|  Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty The staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells recently travelled to Ohio to report on the state’s contentious Republican Senate primary. Ahead of Election Day, we talked about what the outcome might tell us about the midterms and the future of the G.O.P. After months of speculation, Donald Trump endorsed J. D. Vance in the race. But, as recently as Sunday, during a rally, Trump mentioned that his guy “J. D. Mandel” was doing great—so maybe he’s not so invested in the particulars. But how has his official endorsement changed things? It’s organized the race without deciding it yet. J. D. Vance has very clearly received a bump. Also pretty clearly, the only real Trump-skeptical candidate in the race, a millionaire named Matt Dolan, received a big bump, too, and is now running second or third in recent polls. Broadly, the whole month of primaries is a really high-stakes test for how much control Trump still has over the Party—which is obviously important for Trump, but also important for the rest of us because of how direct his challenge to liberal democracy remains. Right now, this fundamental thing about American democracy is being tested, which is, Is this whole Party behind Trump or not—and you can see evidence pointing in both directions. From what you’ve seen, what kind of new hybrid strain of Trumpism is going to be the most effective heading into the midterms this fall? The idea of what Trump meant that was most popular at the outset of the primary season is the one embodied in Ohio by Josh Mandel—that Trumpism represented a license to be cruder and more aggressive and more partisan, without any particular change in conservative policies or aims. What Vance represents is perhaps a more interesting proposition, which is to embrace the ideas that Trump sometimes talked about and sometimes didn’t, but that got caught up in Trumpism, of anti-élitism—a politics that organizes itself against corporations rather than for them, against élites here and overseas, against traditional American diplomatic commitments. Vance represents a more doctrinaire America Firstism. In terms of economic interests and commitments, Vance, even clearer than Trump himself, seeks to break with traditional Republican ideas. Then there is Mike Gibbons, a candidate whom one opposing political consultant described to me as a “sloppy plutocrat.” He represents the idea that what had been essential about Trump was that he was an outsider and a businessman. Last of all is Jane Timken, who had a kind of disastrous candidacy. She hired as her consultants Corey Lewandowski, Kellyanne Conway, and David Bossie—a bunch of people who were very close to Trump. That’s also a live idea in the Republican Party—maybe Trumpism didn’t really mean anything except the ascendancy of a specific group of people close to this one man. In different states with different candidates taking up these different strains, you might have a different outcome. What this pattern in this race shows is that the question of what Trump’s dominance over the Party has meant, and what it derives from, and where it goes, is still totally up for grabs. Read more of the interview here, including an explanation for why Ohio has turned so red, so fast. Plus: the polls close in Ohio at 7:30 P.M. E.T. Follow the results on our live election map. | 
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