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      The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold

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      There are very real — and substantial — policy differences separating the Democratic and Republican Parties. At the same time, what scholars variously describe as misperception and even delusion is driving up the intensity of contemporary partisan hostility.Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, describes some of these distorted views in his recently published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide”:Seventy-five percent of Democrats said Republicans were closed-minded, and 55 percent of Republicans said that Democrats were immoral (Pew Research Center, 2019). Nearly eight in 10 say that the two parties “fundamentally disagree” about core American values. More than 70 percent of all voters think those in the other party are “a clear and present danger to the American way of life.”At an extreme level, James L. Martherus, Andres G. Martinez, Paul K. Piff and Alexander G. Theodoridis write in a July 2019 article “Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization,” “a substantial proportion of partisans are willing to directly say that they view members of the opposing party as less evolved than supporters of their own party.”In two surveys, the authors found that the mean score on what they call a “blatant difference measure” between Republicans and Democrats ranged from 31 to 36 points. The surveys asked respondents to rate members of each party on a 100-point “ascent of man” scale. Both Democrats and Republicans placed members of the opposition more than 30 points lower on the scale than members of their own party.“As a point of comparison,” they wrote, “these gaps are more than twice the dehumanization differences found by Kteily et al. (2015) for Muslims, 14 points, and nearly four times the gap for Mexican immigrants, 7.9 points, when comparing these groups with evaluations of ‘average Americans.’”A separate paper published last year, “Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy and Support for the Capitol Attacks,” by Miles T. Armaly, David T. Buckley and Adam M. Enders, shows that support for political violence correlates with a combination of white identity, belief in extreme religions and conspiracy thinking.“Perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities and support for conspiratorial information,” they wrote, “are positively related to each other and support for the Capitol riot.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, noted in an email that “much research has shown that Americans’ views of the other party are in fact driven by misperceptions and falsehoods.” Bringing Republicans and Democrats together and revealing their commonalities, she continued, “only lessens affective polarization. It cannot eliminate it.”Why?“Because humans are innately good at finding patterns and establishing stereotypes,” Wronski wrote, citing research showing that just as “Democrats overestimate the percentage of wealthy Republicans, Republicans overestimate the number of L.G.B.T.+ Democrats.”Since these beliefs have their foundations in core values, self-image and group identities, Wronski wrote, “people are motivated to defend them. Protecting your identity becomes more important than embracing the truth.”In other words, misperceptions and delusions interact dangerously with core political and moral disagreements.In March 2021, Michael Dimock, the president of the Pew Research Center, published “America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide,” in which he explored some of this country’s vulnerabilities to extreme, emotionally driven polarization:America’s relatively rigid, two-party electoral system stands apart by collapsing a wide range of legitimate social and political debates into a singular battle line that can make our differences appear even larger than they may actually be. And when the balance of support for these political parties is close enough for either to gain near-term electoral advantage — as it has in the U.S. for more than a quarter century — the competition becomes cutthroat, and politics begins to feel zero-sum, where one side’s gain is inherently the other’s loss.At the same time, Dimock continued:Various types of identities have become ‘stacked’ on top of people’s partisan identities. Race, religion and ideology now align with partisan identity in ways that they often didn’t in eras when the two parties were relatively heterogenous coalitions.The result is that an individual whose party loses on Election Day can feel that his or her identity has suffered a defeat.In separate analyses, Pew has demonstrated the scope of mutual misperception by Democrats and Republicans. In an August 2022 study, “As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System,” Pew found that majorities of both parties viewed the opposition as immoral, dishonest, closed-minded and unintelligent — judgments that grew even more adverse, by 13 to 28 points, from 2016 to 2022. In a June-July 2022 survey, Pew found that 78 percent of Republicans believed Democratic policies are “harmful to the country” and 68 percent of Democrats held a comparable view of Republican policies.I asked Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford, about these developments, and he emailed back, “Americans misperceive the extent of policy disagreement, antidemocratic attitudes, support for political violence, dehumanization of rival partisans — again with the strongest results for perceptions of the views of rival partisans.”Importantly, Willer continued, “misperceptions of political division are more than mere vapor. There is good reason to think that these misperceptions — or at least Democrats’ and Republicans’ misperceptions of their rivals — really matter.”Why?Democrats and Republicans don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight; they greatly overestimate how much their rivals want to break norms of nonviolent, democratic engagement, and this leads Democrats and Republicans to support violent and undemocratic engagement more than they otherwise would.He concluded:As the old sociological adage goes, situations believed to be real can become real in their consequences. It is likely that Democrats’ and Republicans’ inaccurate, overly negative stereotypes of one another are to some extent self-fulfilling, leading partisans to adopt more divisive, conflictual views than they would if they saw each other more accurately.Willer and others who described the centrality of misperception in American politics stressed that they do not want to diminish the serious divisions between Democrats and Republicans on such matters as abortion, race, women’s rights, the safety net and the proper role of government.