Solar tech’s near future

Solar on water, robots, and 2-sided panels, oh my: solar tech’s near future

Today’s hottest solar tech is all about supporting old-fashioned silicon panels.

By David Roberts

Back in 2008, when the US was deploying less than 300 megawatts a year of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, and the boom in solar was but a gleam in President Barack Obama’s eye, it was very much an open question which solar technology might triumph in the end, or if any of them would triumph at all.

Most solar at the time used old-fashioned crystalline silicon panels, which have been around since the 1950s. But there were hopes for (and some extremely large investments in) multi-junction solar cells, thin-film solar panels, organic and carbon nanotube cells, concentrated solar plants, and a variety of other solar power-generation technologies.

Today, after a dizzying decade of solar growth — the US installed more than 10 gigawatts of PV in 2017, and five US states now generate 10 percent or more of their electricity from solar — most solar uses ... old-fashioned crystalline silicon panels.

They’ve gotten better, of course, but more importantly, they have gotten cheap — more than 80 percent cheaper since 2009.

Silicon PV dominates the market more than ever.

The point was driven home to me recently when GTM Research (which is in the process of becoming Wood McKenzie) contacted me about a series of short reports on nascent solar technologies just breaking into markets.

I expected to hear about fancy new solar cells — nano-this, quantum-that. But that’s not what the solar market it is right now.

Rather than silicon alternatives, the new technologies nudging their way into commercialization complement silicon PV, enabling panels to deploy in new places (on lakes and reservoirs!) or reducing the cost of maintenance (panel-cleaning robots!).

At least for now, silicon PV has won the market race. The promising solar markets are for technologies that help it go farther.

There is some controversy over whether silicon PV can ever go far enough — whether it will be sufficient for the ambitious long-term decarbonization goals the US has set for itself. Some researchers worry it could plateau early and fall short.

But first, let’s take a look at a few of these PV-supporting technologies. There will be robots.

Solar on the water (fire in the sky)

In some growing solar markets, especially in East Asia, land is becoming a constraint. Much of the flat land is taken for agriculture. The land in and around cities is densely populated. Finding room for solar will only get more difficult.

One solution: Put it on the water! PV panels can be mounted on pontoons that float on freshwater lakes and reservoirs.

Floating PV has a few advantages: it can be built without traditional site preparation, pile driving, or fence and road construction; there’s less competition for the “land”; the panels stay cooler, which boosts efficiency; and floating systems can often be built closer to loads.

Floating PV has been around since 2007, but falling costs mean it’s just now beginning to take off in high-population-density, land-constrained markets like Japan, China, and South Korea. A total of 100 MW of floating PV was installed in 2017, with a 40 MW project completed in China and a 200 MW project announced for 2019 construction in Indonesia.

Just based on what’s currently in the pipeline, GTM expects floating PV to top 1.5 GW next year.

And as PV grows, more markets will begin to find land constrained, leading to more opportunities for floating PV.

What would really crack open the floating PV market would be saltwater PV, i.e., “offshore solar” that could sit in bays or harbors, or offshore, adjacent to wind or oil platforms. For now, there are just a few startups and pilot projects in saltwater PV, but the potential might be big enough to attract investment in coming years.

Imagine, for instance, the potential of a floating PV system in New York Harbor: almost unconstrained in size, competing with nothing but shipping, and sitting right next to an enormous load. Juicy!

Autonomous robots that clean solar panels, because of course

For the operators of solar PV power plants, “soiling” — wind blowing dirt or sand up onto panels — can be a serious problem, leading to as much as $0.3/kWh of energy loss.

But getting them cleaned isn’t cheap either. “Most third-party module-washing companies charge around $0.25 per panel,” according to GTM’s report, which can add up to thousands of dollars per site visit. The efficiency loss of soiling versus the cost of cleaning is a delicate (and extremely site-specific) balance.

Current washing options are manual (hoses, squeegees), semi-autonomous (a robot is placed on the end of each row in succession), or fully autonomous (there’s a cleaning robot on each row and it runs itself). Some autonomous solutions are waterless.

The fully autonomous market is still pretty tiny — it covers around 0.13 percent of the global solar market. One big problem: rain. Cleaning is only really a problem in areas with low rainfall and high soiling.

Nonetheless, GTM thinks that if robot vendors work more cooperatively with module vendors, costs come down a bit more, and some big incumbents get in the game, the market has a lot of headroom. It expects the total amount of robot-washed PV to grow from 1,905 MW today to 6,103 MW in 2022.

Solar all up in your buildings

“Building-integrated PV” (BIPV) is designed into materials so that it is part of initial building construction (or big retrofits). Theoretically, that covers all kinds of materials that people are trying to put PV into, from windows to awnings to concrete itself, some of which have small markets going. But GTM mainly focuses on solar roofing.

Solar roofing uses solar panels as shingles, replacing (rather than sitting on top of) a traditional roof. You may recall that Elon Musk made a big splash back in 2016 when he announced that Tesla would be getting into solar roofing. (Like many things in Musk’s life, that is not going very well.)

The GTM report (not yet published online) is skeptical about the solar roofing market.

It acknowledges that the advantages are substantial. “It is a pretty serious problem that many potential customers of residential PV don’t like how it looks,” Ben Gallagher, senior GTM analyst and lead author on the reports, told me. Solar tiles improve aesthetics.

And there are advantages to reducing the upfront “soft costs” of solar — customer acquisition, siting, engineering, permitting, etc. Theoretically, solar roofing avoids much of that by slipstreaming into the established construction process. It requires less specialized labor and fewer man-hours to install.

The “total addressable market,” GTM calculates, “encompasses 14 states totaling 15.49 GWs.” In almost all of those states, the demand just for re-roofing (or just for new roofing) exceeds current PV demand.

But it has never taken off. “From 2010 to 2017,” GTM reports, “BIPV has never accounted for more than 1% of annual residential rooftop installations.”

What’s the problem? To return to a theme: The price of “standard” rooftop solar has gotten so damn cheap that BIPV is having trouble getting a foothold. Some 13 companies that tried have either gotten out of the market or gone under.

And, though it acknowledges enormous uncertainty around the solar roofing market, GTM doesn’t expect any huge leap any time soon. Two things will spur the market a bit: Tesla reliably producing solar roofs and California’s new mandate that all new homes install solar. But even with those boosts, BIPV will be less than 1 percent of the residential rooftop market. (GTM also runs a high-end case, where the market catches on and big vendors get in, where BIPV reaches 5 percent.)

A few other PV-supporting technologies to watch (more robots!)

In addition to those above, here are a few more nascent markets growing in the silicon-PV ecosystem:

• Drones: GTM has a report coming soon on unmanned aerial drones (ahem, flying robots) that can monitor PV farms, identifying nascent problems and helping with preventative maintenance.
• Smart inverters: Another upcoming report looks at recent advances in inverters, the widgets that control PV at the module and string (i.e., string of panels) level. They’ve been getting smarter, with “more and more granular data from the string level,” Gallagher told me. That will continue improving the performance (and lowering the price) of PV plants.
• Bifacial panels: Gallagher told me to keep an eye on panels with PV on both sides, which can capture the sunlight that reflects off the ground, boosting overall efficiency, according to manufacturers, up to 30 percent.

You will note that, with the possible exception of BIPV (some solar roofing panels use thin-film PV), all the technologies described above are devoted to lowering the costs or boosting the deployment of silicon PV.

Is that all we can expect from now on? Is the cell-level solar race over?

The future of solar module technology is ... cloudy

“At least in the near term,” Gallagher said, “the market for alternatives to silicon-based PV is not really there. But looking farther down the road, it’s hard to say.”

Right now, US consumers are paying almost twice as much as their international counterparts for residential solar PV, mainly because of soft costs. In coming years, Gallagher says, solar panels and inverters are going to get so cheap that the vast majority of solar costs are going to be soft costs. “The global spot price for a standard PV module right now is around $0.32 per watt,” Gallagher says, “in the next five years, we forecast it’s going to be closer to $0.18 to $0.19 per watt.”

That means, in the near-term, the most robust markets for new solar products are going to be for techniques and technologies that reduce the soft costs for silicon PV.

“I don’t know if we necessarily need perovskites or quantum dots or ‘disruptive technologies’ now,” Gallagher says. “We need to focus on deployment: making deployment easier, lowering lifetime costs, reducing the cost of capital. Those are the most important things for the PV industry.”

Investments in alternatives to silicon PV are, at least in the next five to 10 years, going to have a rough time getting anywhere.

But that’s the market perspective. There’s also the broader public-policy perspective.

Though the issue remains controversial, many researchers warn that PV could be headed for a plateau — the top of the “S-curve” of development — well before it reaches the penetrations envisioned in deep-decarbonization scenarios.

The worry focuses on solar “value deflation.” Every new increment of solar makes all the other increments of solar worth a little less, because all solar produces energy at the same time, when the sun is out, so all solar competes with all other solar. To remain competitive, falling solar costs must chase a receding target. Solar must get cheaper faster than it loses value.

Energy storage can somewhat offset this problem, but no storage tech on the horizon can do nearly enough. The only way to do keep solar competitive in the long-term, they warn, is through new business models and intensive innovation, including in the chemistries and cells at the core of solar. (This argument is best summarized by energy researcher Varun Sivaram in his recent book Taming the Sun.)

