After their party was decimated in the 2008 elections, mainstream Republican leaders believed they could harness rising far-right populist forces. Instead, they were overrun by them.
For Republicans in 2008, he briefly became a symbol of Middle America when he questioned the presidential candidate Barack Obama in an impromptu televised encounter.
A decade after the Affordable Care Act’s federal health insurance marketplace was created, its outsize — and improbable — popularity in South Florida persists.
The former Alaska governor, once the standard-bearer of the G.O.P.’s dog-whistling, no-apologies culture, was no match for the same forces she rode to national prominence.