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” stressed these points in an emailed response to my questions, saying, “Democrats and Republicans are having very real and consequential disagreements on matters of equality, social hierarchy and what it means to be American.”At the same time, Mason continued:Matters of status and identity are easy to whip up into existential conflicts with zero-sum solutions. To the extent that political leaders are encouraging people to focus on threats to their social status rather than their economic or material well-being, they are certainly directing attention in an unhelpful and often dangerous direction. It’s much easier to think of others as disproportionately dangerous and extreme when their victory means your loss, rather than focusing on the overall well-being of the nation as a whole.Alia Braley, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, is the lead author of an August 2022 paper, “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” She and her co-authors argued that “simply fearing that opposing partisans support democratic backsliding can lead individuals to support it themselves.”In an email, Braley wrote:We find that everyday Democrats believe that everyday Republicans are way more hostile to democracy than they really are. And vice versa. In that sense people are, in fact, operating under a delusion that everyday opposing partisans are willing to undermine democracy. And yes, this misperception seems to cause intense affective polarization.Partisans, Braley continued, “overestimate how much members of the other party dislike and dehumanize them. Partisans tend to believe members of the other party want far more extreme policy outcomes than they actually do.” These misperceptions “can create a type of downward spiral in terms of polarization,” she wrote, citing Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen:This rhetoric likely causes Republicans to start to believe that Democrats are undermining democracy. When Democrats see this election denial, they naturally come to think that Republicans are trying to undermine democracy by not accepting election results. The result is a state of mutual fear.Gabriel Lenz — a political scientist at Berkeley and one of Braley’s co-authors — emailed to say “that much of the polarization is delusional.”“There are two main drivers” of this phenomenon, Lenz wrote. The first “is the need for politicians to mobilize citizens with busy lives and not much of an incentive to participate in politics. There are many ways politicians can mobilize voters, but fear is tried and true.”The second is speculative: “That humans evolved to survive conflict with the other human groups around them,” Lenz wrote. “This likely selected for people who excelled at sticking together in conflicts. Many of our biases seem explained by this incentive, especially a tendency to see the other side as evil.”Lenz stressed the point thatPoliticians don’t need to fully convince their supporters of these perceptions to get their supporters to act on them. If I’m only partially convinced that Democrats intend to steal the next election or want to murder babies, that partial belief may still be enough to get me to act.Even more significant, according to Lenz, is the recognition thatSome misperceptions are much more important than others. Misperceptions on policy or on the demographic makeup of parties are probably important, but they don’t directly threaten democracy. Misperceiving that the other side no longer supports democracy, however, is a more direct threat to democracy. It’s a more direct threat because it leads your own side to no longer support democracy to the same degree.Lenz cited a 2020 paper, “Malice and Stupidity: Out-Group Motive Attribution and Affective Polarization” by Sean Freeder, a political scientist at the University of North Florida, who argued that “negative motive attribution — partisans’ tendency to assume ill intent guides out-party interests” is a “key dynamic underlying affective polarization. When asked why out-party members prefer certain policy outcomes, roughly half of partisan respondents offer an explanation involving selfishness, ignorance, hatred and other negative motives.”Freeder wrote:Exposure to positive out-group motives does appear to lead respondents to update out-partisan attributions, which in turn leads to increased out-group affect. However, motivated reasoning makes such updating likely only when the out-party motives shown are of uniformly high quality — even one bad apple appears to spoil the whole bunch.Affective polarization can, in Freeder’s analysis, take on a momentum of its own:Once partisan polarization begins, negative motive attribution may provide partisans with an easy way to ‘other’ the out-group, which in turn increases the internal desire to further negatively attribute. Such a feedback loop leads citizens to perceive themselves as increasingly surrounded by monsters.There are other problems with efforts to lessen the mutual disdain of Democrats and Republicans.A May 2023 paper by Diego A. Reinero, Elizabeth A. Harris, Steve Rathje, Annie Duke and Jay Van Bavel, “Partisans Are More Likely to Entrench Their Beliefs in Misinformation When Political Out-Group Members Fact-Check Claims,” argued that “fact-checks were more likely to backfire when they came from a political out-group member” and that “corrections from political out-group members were 52 percent more likely to backfire — leaving people with more entrenched beliefs in misinformation.”In sum, the authors concluded, “corrections are effective on average but have small effects compared to partisan identity congruence and sometimes backfire — especially if they come from a political out-group member.”The rise of contemporary affective polarization is a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon.In a July 2022 paper, “Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization,” Shanto Iyengar and Matthew Tyler, both political scientists at Stanford, found thatThe share of American National Election Studies partisans expressing extreme negativity for the out-party (a rating of 0 on a scale of 0 to 100) remained quite small leading up to and during 2000. Since 2000, however, the size of this share has increased dramatically — from 8 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2020. Thus, over the first two decades of this century, partisans’ mild dislike for their opponents metastasized into a deeper form of animus.In their paper “Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information-Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading?” Erik Peterson, a political scientist at Rice, and Iyengar asked, “Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading?”Their answer: “Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.”In an email, Iyengar warned that “The threat to democratic functioning posed by misinformation is real. The people who stormed the Capitol were not cheerleading; they genuinely believed the election was ‘stolen.’”He wrote that of the causes of increased affective polarization, “the explanation I consider most viable is changes in the media environment.” In the 1970s, he continued, “the vast majority of the voting-age population encountered the same news stories on the same topics” — what he called “a vast information commons.”Today, Iyengar wrote, not only are there more sources of information, but also “partisans have ample opportunity to tune in to ‘congenial sources’ — news providers delivering coverage with a partisan slant in accord with the viewer.”Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, wrote by email that “there are two schools of thought” concerning delusions and misperceptions in contemporary politics:The first argues that factual mistakes are a significant engine of polarization and if we spend time correcting people’s misperceptions, it will have beneficial knock-on effects in reducing affective polarization.He continued, “In lab settings or other controlled environments where experts can bombard subjects with accurate information, people can move toward the center and release themselves from some of their partisan misconceptions.”Persily wrote, however, that his analysis falls into a second school of thought:I do not think most of affective polarization is driven by a misunderstanding of facts. Indeed, I think many in this field make the mistake of thinking that the line to be policed is the line between truth and falsehood. Rather, I think the critical question is usually whether the truth is relevant or not.In this context, according to Persily, “partisan polarization resembles religious polarization. Attempting to ‘disprove’ someone’s long-held religion will rarely do much to convince them that your god is the right one.”Viewed this way, partisan affiliation is an identity, Persily wrote, “and displays dynamics familiar to identity politics”:People root for their team, and they find facts or other narratives to justify doing so. Remember, most people do not spend a lot of time thinking about politics. When they do so, their attitudes grow out of other affinities they have developed over time from signals sent by trusted elites or friendship networks.Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., shares Iyengar’s view on the key role of the changing media environment. In an email, he wrote:A good chunk of affective polarization is delusion or based on misperceptions. For instance, people have exaggerated stereotypes about the other party (and what members of the other party think of them), and when you correct those false perceptions, they quickly become less hostile.People are motivated, he continued,to affirm evidence that confirms their beliefs and affirms their identities. For committed partisans, they are often more motivated by these social goals than the desire to be accurate. People also share misinformation for social reasons — it can signal loyalty and help people gain status in some partisan communities.A significant component, Van Bavel said, “is based on misperceptions they’ve absorbed from their social network on (social) media stories. It suggests that if we could simply provide accurate and diverse portrayals of other groups, it might reduce the growing trend toward affective polarization.”But, he cautioned, “correcting misinformation is extremely hard; the impact tends to be pretty small in the political domain, and the effects don’t last long.”In a 2021 paper, “Identity Concerns Drive Belief: The Impact of Partisan Identity on the Belief and Dissemination of True and False News,” Andrea Pereira, Elizabeth Harris and Van Bavel surveyed 1,420 Americans to see which of the following three alternatives best explained the rise and spread of political misinformation:The ideological values hypothesis (people prefer news that bolster their values and worldviews), the confirmation bias hypothesis (people prefer news that fit their pre-existing stereotypical knowledge) and the political identity hypothesis (people prefer news that allow them to believe positive things about political in-group members and negative things about political out-group members).Their conclusion:Consistent with the political identity hypothesis, Democrats and Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their in-group or the value-undermining behavior of their out-group. Belief was positively correlated with willingness to share on social media in all conditions, but Republicans were more likely to believe and want to share political fake news.There have been a number of studies published in recent years describing the success or failure of various approaches to reducing levels of misperception and affective polarization. The difficulties facing these efforts are reflected, in part, in an October 2022 paper, “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Antidemocratic Attitudes,” by Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight colleagues.The authors found that even when “three depolarization interventions reliably reduced self-reported affective polarization,” the interventions “did not reliably reduce any of three measures of antidemocratic attitudes: support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence and prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means.”In other words, the irrational element of partisan hostility has seemingly created a political culture resistant to correction or reform. If so, the nation is stuck, at least for the time being, in a destructive cyclical pattern that no one so far has found a way to escape.The embodiment of delusional politics is, of course, Donald Trump, with his false, indeed fraudulent, claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The continuing willingness of a majority of Republican voters to tolerate this delusion reflects the difficulty facing the nation as it struggles to restore sanity to American politics — if it’s not too late.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Polls Have Shown DeSantis Trailing Trump

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has struggled in recent polling, receiving an average across polls of around 20 percent among Republicans, falling far short of former President Donald J. Trump’s roughly 50 percent. The gap between the two men has grown steadily over the past few months, as Mr. Trump’s share has increased and Mr. DeSantis has lost ground.In a Quinnipiac poll conducted May 18 to 22, Mr. DeSantis captured 25 percent of Republican voters compared with Mr. Trump’s 56 percent — doubling the former president’s lead over the Florida governor since late March. Still, Mr. DeSantis fares much better in the polls than the rest of his G.O.P. primary competitors, who remain in the low single digits.DeSantis Lags in the PollsPolling averages show Ron DeSantis’s support among Republicans dropping below 30 percent in recent weeks, as Donald J. Trump has gained strength in the primary contest.

      Source: New York Times analysis of polls aggregated by FiveThirtyEightBy The New York TimesWhile it is still early to consider the general election next fall, Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump fare similarly — roughly neck-and-neck against President Biden — in a hypothetical 2024 matchup.Still, Mr. DeSantis is viewed slightly more warmly by the American public: He has a net three percentage point favorability rating on average, while views of Mr. Trump remain underwater. While Mr. DeSantis enters the race with a fairly large polling hill to climb, there are a lot of reasons to believe it’s not too early to count him out. More

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      The DeSantis Delusion

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      If Ron DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little pancake.If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big, manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So there goes that rationale as well.And if DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor. He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more sedan than coupe.On Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.Which doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.He has a legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how buzzless their own candidacies are.But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to him, Pence sizzles.Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.And DeSantis has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details — and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education, the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump is.And as mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood, grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.His assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.”The campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in politicians who reach for the upper rungs.But their bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.DeSantis is betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair, reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why It’s Far Too Soon to Say DeSantis Is Done