Not everyone buys that broader argument, but whether you buy it or not, it seems obviously worthwhile to a) reform markets so they better reflect the time- and location-dependent value of solar, providing the necessary incentives to fight value deflation; and b) vastly increase the level of federal spending on energy research and innovation.

(People have been arguing for more federal energy research money and better research policy for decades. Despite all the good arguments, funding remains abysmally low and the Trump administration is working to slash it further. They remain good arguments, though. Research is good!)

It would not be wise to sit back and think that solar is done, that silicon is it and it’s all over but the soft costs. If only because decarbonization is such an important undertaking, it’s worth having a diverse set of tools to guard against contingencies.

“There will be some sort of room” for other solar module technologies, Gallagher says, “I just can’t say when or what that will look like.” That’s more or less the state of expert knowledge.

So we should hedge our bets and keep developing alternative solar technologies, if only because we have no idea what’s going to happen or what we might end up needing.

But still. It’s worth pausing for a moment to appreciate how rapid and total silicon PV’s rise to dominance has been over the past 10 years. It bestrides solar markets, a hegemon, creating ancillary markets in its wake. And it’s just getting cheaper and cheaper.

Ten years ago, no one expected this. I wonder what we’ll fail to anticipate in the next 10 years.

Texas police officer found guilty of murder

Former Texas police officer found guilty of murder in 2017 shooting of Jordan Edwards

Convictions in police shooting cases are still very rare.

By P.R. Lockhart and German Lopez

A former Texas police officer has been found guilty of murder in the 2017 shooting of Jordan Edwards, a black teenager trying to leave a house party with friends.

On Tuesday, Roy Oliver was found guilty in Edwards’s death, which occurred after Oliver fired into a car of teenagers. Edwards, a 15 year-old high school freshman, was sitting in the passenger’s seat when the shooting occurred. Edwards’s brother was also in the car at the time of the shooting.

Oliver, who was fired from his position with the Balch Springs Police Department for violating department policy, was also found not guilty on two charges of aggravated assault.

The verdict came on the second day of jury deliberations. As the murder trial continued last week, Oliver testified that he had no choice but to open fire, saying that the teens’ car was moving toward his partner. But his former partner, Tyler Gross, testified that he did not believe he was in any danger at the time. According to the Associated Press, a prosecutor also referred to Oliver as “trigger-happy” during the trial, with one prosecutor noting that only nine seconds passed between Oliver drawing his weapon and opening fire.

The shooting drew national attention, with Edwards’s death at the hands of police becoming another high-profile example of the racial disparities in police use of force that have fueled a national conversation about race and policing after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

Edwards’s death drew national attention

Police in Balch Springs, Texas, a majority-minority Dallas suburb, originally claimed there was an altercation with the vehicle. Edwards, who was unarmed, was sitting in the front passenger’s seat of the car, which held four other unarmed teens, including Edwards’s brother, according to family attorney Lee Merritt.

Oliver shot at the car with a rifle. A bullet broke through the front passenger’s window and hit Edwards. Shortly after, Edwards was rushed to a hospital, where he died from gunshot injuries. No officers were injured in the incident.

Balch Springs Police Chief Jonathan Haber at first said the car backed up toward responding officers “in an aggressive manner.”

After his original statement, however, Haber said he “misspoke.” He clarified that the car was in fact driving away from officers, not toward them. He added, “After reviewing video, I don’t believe that it [the shooting] met our core values.”

Neighbors told local reporter Gabriel Roxas that the party Edwards left was crowded, with unsupervised, drunk teens fighting before gunshots were fired. According to the family attorney, Edwards “was leaving a house party because he thought it was getting dangerous.”

Mesquite Independent School District, where Edwards was a freshman in high school, said in a statement that he was “a good student who was very well liked by his teachers, coaches, and his fellow students.” Edwards played football at the school, and one of his teammates called him “the best running back I ever played with.”

“It’s not a fairy tale. He really was that great,” prosecutor Mike Snipes said during the trial. “He really did have a 3.5 GPA, he really did want to go to Alabama to play football for them, he really did work out every day, he really did have a million friends, he really did have a nickname ‘Smiley.’ He was the real deal.”

It’s rare for a police officer to be convicted of a shooting

What stands out about the verdict in the Edwards case is that police are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.

“There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility,” David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, previously told Amanda Taub for Vox. “And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction.”

If police are charged, they’re very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

The statistics suggest it would be a truly rare situation for Oliver to be charged and convicted of a crime in the wake of Edwards’s death. But in this case, that’s exactly what happened.

“I’m happy, very happy,” Odell Edwards, Jordan’s father, told NBC News when speaking of the verdict. “It’s been a long time, a hard year.”

Roaring back

5 reasons why 3 STDs are roaring back in America

The CDC found spikes in cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia — again.

By Julia Belluz

We don’t talk much about chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis, in part because it can seem like they’re not big health issues anymore. But it turns out more and more Americans may be quietly suffering from these once nearly eliminated STDs.

According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were nearly 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis reported in the United States in 2017 — the highest cumulative number ever recorded, and one that surpassed a 2016 record high.

The leaps in cases over the last few years are truly eye-popping. Between 2013 and 2017, the rate of:

• Gonorrhea increased by 67 percent to 555,608 cases
• Syphilis increased by 76 percent to 30,644 cases
• Chlamydia increased by 22 percent to 1.7 million cases

To appreciate just how astonishing the trends are, consider that as recently as a decade ago, these STDs were at historic lows or near elimination, with more and better screening and diagnostics to help identify cases and get people into treatment.

Syphilis can show up on the body in sores and rashes. Gonorrhea and chlamydia can lurk with no symptoms. They’re all generally easy to cure with a timely antibiotics prescription, but when left untreated, they can lead to infertility or life-threatening health complications. That’s what makes screening and access to health care so important.

The increase in cases between across all three diseases was significant, and represents changing disease dynamics.“We are sliding backward,” said Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, in a statement. “It is evident the systems that identify, treat, and ultimately prevent STDs are strained to near-breaking point.”

African Americans and men who have sex with men have traditionally been the populations most plagued by gonorrhea and syphilis (and they’re still disproportionately affected). But other groups are now catching up too, especially women and babies in contracting syphilis.

So what’s behind the spread of these diseases here? There’s no single explanation. Like most health trends, it’s complicated. But here are a few ideas, according to experts:

1) There’s been a rise in condomless sex among men who have sex with men: Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men are generally more at risk for STDs than women and men who have sex with women only. (The majority of new syphilis and gonorrhea cases occurred among men, and in particular, men who have sex with men.) And there’s been some concern about a shift toward riskier sexual behaviors in this group — like not wearing condoms — that may be contributing to the rise in STDs.

The reason for this shift has been explained by everything from the success in treating HIV (and therefore making sex less scary) to the advent of PrEP (pills that can prevent HIV). A systematic review published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that some PrEP users are having more risky sex — and are being diagnosed with more sexually transmitted infections.

HIV and syphilis are also interlinked: Some half of men diagnosed with a new syphilis infection also have HIV. And as these diseases spread in particular populations, like men who have sex with men, there’s a greater risk of them moving even further.

“The fear, which I share, is that we won’t contain syphilis among men who have sex with men,” Matthew Golden, director of the Public Health for the Seattle and King County HIV/STD control program, told Vox in 2017. “And if the epidemic in men who have sex with men gets big enough, which is what is happening, there are enough people who have sex with both men and women that it won’t be possible to contain it.”

2) STDs are spreading more broadly and into populations that weren’t traditionally affected — like babies: A 2017 CDC report on STDs in America showed that more women are getting syphilis these days, and they’re passing it to their babies. When an expectant mother is infected with the disease, and goes undiagnosed and untreated, the bacteria can get into her bloodstream and move through her placenta to her baby. Congenital syphilis is associated with serious health consequences, like stillbirths and neonatal deaths.

In 2016, there were 628 cases of congenital syphilis, an increase of 27.6 percent from 2015 — and that number includes 41 related deaths. According to the CDC, much of the rise was driven by increases in cases in the Western US. Between 2012 and 2016, Western states saw an astounding 366 percent rise in congenital syphilis.

The large increase has to do, in part, with the fact that many Western states have recently had few syphilis cases in women. “We were starting from almost nothing [in Washington],” said Golden. But that’s changing, and with more women getting the disease, their babies are at risk too.

3) With the rise of dating apps, sex is more readily available and more anonymous — and that makes it harder for health investigators to track outbreaks: Health experts increasingly view apps and sites such as Tinder, Grindr, and OkCupid as enablers of high-risk sex, helping people meet and hook up more efficiently than ever before. The impact of these sites is so profound they are also transforming the way health officials track and prevent outbreaks.

“We used to think about what we can do with bathhouses and sex clubs to make sure people’s risk was reduced,” said Dan Wohlfeiler, director of Building Healthy Online Communities, a public health group that works with apps to support STI prevention, told Vox in 2017. These places, after all, had become important meeting points for men who have sex with men — the group most affected by the HIV epidemic.

Today, the public health focus has shifted to “digital bathhouses.” Wohlfeiler said, “Now that dating sites and apps have become so common, we know we need to work with them.”

