Hello and happy Saturday. If you’ve been missing the thrill of campaign season—the endless emails soliciting your donations, the commercials from candidates castigating their opponents and begging for your vote, the cable news panels breathlessly debating whether a candidate’s latest misstep is a mere blunder or absolutely fatal—this week was probably pretty exciting for you. And if you’re not that kind of person, you might have been wishing that we were like those other countries with parliaments and prime ministers where the election season lasts a couple of months, tops.

As Chris Stirewalt noted in his Friday newsletter, “the belief that somehow this would be the cycle with a slow start or how certain candidates would be exempt from the normal indignities and vicissitudes of the two-year slog in pursuit of power is revealed as a bunch of hokum.”

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is out and about hawking a new book, Ron DeSantis is launching new fronts in his war on wokism, and Donald Trump must be feeling the heat—he called for an end to federal funding for any school that teaches critical race theory or gender ideology and proposed the direct election of … school principals? Trump is also making visits to early primary states New Hampshire and South Carolina today. 

Heck, as Nick writes in Boiling Frogs (🔐), Marjorie Taylor Greene is basically running for vice president already.