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In 2006, just before Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican strategist Dan Schnur told NPR that “if you’re a Republican trying to warn voters against a Democratic vote, even for one of these more moderate candidates, you can say ‘San Francisco values,’ you can mention Nancy Pelosi, and the point you can make in almost a verbal shorthand is to say, ‘Hey, look, these are tax-raising, terrorist-loving, same-sex marriage supporting, ultra-liberal Democrats who aren’t like you and me.’”

So it’s been for the last 12 years. Pelosi’s name has become a shibboleth, brandished in countless Republican attack ads against Democratic candidates for the House. This year, ahead of the fall midterms, the strategy has only intensified. As USA Today reported in April, a third of all GOP broadcast ads for House races this year featured the Democratic leader—up from 9 percent in 2016 and 13 percent in 2014.

Some Democrats fear the strategy is working, costing the party votes and possibly endangering the predicted “blue wave” in November. “People pretend that it isn’t a problem, but it’s a problem that exists,” Representative Brian Higgins, a New York Democrat, told The Washington Post. Even if Democrats still win the House, Republican consultant Ken Spain said, “it could be the difference between having a razor-thin majority and a governing majority. It’s a lot easier to move legislation when you have a cushion of votes to work with.”

To move House legislation, of course, the party will need a House leader. But it’s not clear, amid a growing mutiny, that Pelosi will retain the position she’s held for the past dozen years—nor is there a clear alternative. That’s why the real Pelosi conundrum for Democrats isn’t on the campaign trail; it’s in the House come January.

The midterms are still a few months away, but the signs are promising for the opposition party. Democratic turnout is up. According to recent polls, voters prefer Democrats in Congress over Republicans—even in deeply conservative regions like western Virginia. In generic congressional ballots, Democrats currently lead Republicans by an average of 5 points, and new candidates have either upset Republicans in historically red districts or at least closed wide gaps.

While the party regains its footing in the Trump era, though, its leadership seems less certain. NBC News reported last week that over 50 Democratic candidates have declined to back Pelosi’s continued leadership. Among the rank-and-file, anti-Pelosi sentiment seems even stronger. About half of Democratic voters say they’d support a new party leader over Pelosi.

This opposition to Pelosi’s leadership did not appear overnight. Dissent has grown slowly for years, and it now seems to unite the party’s left and moderate wings. Left-wing candidates tend to oppose Pelosi because they find her fearsome “San Francisco values” not very far to the left at all. In 2016, she rejected Senator Bernie Sanders’s suggestion that the government could raise taxes to pay for his social welfare policies. And in 2017, she declined to endorse Sanders’s single-payer health care bill. In its 2017 report card on Congress, the website GovTrack ranked Pelosi as the 37th most conservative House Democrat, out of 197.

Pelosi might be a more natural ally to moderate Democrats, but lately they aren’t interested in her support, either. Pennsylvania’s Conor Lamb disavowed Pelosi during his successful campaign for the House; so did Danny O’Connor, who nearly achieved an upset victory in Ohio’s 12th congressional district. The one challenge to Pelosi’s leadership has also come from the party’s moderate wing. Ohio Representative Tim Ryan unsuccessfully ran against Pelosi for the party’s leadership in 2016, but re-emerged recently as a possible successor: Politico reported last month that Ryan is privately considering another challenge.

While left-wing and moderate Democrats seem unified in their disdain for Pelosi, there is no clear unity candidate to replace her as leader. Ryan, who won the support of one third of the Democratic caucus in 2016, might be able to unify the party’s center and center-right. His views have evolved during his time in office—he no longer opposes abortion rights, for example, and he supports Medicare for All—but he is still a moderate. He recently told Politico that he “would not be mad” if the outlet said that he considered himself a younger version of former Vice President Joe Biden. (He ranks 60th on that GovTrack list.)

A Ryan leadership might spare candidates targeted by the GOP (“Youngstown values” doesn’t have the same ring as “San Francisco values”), but he’s not likely to get support from left-wing Democrats. “You’re not going to make me hate somebody just because they’re rich. I want to be rich!” Ryan joked recently at a conference held by Third Way, the centrist think tank. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, two democratic socialists who are almost certain to enter the House this fall, probably don’t see the humor in Ryan’s remarks. Many Democratic voters might not either, given evidence that the party’s base now views socialism more favorably than capitalism.