But many of the major dating networks don’t want to be involved in STD prevention, nor have they acknowledged the impact they’re having on public health, health experts told Vox.

4) The numbers may be higher because we may be better at detecting cases in some groups: The rise in chlamydia — which overwhelmingly causes no symptoms but can lead to infertility in women — may be an artifact of better detection and screening. The CDC keeps finding that rates of chlamydia are highest among young women, the group that’s been targeted for routine chlamydia screening. So an increase could just mean more testing.

5) Cuts to public health funding mean fewer STD clinics: Public health in the US — which includes operating STD clinics where people can get tested and into treatment — is historically underfunded. (As of 2012, only 3 percent of the health budget went to public health measures; the rest went mostly to personal health care.) And since the global financial crisis, public health funding has really taken a battering. There are 50,000 fewer public health jobs since 2008, and many STD clinics have had to reduce their hours or shut down.

STD clinics were a traditional safety net for people with these diseases. If those clinics continue to be harder to reach or vanish, finding and treating STDs will become even more difficult — and the diseases will continue to spread.

So in some ways, the STD increases across the country may have less to do with a changing sexual landscape, and more to do with more limited access to sexual health care. With Trump’s proposed public health budget cuts, the problem may be poised to get worse.

“It’s not a coincidence STDs are skyrocketing — state and local STD programs are working with effectively half the budget they had in the early 2000s,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, in a statement today. “If our representatives are serious about protecting American lives, they will provide adequate funding to address this crisis. Right now, our STD prevention engine is running on fumes.”

Prep for Violence???

Trump Urges Evangelicals to Prep for Violence After They Lose Election

KEVIN DRUM

Donald Trump lied to a bunch of evangelical leaders last night, but that’s no big deal. “Thou shalt not lie” isn’t actually one of the Ten Commandments, which is a good thing or else Trump would have self-immolated decades ago. However, he did make some progress in converting evangelicals into his very own private army of brownshirts:

At stake in the November midterms, Trump told the audience, are all the gains he has made for conservative Christians.

“The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable,” he said. “Part of it is because of some of the things I’ve done for you and for me and for my family, but I’ve done them. … This Nov. 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.”

If the GOP loses, he said, “they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people.”

First things first: telling his audience that the election is a referendum on “your religion” is refreshingly honest, since everyone knows that Trump himself has no particular religious beliefs other than “an eye for an eye—and then some.”

But the rest of it is—well, what is it? It’s not clear exactly what Democrats will overturn if they take power, but there are certainly a few things here and there they’d take a crack at. So that’s fair enough. But violently? If Republicans lose, Democrats are going to overturn free speech and the First Amendment and they’re going to do it “quickly and violently”? The only reason to say something like that is to prep your supporters to become violent themselves. Be ready to take to the streets if Democrats win! I guess that’s what Trump is girding his loins for.

All Its Electricity Emissions-Free

California Lawmakers Just Voted to Make All Its Electricity Emissions-Free by 2045

“This is a pivotal moment for California, for the country, and the world.”

JACKIE FLYNN MOGENSEN

On Tuesday afternoon, California state lawmakers passed a landmark bill, SB100, which would put the state’s electricity supply on track to be totally emissions-free by 2045. It passed 43-32.

The bill would amend California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, which currently requires half of all the state’s electricity to come from clean, renewable sources of energy by 2030. Regulators have already predicted the state will meet that goal 10 years early, by 2020.

Although Hawaii was the first state to commit to a 100-percent renewable portfolio last year, California’s decision to go green would likely have much bigger implications. The most populous state in the country and with the world’s fifth largest economy, the Golden State could provide a model for others to follow. And, as MIT Technology Review reports, with the move, “California is effectively acting as a testbed for what’s technically achievable, providing a massive market for the rollout of clean-energy technologies and building a body of knowledge that other states and nations can leverage, says Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley.”

Environmental groups lobbied hard for the bill, which passed the state Senate 25-13 last year, while the Assembly held the bill, effectively killing it for a time.

“This is a pivotal moment for California, for the country, and the world,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune in a statement Tuesday. “While Donald Trump abandons reality by ignoring the climate crisis and the incredible growth of clean energy, California is stepping up to lead the transition to a 100 percent clean energy economy.”

California has been a leader in its commitment to renewable energy, boasting more than 500,000 jobs in the clean energy sector, according to the Department of Energy—more than any other state in the union.

“This is a massive victory for Californians who’ve been demanding a swift transition to clean energy in the state,” executive director of 350.org May Boeve said in a statement. “With wildfires intensifying and temperatures skyrocketing, the impacts of climate change across the Golden State are impossible to ignore.”

The state Senate will reconcile the changes made to the Assembly’s version of the bill before it heads to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. Brown has not made his position on the bill public.

Nearby Cepheid Variable RS Pup

In the center is one of the most important stars on the sky. This is partly because, by coincidence, it is surrounded by a dazzling reflection nebula. Pulsating RS Puppis, the brightest star in the image center, is some ten times more massive than our Sun and on average 15,000 times more luminous. In fact, RS Pup is a Cepheid type variable star, a class of stars whose brightness is used to estimate distances to nearby galaxies as one of the first steps in establishing the cosmic distance scale. As RS Pup pulsates over a period of about 40 days, its regular changes in brightness are also seen along the nebula delayed in time, effectively a light echo. Using measurements of the time delay and angular size of the nebula, the known speed of light allows astronomers to geometrically determine the distance to RS Pup to be 6,500 light-years, with a remarkably small error of plus or minus 90 light-years. An impressive achievement for stellar astronomy, the echo-measured distance also more accurately establishes the true brightness of RS Pup, and by extension other Cepheid stars, improving the knowledge of distances to galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The featured image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

New Horizons Makes First Detection

Ultima in View: NASA’s New Horizons Makes First Detection of Kuiper Belt Flyby Target

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than four months ahead of its New Year's 2019 close encounter. 

At right is a magnified view of the region in the yellow box, after
subtraction of a background star field "template" taken by LORRI in
September 2017 before it could detect the object itself. Ultima is clearly
detected in this star-subtracted image and is very close to where scientists
 predicted, indicating to the team that New Horizons is
being targeted in the right direction. 

Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons’ telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and transmitted home through NASA’s Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team’s first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft's own cameras.

"The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist and LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “It really is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that’s roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter – and easier to see – as the spacecraft gets closer.”

This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft's course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima’s orbit.

The Ultima flyby will be the first-ever close-up exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object and the farthest exploration of any planetary body in history, shattering the record New Horizons itself set at Pluto in July 2015 by about 1 billion miles.  These images are also the most distant from the Sun ever taken, breaking the record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth taken in 1990. (New Horizons set the record for the most distant image from Earth in December 2017.) 

“Our team worked hard to determine if Ultima was detected by LORRI at such a great distance, and the result is a clear yes,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “We now have Ultima in our sights from much farther out than once thought possible. We are on Ultima’s doorstep, and an amazing exploration awaits!"

Race has tightened...

‘The race has tightened’: Cruz allies sound alarm about Texas Senate race

By ALEX ISENSTADT

Republicans are sounding the alarm about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s closer-than-expected reelection contest, with an influential conservative group racing to his aid.

The Club for Growth, a Washington-based anti-tax group, is drawing up plans for a major TV ad campaign boosting Cruz — the first such intervention by a Republican outside group in this race. The move comes as Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, an online fundraising behemoth who has attracted national support, continues to narrow the gap in polling.

David McIntosh, the Club for Growth’s president, said on Tuesday the organization is planning a seven-figure-plus offensive targeting O’Rourke. McIntosh was speaking from Texas, where he is meeting with pro-Cruz donors who could help fund the effort.

“In the last five weeks, it’s become clear that the race has tightened,” said McIntosh.

Republican officials once saw Cruz, a failed 2016 presidential candidate, as safe given Texas’ conservative tilt, and in public, they have largely derided O’Rourke’s candidacy and public polls showing a close race. But, privately, they have grown increasingly concerned. An NBC News/Marist poll conducted earlier this month showed Cruz leading O’Rourke by a narrow 49 percent to 45 percent margin.

O’Rourke has emerged as a national liberal cause célébre. An online video of O’Rourke defending the right of NFL players to kneel during the national anthem has gone viral in recent days, and it was announced on Tuesday that O’Rourke would appear on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in September.

The extent of the rescue effort remains an open question. While a pro-Cruz super PAC, Texans Are, has been established, other conservative outside groups have remained focused on other Senate contests. But with the Club’s foray into the Texas race, more national Republican groups may assess whether to assist Cruz.

The White House, meanwhile, has been monitoring the contest. Two senior Republicans said they expected President Donald Trump, who fought bitterly with Cruz during in the 2016 presidential race, to hit the trail for the Texas Republican ahead of the November election.

McIntosh said it had not been determined when the Club’s campaign would begin. But he said it would focus heavily on casting O’Rourke as an establishment figure who, contrary to the nonpolitical and outsider persona he has cultivated, is eager to climb the ranks of political power.

The Club for Growth has long been supportive of Cruz. During his first Senate bid in 2012, the organization spent over $5.5 million in support of his candidacy and bundled an additional $922,000 for him. But the Club for Growth did not mount any major advertising campaigns during the general election, when Cruz easily defeated Democrat Paul Sadler by 16 percentage points.

