Senator Strange will not be back in Washington next year. Senator Corker will not be here in 2019. And Senator Flake may not be either.

What do these three GOP Senators have in common?

The primary system. Senator Strange was beaten by it. Senator Corker got scared into retirement by it. And Senator Flake is gearing up to be challenged by it.

As Anthony King wrote 20 years ago in his wonderful article The Vulnerable American Politician, the U.S. electoral system is an outlier among democracies in creating unsafe incumbent politicians. American legislators face more elections than politicians in other countries, they are forced to raise their own money for campaigns, they must succumb to nomination challenges via ballot, and the weak American parties provide them little cover from constituents angry at their policy choices. King described many of the well-known consequences of this reality: members are hyperresponsive to consituents, have short 2-year time horizons for policy decisions, spend lots of time raising money, and often bring a risk-averse outlook toward tough policy decisions.

What is fascinating in the contemporary political environment is that many members of Congress occupy districts where their main vulnerability is not in the general election, but in the primary. The rise of so-called “safe seats” is a well identified trend going back over a generation; Mayhew identified his vanishing marginals in 1974. But the safe seat designation is a misnomer; the seats are only safe in the general election. Members are secure only to the degree they can forestall a credible primary challenger on the left (if they are a Democrat) or the right (if they are a Republican). And so Members vulnerable to these challenges spend a lot of time positioning themselves as solid liberals and conservatives.

The interesting developments are on the right. Since 2010, conservative politicians have increasingly run and won elections by tapping into voter and activist anti-Washington and anti-establishment sentiment in these safe districts. Sometimes they have defeated incumbents for nominations and won general elections (Mike Lee; probably Roy Moore); other times they have won open-seat primaries just to lose to Democrats in otherwise winnable seats (O’Donnell in Delaware; Angle in Nevada); sometimes they have unseated incumbents in primaries and gone on to lose general elections (Mourdock over Lugar in Indiana). The threat of such a challenge may also scare incumbents into retirement, who would rather go out on their own terms than face an embarrassing primary loss.

As the GOP base moves further to the right in its anti-Washington and anti-establishment thinking, the trend appears to be accelerating. After the victory by Moore over Strange this week, Steve Bannon has pledged to begin recruiting primary challengers across the country, in an effort unseat GOP incumbents who are not sufficiently populist or anti-establishment. In addition to Corker’s seat and the challenge to Flake, this may add Senator Wicker (MS) to the target list and a host of moderate House Republicans.

The dilemma for many incumbent GOP legislators is stark. Part of the attack upon them is that they are insufficiently anti-establishment, evidenced by the fact that they are too cozy with the congressional leaders. But defining the congressional leadership as tantamout to “the establisment” eates an intractable problem under the populist never-compromise ideology of the far right. Leaders in Washington *have* to compromise, because our system of government demands it; the only other choice is to get nothing done. So each GOP incumbent is in the uncomfortable spot of potentially facing a primary challenger who will accuse them of cozying up to the leadership and selling out to the establishment, all the while knowing that the only choices they have in DC are to either work with the leadership to accomplish things or join the chorus of anti-establishment attacks that make headlines but accomplish little concrete policy.

I was discussing this (in more simple terms) with my 9-year old last night, and it dawned on her that there’s a serious recursive problem here. You can win a primary and defeat an incumbent, but the moment you attempt to work with the leadership, you will yourself be exposed to a primary challenge on *your* right, as you have now become a compromising member of the establishment. To some degree, this is true almost regardless of ideology; once the leadership in Washington has become the hated establishment, it becomes in some ways its own substitute for ideology. The deals themselves are the enemy.

Of course, this is even more plainly true for the leaders, who are stuck in a similar game with their conferences. You can remove them (Boehner; maybe Ryan and McConnell), but anyone who takes the job will instantly be forced to make deals and become part of the establishment. And so you have the recursive problem facing both sides of the GOP right now; neither the leaders or followers can cut deals in Washington without exposing themselves to someone’s wrath. The rank-and-file are scared of the primary challengers, and the leaders are scared of the rank-and-file.

There’s an old belief that the world is flat, and lays on the back of a turtle, who himself is standing on a larger turtle. When the curious student asks the teacher what the larger turtle is standing on, he is met with a terse response. “It’s turtles, all the way down.” As we stand at the beginning of the 2018 primary preseason, you may be tempted to ask a similar question to the one my daughter posed last night. Where does this end?

Quite possibly, it’s primaries, all the way down.

It has dawned on many people this week that the devastating hurricane that has hit Puerto Rico is not getting as much attention as those that recently hit Florida or Texas. Likewise, the U.S. response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico has been slow, and a relief package does not appear to be a congressional priority in the same way it was for the previous two hurricanes this season.

Why is that?

A lot of theories are being thrown around. I wrote my dissertation on territorial politics, so I have some relevant knowledge (although I don’t really think this is about territorial politics, per se). Here are seven things that I think are relevant to the situation.