But left-wing Democrats don’t have an obvious alternative to Ryan, which points to the real problem with Pelosi. “They come after me because I’m effective,” Pelosi told Rolling Stone in July. She was referring to Republicans, but could well have been referring to Democrats, too. Her skill as a parliamentarian is unquestionable, as when she shepherded the Affordable Care Act through a fractious Congress. She’s also an accomplished fundraiser for her colleagues. She is effective, which is partly why she’s been a congresswoman since 1987 and has steered the party since 2006. But while Pelosi and her fellow leaders held onto power, the party’s backbench has withered. Now, the backbench is rising up—with enough votes to boot Pelosi from power, but not enough to elevate a new leader.

Is Pelosi still “worth the trouble,” as she puts it? Democrats won’t know for sure until next year, but her tenure is certainly in doubt.

Even by the standards of Elon Musk’s wild 2018—which has included production, cash flow, and fire problems at his electric car company Tesla, and a number of reckless and irresponsible tweets—the last week has been insane. Tesla’s trading was halted last Tuesday after Musk tweeted that he planned on taking the company private at $420 a share.

Given Musk’s propensity for using Twitter for pranks, many assumed he was joking. But two days later, with the Securities and Exchange Commission circling (tweeting about taking a company private almost certainly counts as stock manipulation), Musk stuck to his guns. There are still numerous legal hurdles involved, but he confirmed that he is exploring a deal to take the company private, which he believes would create the environment for Tesla “to operate best.” On Monday, he suggested that the money would come from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which had approached him “multiple times” about taking the company private over the past two years.

It very well may be true that Tesla needs to go private to “operate best.” Tesla has had serious cash flow and manufacturing problems as it has tried to ramp up production. Musk also has serious problems dealing with the transparency requirements that come with being a public company. But investors have hardly punished it. Instead, Tesla’s stock has stayed in the $350 range over the past year, even as Musk has done everything possible to dampen enthusiasm for his leadership.

So the question of whether Tesla is a public or a private company seems to point to larger ones: Is Tesla the world-altering car company that Musk and his acolytes claim that it is? If so, is the erratic Musk the right person to lead it? And if not, is it just another cash-burning Silicon Valley darling on the verge of losing its luster?

Musk made his fortune at PayPal and has poured it into Tesla, a company that he sees as part of a larger mission to save the world from environmental ruin. He has also founded SpaceX, a space exploration venture; Boring Company (“hyperloop” travel); and Neuralink, which is pursuing cyborg-ish brain implant technology. While all of these companies play a role in Musk’s public image as a man of the future (or, for his critics, the personification of everything wrong with Silicon Valley technocapitalism), Tesla is his day job and the company with which he is most closely associated.

That Musk is essentially synonymous with Tesla has been a boon for Tesla. Tesla has struggled to meet production targets and laid off nine percent of its staff in June to ensure profitability. It is burning through cash and had its credit rating downgraded by Moody’s in May. One of its self-driving cars crashed on autopilot, killing its driver. And yet the market rewards Tesla for modest successes (and promises of future profitability), thanks in part to confidence in Musk. Even his bizarre tweets (like when he accused a diver involved in the Thai soccer team rescue of being a “pedo”) play into a narrative of the brilliant and eccentric innovator.

There are a lot of advantages to going private. The panoply of venture capital firms in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) could supply the cash that Tesla craves as it inches toward some semblance of sustainability, without worrying about the kinds of targets and disclosures that are required of a public company. And for Musk, it is the transparency of a public company—and the critics and short-sellers transparency attracts—that really bothers him. He has admitted as much, saying:

As a public company, we are subject to wild swings in our stock price that can be a major distraction for everyone working at Tesla, all of whom are shareholders. Being public also subjects us to the quarterly earnings cycle that puts enormous pressure on Tesla to make decisions that may be right for a given quarter, but not necessarily right for the long-term. Finally, as the most shorted stock in the history of the stock market, being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company.