To some Cruz backers, the help cannot come soon enough, and many of them are eager to see Cruz’s donor network, which he forged during his 2016 presidential bid, activated for his reelection.

“I don’t think you can count anybody out at any point. This world is changing so rapidly. It’s pretty unbelievable,” said Lee Roy Mitchell, a Dallas-based Cruz donor and founder of the Cinemark movie theater chain.

“We’re solidly behind the senator, and I would like to think most Texans are. I believe they are,” said Mitchell, who with his wife Tandy has donated a combined $1 million to the pro-Cruz super PAC. “But there’s a tremendous amount of money being poured in here to change people’s opinions.”

Proves that GOP are in pocket of Fux...

How Ron DeSantis won the Fox News primary

In his primary campaign for Florida governor, the cable network made all the difference.

By MARC CAPUTO

One of the key ingredients in Ron DeSantis’ victory in the Florida GOP governor’s race turned out to be makeup.

The once little-known congressman spent so much time broadcasting Fox News TV hits from Washington this year that he learned to apply his own powder so he could look as polished as he sounded.

In his primary election campaign against Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, DeSantis’ cultivation of his Fox relationship made all the difference. It powered him to a double-digit win over a once better-known and better-funded candidate whose nomination appeared inevitable months ago. Just as important, the cable network introduced the Harvard-educated lawyer to his most useful patron — President Donald Trump, who endorsed him on Dec. 22.

Since then, DeSantis made 121 appearances on Fox and Fox Business — his campaign estimates it would have cost his campaign $9.3 million to purchase all that air time.

It’s impossible to overstate the value of a steady stream of Fox appearances among Florida Republicans: 70 percent of likely Florida GOP voters regularly watch Fox News and Fox Business channels, according to the DeSantis campaign’s polling.

Putnam sought to counter the Fox effect by repeatedly emphasizing his Florida roots — he even went so far as to underwrite a DeSantis-bashing website with the address “emptystudioron.com.”

But DeSantis’ campaign research made one thing clear: a Fox first campaign was superior to a Florida first effort. For Republicans, all politics isn’t local — it’s on Fox News.

“We are in a political environment where far more attention is being paid to what is happening in Washington than what is happening in Tallahassee. Putnam’s Florida strategy effectively took himself out of the conversation,” said Todd Harris, a lead consultant for DeSantis.

Harris said that while it’s not a mystery that Republicans watch Fox, the campaign’s polling and research provided it with a solid idea about how the primary electorate got its information and how it sees itself. One revelation from the data: 52 percent of GOP primary voters saw themselves as supporters of the president first while only 37 percent saw themselves as Republicans first.

DeSantis’ combination of Fox appearances and Trump boosterism was perfect for both Fox’s general Republican audience and its audience of one: Trump.

“Trump is going all out for DeSantis because he gets 100 percent of his news from Fox and he knows DeSantis has gone to bat for him and he knows Florida is important,” said Roger Stone, a longtime on-again and off-again Trump adviser from Florida who had supported Putnam.

Trump’s endorsement proved priceless. His approval rating among Republican primary voters is in the low 90s, according to public and private Democratic and Republican polls. In 2016, he won the state so handily in the presidential primary that his main opponent, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, carried only one county — Miami-Dade, his home base.

This year, the DeSantis campaign’s polling showed that more than half of the primary voters in the governor’s race identified themselves as Trump supporters, and slightly more than a third identified themselves as Republicans primarily. The campaign’s polling showed that 37 percent of the party’s voters watched Fox daily and of those who called themselves Trump Republicans, the daily viewership was higher still: 47 percent.

“It’s fishing where the fish are,” Harris said.

An Iraq War vet and former military prosecutor, DeSantis had already parlayed his membership on the House’s Judiciary, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees into regular appearances on Fox prior to the 2016 election. But after Trump was elected and faced multiple investigations, DeSantis became an early supporter of the president on everything from moving the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem to questioning the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

“DeSantis was already a figure on Fox and the timing of everything just worked out perfectly for him,” said fellow Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who has followed in DeSantis’ footsteps in frequently appearing on the network.

“I used to make fun of Ron for putting on makeup. And now I had to go to him for tips to put it on and hide the circles under my eyes,” Gaetz joked.

On Dec. 8, DeSantis and Gaetz flew to a Pensacola rally with Trump on Air Force One, where Putnam allies with close ties to Trump — including Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Trump lobbyist Brian Ballard — tried to keep the congressional duo away from the president in the hopes of forestalling that endorsement.

But it was too late. Trump committed anyway, swayed both by DeSantis’ unwavering loyalty on Fox and the president’s recall of comments from Putnam during the GOP convention in 2016 when Putnam unfavorably compared the president to his running mate, Mike Pence.

“If there’s one way to get under Trump’s skin, it’s to compare him to Pence like that,” said one Republican who lobbied the president unsuccessfully for Putnam.

For a time after the Air Force One trip to Pensacola, the effort to keep Trump from endorsing worked. The White House denied the president had offered to back DeSantis on the flight. But in late December as Trump flew to Palm Beach International Airport for one of his winter stays at Mar-a-Lago, the president saw a clip of DeSantis on Fox and decided to endorse him via Twitter at 1:34 p.m. when the plane landed.

“Congressman Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida. He loves our Country and is a true FIGHTER!” Trump wrote.

Months later on Fox, Trump would refer to DeSantis, Gaetz and two other Republican House members, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan as “absolute warriors” — comments that echoed through the conservative media ecosystem.

On the strength of his free media campaign, DeSantis continued to rise in the polls through the winter and spring. Putnam, sitting on heaps of Tallahassee establishment money and big support from the sugar lobby, had to spent millions to stay ahead. DeSantis, however, kept moving upward without spending nearly as much, largely due to his frequent appearances on Fox.

Putnam’s campaign consistently complained to Fox for equal time, according to a top campaign ally and a DeSantis campaign liaison with the network. It relented once by giving Putnam — the Tallahassee establishment favorite, a 44-year-old who had held various elected offices without interruption for 22 years — an interview with host Shannon Bream, a Tallahassee native and daughter of a former Leon County commissioner.

Putnam didn’t play well on TV, at least in the eyes of President Trump, who told others that the red-haired Putnam either “looked like a shrimp” or “looked like shit,” according to those who recall the president sneering at Putnam.

The Fox airtime for DeSantis effectively wiped out the cash advantage held by Putnam, who had never lost an election until Tuesday.

Putnam had bragged for months about running a “Florida First” campaign. His campaign touted pastoral outdoor barbecue events. He attended the Wausau Possum Festival. At the first live debate between the at a June 28 Republican Party of Florida conference, Putnam started the evening by relishing the comparison of DeSantis’ broadcast-based strategy with countrified homespun meet-the-folks campaign.

“It’s completely different than a Washington D.C. studio. And I just want to say, ‘Welcome to Florida, congressman,’” Putnam said to applause.

The debate was broadcast on Fox. And though Putnam wanted to talk Florida-specific issues, the national broadcasting company made it more of a national debate that, in the estimation of DeSantis’ campaign, played to DeSantis’ strengths.

Five days before, President Trump re-endorsed DeSantis.

“Congressman Ron DeSantis, a top student at Yale and Harvard Law School, is running for Governor of the Great State of Florida. Ron is strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big on Cutting Taxes - Loves our Military & our Vets,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “He will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement!”

DeSantis made sure to name-drop Trump 21 times during the debate. Putnam mentioned the president five times.

The effect of the president’s endorsement and the Fox debate were devastating for Putnam.

“Before the June endorsement, we were up 9 in our internals. Afterward, we were down 14 points,” said a Putnam campaign hand who didn’t want to be identified. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Within two weeks of the debate, DeSantis was leading in public polls as well.

The DeSantis campaign then set about cutting a TV ad that would check all the boxes — appeal to Trump voters, get viral-like coverage on Fox (as well as other networks) and outrage Trump-hating liberals. In the ad, DeSantis’s wife — Jacksonville TV personality Casey DeSantis — poked fun at her husband’s Trump-based campaign.

“Everyone knows my husband Ron DeSantis is endorsed by President Trump. But he’s also an amazing dad,” she narrates direct to camera. “People say Ron's all Trump, but he is so much more.”

The ad then cuts to different scenes of him as he tells his little kids to “build the wall” with toy blocks, reads Trump’s “Art of the Deal” book and “Make America Great Again” slogan and uses the president’s trademarked “big league” phrase as his baby son lies in his crib.

The ad more than paid for itself in free media. The following day — July 31, roughly one month before the GOP primary — Trump headed to Tampa to rally for DeSantis. The next week, DeSantis and Putnam met up for their final debate.

By that point, Putnam was no longer making fun of DeSantis for being the candidate of Fox News. Putnam was complaining about it.

“It has felt a lot like I’m running against the Seinfeld candidate,” Putnam said. “The campaign’s being run out of studio. They have a smattering of celebrity guest appearances. And at the end of the day, it’s all about nothing. But unlike Seinfeld, it’s not funny.”

On Monday, Trump took twice to Twitter again to urge Republicans to vote for DeSantis — and the tweets were promptly picked up by Fox News. But by then, the race was long over.