1. Most disaster relief spending is contested, and it can also wear on Congress. Most Members of Congress agree that substantial emergency disaster relief is a reasonable congressional response to hurricanes, but some Members believe disaster relief should be paid for or otherwise offset up front, either on principle or as a specific leverage opportunity to cut spending. You saw this with Sandy, and Harvey, and Irma. It’s not like a hurricane that hits the mainland doesn’t generate contest in Congress over relief. And like most congressional spending, there’s a weariness to it. As the third hurricane, some Members are going to become *more* concerned about the deficit spending, even if that is, in principle, irrational.

2. Puerto Rico has no Senators or Representatives. This is the factor you hear about if you turn Twitter on. And it is certainly true that territories, in general, tend to get less distributional benefits than states. The connection is obvious. But I also think the mechanism isn’t quite as obvious as people think. Three Representatives don’t carry much weight in the House, certainly not enough to leverage those votes as a bloc. Two Senators is better—individuals in the Senate can cause all sorts of procedural problems and thus generally have more leverage—but it’s still not, on its own as a pair of votes, that much leverage.

The more hidden advantage of having Senators and Representatives is that (1) it creates official advocates who will make disaster relief their singular intense priority immediately and continuously; and (2) it creates personal relationships between these advocates and other Members of Congress, relationships that have both a history and a future. Right now, there’s no Senator with a direct constituent concern for Puerto Rico, nor any Senator with a personal relationship with such a Senator. Those things matter, perhaps as much or more than a few votes on the floor. But the most important reason it would help PR to have Senators is…

3. Many Americans don’t see PR as part of the United States. For better or worse, people are going to be more willing to support disaster relief for places that are in the United States than they are for random places in the world. Most Americans probably think of Puerto Rico as somewhere between “part of the United States” and “some random place in the world.” If Puerto Rico has two Senators and its full complement of Representatives (probably 3), it would unmistakably be part of the United States (like Hawaii) and many Americans would be more likely to see people who live there as part of the shared community in which they are obliged to support disaster relief, without question. Presumably, many Americans don’t realize Puerto Rican citizens are U.S. citizens. That can’t help. It would unambiguously be an island with millions of U.S. citizens  if it was as state and had full representation in Congress.

4. Puerto Rico *isn’t* part of the U.S. the way the Arizona Territory was. The relationship between the U.S. and its external territories, especially Puerto Rico, is complicated. Puerto Rican citizens are U.S. citizens, pay social security taxes, and have rights to move to the mainland at any time. On the other hand, most don’t pay federal income taxes, they can’t vote in the presidential election, and they don’t have a traditional territorial government (for instance, the governor is elected by the people rather than appointed by POTUS). They also have a political and cultural history distinct from the United States. So relative to the mainland territories of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Puerto Rico is somewhat more like “some random place in the world.”

5. Racism. I have no doubt that one factor related to all of this is that Puerto Rico has a large non-white population (the exact demographics are tough to know, because self reporting of white/Mestizo/Latino/mixed is a complication). To what degree this is an independent factor rather than just an input into why people don’t see PR as part of the United States is hard to discern. After all, Hawaii has a non-white supermajority, and while that probably creates some hostility from those on the mainland, it doesn’t seem to be a driving factor in distributional politics against the state. The official languages of Puerto Rico are Spanish and English, but Spanish is spoken by the vast majority of the population. This creates further cultural divides between the island and the mainland, and may create additional cultural racism.

6. Media Infrastructure. One problem after the hurricane was that there was little or no U.S. media on the island to report back pictures or video of the devastation. This is in part derivative of the already-mentioned factors, particularly the Spanish language culture and the “foreign” perception of the island, but also because it is, well, an island. It’s not an easy place to get to; if a hurricane wiped out  Chicago, you’d have camera crews driving in from everywhere to let people know about it. If an island goes down in the Caribbean and loses communications, it’s just not easy to get there quickly with the infrastructure to do good immediate reporting.

7. Presidential leadership, or lack thereof. If the President was more interested in the devastation in Puerto Rico, there would have been much more attention paid and a much quicker response. But he wasn’t/isn’t and so there wasn’t. As Jonathan Bernstein pointed out this morning, the president spent the weekend fighting with the NFL and when he finally got around to Puerto Rico, he sort of blamed their debt crisis for their predicament. This stands in contrast to his statements and actions after Harvey and Irma, which were normal and well-received, if not particularly distinguishing. Nothing has the power to focus politics on a particular event like the bully-pulpit of the president. Trump’s lack of agenda control has been obvious for a while, and as in other cases it’s not clear whether it’s odd strategic choices, incompetence, or just a lack of message discipline.

Of the seven items on this list, I think the fundamental one is #3, that most Americans don’t see Puerto Rico as part of their national community. Of course, as discussed above many of the items are endogenous and so I definitely agree that if Puerto Rico had Senators, PR would be seen as part of the community and we would have had quicker and more decisive relief action. I’m hopeful that Puerto Rico will ultimately receive a similar package of aid to what Texas and Florida get, but I’m not holding my breath. Opponents will probably do some foot-dragging, and the fact that Puerto Rico *is* exempt from a fair amount of federal taxation does create a slim-reed of an argument that this is in some ways foreign aid and the Puerto Ricans less deserving of our help than the Floridians. But remember, Puerto Rico is a devastatingly poor place (it would be the poorest state per capita if it was a state) within the United States, and for that reason alone it probably deserves more of our federal generosity during a disaster than more prosperous areas of the country.