The Trump factor, according to Rosenberg, is key. For the past several election cycles, nothing has united Democratic voters more than the chance to vote against him. And all summer Trump has been back in the news, thanks to revelations from testimony in the House’s January 6th hearings; the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents improperly taken from the White House; and endless speculation about whether Trump will be indicted or run again for President—or both. “It awakened the anti-maga majority in the country,” Rosenberg insisted.

Rosenberg sees this fall as a genuinely competitive election, not a foregone conclusion. And his predictions for the long-term fate of the Trumpified G.O.P. are bleak. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight Presidential elections, and Trump was the first incumbent President running for reëlection since Herbert Hoover to have his party lose the White House, Senate, and House in just four years. Rosenberg said he remained convinced that divisive primaries, such as the Wyoming election this week, are disastrous for the Republican Party in general elections—even if pro-Trump candidates beat out the few Liz Cheneys every time. “The Republican coalition,” he asserted flatly, “is cracking.” At this rate, he insisted, the Trump party could even become just as much of a “noncompetitive national entity” as the post-Hoover G.O.P. of the nineteen-thirties and forties.

After hearing Rosenberg’s case, I called Amy Walter, the editor-in-chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, for a reality check. She joked that there’s nothing wrong with “taking a hit of the hopium.” But Walter and others are not ready to abandon the laws of political physics just yet. “All the fundamentals are telling us not that much has changed,” she told me. “There is not a blue wave, no. The question is: How big is the red wave?” On Thursday, the Cook Political Report moved its prediction for control of the Senate from favoring the G.O.P. to a tossup; Walter still sees Republicans taking the House.