Doing Just Fine

Trust Me, Mr. President, White South Africans Are Doing Just Fine

White supremacists think farmers here are getting slaughtered. The truth is, life in this country isn’t much different than it was under apartheid.

By EVE FAIRBANKS

I live in South Africa, and days after President Donald Trump’s tweet last week about the dangers, including “large-scale killing,” faced by white South Africans, I got an email from a friend back home in America. It was a forward written by someone else, and it began: “Here's a bit of unfortunate news that has serious implications for world order.” The writer alleged that all South Africans knew that when Mandela died—he passed away in 2013—“the nation will fall apart,” and “now that appears to be happening.” The writer spoke of 400,000 whites “living in tent camps” because “jobs are largely given to blacks”; of secret black “hit squads” invading white farms; and of “whites preparing for war with huge vans which contain trays of vegetable gardens illuminated by ‘growlights.’” “International news organizations,” he said—liberal ones—“didn't want to report” these truths because they would “ruin the ‘miracle’ of independence.”

My friend was concerned. He urgently wanted to speak to me. Not only, I got the sense, out of concern for me—a white person living in this purported media black hole—but because the secrets the writer laid out in the message seemed somehow, for him, critical to know, some kind of essential learning for a critical thinker, for an adult, like the truth that Santa Claus isn’t real.

I didn’t know what to say because it was all so far from the truth that it beggared belief. Some lies are so fantastical they cannot be countered without vaguely soiling the arguer. They make her say or do ridiculous things, like snapping cellphone photos of her breakfast (a faintly embarrassing spread of espresso, a brownie, Nutella and a pecan tartlet) to demonstrate that white people in South Africa are not, in fact, being subjected to forcible “genocidal famine,” or to post a question on the Facebook page for her new Johannesburg neighborhood inquiring straightforwardly whether the white folk there were now “preparing for war” with mobile vegetable gardens. I did that, and it made my neighbors laugh at me. “Yes,” one taunted, “hundreds of trucks full of tomato & potato plants whose fruits will be used to destroy the enemy one overripe veggie at a time.”

My neighbors said the notion was bonkers. But when I suggested there was a role for white South Africans to speak up and challenge Trump’s notion that whites were being persecuted in South Africa, they demurred. “Why should I even counter something so crazy?” one of them wrote. Crazy is as crazy does, and when countering a lie requires you to speak sentences such as “No, we are not yet being made to wear identifying garments, like the Jews wore in 1938,” you just don’t even go there.

Because the truth is the opposite, almost the exact opposite. It’s true that news organizations, in my view, under-report from South Africa. But the reality they under-report is that white life is amazing. The average household income for white-person-headed households in South Africa, according to a 2016 survey, is five times the average income of a black-headed one. They are almost 10 percent of the country’s population and still possess nearly three fourths of its privately owned agricultural land. It’s arguably the world’s finest quality of life—oysters, golf, fine wine—for the cheapest prices on earth. We buy a fillet of smoked salmon at the upscale grocery for more than most of us pay our black maids per day. In my nine years living here, and in travels all over the country, I have met only two white South African families that don’t employ black household help, a maid or a gardener.

The end of apartheid in 1994 captured the world’s attention because it was a kind of test case of the proposition that the 20th century represented humanity’s teenage passage: By the end, we would have gotten tribalism and hate out of our system. The formerly dominant people, now a minority, would live under the rule of people of color they had brutally oppressed for centuries.

People were uneasy; the neat story of liberation and reconciliation seemed potentially too good to be true. The transition hasn’t been painless for white South Africans. In certain sectors—academia, the government—it is harder for young white people, now, to gain employment, thanks to affirmative action. And the country’s new president did speak recently of amending the Constitution to allow for the expropriation of land. Even so, such calls have been made by leading political lights for a decade, and there’s no real plan, which—rightly or wrongly—has led most South Africans, white and black, by now, just not to believe it will ever happen. Family capital and residual pro-white prejudice still works in whites’ favor.

There is some evidence that white farmers are more likely to be the targets of crime than white city-dwellers, but there’s absolutely no evidence that this crime is racially motivated. With their isolation and physical assets like livestock, farmers are soft and alluring targets. Yet black people are more likely to be the victims of crime here in general. My partner, a white South African, remarked recently that sheerly in terms of advantage, being white here is still like being a team of world rugby stars asked to play a team of under-14s.

That’s uncomfortable. That’s what’s hard for the international press to write about. It is, in fact, a tarnishing of the “miracle”—but in, maybe, an even more unsettling way than if black people had abandoned Mandela’s reconciliatory attitude and massacred their former oppressors. At least that would have meant that something big actually happened. It’s harder to face the thought that what was supposed to be the most symbolic shift of the bitter 20th century was kind of a nothing burger.

So why these rumors of an uprising against whites in South Africa now? Trump didn’t start them with his tweet. Tucker Carlson didn’t start them. I’ve been receiving emails for a year or two now from anxious friends abroad about tidbits they’ve read about growing anger towards white people here—mostly in the U.K. tabloid press or on the Twitter feeds of the Canadian right-wing provocateurs Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. Not just from right-wing friends—from left-wing ones, too.

For some liberals, I think it might be a feel for justice, displaced. We're so deeply enmeshed in economic and social systems that are ruthless toward the poor or disadvantaged; we've benefited from arbitrary privilege, from high-status or high-capital parentage. But most of us don’t know how or whether to disinvest ourselves, how to sincerely push for change that feels adequate to the problems. It’s a relief, in a sense, to think that somewhere, off in some distant corner of the earth, the poor and the despised are taking back their portion—that a leveling is occurring—in accordance with the supposition that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, even if that doesn't seem to be happening in our own neighborhoods.

For others, it’s an enabling fear. The claim my friend forwarded that 400,000 white South Africans are living in tent camps is utterly false—though it has been repeated by the BBC. A 2016 study determined only about 13,000 whites live in “informal dwellings,” or home-built shacks, representing 0.3 percent of the white South African population, while nearly 15 percent of the black population does.

The friend who sent me the email is a 30-something Republican raised in a conservative family. His ringtone is “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But he’s been troubled, in the past two years, by Trump.

He’s disturbed by what Trump seems to be flushing out of his party—and by the things some female friends and friends of color from the liberal university he attended have been telling him about their different, contemporary experience of America. It’s an internal tension. In that context, imagining that whites are now being targeted for full-scale annihilation is kind of a relief, because it seems to show that giving up privilege, or even questioning it, is so dangerous we can’t afford to do it, no matter how moral it might be. We don’t always like to know that a change that seems big will actually be no big deal, because that shatters our excuses for not undertaking it.

I once had a therapist who told me, in the context of anxieties I raised about quitting nicotine, that my fears about what would happen if I quit—lethargy, a quick relapse that would humiliate me in front of my family and friends—were just a form of “giving myself permission” not to. I’d always known that we have some capacity to choose to ignore our fears. But it hadn’t occurred to me that being fearful could be a kind of intentional, if subconscious, choice, one that benefits or absolves us.

In the context of South Africa, fearing or predicting a massacre of whites there allows whites elsewhere to act like the kind of people who possibly ought to be massacred. The very few white South Africans I’ve met who treat blacks with open hostility are also the very few who openly express terror of an armed black uprising and a race war. I’ve wondered why, if that was their worry, they didn’t try a little more tenderness to avert the dire outcome. But fear of a dark end allows us to continue living in the uncomfortable ways that might make such an ending inevitable.

When I first read the email telling me that events in South Africa had “serious implications for the world order,” I briefly didn’t understand what the writer meant. It’s an important country, especially to Africa, but it’s only got a population of 55 million, and even if it were to collapse that wouldn’t overturn the whole world. Then I realized: He meant events here are symbolic. They have implications for how we think about the “world order,” about human nature and what we are and aren’t capable of.

Unfortunately, the symbolism so many have become interested in is just that—a symbol, a story, not true. But symbols become truths. Some white friends of mine here, previously great lovers of the country, have expressed worry lately that it might, indeed, be going to hell. It was crazy that they were worrying about South Africa because of some Canadian alt-right tweeters and the ill-informed American president. But the day after Trump's tweet, investors got spooked and the South African currency dropped 2 percent, damaging the country more than any white genocide ever has. What’s crazy has a way of becoming reality before we can blink.

Hostile takeover of immigration policy

Inside Stephen Miller’s hostile takeover of immigration policy

The 33-year-old policy adviser has made unprecedented power grabs as he seeks to slash immigration to America.

By NAHAL TOOSI

When the White House held a series of meetings last year to discuss how to deal with nations that refuse to take back their citizens whom the U.S. is trying to deport, one voice in the room was louder than all the others: Stephen Miller.

It was odd that Miller, a powerful senior policy adviser to President Donald Trump focused on slashing immigration to America, was even there.

The issue of so-called recalcitrant countries has traditionally been handled by the National Security Council, in part because it overlaps with sensitive foreign relations matters, such as fighting terrorism — and Miller is not a part of the NSC.

But, Miller, who recently turned 33, led several of the meetings. And he would launch the sessions with horror stories about Americans being victimized by noncitizens, such as a 25-year-old Connecticut woman stabbed to death by a Haitian man who should have been deported earlier. The tone left some in the room feeling anxious about trying to argue against him, according to current and former U.S. officials.

