But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.

First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.

Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub.

But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the burgeoning field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain kinds of extreme weather events become more likely on a warming planet — for example, what used to be a heat wave we’d experience on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the odds of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the odds that the same event would have happened without climate change.

In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We don’t yet have estimates for the latest, still ongoing series of disasters, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost surely just the leading edge of the crisis, a small foretaste of the many disasters to come.

Which brings me back to the “politicization of the weather.” Worrying about the climate crisis shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. As of last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves to be on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was far larger than it was in other countries. And only in America do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.

The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed at all over the years: Climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; besides, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.

And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in America, the usual suspects will once again assert that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to greatly reduced emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, hasn’t stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsupportable.

So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the globe to end assertions that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what is happening in the world.

What this means is that if the G.O.P. wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost surely try to dismantle the array of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to a major reduction in emissions.

Like it or not, then, the weather is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it’s one of the most important issues they’ll be voting on next November.

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Will GOP Extremists End Their House Majority?

Personally, I find House Speaker Kevin McCarthy deplorable and in his zeal to become speaker I suspect he would have sold his own mother into white slavery.   Principle, reason and responsible legislative action mean nothing to the man and through his groveling to far right extremists - some of whom would have been widely viewed as white trash in the GOP of old - he has set the stage for chaos and obstruction in the House as we move forward, particularly when it comes to funding the federal government.  The only good news is that stunts by these extremists may well work to sink the GOP's control of the House in the 2024 elections.  As Ron DeSantis has found out (a separate post will be forthcoming on the topic), thrilling the ugliest and most extreme elements of the MAGA base doesn't play so well with the majority of voters,  But this reality seems utterly lost on the misnamed "Freedom Caucus" and other knuckle dragging elements of today's Republican Party as noted in a column in the New York Times.  Here are column excerpts and a prediction of the rocky road ahead where anarchists and know nothings have been empowered:

Some days, Speaker Kevin McCarthy must look out over his House conference in awe and think: Are you maniacs trying to lose us the majority?

Thursday may well have been one of those days, as hard-right crusaders larded up the National Defense Authorization Act with divisive, culture-warring amendments taking aim at abortion access, transgender medical care and diversity training. The annual N.D.A.A. usually garners solid bipartisan support, passing without excessive turbulence for the past 60 years. Last week, the House Freedom Caucus and its allies labored to insert more poison pills into the package than a back-alley fentanyl mill. After much drama, and much futile pleading by Mr. McCarthy with his right flank, the House passed the bill Friday, 219-210, on a mostly party-line vote.

Rest assured, the spectacle is far from over.

The odds of the bill’s extreme measures passing muster with the Democratic Senate and White House are worse than Mike Pence’s odds of winning the presidency next year. So, less than zero. But House conservatives aren’t aiming to make serious policy gains here — at least, not the ones who understand how a divided government works. They are looking to make trouble, to prove they are loud, uncompromising fighters for the conservative cause.

They are also looking to make a point, one directed in no small part at Mr. McCarthy, with whom they remain spitting mad over the debt-ceiling deal he negotiated with Democrats in May. And if they need to imperil their nascent majority to make that point, then so be it. Life is full of difficult trade-offs.

Mr. McCarthy’s debt-deal machinations this spring won plaudits from many political watchers: What leadership skill! Maybe we underestimated him! Maybe he really can keep his conference in line! But his hard-liners raged that he had sold them out and promptly committed to making the House as dysfunctional as possible, even if it meant bogging down their own team’s policy goals. Their hostage-taking and acting-out have been a warning to Mr. McCarthy: Fool us once, and we’ll turn this chamber into a do-nothing freak show just to teach you a lesson. Try to fool us twice, and things will get really dark and weird.

This purity-over-progress approach isn’t just making life awkward for the speaker. It is making the entire Republican conference look like a pack of obstructionist zealots. This may play well in deep-MAGA districts, but not so much in battleground areas. . . . with a majority this scrawny, House conservatives are playing with fire. All Democrats need to do is flip a handful of seats to snatch the gavel from Mr. McCarthy’s hand. They could, say, claw back some of the ground unexpectedly lost to Republicans in New York in the midterms (starting with George Santos’s district). And they could pick up a seat or two thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act that may lead to various Southern states redrawing their congressional districts to address sketchy gerrymandering.

Even if Republicans hold on to the House — where, to be fair, a certain level of crazy has come to be expected — the wingers’ shenanigans are doing nothing to help the party’s brand. Many, many Americans are weary of political chaos and performative jerkiness. And many are particular tired of it on the issue of abortion . . . But time and again, Mr. McCarthy’s troops seem dead set on signaling that the G.O.P. is a pack of bomb-throwing fringe-dwellers actively trying not to govern. Swing voters aren’t generally all that keen on posturing, do-nothing Congresses, either.

Some Republican House members are cheesed off over these political games. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, for instance, was overheard Thursday dropping all kinds of colorful language, including an “f” bomb or two, about people being forced to vote on the abortion amendment, according to Politico. . . . “It’s not going to pass the Senate anyway; it doesn’t matter,” she told The Hill.

It doesn’t matter. Well, except that, going forward, Ms. Mace can expect the situation to get so much worse. However much blood and tears get shed in passing the N.D.A.A., they are nothing compared to the carnage anticipated in the coming cage match over funding the government.

In protest of the debt deal, a pack of conservatives ground action on the House floor to a halt for several days in June while lobbying (or, if you prefer, blackmailing) the speaker to give them more power — including more leeway to slash spending beyond the levels set in the debt-ceiling agreement. With the conservative knife at his throat, Mr. McCarthy has been allowing the conference to move ahead with appropriations proposals that do just that.

But, after getting crosswise with his wingers on the debt deal, the speaker now seems to have retreated back into a policy of appeasement. This bodes ill for keeping the government running smoothly in the coming months — and for any future legislative efforts.

There is no point in feeling sorry for Mr. McCarthy. He’s a political creature. Coming into this job, he knew the risks of negotiating with, and bowing to, ideological terrorists. And he was apparently cool with that. His party is earning whatever electoral comeuppance it gets. But it is shameful that the rest of America may wind up forced to pay a price as well.

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