Elaine Godfrey

LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va.—The beer was flowing, the handmade potato chips were self-serve, and hope was in the air. Early in the night, the Loudoun County Democrats who gathered at the Döner Bistro in Leesburg were cautiously—anxiously—optimistic: Sure, it had been a rough year. A global pandemic, regular protests at the local school-board meetings, and the contentious governor’s race, rife with misinformation, had pitted neighbor against neighbor.

The very first United Airlines evacuation flight from Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, on Sunday had 300 passengers on board, and those passengers had many questions. Some wondered where the flight was headed and how long the trip would be. Others asked crew members where their luggage was, whether it had made it out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, and whether it would catch up to them in America.

In just a few hours, Americans will start reading headlines announcing all the lessons learned from today’s Democratic primary in Ohio’s Eleventh Congressional District. Political writers will treat the race as a parable: a warning for progressives or an admonishment of the Democratic Party’s establishment wing. Twitter pundits will publish threads about the winning candidate’s strategy to woo working-class voters.

All along the hallways of the Capitol complex today, members of the Capitol Police stared at their phones and nearby TV screens. Four of their fellow officers were testifying before Congress for the first time about the treatment they’d endured on January 6. They described being beaten with metal flagpoles, sprayed in the eyes with wasp repellent, and shocked with their own Tasers. One of the men cried while he spoke; a colleague patted his back.

Dozens of Texans are dead because of the state’s energy crisis last week. Some froze in their bed or their living room. Others suffocated in their idling car, poisoned by carbon monoxide. A few perished in house fires while trying to keep their family warm. And millions spent days without heat or running water. Gaming out the electoral ramifications of an event when it’s still causing pain may seem crass. But the politics of the energy crisis are inextricable from the event itself.

Updated at 10:28 a.m. ET on February 6, 2021.Public-health experts predicted a tsunami of COVID-19 infections in Iowa this winter. Doctors and researchers told me in November that they expected thousands of Iowans to travel to visit family over Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Donald Trump’s presidency concluded not with mutiny in state capitals or an attempted attack on his successor, but with a calm, conventional ceremony in an otherwise quiet city.Walking through Washington, D.C., today, the silence in the streets was the sound of a country not quite ready to exhale. It was a fitting end to the noisiest era of American politics that many Americans can remember.

Photographs by Tavon TaylorBeyond the dozen National Guardsmen stationed behind the Library of Congress, the seven-foot-tall fence lining the back side of the Capitol, and the men in balaclavas carrying assault rifles, 67-year-old Rick Genderson sells liquor and old wine in his store, Schneider’s of Capitol Hill.

It still hurts to swallow or drink. Water tastes off. She can’t sleep. She buried herself under blankets all weekend, but she couldn’t stay warm. Then came the pounding headache, the blocked sinuses. So far, she’s spent more than a week in self-isolation, toggling between British TV dramas and news reports about the rioters who wanted to assassinate her colleagues in Congress. Her husband’s symptoms are the same, but he is older than her and in a high-risk group.

On the West Lawn of the Capitol Wednesday, a man in a pom-pom beanie clamored for blood. “Execute the traitors!” he shouted into a megaphone. “I wanna see executions!”The man got the deaths he wanted, if not the executions. Four rioters died as a result of Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol. The mob beat a police officer with a fire extinguisher, law-enforcement sources reports.

The Ellipse was a deep sea of delusion. Thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters drove or bused or flew from all corners of the United States to meet here, in the treeless space beside the White House, in their quest to overturn the results of the 2020 election with the help of congressional Republicans. “As I live and die, we will never give up until we have a fair-and-square election!” a small child in a rainbow hat yelled into a megaphone.

Georgia Democrats are in a door-knocking, lit-dropping frenzy. Many of them are focused on turning out voters in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of suburban Atlanta—the voters who helped flip the state to Joe Biden in November, and who are widely considered the key group for Democrats to reach. But not Ben Davidson. Ben Davidson is hitting the apartments.

Updated on October 5, 2020 at 7:04 p.m. ET.On any given morning, the White House is a blur of activity. A chef may be whipping up breakfast for the first couple in the second-floor kitchen. A valet might be shining the president’s shoes, while the head butler lingers in the West Sitting Hall, awaiting any urgent presidential requests. Housekeepers, maybe a dozen of them, could be deployed throughout the building, vacuuming, polishing, and dusting.

On a cold February evening, weeks before the full force of the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, a few dozen Mike Bloomberg supporters milled around the airy living room of a home in the genteel Washington, D.C., suburb of McLean, Virginia. The voters, most of them white, described themselves as moderates or former Republicans.

The messages in the Zoom chat were snide at first, but not despondent. One person observed that the Democrats would rather listen to young people singing the national anthem than to their political opinions. Another noted that the event felt like a highly produced infomercial. Just 30 minutes in, a mustachioed man with a palm-tree Zoom background gave up on the whole production. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he wrote to the group. “I’ve got
 Bernie taped.

The far left of the Democratic Party spent much of the primary attacking Kamala Harris, decrying her as an untrustworthy “cop” whose overtures to the left were half-hearted and opportunistic. But with Joe Biden naming the senator from California as his running mate, some progressive leaders and activists, including Harris skeptics, sound reluctantly optimistic about what the pair could achieve.

Donald Trump needs Arizona on his side in November. Losing the state and its 11 Electoral College votes would, at the very least, mean a drastically narrower path back to the White House. Keeping Arizona red shouldn’t be a challenge; the state has long been a Republican stronghold.

Debbie Dingell was one of the few Democrats who saw Donald Trump coming. She’s worried that her party will underestimate him again.The 66-year-old representative from Michigan first noticed his pull with voters in her district, which stretches from Ann Arbor to Detroit, in August 2015 at a United Auto Workers picnic.

Jamaal Bowman wasn’t supposed to win.The 44-year-old black progressive candidate, a former middle-school principal, challenged a New York representative who’s been in Congress since before the fall of the Berlin Wall and who had the backing of some of the most powerful players in the Democratic Party. But if the initial results in his primary yesterday hold, he could soon be a presumptive congressman.

A child sat on her father’s shoulders, squinted through layers of new fencing separating the White House from protesters, and asked, “Where’s Trump?” Demonstrators chanted “George Floyd!” in the tunnel under K Street so loudly that the name echoed through the length of the underpass. Streams of sign-carriers seemed to arrive at the White House from every direction, all day, and kept coming, coming, coming.