“‘What are we doing to save American lives? We must save American lives! We must save Americans from these immigrant criminals!’” a former NSC official recalled Miller saying in one session. “He would tell these stories to make it clear there was no room for anything other than to come down hard on these countries, even if we had other national security interests to consider.”

Miller’s hard-charging approach to the discussion offers a glimpse into just one of the many tactics — psychological and otherwise — he has used to secure an iron grip on Trump’s immigration policies, surviving blowups such as the initial blowback over the president’s travel ban and the more recent fracas over the migrant family separation policy.

One major reason Miller remains a powerful player on immigration is that he’s so close to Trump, who agrees with many of his hard-line views. But according to nearly a dozen current and former U.S. officials and others who deal with migration, Miller also has managed to set the agenda on Trump’s signature campaign issue through another quality: sheer bureaucratic cunning.

He has installed acolytes across key U.S. agencies, such as the State Department. He has inserted himself into NSC deliberations to an extraordinary degree for someone not in that elite group’s ranks. He takes care to limit his paper trial, avoiding email and keeping his name off documents when possible. He has cajoled and bullied some career staffers into implementing his vision of radically tighter U.S. borders — a vision that, according to a former White House official, even Trump has privately suggested can be extreme. Even when he doesn’t get everything he wants, such as with the recalcitrant countries, he manages to dramatically alter the boundaries of the debate.

The latest test of Miller’s power is underway, as he tries to slash the number of refugees the U.S. accepts next year to 25,000 or fewer, according to former officials and advocates for refugees. That’s even lower than the historic nadir of 45,000 he helped pull it down to last year, and Miller is playing a major role as the State Department, Pentagon and other agencies try to reach a consensus before Sept. 30.

Miller also is behind other immigration-related policy initiatives in the works, including ways to make it harder for people to obtain legal status in the United States.

The White House did not make Miller available for an interview, but deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley defended Miller as just doing what his boss wants. “Everything Stephen Miller does is the result of first asking the question: What does President Donald Trump want done?” Gidley said.

Others, however, said Miller is a gifted behind-the-scenes operator whose obsession with immigration is shaping Trump’s agenda.

“We thought good policy arguments, good bureaucratic arguments — that if we just did the right thing and told the truth, that we would win,” the former NSC official said of the bureaucratic wrangling with Miller. “But he was playing a totally different game than we were.”

‘An intimidation session’

Miller’s combative style quickly spilled into public view within days of Trump’s inauguration, when he, working with a coterie of like-minded colleagues, rolled out Trump’s infamous travel ban: an executive order barring from U.S. soil the citizens of several Muslim-majority countries.

The order had not gone through the usual interagency review, leading to widespread confusion about its implementation. The result: scenes of refugees, elderly women and even children detained at U.S. airports as protests emerged nationwide.

In the days afterward, as the travel ban hit obstacles in the courts, Miller publicly and forcefully defended it, bolstering his national notoriety in the process. “There is no constitutional right for a citizen in a foreign country who has no status in America to demand entry into our country. Such a right cannot exist. Such a right will never exist,” Miller said on ABC News. “This is an ideological disagreement between those who believe we should have borders and should have controls and those who believe there should be no borders and no controls.”

Behind the scenes, Miller was surprising and rankling his colleagues.

The day after the ban was unveiled, a Saturday, NSC staffers were asked to convene a “principals committee” meeting to discuss the fallout. Such meetings are attended by Cabinet secretaries and other specially designated U.S. officials who deal with national security, and they are typically chaired by the national security adviser. But the team that assembled that day was a mix of officials at varying ranks — and it was Miller who chaired the meeting. (A White House official pushed back on this, arguing that because Miller chaired the gathering, by definition that made it not a meeting of the “principals committee.”)

After spending a few minutes leading a discussion of murky legal issues around the travel ban, Miller pivoted to what one senior administration official said felt like “an intimidation session.” “Stephen was like, ‘This is the way it’s going to be. This is the president’s will.’ That Trump was ‘heartened, encouraged,’ something like that, by what’s happening at the airports,” the official said.

“That really set the tone,” the official added. “Stephen just had this aura about him. People realized at that point this guy — Stephen — is the president of immigration.”

‘You’re so tough on this stuff, Stephen’

Miller’s fixation on immigration is something of a mystery to many people who know him.

He has often been described as a contrarian who rebelled against his liberal upbringing in Santa Monica, California. He has been a conservative activist since at least his high school days, and his writings portray a young person deeply shaken by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He grew his reputation for antagonism at Duke University, where — as a columnist for the student newspaper — he defended lacrosse players falsely accused of rape and warned that multiculturalism poses a threat to American identity.

Miller later worked as a communications aide to Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama whose far-right anti-immigration views Miller shared.

Miller joined the Trump campaign in early 2016, finding in the president a fellow anti-immigration crusader. Their relationship is what some of Miller’s defenders point to when discussing his tactics.

“He has been very effective at navigating the office politics of the West Wing, but the idea that Stephen is some Svengali is ridiculous,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks more restrictions on immigration. “Part of his success is that he’s simpatico with Trump — there’s nothing he’s promoting that the president is actually against.”

Over time, though, even Trump has become aware of how far to the right Miller is on the issue, and he listens to other voices, a former White House official said. “Trump will sometimes say, ‘Well, yeah, but you’re so tough on this stuff, Stephen,’” the former official said. Still, Trump also sees how well the hard-line stance plays with his Republican base, and he relies on Miller to flesh out much of his immigration policy.

Despite his high rank of assistant to the president and broad title of senior policy adviser, it quickly became clear to people in Trump’s orbit that immigration wasn’t just the singular issue Miller truly cared about, it was also, by far, the subject he knew the most about. Other officials couldn’t keep up with his grasp of the details.

The backlash over the travel ban didn’t deter Miller from pursuing seismic immigration policy changes in the weeks that followed, officials said. Instead, he learned that he needed the stamp of the interagency process to successfully implement and validate the changes he sought.

So he looked for ways to gain more control of that process.

Without a trace

Because of his mind-meld with Trump, Miller from the start wielded tremendous sway over the Domestic Policy Council, a White House-based forum of top U.S. officials and staffers who deal with issues such as health care, education and other domestic topics aside from the economy.

Some elements of immigration policy are among the DPC’s portfolios. But there are other aspects of immigration that have been traditionally dealt with by the NSC, such as refugee resettlement and recalcitrant countries. According to multiple former officials, under Miller, the DPC proposed that it take the lead on all immigration matters, including what was supposed to be handled by the NSC.

NSC staffers raised concerns. But Miller pushed then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Tom Bossert, the homeland security adviser at the time, to effectively cede control of immigration policy to him, two former officials said, saying that in exchange, he wouldn’t get in their way on other matters. (Bossert declined comment, and McMaster did not reply to a request for comment.)

“He’s willing to cut deals implicitly and explicitly with people: If you give me free rein on immigration, I will leave you alone on a bunch of other stuff,” the former White House official said.

Due to his machinations, Miller began unofficially co-chairing meetings on refugees, recalcitrant countries and other topics that used to be in the NSC’s domain, but in which the DPC was now given a major role. An NSC unit known as BATS — Border and Transportation Security — largely came under Miller’s control, current and former officials said.

Miller’s bureaucratic coup also meant that he was part of the clearance process for many papers generated by units within the NSC. That infuriated lower-level NSC staffers who found that Miller would often misrepresent data about refugees or other types of immigrants, former and current U.S. officials said. (Miller has been accused of suppressing information about the overall net benefits of refugees on the economy during the administration’s debate last year over how many refugees to admit to the U.S.)

“We would clear a paper that was accurate at the working level with all the relevant experts and stakeholders at the NSC, but then it would go to him before it went to our own leadership,” a former administration official said. “He’d make all these changes, and we wouldn’t see it or have a chance to ensure the integrity of his edits.”

Miller was careful about minimizing his paper trail, current and former officials said. He would edit documents by hand instead of in a digital file. He would make phone calls instead of sending emails.

It’s not entirely clear why Miller does this. Some officials who have dealt with him speculate that he did not want his level of influence in the NSC to be too obvious. Others say he may be aware that his name is toxic in certain political circles, including among moderate Republicans who support reforming the immigration system.

“The entirety of my work during my time in the administration was influenced or dictated maybe 90 percent of the time by Miller, but I saw maybe three emails from him,” the former administration official said.

Miller often relied on like-minded allies to act as proxies in various settings, communicating with them by phone or in person. Miller also wasn’t listed as a co-chair of the meetings on various immigration issues. A Miller ally or some other official with the DPC would be listed as the co-chair, but Miller would come in and take over.

A former West Wing aide said Miller would at times ask people in the White House to send him suggested inserts for the president’s speeches that he wanted to include. It seemed to be Miller’s way of making it appear the ideas originated from someone besides himself.

“I never understood it,” the former aide said. “He had the power to put it in himself.”

‘The president believes’

Aside from the president, several other top administration officials shared Miller’s broad goal of cracking down on immigration.

Sessions, his old boss on Capitol Hill, was named the attorney general. John Kelly, a retired general, defended ramping up deportations as the secretary of homeland security; he later became Trump’s chief of staff. Kirstjen Nielsen, Kelly’s replacement as homeland security secretary, was also willing to cast her lot with the hard-liners.

