Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri.

It’s been another wild day in Washington as Joe Manchin bows out of next year’s Senate race in West Virginia, likely seeing the writing on the wall. Shortly after the news was announced, I saw that super PAC paperwork had been filed by a former Romney aide to try to draft a Romney-Manchin ticket to lead the No Labels ballot in March. It’s all exceedingly unlikely, but it nevertheless illustrates the degree to which 2024 remains unsettled. Just today, we also got a new entrant into the third-party mix: Jill Stein, a name sure to trigger heart palpitations among Democrats who recall all too well how she likely cost Hillary the race in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

Meanwhile, if you’re still trying to make sense of the G.O.P. debate last night, check out the latest episode of my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, for a rollicking convo with SiriusXM’s POTUS channel host Julie Mason.

Tonight, news and notes on the increasingly anxiety-inducing ‘24 dynamic: the Democrats second-guessing of Biden, Nikki Haley’s money grab, and an R.F.K. spoiler math lesson from Steve Bannon.

But first, Abby Livingston has the latest dish from Capitol Hill…

• The Beshear grumblings: In private conversations, Republicans won’t bother pretending that Tuesday’s elections marked a positive development. But there is very much a keep-calm-and-carry-on spirit, an optimism about 2024, that’s based mostly on Biden’s dreadful polling. This worldview hangs on the fact that he was not on the ballot this week, but he will be next year. Moreover, one Republican operative told me that it was widely assumed within the party that Beshear would win on Tuesday. His strong re-election margin, they argue, is not a glaring cause for concern.

  Kentucky is not competitive statewide in federal races, so it’s not as if his victory will affect the Electoral College or the Senate when those seats are up. (Although Beshear’s win could mean that current law—which states that if there’s a Senate vacancy, the successor will come from the past senator’s party—could be litigated in court.) Beshear has a dynamo family political brand, and Republicans regard his talent as on par with that of John Bel Edwards, Louisiana’s outgoing Democratic governor, who won two terms in a deeply Republican state. Once his term limit hit, Republicans seized power and the state reverted to its ideological mean.

• G.O.P. wasteland: Despite these arguments, it’s worth pointing out that the House G.O.P. appears on track to waste the entire fall. September and October’s legislative agenda evaporated in the speaker race anarchy, and there is no clear plan to keep the government open next week. Currently, censure resolutions—a highly abnormal practice in past congresses—are eating up floor time. Indeed, Capitol Hill is not passing the kind of legislation that provides vulnerable House incumbents with small policy wins to take back to their constituents. This congressional term is not yet halfway over, but every day it’s becoming more difficult to pass legislation.
• The best-laid plans… : Democrats I’ve spoken with lately concede they were only cautiously optimistic about election night and bracing for split decisions. But as the final votes are counted, they say they are particularly happy with results in local races—district attorney and state legislative contests, etcetera—that correspond with competitive congressional districts in Virginia and New York. In particular, they saw reason for optimism in the Hudson Valley, where Democrat Pat Ryan and Republicans Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro are facing stiff competition next year. Down in Virginia, Democrats are buoyed by the possibility of defeating G.O.P. Rep. Jen Kiggans in 2024 and holding a possible vacancy in Abigail Spanberger’s seat, should she retire ahead of a 2025 gubernatorial run.

  Speaking of Spanberger, she may be the darling of the night. For months, she’s been raising money for state legislative Democratic candidates and supporting the state party. The third-termer has yet to officially announce her future plans, but either way, there are no assurances her path to the nomination will be a walk. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney is a fellow Virginia up-and-comer, and the two Democrats may be on a collision course in the 2025 primary. As for the outlook on Virginia, the state seems to be settling in as a more reliably blue state prone to the occasional, unpredictable red mood swing.

Broadly speaking, there is a cyclone of frustration building among non-Biden-affiliated Democrats in town, who feel that the president is truly vulnerable to Trump. And that frustration was compounded this week by a belief that the White House took an unearned victory lap after the positive electoral developments on Tuesday: Gov. Andy Beshear’s re-election in Kentucky, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s humbling in Virginia, the referendum protecting abortion access in Ohio. “[Tuesday] confirmed that the Democrats should lead with abortion, not Joe Biden,” said a Democratic operative close to party leadership. “People are going to tell him that he’s fine because they make millions of dollars off of him.”

Yes, people outside the White House have been known to second-guess those working inside the building—and Biden’s team, in particular, is accustomed to the criticism—but there is a genuine panic that the president’s advisers are not sufficiently freaked out. A number of people pointed me to the appearance of surrogates on cable news, taking credit for the battleground triumphs, suggesting it’s a harbinger for 2024 and a victory for team Biden. Indeed, the Biden-Harris Twitter handle specifically blamed the media for sleeping on their big wins and fixating on “random Democratic consultants who fear Democrats can’t win under Joe Biden”—a shot, perhaps, at Axelrod. (A tweet from former White House official Kate Bedingfield particularly rankled some. “Polls come and polls go—votes are forever,” she wrote, linking to her op-ed arguing that Biden has some real work to do. “Or at least until the next Election Day. A terrific night for Dems last night with some great signals from voters to help them navigate 2024.”)