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      Despite his struggles, fortunes can change very quickly in presidential primaries.Will Ron DeSantis start attacking Donald Trump?Sophie Park for The New York TimesIs the Ron DeSantis campaign already over?After the last few months, it’s hard not to wonder. His poll numbers have plummeted. Would-be donors seem skeptical. Pundits have questioned whether he should even run at all.But as he finally announces a presidential bid, expected later today, it is worth mulling his path back to contention. Despite it all, Ron DeSantis could still be the next Republican nominee.That might seem hard to imagine, but fortunes can change astonishingly quickly in presidential primaries. There are still more than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and there will be plenty of opportunities for him to right his ship.In the end, the factors that made Mr. DeSantis formidable at the beginning of the year could prove to be more significant than the stumbles and miscues that have recently hobbled him. The damage is not yet irreparable.Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. His campaign’s decision to announce his bid on Twitter tonight forfeits a rare opportunity to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use as a frequent Twitter user. And even if his campaign is ultimately run differently than it has been so far, it’s not clear that even a perfectly run Republican campaign would defeat Donald J. Trump — at least if the former president survives his various legal challenges politically unscathed.But if you’re tempted to write off Mr. DeSantis, you might want to think again. The history of primary elections is littered with candidates who are written off, only to surge into contention. Unknown candidates like Herman Cain briefly become front-runners. Early front-runners like Joe Biden and John McCain are written off, then come back to win. Even Barack Obama spent six months struggling and trailing an “inevitable” Hillary Clinton by double digits.Perhaps one day we’ll say something similar about Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He still has unusually broad appeal throughout the Republican Party. His favorability ratings remain strong — stronger than Mr. Trump’s — even though his standing against Mr. Trump has deteriorated in head-to-head polling. He is still defined by issues — like the fight against “woke” and coronavirus restrictions — that also have broad appeal throughout his party. If this was enough to be a strong contender in January, there’s reason it might be again.While it’s easy to see Mr. DeSantis’s decline over the last few months as a sign of profound weakness, the volatility of the polling can also be interpreted to mean there’s a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.Mr. DeSantis’s strategy so far this year may have also increased the likelihood of big swings. As I wrote last week, there are two theories for defeating the former president — Trumpism without Trump, and a reinvigorated conservative alternative to Trump. Of the two, the proto-DeSantis campaign can more easily be interpreted as a version of Trumpism without Trump. If his campaign has done anything, it’s to narrow any disagreement with Mr. Trump — even to a fault. Mr. DeSantis hasn’t really made either an explicit or implicit case against the former president. Perhaps worse, he hasn’t punched back after being attacked.This combination of choices has helped set up an unusually rapid decline in Mr. DeSantis’s support. After all, the only thing that unifies a hypothetical Trumpism without Trump coalition is opposition to Mr. Trump and the prospect of beating him. If you’re not attacking him and you’re losing to him, then you’re not saying or doing the only two things that can hold your supporters together.The evaporating basis for Mr. DeSantis’s support has played out subtly differently on two different fronts. On the right, conservative voters open to someone other than Mr. Trump nonetheless have returned to the side of the former president. What kind of conservative wants Trumpism without strength? Toward the center, the many relatively moderate and neoconservative establishment Republicans who yearn for a candidacy opposed to Trumpism, not just to the conduct of the man himself, have withheld crucial support for Mr. DeSantis and flirted with other options, from Chris Christie to Chris Sununu.But if the DeSantis campaign can revitalize the case for his Trumpism without Trump candidacy, he might quickly reclaim many of the voters who backed him a few months ago. Indeed, it’s even possible that the current media narrative and low expectations are setting the stage for a DeSantis resurgence.Imagine what it might feel like if he launched a successful, vigorous attack against Mr. Trump after all of these months on defense. What might have otherwise been a routine sparring match would be imbued with far greater significance, unleashing months of pent-up anxiety among his supporters. What if part of the reason he’s announcing his candidacy on Twitter is to mock Truth Social? Silly as it sounds, successfully putting down Mr. Trump might breathe life into his candidacy — and the media loves a comeback story.One important factor keeping Mr. DeSantis’s path open is that, so far, none of the potential moderate alternatives to him have gained a foothold in the race. If they did, it would deny him the moderate and neoconservative voters who supported the likes of John Kasich and Marco Rubio in the last primary. He would essentially become another Ted Cruz.But for now, Mr. DeSantis is the only viable not-Trump candidate in town. As long as that’s true, he will have every chance to rebound among the voters who would prefer someone other than Mr. Trump — if there is a market for someone other than Mr. Trump.In the end, whether there’s sufficient demand for a Trump alternative may be the bigger question than whether Mr. DeSantis can resuscitate his campaign. With Mr. Trump already holding more than 50 percent support in the polls, actually defeating Mr. Trump might require some breaks, like the possibility that his legal challenges are worse than we might assume. It might also require a DeSantis win in Iowa to break Mr. Trump’s grip on a crucial segment of the party, much as the midterms seemed to temporarily crack Mr. Trump’s base last winter.But even if Mr. Trump is a clear favorite, it’s easy to see how Mr. DeSantis can at least make this a competitive race again. When he’s able to focus on his own issues, he has a distinctive political brand with rare appeal throughout a divided Republican Party. With expectations so low, the groundwork for a recovery might even be in place. It’s happened before. More

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      Greece Elections: New Democracy on Track to Win Most Votes

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      Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party did not win enough votes to form a one-party government. But he appeared to rule out talks to form a coalition, setting the stage for a second vote in weeks.The party of Greece’s conservative prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was on track to win a decisive victory in the general election on Sunday but fell short of the majority required to lead a one-party government, setting the stage for another ballot within weeks since Mr. Mitsotakis appeared to rule out forming a governing coalition.Mr. Mitsotakis described the preliminary outcome as a “political earthquake” that called for an “experienced hand to the helm” of Greece, and said that any negotiations with fractious potential coalition partners would only lead to a dead end.With 93.7 percent of the votes counted on Sunday night and his party, New Democracy, leading the opposition Syriza by 20 percentage points, Mr. Mitsotakis greeted a crowd of cheering supporters outside his party’s office in Athens.“We kept the country upright and we’ve laid the foundations for a better nation,” he said. “We will fight the next battle together so that at the next elections what we already decided on, an autonomous New Democracy, will be realized.”New Democracy had captured 40.8 percent of the votes by Sunday night, preliminary results showed, after calling on Greeks to opt for economic and political stability over “chaos” in a tense campaign. The center-left Syriza party, led by former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, under whose tenure Greece came close to leaving the eurozone in 2015, landed in second place, with 20.7 percent of the votes. The socialist Pasok-Kinal party took third place, securing 11.6 percent.Mr. Tsipras said in a statement that he had called to congratulate Mr. Mitsotakis on his victory, and that his party would convene to discuss the result given that a second election appeared all but assured.On Monday, when the final result is clear, the leading party will get a mandate to try to form a government. But it appeared most likely that the prime minister will not explore that option, leading to a new election, possibly in June or early July.New Democracy was on track to win 145 seats in the 300-seat Parliament, with 72 seats for Syriza, preliminary results showed. Syriza’s poor performance spurred speculation in the Greek news media about the center-left party’s future.Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis addressed supporters at his party’s headquarters in Athens on Sunday.Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press“It reflects the utter collapse of Syriza’s strategy, its perpetual rightward drift, a hegemonic position on the left that deepened confusion and demoralization,” said Seraphim Seferiades, a professor of politics and history at Panteion University in Athens.He also noted the high abstention in the vote, over 40 percent: Turnout stood at 60 percent, preliminary results showed.Three factors added to the ambiguity of the election on Sunday: the one in 10 undecided voters; the roughly 440,000 young people who were eligible to vote for the first time; and the 3 percent of the electorate that had backed a party founded by the jailed spokesman of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which was banned from running.The absence of an outright winner had been expected, since the election was conducted under a system of simple proportional representation, which makes it hard for a single party to take power. Any second vote would be held under a different system, which grants bonus seats to the winning party, giving New Democracy a better chance of forming an independent government.In his campaign speech in Athens on Friday night, Mr. Mitsotakis pointed to his government’s success in increasing growth (now at twice the eurozone average), attracting investment and bolstering the country’s defenses amid a testy period with neighboring Turkey.“This is not the time for experiments that lead nowhere,” he said, adding that achieving an investment grade rating, which would allow Greece to lower its borrowing costs, required a stable government.Mr. Mitsotakis was also unapologetic about Greece’s tough stance on migration, which has included heightened border controls and has led to a 90 percent drop in migrant arrivals since 2015. While his government has come under fire by human rights groups for illegally pushing back migrants at sea and creating camps with prisonlike conditions, many Greeks have welcomed the reduced influx. Migrants overwhelmed Greece’s resources at the peak of Europe’s migration crisis.“Greece has borders, and those borders must be guarded,” Mr. Mitsotakis declared on Friday to a crowd of cheering supporters waving Greek flags.Former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, leader of the leftist Syriza party, at a polling station in Athens on Sunday.Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Tsipras, for his part, had campaigned for change. He highlighted a perceived abuse of power by the current administration, including a wiretapping scandal, and drew attention to the rising cost of living, which opinion polls show is most voters’ key concern.Before casting his ballot on Sunday, Mr. Tsipras called on Greeks to “leave behind an arrogant government that doesn’t feel the needs of the many.”His message was convincing to Elisavet Dimou, 17, who voted for the first time on Sunday in a central Athens school. She said she had been swayed by Syriza’s promise of “change” and “justice.”“Syriza made mistakes, too, but they didn’t spy on half the country,” she said, referring to reports that the wiretapping scandal had swept up dozens of politicians, journalists and entrepreneurs.Another factor in her choice of Syriza was the fatal train crash in central Greece in February that killed 57 people, including many students. “They had their whole lives ahead of them, and they died because those in power didn’t care enough to fix the trains,” she said.Public outrage over the crash briefly dented New Democracy’s lead in opinion polls, but that edged back up as supporters were apparently comforted by promises of continued stability and prosperity.One supporter, Sakis Farantakis, a 54-year-old hair salon owner, said: “They’re far from perfect, but it’s the only safe choice. We’ve moved on; why go backwards to uncertainty?”Mr. Mitsotakis has argued that a one-party government would be preferable to a coalition deal to ensure stability and reassure investors. Economic growth has taken hold in Greece after a decade-long financial crisis that ended in 2018.Voters outside a polling station in Athens on Sunday.Petros Giannakouris/Associated PressHe has little choice of partners. The socialist Pasok party had been regarded as the only realistic candidate for a coalition with New Democracy. But Mr. Mitsotakis’s admission last year that Greece’s state surveillance agency had spied on Pasok’s leader, Nikos Androulakis, strained ties between the men and cast a shadow over any prospects for cooperation.A leftist-led administration had been another possibility. Syriza had been courting Pasok for a coalition that would most likely require a third party, probably Mera25. That party, led by Yanis Varoufakis, Mr. Tsipras’s former finance minister, appeared not to have gained a foothold in Parliament with most of the votes counted.Mr. Androulakis had kept his intentions unclear, declaring that both parties were unreliable and that neither Mr. Mitsotakis nor Mr. Tsipras should lead any coalition government. Mr. Androulakis called to congratulate Mr. Mitsotakis late Sunday. More

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      As Greece Votes, Leader Says Blocking Migrants Built ‘Good Will’ With Europe