But Miller had Trump’s ear in a way even some Cabinet secretaries don’t, and he didn’t let those officials forget it.

One meeting last year demonstrated Miller’s savvy, according to a senior immigration security official briefed on what happened.

Then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Kelly, who was the homeland security secretary at the time, were waiting to see Trump. Miller arrived with the president, who was holding a document and seething. The document, apparently given to him by Miller, showed that thousands of Iraqis had visited the United States in the previous year.

The president was furious: Why were they let in?

Kelly and Tillerson pointed out that these were not technically immigrants — merely tourists and other types of short-term visitors. Relatively few overstayed their visas. But Trump was angry anyway, and Miller had scored a psychological victory over the Cabinet officials.

In meetings and other settings, Miller would frequently use phrases such as “We all know the president believes …” or “The president thinks ….” Career Civil and foreign service staffers came to view that move as another Miller tactic to restrict genuine and honest debate about the merits of a policy. What staffer, after all, would dare rebuff the president — or the man so close to the president?

Miller has taken the approach of “I will tell you what the outcome is, and we’ll work backward to get there,” the former administration official said.

Some observers also pointed out that, as one of Trump’s main speechwriters, Miller has a lot of control over how Trump articulates his beliefs.

All of Miller’s men

Perhaps Miller’s most important move has been identifying and promoting lower-level staffers who share his anti-immigration views, some of whom he helped place into key agencies, essentially embedding foot soldiers across the federal government.

Three people in particular have proven valuable proxies: John Zadrozny, Andrew Veprek and Gene Hamilton.

In the first months of the Trump administration, Hamilton was a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security. He and Miller would attend meetings with NSC staffers having seemingly choreographed what they would say to each other during the gatherings, current and former officials said. Hamilton is now at the Justice Department, where he advises Sessions.

Zadrozny worked for the Domestic Policy Council but recently moved to the State Department — an institution Miller views with deep suspicion — to serve on the Policy Planning Staff. He previously worked for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a stridently anti-immigration group.

Veprek is a Foreign Service officer who was detailed to the White House but more recently landed a top role in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. He’s also drawn headlines for trying to water down proposed United Nations language on the need to fight racism.

A White House staffer who admires Miller said the Trump confidant is in contact with many more career staffers across the government who support his views, even lawyers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Miller has asked people to look at every policy change possible within the executive branch’s authority to be stricter on immigration, the White House staffer said.

The former White House official warned, however, against exaggerating Miller’s reach, saying that although he has a solid “kitchen cabinet” of advisers, “there’s a mythology that’s crept up that overstates their influence.” Miller, the former official added, has promoted that “myth.”

Gidley, the deputy White House press secretary, downplayed Miller’s role in placing acolytes across the government. “The president empowers his employees to put people at agencies who agree with the president’s policies. That's no surprise,” he said.

Criticisms of Miller, Gidley said, aren’t really about him. “It seems to me these are attempts by people who don’t like the president to attack Stephen Miller, who is loyal to the president,” he said.

Multiple people interviewed said Miller enjoys being characterized as some dark, Machiavellian figure, but that he’s affable and generous in private, although a bit awkward. “He really gets along with people on a personal level,” the admiring White House staffer said. Gidley added: “He’s one of the funniest, wittiest people I know.”

But Miller has also taken revenge on people he views as hostile to his policy goals.

In the early months of the Trump era, Miller held a meeting with several government employees who dealt with refugees. One attendee was Lawrence Bartlett, a veteran State Department official with extensive experience resettling refugees to the U.S.

The topic centered in part on studying the costs and benefits of refugees. Miller made it clear that he, and the president, saw refugees as a financial drain. Bartlett, however, mentioned a study out of Ohio that showed that refugees could boost local economies.

“From that point, Larry was on all their hit lists,” the senior administration official said.

Bartlett, who declined comment, continued advocating for refugees in the months that followed. He was eventually handed new duties: helping process Freedom of Information Act requests. It was like being sent into exile.

Most of the people interviewed for this story requested anonymity for reasons including not wanting to be targeted by Miller.

In recent months, Miller has been convening side meetings with his clique of allies to come up with new ways to shift immigration rules. The gatherings have evolved from loosely structured conference calls and other connections Miller and his acolytes used earlier. In theory, the proposals the group generates must still go through the traditional interagency review, but it’s not always clear whether that happens.

The informal group devised the basis of the Trump administration’s decision to separate undocumented adult migrants from their children at the southern U.S. border, administration officials and Republicans close to the administration previously told POLITICO. That decision spawned images of children held in cages, sparking a public outcry and leading Trump to order an end to the separations.

The fallout from the separation policy hurt Miller’s standing with Trump, but not because the president disagreed with the idea behind it, the former White House official said. Rather, Trump was disappointed that Miller hadn’t thought through the optics of how people beyond hardcore Republicans would react.

“Even the president realizes that Miller is so far on one end of the spectrum that sometimes he has political blind spots,” the former White House official said.

Terms of animosity

Current and former officials say they can’t recall any incidents in which Miller used overtly racist language. Instead, they say, his views appeared more nativist — his language loaded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, toward non-Americans, including refugees. Miller and his allies would use terms like “illegals” or “aliens” to describe various immigrants; in one case, a Miller ally said that refugees negatively affected by the travel ban were “hosed.”

A White House official defended Miller’s language, arguing that he was simply sticking with official legal terms, such as “illegal aliens,” and that softer descriptions, such as “undocumented,” had no legal basis. But the terminology used to describe non-Americans by Miller and his allies nonetheless weighed on many career staffers.

“He doesn’t treat them as human beings. They’re animals, or they’re a product,” the former NSC official said.

On recalcitrant countries, Miller wanted to invoke a U.S. law that would bar citizens of those nations from obtaining American visas. (There was a major exception to this: Miller didn’t agitate to punish China, which hasn’t taken back tens of thousands of its citizens eligible for deportation.)

NSC staffers argued that it wasn’t worth straining relations with some of the countries, especially if, say, America was trying to build a drone base in one of the nations.

But Miller and his allies insisted that the U.S. had to enforce its immigration laws, citing the potential threat to Americans from noncitizens eligible for deportation, some of whom may have simply overstayed a visa.

“They just wouldn’t give equal weight and discussion time and value to things that related to the complex dynamics involved in relations between the U.S. and Cambodia or Chad or South Sudan,” a second former NSC official said.

Miller did not immediately get everything he wanted. He’d hoped to impose visa sanctions on more than a dozen countries considered recalcitrant.

But his agitation helped push the debate to a new place.

By the fall of 2017, the Trump administration had imposed visa sanctions on four offending countries: Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Earlier this summer, the administration imposed such sanctions on two more countries: Laos and Myanmar.

In the 16 years before Trump — and Miller — reached the White House, the U.S. had imposed visa sanctions on just two recalcitrant countries.

McCain’s death won’t be filled soon

Senate void left by McCain’s death won’t be filled soon — if ever

McCain’s passing marks the end of an era.

By JOHN BRESNAHAN

Can John McCain be replaced?

And does anyone really want that to happen?

As senators went to the floor to pay tribute to the late Arizona Republican this week, there was an overwhelming sense that the Senate had lost a singular figure, the rare lawmaker able to bridge the gulf between the parties and make bipartisan deals.

Especially for Democrats, who rejoiced over McCain’s stunning vote in July 2017 to block Obamacare repeal, handing President Donald Trump and the GOP a huge defeat, McCain was a godsend. He stood up to Trump in a way that no other Republican could, and they adored him for it.

“His ability to see beyond party labels was one of the qualities that so many of us loved about him,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “We are stronger together than we are divided, and John McCain knew that.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), McCain’s closest friend in the Senate, gave an emotional, tear-filled speech on the floor Tuesday, recalling jokes and stories of his longtime colleague.

For Graham, McCain’s most poignant moment may have come in November 2008, after McCain lost the presidential race to then-Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

“John taught us how to lose,” Graham said. “John said that night, ‘President Obama is now my president.’ So he healed the nation at a time he was hurt.”

Yet the irony of this week of McCain tributes — the toxic political atmosphere in which they are taking place, even the reason the Senate was in session this month to begin with — isn’t lost on any of his colleagues.

“It’s changed,” added Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) of the Senate and American politics generally. Shelby was elected as a Democrat in 1986, the same year McCain moved to the upper chamber from the House. “When I came here, you had [Robert] Byrd, you had [Ted] Stevens, you had [Bob] Dole, you had [Dan] Inouye, among other people. Mark Hatfield. [Ted] Kennedy. … It was real different then. It was partisan at times, but not always.”

“You have a changing of the guard every so often,” Shelby added.

Trump — a man for whom McCain had little respect, an enmity returned by Trump many times over — is in the White House, and the country and Republican Party won’t ever be the same. The Senate is led by sharply partisan former campaign committee chairmen in Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). Committee chairmen no longer have the power they once had, and partisan media on each side mercilessly pound any senator who even dares thinks of crossing the aisle to vote with the opposition. McConnell, at the urging of Trump and many Senate Republicans, kept the chamber in session during August because Democrats have filibustered many of Trump’s nominees, dragging out the process of staffing up the administration deep into the 115th Congress.