But Musk is mistaken if he thinks that going private will solve these problems. He will continue to own about 20 percent of the company, which means he will still have investors to answer to. Because attorneys for Musk have suggested that new investments will come from a “special-purpose vehicle that is accessible to all shareholders,” the new company would (probably) still be public enough to be expected to produce financial statements. Scrutiny is inevitable, and there’s no reason to suspect that a scarcity of financial information will suddenly make his haters disappear.

It also won’t make Tesla’s larger problems disappear, either. Yes, the company burned through less cash in the second quarter of 2018 (negative cash flow of $740 million) compared to the first (over $1 billion). And Musk claimed in an investor call in early August that he expected progress to continue. But Tesla, founded in 2003, now faces increased competition in the electric car market. It produces 5,000 cars a week, or 260,000 cars a year. (A single BMW plant in South Carolina made nearly 400,000 cars in 2017.) Combined with Musk’s public relations problems, there is no strong sense that Tesla is on the verge of turning a corner.

Wall Street has been very patient with the company. The company’s image as a world-shaking unicorn on the cusp of a major breakthrough has remained intact. Even when Musk has tried to change that narrative with tweets about bankruptcy and odd behavior on earnings calls—which some have speculated is an attempt to sabotage the stock so he can take the company private—the market has largely stuck with him.

This ultimately gets at the absurdity surrounding the company. Musk has done everything possible over the past few months to dampen enthusiasm for Tesla, but it just floats along. Musk may be fond of saying that Tesla is the most shorted company in history, but its short sellers have lost billions as the stock has stubbornly refused to plummet. In this regard, Tesla may not be unique at all. Perhaps it is just another overhyped tech darling, buoyed by an industry that has a history of supporting middling companies with charismatic founders. Sometimes that faith is rewarded. Other times reality eventually catches up.

During the month that the World Cup was broadcast on Florida’s three Telemundo TV stations this summer, one advertisement stood out. It begins with Colombian, Mexican, and Brazilian fans celebrating their national teams. Over a soaring score and a snare drum, a voice cuts in: “We in Florida celebrate because we come from all over the world, and this great state is now our home.” Then Republican Governor Rick Scott appears on camera, the sleeves of his light blue dress shirt rolled up. “I’m Rick Scott,” he says in rapid Spanish. “The time has come to enjoy the games. May the best team win!”

Scott’s $700,000 investment in the ad, which aired at least once a day throughout the World Cup, reaching hundreds of thousands of Latinos across Florida, suggests that he sees their votes as a key element in his strategy to unseat Senator Bill Nelson this fall. The 75-year-old Democratic incumbent hasn’t shown the same interest. While Nelson has taken strong stances on Latino issues, he didn’t invest in any World Cup ads of his own and, as of August, still didn’t have a Spanish-language page on his web site. (Scott does.) Such decisions reveal a cavalier attitude toward Latino voters that isn’t just a problem for Nelson, whose race is unexpectedly tight, but for the party as a whole.

Donald Trump’s decision to strike down protections for young, undocumented immigrants; the botched response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; the ramped-up deportations and separated families at the border—all these should help Democrats win over Latino voters. Matt Barreto of the polling firm Latino Decisions said he has never seen them so frustrated. A recent poll of 1,000 Latino voters found that more than 70 percent were “very angry” about the separation of families at the border and about Trump calling immigrants “animals.” And yet Democratic candidates are underperforming in key Hispanic districts: In California’s 39th, which Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, Democrat Gil Cisneros is now trailing the Republican incumbent by 2 points, according to a recent poll; and in Texas’s Senate race, Democrat Beto O’Rourke struggled during the primary to drum up support in the predominantly Latino border towns. (More recently, in a May Quinnipiac poll, he was lagging behind Ted Cruz with Hispanic voters, 46 percent to 44 percent.) Such signs should spur Democratic leaders, who are relying on Hispanic support to win back the House, to redouble their efforts to engage Latinos, organizationally and financially. But it hasn’t happened.

