Around this time a year ago, President Trump and his MAGA acolytes saw North Carolina as a trough at which they could gluttonously feed.

They decided that its U.S. House delegation of 10 Republicans and four Democrats — already a mockery of a purple state with roughly equal numbers of voters in each party — wasn’t lopsided enough, so they successfully pressured Republicans in the State Legislature to gerrymander the existing gerrymander, with the aim of an 11-3 split after the midterms.

They envisioned oodles of money pouring into North Carolina to ensure that its 2026 Senate contest went Republicans’ way and that Democrats, who hadn’t won a Senate race in the state since 2008, continued their losing streak. How confident they were. How cocky. How premature.

Last week, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a prominent newsletter that tracks elections, changed its ratings for North Carolina’s First and 11th Congressional Districts, once thought to be Trump territory, to “leans Democratic,” reflecting a continued nationwide mood shift in favor of Democrats. That update coincided with the release of an Emerson College poll that put Jamie Ager, the Democratic nominee in the 11th, an astonishing 13 percentage points ahead of the Republican nominee, Jennifer Balkcom.

If Democrats indeed prevailed in the 11th and the First, North Carolina’s U.S. House delegation after the midterms would probably be nine Republicans and five Democrats. Political analysts in North Carolina tell me that such an outcome is as good a bet as any.

The Senate contest also hasn’t gone as Republicans expected. Early this month, The Times reported that a major Republican super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, would stop spending money on television ads for Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee. In poll after poll, he has failed to close the gap between him and the Democratic nominee, Roy Cooper, who currently leads Whatley by about 10 percentage points, according to an average of recent voter surveys.

All in all, North Carolina is poised to prove that a president and a political party can’t outrun reality, not with shady scheming, not with mountains of cash, not with all the swagger and bluster in the world. It’s also demonstrating that the deep cynicism, deep fakes and deeply entrenched partisanship of our era haven’t rendered certain principles obsolete. The quality of candidates matters. So does the quality of their campaigns. North Carolina, my home for the past five and a half years, is reassuring me of that. It’s giving me hope for the future.

Of course nothing’s certain, and Republicans haven’t wholly surrendered the fight here. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance separately visited and held rallies in North Carolina last week, intent on reinvigorating their party’s most loyal voters.

But an Elon University poll that was released last week showed what a hostile environment Trump and Vance were entering. Only 34 percent of North Carolina adults approved of Trump’s job performance while 57 percent disapproved. North Carolinians’ frustrations with the economy and misgivings about the president are so palpable that Michael Bitzer, a professor of history and political science at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., questioned the usefulness of a Trump rally here.

“I haven’t seen the kind of energy and enthusiasm on the Republican side that you would think these high-profile visits would bring,” Bitzer told me. “I’m almost wondering if it’s having a backfire effect. It’s going to rile up Democrats even more.”Those Democrats are already plenty riled. Representative Deborah Ross, a Democrat whose seat in North Carolina’s Second Congressional District is safe, told me that the degree of Democratic enthusiasm and the scope of efforts to turn out the Democratic vote remind her of 2008, which was the last time not only that Democrats won a Senate contest but also that a Democratic presidential candidate — Barack Obama — won North Carolina. “People are putting it all on the line,” she said.

The prospect of Democratic triumphs here is mostly about national dynamics, and it’s consistent with reappraisals of Democrats’ chances in House and Senate races across the country.

But the North Carolina story is also one of smart choices and discipline — virtues that the Democratic Party has not exhibited in abundance over recent years. It was smart of Democratic leaders to press Cooper, who was North Carolina’s governor from 2017 to 2025, to run for the Senate seat that Thom Tillis, a Republican, is vacating after two terms. Cooper’s name recognition, proven popularity among the state’s voters and moderate image made him a daunting opponent for any Republican nominee.

And he has run a disciplined campaign whose focus on affordability is almost comical in its folksiness, as I wrote in July. “Make Stuff Cost Less” is his slogan. His rallies are part of the Make Stuff Cost Less tour. The culture war? To hear him talk — about utility bills, grocery prices, health insurance — is to forget it even exists.