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      Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has taken a tough line on migrants as he turns around the country’s economy. It’s a trade-off that voters and the European Union seem more than willing to abide.Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece has been accused of illegally pushing asylum seekers back at sea. He has acknowledged that the state’s intelligence service wiretapped an opposition leader. He has consolidated media control as press freedom in Greece has dropped to the lowest in Europe.It is the sort of thing that the guardians of European Union values often scorn in right-wing populist leaders, whether it be Giorgia Meloni of Italy or Viktor Orban of Hungary. But with Greece holding national elections on Sunday, Brussels has instead lauded Mr. Mitsotakis, a pro-Europe conservative, for bringing stability to the Greek economy, for sending military aid to Ukraine and for providing regional stability in a time of potential upheaval in Turkey.Above all, European Union leaders appear to have cut Mr. Mitsotakis slack for doing the continent’s unpleasant work of keeping migrants at bay, a development that shows just how much Europe has shifted, with crackdowns formerly associated with the right wing drifting into the mainstream.“I’m helping Europe on numerous fronts,” Mr. Mitsotakis said in a brief interview on Tuesday in the port city of Piraeus, where, in his trademark blue dress shirt and slacks, the 55-year-old rallied adoring voters on crowded streets. “It’s bought us reasonable good will.”With Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, calling Greece’s border enforcement Europe’s “shield,” Mr. Mitsotakis argued that after the arrival of more than a million migrants and asylum seekers destabilized the continent’s politics by entering through Greece during the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016, Europe had come around to Greece’s tougher approach.Migrants on a dinghy accompanied by a Frontex vessel at the village of Skala Sikaminias, on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey in 2020.Michael Varaklas/Associated Press“We’ve been able to sort of change, I think, the European approach vis-à-vis migration,” said Mr. Mitsotakis, a self-described progressive, disputing the notion that the policy — which critics say includes illegally pushing asylum seekers back — was hard-right.“Right-wing or a central policy,” said Mr. Mitsotakis, the leader of the nominally center-right New Democracy party, “I don’t know what it is, but I have to protect my borders.”In turn, Europe seems to have protected Mr. Mitsotakis.“It’s the Mitsotakis exception,” said Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Union law at the HEC Paris business school. Mr. Mitsotakis’ special treatment has derived from his political closeness to Ms. von der Leyen, Mr. Alemanno said, and his willingness to build — with funding from the bloc — a vast network of migrant centers that have proved politically popular in Greece.Mr. Mitsotakis argued that some “leftist Illuminati in Brussels” failed to see that he was saving lives with his policy, something that he said Europe’s leaders appreciated.“We’re no longer sort of the poster child for problems in Europe,” he said, adding that what he had done “offers a lot of people relief.”Greeks included. Before Sunday’s elections, Mr. Mitsotakis held a comfortable lead in the polls against his main rival, Alexis Tsipras, of the left-wing Syriza party, even if the prime minister still appeared to lack enough support to win outright. A second round of elections looks probable in July.Alexis Tsipras, left, and Mr. Mitsotakis taking part in a televised debate at the headquarters of the state broadcaster ERT this month.Alexandros Avramidis/ReutersAround the neighborhood where Mr. Mitsotakis campaigned, people talked about how he had made their native Greek islands that were once overrun with migrants livable again, how he had been the first Greek prime minister invited to speak to a joint session of Congress in Washington, and how he had stood up to Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who himself faces an election runoff next weekend.Greeks around the country appreciate how Mr. Mitsotakis has cut taxes and debt and increased digitization, minimum wages and pensions.For a decade, Greece was Europe’s thumping migraine. The country’s catastrophic 2010 debt crisis nearly sank the European Union. Humiliating bailouts followed, and a decade of stark austerity policies — directed by Germany — cut pensions and public services, shrank economic output by a quarter, inflated unemployment and prompted thousands of young and professional Greeks to flee.In 2015, under the leadership of Mr. Tsipras, Greeks voted to reject Europe’s many-strings-attached aid package, and the country was nearly ejected from the eurozone. Social unrest and talk of “Grexit” mounted, but Mr. Tsipras ended up carrying out the required overhauls and moderated in the following years, arguing that Greece had started on the road to recovery.But in 2019 he lost to Mr. Mitsotakis — the son of a former prime minister, trained at Harvard and Stanford, at ease in Washington — who seemed the personification of the establishment. He promised to right the Greek ship.“This was always my bet,” Mr. Mitsotakis said. “And I think that we delivered.”His government has spurred growth at twice the eurozone average. Big multinational corporations and start-ups have invested. Tourism is skyrocketing.Tourists visiting the Acropolis in Athens in October.Petros Giannakouris/Associated PressThe country is paying back creditors ahead of schedule, and Mr. Mitsotakis expects, if he wins, international rating agencies to lift Greece’s bonds out of junk status. The number of migrant arrivals has dropped off 90 percent since the crisis in 2015, but also significantly since Mr. Mitsotakis took office four years ago.“A European success story,” The Economist called Greece under Mr. Mitsotakis.But he argues that he needs another four years to finish the job. Greece, which still has the European Union’s highest national debt, is also the bloc’s second-poorest nation, after Bulgaria. Tax evasion is still common, and the country’s judicial system is so slow that it scares off investors.Critics of Mr. Mitsotakis say that, apart from the economy, he represents a danger to Greece’s values, and that Europe is diverting its eyes as it focuses on the financials and the declining number of migrants.Humanitarian groups have accused Mr. Mitsotakis of illegally pushing back migrants by land and sea. He has hardly run away from the issue, recently visiting Lesbos, the Greek island that became synonymous with the abominable conditions of its Moria camp, which was crammed with 20,000 refugees before burning down.“Moria is no more,” Mr. Mitsotakis said in the interview. “It simply doesn’t exist. I mean, you have olive groves and we have an ultramodern reception facility that’s been built with European money.” Critics have denounced the new camp’s prisonlike conditions, but Greeks overwhelmingly support his tough line.Mr. Mitsotakis during a campaign event on the island of Lesbos last week.Elias Marcou/ReutersEurope is “less on top of Greece for doing pushbacks and all the sort of things,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, who heads the Brussels office for the Center for European Reform, a think tank.The latitude given Greece, she said, was in part recognition that the country had lived through a decade of brutal austerity. But it also reflected that Europe as a whole is “basically unable to help” Greece and other nations at the front line of the migration crisis, and therefore lets “these governments do what they do.”Migration aside, there are other more immediate concerns at home. In February, a train crash killed 57 people, exposing Greece’s rickety infrastructure and the limits of Mr. Mitsotakis’ talk of modernization. Reporters Without Borders deemed Greece the worst country in the European Union for press freedom in its 2023 index.Destroyed train cars at the site of a crash where two trains collided near the Greek city of Larissa in March.Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York TimesOver the summer, Mr. Mitsotakis’ top intelligence official got caught wiretapping journalists and politicians, including Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the opposition Pasok party and member of European Parliament. Mr. Mitsotakis denied, to the incredulity of many, knowing anything about it. Some of the people his intelligence services listened in on were also found to have illegal malware on their devices. The government has denied putting it there.But Mr. Mitsotakis, in a televised debate this month, conceded that Mr. Androulakis should not have been wiretapped. The spying was an especially bad idea, it turns out, because Mr. Androulakis’s support may prove pivotal to the election’s ultimate outcome.Yet the scandal is way down on voters’ list of priorities, as is Mr. Mitsotakis’ treatment of migrants.John Vrakas, 66, who was handing out fliers for Mr. Tsipras across from the square where Mr. Mitsotakis was due to speak, shrugged that Europe didn’t seem particularly bothered as long as the prime minister assuaged their concerns on the economy and Ukraine. “It’s a kind of trade,” he said.It is one that Greek voters seem happy to make.As Mr. Mitsotakis walked the streets, a bus driver reached out the window and clasped his hand. “Supporters until the end,” chanted a group of men in front of a cafe. “We trust you,” a woman shouted from her jewelry shop.What “resonates in Europe,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, was that his was an “anti-populist government” that had brought much-appreciated stability back to Greece in a rough region.He got up from the interview in a small and otherwise empty restaurant, and shook more hands on the way to the square, where he launched into a short stump speech interrupted by chiming church bells.“I’m not sure who they are tolling for,” Mr. Mitsotakis exclaimed, “but not for us.”In Athens this month.Orestis Panagiotou/EPA, via ShutterstockNiki Kitsantonis More

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      Alberta Fires Rage While Election Ignores Global Warming

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      For politicians, discussing climate change in a province enriched by oil money is fraught.When I arrived in Alberta recently to report an upcoming political story, there was no shortage of people wanting to talk about politics and the provincial election on May 29. But, even as wildfires flared earlier than usual and raged across an unusually wide swath of forest, discussions about climate change were largely absent.Destruction left behind by wildfires in Drayton Valley, Alberta.Jen Osborne for The New York TimesThe smoke that enveloped Calgary this week briefly gave the city one of the worst air-quality ratings in the world, as the fires to the north and west led to the evacuation of roughly 29,000 people across the province.[Read: A ‘Canadian Armageddon’ Sets Parts of Western Canada on Fire][Read: Canada’s Wildfires Have Been Disrupting Lives. Now, Oil and Gas Take a Hit.][Read from Opinion: There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke][Read: 12 Million People Are Under a Heat Advisory in the Pacific Northwest]Smoke from wildfires has blotted out the sun in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver several times in recent years and kept runners, cyclists and walkers indoors. Charred forests, already burned in previous wildfire seasons, lined the roads I drove in Alberta’s mountains.I had been to Alberta in 2016 to cover the fires sweeping through Fort McMurray, but that blaze, almost miraculously, took no lives except in a traffic accident. But fires in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have become bigger and stronger, and research suggests that heat and drought associated with global warming are major reasons. When the town of Lytton, British Columbia, was consumed by wildfires in 2021, temperatures reached a staggering 49.6 degrees Celsius.Poll after poll has shown that Albertans are more or less in line with other Canadians on the need to take steps to reduce carbon emissions. But the candidates aren’t talking much about it.During Thursday’s debate between Danielle Smith, the premier and leader of the United Conservative Party, and Rachel Notley, the former premier and leader of the New Democratic Party, the subject of climate came up only in an economic context.Ms. Smith repeatedly accused Ms. Notley of springing a “surprise” carbon tax on the province, and warned that any attempt to cap emissions would inevitably lead to reduced oil production and reduced revenues for the province, (an assessment not universally shared by experts).A layer of dense smoke spread through much of Alberta this week.Jen Osborne for The New York TimesI asked Feodor Snagovsky, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta, about this apparent disconnect in Alberta between public opinion about climate change and campaign discourse.“It’s very tough to talk about oil and gas in Alberta because it’s sort of the goose that lays the golden egg,” he said. “It’s the source of a remarkable level of prosperity that the province has enjoyed for a long time.”This year oil and gas revenues will account for about 36 percent of all the money the province takes in. And during the oil embargo of the late 1970s, those revenues were more than 70 percent of the province’s budget. Among other things, that has allowed Alberta to be the only province without a sales tax and it has kept income and corporate taxes generally low relative to other provinces.But oil and gas production account for 28 percent of Canada’s carbon emissions, the country’s largest source. While the amount of carbon that’s released for each barrel produced has been reduced, increases in total production have more than offset those gains.The energy industry is also an important source of high-paying jobs, though. So the suggestion that production might have to be limited in order for Canada to meet its climate targets raises alarms.“People hear that and they think: my job’s going to go away,” Professor Snagovsky said. “It hits people really close to home.”He told me that he had lived in Australia in 2020 when that country was plagued by extreme heat and wildfires. At the time, Professor Snagovsky said, not only was there very little discussion there about climate change, but politicians and others argued that it was not an appropriate time for such talks.Professor Snagovsky said he hoped that the fires and smoke will prompt Albertans to start thinking about the climate effects that caused them, but he’s not confident that will happen.“I think it’s unlikely, but you can always hope,” he said.Trans CanadaImages made from the scan of the Titanic wreck clearly show small details.Atlantic/Magellan, via Associated PressA hyper detailed 3-D scan of the Titanic’s wreckage off Canada’s coastline has produced evocative images of the doomed steamship.A dilapidated farmhouse near Palmyra, Ontario, which is a favorite of photographers, may face demolition.Canadian Tire is among the companies picking over the ruins of Bed Bath & Beyond.A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.How are we doing?We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More

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      Trounced, Conservatives Feel Voters’ Wrath in English Heartlands