The money and the machinery is there. It’s just that not enough of it is directed at Latinos. With total spending on the midterm elections expected to reach $4 billion, outside groups and super PACs have almost unlimited funds. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer has pledged $30 million to take back the House. Liberal philanthropist George Soros has already spent $15 million. And Michael Bloomberg has promised $80 million. Yet none of the cash they have allocated has been earmarked exclusively for a major new initiative to reach Latinos. Bloomberg has been focused on gun control and Steyer on climate change—as well as impeachment. He has spent another $40 million on billboards in Times Square, town hall meetings, and TV ads urging the House to oust the president. “If he’d given Mi Familia Vota [a Latino group that works to register and mobilize Hispanic voters] that money, they would have registered enough Latino voters by now to turn Texas blue,” said Andres Ramirez, a veteran Democratic strategist. Yet most of these liberal megadonors “would scoff at Latino groups making this request,” he added. “They wouldn’t even entertain it.”

Part of the problem is who’s in the room making choices about where to put the money. “The structural spaces that make these decisions constantly exclude Latinos,” said Hector Sanchez Barba, executive director of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement. The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, for example, has long been criticized for having only a handful of Latinos on staff. (A spokesperson from Priorities said it is “interviewing consulting firms to supplement our staff.”)

This impacts how funds are distributed: Increasingly, Latino outreach efforts are folded into broader plans to engage black voters and other minorities. This is the case at Steyer’s NextGen Rising and at George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, which used to have an annual $5 million Latino engagement fund—until two years ago, when it was overhauled and given a new mission: to support Latino, African American, Native American, Pacific Islander, and LGBT groups. The fund’s director, David Montez, won’t divulge how much of his current annual budget goes to Latinos, saying only, “It’s not enough.” And even with Tom Perez, the first Latino to head the Democratic National Committee, at its helm, the party has been little help. Apart from a $2.5 million effort to engage “low propensity” voters, which includes both minority groups and rural voters, the DNC has only spent $100,000 on Latino engagement in Florida and another $100,000 in Pennsylvania. “They should be doing [more of] this work, but frankly they don’t have the money,” said a DNC member who works on diversity outreach and who asked for anonymity to describe the state of the party’s finances.

Without funds devoted to Latinos specifically, it’s going to be difficult to turn them out, let alone register them to vote. In the ten states with the largest Hispanic populations, between 40 to 43 percent of the Latino community has not yet registered this year, said Ben Monterroso, Mi Familia Vota’s executive director. “The bottom line is, if we’re not invited to the party, we’re not coming.”

In June, hours before the 5 p.m. filing deadline, Keith Ellison submitted papers to Minnesota’s secretary of state announcing his intention to run for attorney general. Since then, the six-term congressman from Minnesota’s most liberal district has taken the talking points he honed over a decade in Washington to family restaurants in Crookston and farms in Holdingford, promising to stop predatory lending practices and fight for the rights of workers.

Small-town Minnesota might seem like a step down from Washington, where Ellison’s name regularly pops up on MSNBC and CNN, and where he is a leader in the national debate about single-payer health care and a $15 minimum wage. But in Donald Trump’s Washington, where the partisan blood wars on Capitol Hill have ground the federal legislative machinery to a halt, his decision is less career suicide and more common sense.

Over the last year and a half, state attorneys general have fought Trump’s worst excesses in the courts, and they’ve stood in for a Department of Justice that has long since abrogated its duty to safeguard the public. If he wins the state’s August 14 Democratic primary, Ellison, along with the other liberal candidates vying for state attorney general seats this fall, can be expected to expand that role further still—into areas like antitrust enforcement and financial regulation, which regulators have ignored for decades. “When this moment in history is written, there’s got to be a chapter on state attorneys general, standing up for immigrants, standing up for students,” he told me in July. “It’s why I want to be a part of it.”

