“His intense ground game—you can’t underestimate the power of that,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science. “Even from political science research, we know that the most effective way to get people to turn out is face-to-face contact. He’s doing a lot of that. …He’s got tons of volunteers.”

Baobao Zhang, Maxwell Dean Associate Professor of the Politics of AI, says that the administration may have been willing to give up on the moratorium in order to push through the rest of the bill by its self-imposed Independence Day deadline.

“In theory, what we want is the election that really decides who is going to serve in government to be one that was a higher-turnout election where campaigns, candidates, platforms, policies made some sort of difference in the outcome,” says Assistant Teaching Professor Richard Barton. “But most of those general elections are just not competitive, and they’re not consequential.”