These people pointed out, obviously, that Biden wasn’t on the ballot on Tuesday and he didn’t campaign on the issues or for the candidates. Some have argued that Biden, for his part, has not tackled abortion head on. (The Biden campaign pushed back, saying they’ve held 50 reproductive rights events.) Instead, his team seems hopeful that just the idea of abortion protections on the ballot (and the threat of Trump) will mobilize their voters. “Every consultant in town is thinking ‘You idiots, you are winning in spite of everything, not because of Biden,’” said one of those Biden-skeptic consultants, noting that off-year elections tend to benefit Democrats because their activists come out, especially those driven by abortion rights.

The day after the elections, campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told reporters: “Time and time again, Joe Biden beats expectations. He did in 2020. He did it in 2022. And he did it Tuesday night. But still, we see the same pattern. Days and weeks and months of breathless predictions about how terrible things are going to be for Joe Biden. Followed by an election day with historic victories. Followed by the same ramp-up of the same unrelenting negative coverage.”

Of course, the recent, panic-inducing Times/Siena poll largely backed up what the chattering class has been saying for months: The party’s ideas are popular, it’s the candidate who is the problem. Not only is he too old, these people argue, but his numbers are particularly soft among Black, Hispanic and young voters, and especially in the six battleground states that matter. Even more jarring, according to the Times/Siena poll, a generic Democrat beats Trump by 8 points, while Biden loses to Trump by 5. “This is not a Democratic problem, this is a Joe Biden problem,” said one Democratic operative close to party leadership. “The polls are real. The only people carrying the torch for Joe work for Joe.”

A Morning Consult poll last month found that Biden’s unfavorables were shockingly high in the battleground states: 55 percent in Michigan and Georgia; 56 percent in North Carolina; 57 percent in Pennsylvania; and 58 percent in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. “You have some Democrats who are like, ‘This is a five-alarm fire! We’re fucked! We need to fix this!” the operative said. “[The Biden] side says, ‘It’s too early, polls are polls.’ The problem is that his numbers are Jimmy Carter, Trump [2020]-level bad.” Putting it less elegantly, this operative continued: “It’s bad, it’s really fucking bad. I think the tide is really turning. Between the lawsuits against Trump that have completely backfired and Biden seeming older and older, it’s like, ‘Oh fuck, what’s the alternative?’”

Nevertheless, the speculation surrounding a potential Biden backup candidate continues. The latest parlor game in town is how the Democratic Party might actually go about swapping candidates, if need be, given that the primary filing deadlines have already passed for Nevada, South Carolina, and other states with delegates. Some are whispering about the potential for a brokered convention next summer, when Biden could be convinced by party leaders—people he respects, like Obama, Jim Clyburn, and Nancy Pelosi—to step down if his numbers are still dismal.

Popular Democratic governors Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzker, and Gavin Newsom have all launched political groups in recent months, ostensibly to support Biden’s re-election and elevate other Democrats, but also, obviously, to elevate themselves. Regardless, a new face would get instant name ID from the media spectacle, these people say. “It’s like a new product launch” surmised one of the operatives close to party leadership. “You’re overnight famous, you just have to be under the age of 60.”

Now that Youngkin’s bid is dead, his absence could unlock a number of wealthy donors who have yet to fully commit to a candidate, including Thomas Peterffy, Paul Singer, and Ken Griffin. As for the co-hosts of the Klein event in D.C., they include a number of power players among the K-Street set: Manisha and Roy Kapani, who have also supported Youngkin in the past; Susan Neely of the American Council of Life Insurers; Sidley Austin’s Justin Savage; and Daimler Trucks’ external affairs VP David M. Trebing.

At least Democrats don’t need to worry about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who launched his presidential campaign with Democratic branding and is now running as an independent after the ecstatic reception he received in the right-wing universe. Indeed, Republicans of the more conspiratorial ilk have rallied around the Kennedy campaign after his many appearances on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s Twitter/X show. Kennedy has also gotten a boost from Steve Bannon, who shares a book publisher with Kennedy in Skyhorse, and who frequently muses on his War Room podcast about how Kennedy could be Trump’s running mate.

Not surprisingly, it turns out, the same cohort that enjoys Trump’s conspiracy theorizing has fallen in love with Kennedy, a vocal anti-vaccine activist who has gone much further than Trump, and further than most elected Republican lawmakers, in denouncing Covid science. Also not surprisingly, various polls now show Kennedy pulling more votes from Trump than from Biden. I asked Bannon if he had any regrets about talking up Kennedy, and of course his answer was no. He doesn’t believe the polls that include third-party candidates. (He does, however, believe the Times poll that shows Trump leading Biden.)

“Bobby Kennedy helped in the primary because he took all the sting out of DeSantis, so he couldn’t land a glove on Trump or Fauci or the vaccine,” Bannon told me, dismissing the recent polls and standing by his theory that Kennedy won’t hurt Trump. “That’s all DeSantis had at the end of the day, the only difference he had on Trump was the vaccine. Other than that, he’s just a mini-me.”