Since Trump’s inauguration, the 22 Democratic state attorneys general have sued his administration on everything from enacting the Muslim travel ban and reversing auto mileage standards to building a border wall and ending net neutrality. California alone has sued the Trump administration 38 times. And, unlike Democrats in Congress, they’ve fought and won. Courts have frozen the administration’s plan to end protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children. They’ve stopped the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Treasury from denying women free birth control under the Affordable Care Act. They’ve forced the Environmental Protection Agency to control smog pollution that travels across states.

This form of prosecutorial activism is far from new. In 1979, Robert Abrams took office as attorney general of New York and transformed the position from a low-key counsel to the governor into a political powerhouse confident enough to confront Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory schemes. Abrams forged a reputation as a consumer advocate. He went after corporations to clean up toxic waste sites such as Love Canal in upstate New York. (This led Congress to establish Superfund legislation to facilitate environmental restoration of polluted areas, paid for by the responsible parties.) He forced manufacturers to return millions of dollars after they conspired to fix prices for retailers, and got insurance companies to reimburse customers for reneging on discounts.

Significantly, he worked with attorneys general in other states on investigations and litigation, drafting lawyers from their offices onto cases that blanketed entire industries with scrutiny. These coalitions continued even after Abrams left office: In 1998, 46 state attorneys general landed the $206 billion settlement against four leading tobacco companies, the largest corporate penalty in history.

Abrams’s approach has relevance today. Since Trump’s election, some liberal Democrats have argued that the party should return to its traditional monopoly-busting stances. But it is in fact state officials, and not federal legislators, who are best positioned to lead on this issue. Antitrust enforcement originated in the states in the nineteenth century, when progressive populists demanded an end to the power of the railroad trusts. With versions of the state laws that followed still on the books, some attorneys general have begun to make tentative moves to force divestitures and contest mergers. Last year, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra blocked a merger between Valero Energy Partners and two petroleum terminals in northern California. “The outer limits haven’t been tested,” said Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University who is running for the New York attorney general seat vacated by Eric Schneiderman in May. “People are waking up to corporate consolidation, often with hopelessness. It’s critical that attorneys general lead the fight.”

Trust busting isn’t the only arena where attorneys general elected this fall could leave their mark. (Though it may be the highest-profile: Teachout, for example, has vowed that if elected, she will strongly consider filing to block the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, which would reduce national cell phone carriers from four to three, if the federal government fails to act.) New York also has the Martin Act, a securities law that Eliot Spitzer, when he was attorney general from 1999 to 2006, used to protect the integrity of financial markets and eliminate systemic fraud. States can prosecute environmental crimes or take down shady financial operators ripping off seniors and veterans. Virtually everywhere federal enforcement has withered, states can provide a substitute.

Part of their power lies in their efficiency: Attorneys general can act quickly, without having to navigate the bureaucracy, infighting, and red tape on Capitol Hill. In 2015, for example, Ellison introduced a bill that would have made it illegal for a company to agree not to hire someone who’d previously been employed at a competitor. Three years later, it still hasn’t gotten out of committee. “When was I going to get a hearing on that?” Ellison said. By contrast, it took state attorneys general just three days this summer to extract similar concessions from the fast food industry. In July, after eleven attorneys general announced an investigation into hiring practices, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson brokered a deal with seven companies to remove such clauses from their contracts with franchise owners.

This fall, Democrats are going after Republican-held attorney general seats: in Ohio, backing Steve Dettelbach, the former U.S. attorney for Ohio’s Northern District (and a law school classmate of Barack Obama); in Nevada, with Aaron Ford, a young, black state senator; and in Colorado, with Phil Weiser, former dean of the University of Colorado Law School. Even in Alabama, Democrat Joseph Siegelman, the son of the state’s last Democratic governor, has a chance at an upset.

If elected, they could make up a new center of legal power in this country, building alliances across states and pooling resources. Someone like Ellison (or Teachout, though she has a much more daunting path to the Democratic nomination in New York) could exert a leftward pull on the law nationally. A conservative Supreme Court stands ready to construct a fortress around oligarchs and multinationals. States may be the only territory left for a new vision based on corporate accountability, freedom for workers, and justice for all. That courage to take on powerful interests, to write a new American story, can be contagious. Liberals often believe politics flows from Washington. But sometimes it comes from Crookston.