


Understanding the Republican Party’s rightward march
Remember the two R’s of Republican history: Rockefeller and Reagan
WHEN Gerald Ford accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president at the 1976 convention, he stood, literally, between the party’s past and future. He shook hands with the future, standing on his right: Ronald Reagan, the challenger he narrowly defeated. To his left, the past—Nelson Rockefeller, the vice-president whom Ford dropped from the ticket—dutifully cheered. Ford would go on to lose to Jimmy Carter that autumn; four years later, Reagan would win the nomination and the first of his two landslide general-election victories. Rockefeller, meanwhile, would leave public life and die at his desk in 1979.
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Mark Robinson has hijacked his own campaign in North Carolina
Who will go down with the would-be Republican governor?

What is the effect of the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ban?
Making sense of the drip-drip of admissions data from American universities

How the right is taking culture war to culture itself
A new “mockumentary” satirises anti-racist activism
Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in America’s election
Buckets of money, vicious advertising and consultants galore have left the race for the state a virtual tie
Eric Adams’s friends keep having their phones taken away
It can be hard to keep track of all the people around New York’s mayor who are under investigation
Kamala Harris’s post-debate bounce is now visible in the polls
But it comes with two big caveats