Representative Don Davis, the Democratic nominee in the First Congressional District, has painstakingly emphasized votes and beliefs that position him as moderate. That’s the only sane strategy in territory dominated by Republicans and independents who favored Trump in 2024. After that contest, the district was redrawn to make it even Trumpier, with the goal of replacing Davis with a Republican. But what polling there is suggests a tight, winnable race against his Republican challenger, Laurie Buckhout.

A series of developments have put the 11th Congressional District — in a largely rural patch of western North Carolina — into play. The Republican incumbent, Representative Chuck Edwards, ended his re-election campaign shortly before the House censured him in September for inappropriate conduct with young women on his staff. That left the party scrambling for a last-minute replacement — and meant that Ager, the Democratic nominee, had a huge head start.

More important than that, Ager has an ideal profile for a Democrat running on red turf. With a father and brother who have served in the North Carolina Legislature, he knows politics, but his occupation — he operates Hickory Nut Gap Farms, which has been in his family for generations — doesn’t carry even a whiff of the establishment. Good luck finding a photo of Ager in a jacket and tie. He’s more likely in flannel or outerwear, near pigs or wooden fences.

“He’s the guy who Democrats wanted Graham Platner to be,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me. “He really is a farmer. He really runs Hickory Nut.”And he has a real knack for connecting with the district’s voters, said Cooper, who mentioned an annual parade in Canton, N.C., where Ager and his Republican opponent, Balkcom, both showed up. “She was riding a float,” Cooper said. “Jamie Ager was in the crowd, pressing the flesh.”

Matt Ballance, a former Democratic chairman for the 11th District, called Ager “a kind of silver bullet for this district.”“We can’t win it with the standard current Democrat,” he said. But with Ager? According to recent financial reports, Balkcom had raised less than $400,000 by the end of September; she had about $300,000 of that on hand. Ager had raised about $5.4 million, with $1.6 million on hand.

That speaks to his hustle, his shrewdness, his ardor. He’s not the only North Carolina Democrat with those gifts, which Trump’s corruption of the truth and attacks on the voting process can’t snuff out.

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For the Love of Sentences In The Times, Sarah Karnasiewicz savored the uncommonly diverse forms of a common fruit: “Snow White’s apple may have been crimson and comely, but these days some of the most exciting varieties in American orchards are old, odd and decidedly unpolished. Their names have the ring of Dickensian villains — Esopus Spitzenburg, Cornish Gilliflower, Fearns Pippin, Hubbardston Nonesuch — and their flavors vary from honeyed sweetness to dark clove spice.” (Thanks to Mary Margaret McGuire of San Simeon, Calif., for nominating this.)

Also in The Times, Amelia Nierenberg recognized that Danish diners’ current romance with sliced cheese on fresh bread is a 180-degree turn “from the best-known Danish cuisine, which has been foraged, fermented and tweezered into submission over the last two decades.” (Jennifer Rothschild, Englewood, Colo., and Jean Knorr, Charlottesville, Va.)

And Samuel A.A. Levine evoked a classic Eagles song to recount his futile interactions with a customer service chatbot: “I had stumbled into the digital labyrinth — a veritable Hotel California, and I was just a prisoner of my own device.” (Andrew R. Zinn, Dallas, and Kelly Frederick, Los Angeles, among others) In The Ringer, Brian Phillips charted the humiliation of the American military under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who prematurely declared victory in Iran, depleted our arsenal and emboldened our rivals: “If he were actually working for China, he would be their employee of the year.” (Chloe Wynns, Chicago) In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis noticed President Trump’s fixation on the hotness of various men in his orbit, including a comrade up for re-election: “Step forward, Jon Husted of Ohio, with your glorious, rippling glutes and your valiant crusade against energy-efficient dishwashers. At a campaign stop for the Republican senator in Dayton, Trump discovered that Husted used to be a star football player. Naturally, the president looked for evidence of this in Husted’s buttocks — the windows to the soul.”

Trump perhaps benefits from such effusions about male pulchritude. “Campiness is key to his political appeal — it’s the secret sauce that transforms nastiness into showbiz sass. Trump is politics’ answer to Joan Rivers, and his persona is influenced by all the flavors of American fakery: the carnival barker, the reality-TV host, the kayfabe world of professional wrestling. He looks like a man doing a drag performance as himself.” (Fred H. Lawson, Bodega Bay, Calif., and Howard Caro, San Francisco, among others) Also in The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri reacted to remarks in which Steve Witkoff, a U.S. special envoy, called Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian”: “My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.” (Helen Scott, Queens, N.Y., and Hilarie Lennan, Media, Pa.)