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      Defections in the once solidly Conservative southern “blue wall” drove large losses in recent municipal elections.LITTLEWICK GREEN, England — Aged 22 and not long out of college, George Blundell never expected to win when he ran in municipal elections against a Conservative Party bigwig in a region long loyal to the Tories. But for a young, enthusiastic, former politics student it still seemed worth a shot.“I was like, ‘Well, what’s stopping me’? It’s not something you get to do every day, is it?” recalled Mr. Blundell, a member of the centrist Liberal Democrats, as he sipped a beer outside the village pub where he once washed dishes as a summer job.To his surprise, Mr. Blundell is now a councilor representing the area around Littlewick Green, having defeated the powerful incumbent in perhaps the biggest upset from local elections that have sent shock waves through Britain’s governing Conservative Party.Unhappy about Brexit and aghast at the economic chaos unleashed during Liz Truss’s brief leadership last year, traditional Conservative voters are deserting the party in key English heartlands, contributing to the loss of more than 1,000 municipality seats in voting this month.With a general election expected next year, that is alarming for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has earned solid marks as a problem solver and seems to have stanched the party’s bleeding from the Ms. Truss fiasco, but whose party nevertheless lags far behind the opposition Labour Party in opinion polls.In these affluent areas within reach of London — called the “blue wall” after the campaign color of the Conservatives — the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, rather than Labour, made big gains in this month’s local elections. But when the next general election comes, the defection of voters from the Conservative Party could deprive Mr. Sunak of a parliamentary majority and propel Labour’s leader, Keir Starmer, into Downing Street.The village pub at Littlewick Green, near Maidenhead.Olivia Harris for The New York TimesIt could also sweep from Parliament prominent Conservatives — like the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, and the senior cabinet minister, Michael Gove — who hold seats in Conservative southern heartlands, as does the former prime minister, Theresa May, the member of Parliament for Maidenhead.According to Robert Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, they have only themselves to blame because many moderate Conservatives feel their party has abandoned them, rather than the other way around.“Their Conservative Party was about stable government and low taxes, and looking after the City of London,” he said, referring to the financial district to which many voters here commute. “This Conservative government has delivered none of that.”“Rishi Sunak turning up and saying ‘Don’t worry, I know we spent five years burning down the house, but someone who is not an arsonist is in charge now,’” Professor Ford said. “Well, it’s not enough.”Certainly, it proved insufficient in Littlewick Green which, with its village pub, cricket field and pavilion flying British flags, is an unlikely spot for a political insurrection.Yet, so successful was Mr. Blundell that, when he joined a crowd of around 200 people celebrating the coronation of King Charles III, they greeted their newly-elected representative with spontaneous applause.Mr. Blundell, who works as a training adviser for an education firm, said he blushed so hard that “I basically turned into a human tomato.” He added: “I’ve known them all for a long time, and I want to do well by them and help them out — even if it’s the smallest things.”Mr. Blundell prevailed in Littlewick Green, despite its tony image as a place having a cricket field, a village pub, and a pavilion flying British flags.Olivia Harris for The New York TimesIn this quintessential corner of “blue wall” Britain, Mr. Blundell lives with his siblings (he is a triplet) and mother, a vicar, in a house that was once used as a set by the makers of “Midsomer Murders,” a TV detective show featuring gory crimes in scenic English villages.Mr. Blundell attributes his victory to a combination of national politics, local factors and the complacency of local Conservatives. The night of the count was “spectacular,” he added.Simon Werner, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Windsor and Maidenhead, thinks the success can be repeated in a general election. “The ‘blue wall’ is crumbling,” he said. “We’ve proved we can do it on a local basis and now we have to step up and do it at the general election next year.”In part, the events here represent the aftershocks of the polarizing leadership of Boris Johnson, who won a landslide general election victory in 2019 with the support of voters in deindustrialized areas in the north and middle of England. But Mr. Johnson’s bombastic, pro-Brexit rhetoric, disdain for the business sector and focus on regenerating the north of England never endeared him to moderate Conservatives in the south.Most stuck with the Tories in 2019 because Labour was then led by the left-winger, Jeremy Corbyn. But with the more centrist Mr. Starmer now firmly in charge, the prospect of a Labour government is no longer so scary for many traditional Tories, liberating them to abandon the Conservatives.Professor Ford added, the Tories had caricatured and pilloried their own supporters for years, with some Conservative politicians characterizing such voters as a privileged elite.“If you tell people often enough that they are not welcome, eventually they will get the message,” said Professor Ford.Even some Conservative lawmakers admit they are worried by the appeal of the Liberal Democrats to these voters.“Those traditional moderate Conservatives for whom the world works very well — who were happy to be in the European Union because it worked for them — yes, I am concerned to attract them back from the Liberal Democrats,” said Steve Baker, a government minister and lawmaker who represents Wycombe, close to Windsor and Maidenhead.Mr. Blundell chats with his mother in Littlewick Green.Olivia Harris for The New York TimesThere are demographic factors at play as well, as younger voters relocate from London, a Labour stronghold, forced out by high property prices.But local issues are important, too. At Maidenhead Golf Club, which was established in 1896, there is anger that the Conservative-controlled municipality facilitated plans to construct around 1,800 houses on the 132 acres of land the club rents — threatening to make the club homeless.Merv Foulds, a former club treasurer and lifelong Conservative voter, said that on election day he decided not to join his wife at their polling station, adding: “If I had I would not have voted Tory.”Both locally and nationally the Conservatives are seen as untrustworthy, he said, while Mr. Sunak has yet to prove persuasive.“Sometimes, when he speaks, you just get the feeling he is speaking down to you,” said Mr. Foulds, an accountant. “At least with Boris you felt that he was talking to you — even though he might have been talking drivel, and maybe lying through his back teeth as well.”In Woodlands Park, a less affluent district of Windsor and Maidenhead, Barbara Hatfield a cleaner, said she had voted for several parties in recent elections but was worried about hikes in food prices and angry about development in the town center.A house decorated with a Union Jack in Littlewick Green.Olivia Harris for The New York Times“Maidenhead is terrible, it looks like Beirut,” she said of the town, where there has been construction work, adding that she was unsure how she would vote in a general election.Another uncommitted voter is Mr. Blundell’s mother, Tina Molyneux, who ministers at local churches as well as being head of discipleship and social justice in the diocese of Oxford. She has her own theory of why her son was victorious.“Everybody was saying ‘There’s got to be a change,’” she said. “There was something to do with youth and a fresh approach.”Rev. Molyneux said she had previously voted for Mrs. May, whom she still respects, but will not support her at the general election because the Conservatives have “gone to the right.” More