And with Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh getting a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination next week, the specter of Merrick Garland is never far from Democrats’ minds. McCain’s successor, a loyal Republican selected by Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey, will almost certainly vote on the Senate floor to approve that nomination as early as next month.

In fact, the week of celebrations of McCain’s life and bipartisan spirit are like a bittersweet daydream, a flashback to the halcyon days of the Senate’s past during a feverishly hot August stretch in Washington. Congress will come back into session after Labor Day and everything will go back to the new normal — more Trump attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller, a possible government shutdown this fall. And the November midterm elections will creep ever closer, with the possibility of a Democratic takeover of the House and Trump’s impeachment.

Whether someone like McCain could thrive in the Senate now is a matter of debate. It would be much harder for such a politician to win a seat in the first place, even with an impressive military record or history of public service. When he or she got here, partisan pressure on them to fall in line would be intense. There are few senators or House members who can go their own way these days and survive politically, as evidenced by the retirement of Trump critics like Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

On the Democratic side, the party has grown more liberal since Trump came into office, and “centrist” has become a dirty word among progressives.

“With 24-7 [media] coverage, anything you say, tweet or do will be blown out of proportion and used against you,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). “This is one of the things John McCain did so well — keeping the job was never more important than doing the right thing.”

Warner also worries that Trump — “his outrageousness,” especially — is the new model for politicians, rather than McCain, especially for anyone seeking the national spotlight.

“In Trump, you have the antithesis of everything that John McCain stood for, in terms of honor, loyalty, American leadership, public service, yet you’ve got to acknowledge that [Trump’s] outrageousness maybe helped him get to there,” Warner said. “You do have those mini, wannabe Trumps popping up around the country.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who came to the Senate in 1976, spoke fondly of iconic past figures, such as Byrd. “They were willing to work with you if you were sincere and dedicated,” said Hatch, who was known for working closely with Kennedy despite their dramatic differences in personality and politics.

But Hatch, who was elected in the wake of the Watergate scandal, also noted that when he got to the Senate, Democrats had huge majorities and basically tolerated Republicans, which made it a lot easier for the majority party to go through the motions of bipartisanship.

“It functioned because everything was controlled by Democrats,” Hatch quipped. “They discussed things with Republicans, but they just did that keep things somewhat cordial. They controlled everything.”

According to Hatch, “things aren’t as bad as you make them out to be. Although there is room for improvement, that’s for sure.”

McConnell, for his part, rejected the notion that the senators of the past are better than the current crop of senators, no matter what pundits and the press say.

“Our country will always produce the great men and women that it needs when it needs them,” McConnell said in an interview. “There are great men and women in the Senate now. I serve with them every day.”

McCain’s temperament is another issue that can’t be overlooked, and Democrats used it against him in the 2008 presidential race. McCain had a legendary temper, and he held grudges for a long time. McCain and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) didn’t speak for years following a blowup in the early 1990s, and the lords of the Senate Appropriations Committee such as Byrd, Inouye and Stevens loathed him.

Former Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), a future chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told the Boston Globe that “the thought of [McCain] being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me." Cochran, however, later endorsed McCain.

But some Senate Republican aides wonder whether some of this bad blood still exists, as there is surprising resistance from some inside the party to renaming the Russell Senate Office Building after McCain, or another high-profile tribute.

“I don’t know if they don’t want to upset Trump or what, but some members aren’t thrilled with the idea,” said a senior Senate GOP aide. “We’ll see what happens.”

Meanwhile, with McCain’s funeral this weekend — preceded by his body lying in state both in Arizona and the Capitol — the McCain memorial tour will continue to roll.

“It will be a long time before anybody like John McCain comes along again,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). “While John McCain was often right, and occasionally wrong, he was never in doubt.”

Upset win in Florida

Gillum’s upset win in Florida swells the surge of black leaders

Democrats are sending three black nominees for governor to November’s general elections, setting up a stark contrast to Trump’s divisive politics.

By DAVID SIDERS

First Stacey Abrams romped to victory in Georgia’s gubernatorial primary. Then came Ben Jealous in Maryland and, on Tuesday, Andrew Gillum.

Five years after the rise of Black Lives Matter — and against the backdrop of a White House that has inflamed racial tensions nationwide — Gillum’s upset win in Florida laid bare the potency of a new generation of black leaders gradually coming to power within the Democratic Party.

With Gillum’s defeat of former Rep. Gwen Graham, Democrats will send three black nominees for governor to November’s general elections. A large number of African Americans are running for competitive House seats in majority-white districts. A black Democrat could become the next House speaker, and several of the Democratic Party’s top-tier prospective presidential candidates are black.

“There is an undeniable energy behind women and candidates of color across the country, and it is in direct defiance to the man in the Oval Office right now,” said Bill Burton, a veteran Democratic consultant.

Following Gillum’s win, the latest victory for a non-white candidate in a high-profile contest, Burton said, “The face of change is less monolithic than it has ever been.”

Gillum’s primary victory — like Abrams’ and Jealous’ — reflects the still-evolving prospects of African Americans in the Democratic Party a decade after America elected its first black president.

African Americans, while serving as the electoral backbone of the Democratic Party, have long been underrepresented in statewide office, and Gillum’s victory stunned Florida’s political establishment.

Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, was running in third or fourth place in public opinion polls before an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) this month. Despite being outspent on television ads, he maintained that he could win if he won over black voters — who make up about 28 percent of Democratic primary voters in Florida — as well as white progressives. Following his late surge, he will now face a Donald Trump-endorsed Republican, Rep. Ron DeSantis, in the general election.

At his victory party Tuesday night, Gillum told supporters that “this thing is not about me.” But if elected, he would become Florida’s first African-American governor, while Abrams is vying to become the first black woman governor in the United States. They and Jealous are all progressive and relatively young, with Jealous the oldest at 45.

Their candidacies have drawn an especially sharp contrast to Trump. While the president has frequently pointed in his speeches to low black and Hispanic unemployment in an appeal to non-white voters, his remarks about “rapists” from Mexico and immigrants from “shithole” countries have enraged Democrats. Earlier this month marked the one-year anniversary of the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — and Trump’s initial response that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Gillum addressed the White House explicitly — and race implicitly — when he told supporters at his victory party that his campaign would paint an alternative to “the derision and the division that has been coming out of our White House.”

“Right here in the state of Florida, we are going to remind this nation of what is truly the American way, what is truly the American way, which simply is that you can start from the bottom, Richmond Heights … and make your way literally to the top of this state,” Gillum said to cheers. “And be of service to all people, have a message of love, of unity, of connection, of common sense, of decency, of what is right and not what is wrong. And that message is big enough, it’s wide enough, it’s deep enough to hold all of us.”

Gillum, Abrams and Jealous are significant to national Democrats not only for the governorships that they could win, but also the shape of the party in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Black turnout in the 2016 election fell for the first time in 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center, contributing to Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. Two years later, Democratic donors have paid increasing attention — and millions of dollars — to black candidates, hopeful that in addition to winning office, they could re-energize black voters ahead of the next presidential election.

The Democratic Party’s large field of prospective presidential candidates includes such black politicians as Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

“The Democratic Party’s finally getting out of the way and supporting candidates at the local level that don’t necessarily look like [Democratic Party officials],” said Michael Ceraso, a Democratic strategist who worked on Bernie Sanders’ and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “I think Andrew’s win, and obviously Stacey’s, and [Iowa secretary of state candidate] Deidre DeJear over in Iowa are three examples.”

Ceraso said that while Trump is “bringing out a lot of frustration and angst … I just think that these candidates are inspiring and, at the same time, putting together really strong campaign operations, combined with a progressive wave.”

Only two African Americans have ever been elected governor in the United States, and the prospects for the Democratic Party’s three black gubernatorial candidates this year are uncertain. Republicans are already attacking Gillum, with the Republican Governors Association casting him Tuesday as a “radical far-left politician.”

But the field of African American candidates is deeper than it has been in previous years. In House races, more than half a dozen black Democrats are running in districts whose electorates are mostly white — significant to African-Americans traditionally considered less competitive in such districts.

The House candidates include Colin Allred, a 35-year-old former NFL linebacker in Texas; Lauren Underwood, who is seeking to flip a House district in Illinois; Antonio Delgado, a lawyer in New York; Steven Horsford, a former Congress member seeking to reclaim his seat in Nevada; Lucy McBath, a gun control activist in Georgia; and Linda Coleman, a state legislator running for Congress in North Carolina.

In another majority-white district, Jahana Hayes, a Connecticut teacher, is favored to become the first black Democratic member of Congress from her state.

If Democrats retake the House in November — and if Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) does not run or is defeated — it is possible the body will elect its first black speaker. Potential candidates include Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Hakeem Jeffries of New York; Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Marcia Fudge of Ohio.

But on Tuesday, the focus held squarely on Gillum. After campaigning for the candidate at his alma mater, Florida A & M, Angela Rye, former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, raved on CNN about “the energy of these students, knowing that they’re going to go and support one of their fellow alums, knowing that there’s someone who looks like them, who represents their interests, who everyone counted out because he didn’t raise the same amount of money, who everyone counted out because of his age, who everyone counted out because he was not the person whose turn it was supposed to be.”

“But you know what?” Rye added. “It was his time.”