In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi treated the books mentioned in Usha Vance’s Goodreads account as rune stones: “‘Arwa,’ you might say, ‘you’re reading way too much into this!’ Of course I am. I have a degree in English literature: That’s three years of explaining how doorknobs in Jane Austen novels represent the hollowness of colonialism.” (David Clohessy, St. Louis) And in the weekly publication Seven Days, Mary Ann Lickteig described how Neil Shah, a Vermont software engineer, developed a device that works with an app to let people know when their wood stoves need tending: “Shah has created a Jetsons solution to a Flintstones problem.” (Angela Simpson, Burlington, Vt.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

What I’m Watching Netflix recently released a new season of “The Diplomat,” and once again, I found myself howling at the story’s implausibility, rolling my eyes at the tape loop of the two main characters’ preposterous marriage, devouring the whole of it and having a grand time. “The Diplomat” isn’t about international intrigue and political gamesmanship, though some of its plotting, especially in the final three of the season’s eight episodes, is electric. It’s about tremendously skilled actors (Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell, Allison Janney, Nana Mensah, Ali Ahn) delivering smart, stylized and precisely cadenced dialogue in regally decorated rooms. Works for me.

Enough praise has been heaped on “You Can See Everything,” about the fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, that I feel compelled to play the contrarian. That’s not hard. As mesmerizing as the documentary can be, its three-hour length is indefensible, the result of a preciously high-concept, tedious final hour and the moviemakers’ decision to let almost every sniffle, every sob, every staring contest play out for twice as long as need be.

The movie’s melodramatic score and extreme close-ups give it a campy quality that becomes grating as the minutes tick by. And its principal characters — including the comic Nathan Fielder, who directed the movie with Lance Oppenheim and points the camera at himself as often as at his interview subjects — beseech attention so aggressively that it can feel icky to reward them with it. Retire These Words!

Many of you write in with excellent suggestions for words and phrases that warrant exile. But in some cases, I’ve covered that terrain in editions of the newsletter that you missed. So I thought it might be worthwhile to provide a bit of a map to semantic sins already exposed. I’m not sure that what follows is complete, but if not, it’s close. Each link leads you to the newsletter in which a given lament of mine appeared, almost always at the end, after other topics.

My first target, back in August 2022, was “unpack.”I subsequently cried foul at the ubiquity of “amazing” and at the banality of “it is what it is.”I pleaded for the sunset of “at the end of the day.”I noted the false promise of “long story short.”When everything is an “existential” crisis, nothing is; the same goes for people, events and objects idolized as “iconic.”And when someone qualifies an observation with the defensive words “in all honesty,” a discerning reader or listener braces for at least a dab of falsity.

Something that’s not machine made isn’t ipso facto “handcrafted,” a description I’ve seen applied to deli sandwiches, for salami’s sake. And you can select something without “curating” it, at least if you’re willing to part with your pretensions.

Pretentiousness is the handmaiden of many grating words and phrases whose retirement I’ve lobbied for: An experience needn’t be a “journey,” a partisan propaganda operation is not a “think tank” and most writers and scholars do not qualify as “thought leaders” and “public intellectuals,” no matter how readily they accept those labels.

Nonsensical dog metaphors are too prevalent in conversation and prose, and our political discussions are polluted by such jargon as these terms and these and these and let us not forget this. We suffer verbal ignominies brought about by, or associated with, the current tenant of the White House, and we should be spared forevermore from “Trump derangement syndrome,” from any four-word phrase that begins with “make” and ends with “again,” and from “trump” as a verb outside the realm of a card game.

We also serve too many “word salads” in which “community” is presumptuously used. We bemoan “pearl clutching” as if there’s no alternative expression for exaggerated offense.

We applaud a “laser focus” in people whose concentration doesn’t seem remarkable at all. The phrase “happy wife, happy life” is often sexist and always dopey. “Sleeping with” is needlessly coy — own and enjoy the sex you’re having. And let’s avoid so many double negatives. They’re not without merit (oops!), but they’re indirect routes — journeys, if you will! — to destinations reachable more quickly and cleanly.

“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions.

Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni •