Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri. Today, a dose of cold water for the Biden Plan B fantasy of a last-ditch Democratic primary or brokered convention switcheroo. Plus, observations on the House impeachment derailment and McConnell succession peacocking. And please please please check out my colleague Julia Ioffe’s new limited series podcast About a Boy about Vladimir Putin’s childhood in the slums of Russia.

But first…

Now he can take some solace in DeSantis’s money problems, evidenced in the announcement that he raised $15 million over the last three months—but only has $5 million cash on hand for the primary election. Trump, meanwhile, raised $45 million in the same period, mostly from small dollar donors reacting to his mugshot. Still, mega donors are not changing sides en masse. Trump’s campaign told me that three of DeSantis’s donors have gone back: Boca Raton millionaire Lewis Stahl, who gave $13,200 to pro-DeSantis committees on May 25, and has since given $25,200 to Trump; telecom billionaire Kenny Troutt, who donated $13,200 to pro-DeSantis committees on June 7 and hosted an event for him in Dallas, and is now hosting Trump at his home in Texas on November 1; and hedge fund titan Scott Bessent, who gave pro-DeSantis committees $6,600 in June but just donated $11,600 to Trump’s committees on September 19.

It’s not quite a herd—and these are hardly the Dick Uihleins, Ken Griffins, Paul Singers, Harlan Crows, and Steve Schwarzmans of the world, who may hold their nose and give to Trump when he is officially the nominee. (After all, they don’t want to write checks for his legal fees.) Until then, they’ll be Virginia dreaming about Glenn Youngkin.

And now, notes on the House chaos from Abby Livingston on Capitol Hill…

• Scalise vs. Jordan: Reps. Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, two Republican congressmen vying to replace ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are working the phones hard this week as many members return to their districts. Of course, leadership races don’t just happen—a great deal of work goes into these battles long before they’ve technically begun. One way aspiring leaders win friends (and influence enemies) is by raising piles and piles of money for the N.R.C.C. It’s a tack Scalise has pursued as the second-ranking House Republican: Last cycle, he donated $14.9 million for the committee, and he was a top fundraiser for the N.R.C.C. in 2020 and 2018, as well.

  Jordan, meanwhile, raised his profile in hearings as the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, leading the charge to impeach Joe Biden. But historically, he’s been less engaged with campaigns. In the 2022 cycle, he raised about $1 million for the N.R.C.C.—and has passed on donating to the committee in not-too-distant election cycles.

• Kevin Who?: One of the things I’ve struggled to square in the last two days is how McCarthy was so astute in building relationships in the House G.O.P. conference—save, obviously, for a handful of outliers—and yet how little affinity existed for him on the Democratic side. Sure, these are partisan times. But McCarthy came to Congress when bipartisanship was still perceived as mildly fashionable.

  A senior Democratic member who arrived around the same time as McCarthy posed this theory to me: Republicans installed McCarthy into leadership at the beginning of his third term, in early 2011. Before that, he spent his second term focused on successfully recruiting candidates across the country for the 2010 wave. He had a meteoric rise: In contrast, Pelosi didn’t make it to the leadership table until almost 15 years into her House career.

  Following this line of thinking, the downside of his accelerated ascent was that McCarthy never spent any real time in the trenches on policy committees, where most bipartisan alliances are formed. So in addition to all of the other reasons Democrats unanimously voted him out, there was nobody on the Democratic side of the aisle who even really knew him.

• When It Rains, It Pours: Alabama’s new congressional map is finally out, and a three-judge panel drew lines that likely mean that Democrats will pick up a second seat in the state at the expense of Republicans. It’s unclear yet if Reps. Jerry Carl and Barry Moore will face off in a member-member race. But these are painful experiences for the larger caucuses, and colleagues are often enticed to pick sides by way of endorsements, donations, and moral support. This is pretty much the last thing the House Republican conference needs right now, and there’s a pretty good chance at least one other Southern state—if not more—will face a similar redraw.

This disconcerting reality, however predictable, has many in the D.C. cafeteria asking the inevitable, if notably farfetched, question: When is the absolute latest moment that Biden could step down so that the party could hold a primary and field another candidate? This comes after months of teasing comments from Rep. Dean Phillips, among others, followed by the recognition that no one was willing to rock the boat.

In fairness to Biden, the polling was more favorable to him before April, when a December 2022 USA Today/Suffolk poll showed him beating Trump by 8 points in a head-to-head matchup. At the time, according to the same poll, two-thirds of Republicans wanted DeSantis to run for president. (Oh, how times have changed...) But, regardless, Biden’s decision to run again was also more or less preordained, especially after he defeated Trump in 2020. As NBC’s Jon Allen smartly pointed out on my podcast this week, Biden has been essentially either contemplating a run for president, running for president, or serving as vice president before every national cycle since he was 35 years old. Why would anyone expect that to change?

Of course, there’s not much time to allow for a primary, in which the likes of Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, and Pete Buttigieg—all of whom are patiently waiting in the wings—might step in and have an actual race. After all, to get on the ballot in all 50 states, you have to first register for the Nevada primary (no longer a caucus), which has moved up its filing date to October 15. So for all the wish-casters waiting for Biden to drop out, there’s only 10 days remaining for the fantasy to take form.

Even then, the dream of a Biden Plan B will likely continue on to the convention, where delegates could go rogue if—yes, it’s quite an if, but people in town have ants in their pants these days—the presumptive nominee stepped down. “​​Biden’s committed once these deadlines hit, but it’s really just delegates who could always determine the candidate later,” said a Democratic party insider, hinting at the possibility of a late summer surprise, such as a brokered convention where Biden and the party could essentially pick his successor on site.

Obviously that scenario is also farfetched, making for a better political thriller than political reality, but who’s to say what might happen if Biden—80 years old and not getting any younger—is substantially trailing Trump in the final stretch of the race? Or, as some murmur, if he suffers an ailment related to his age. By moving up the South Carolina primary, some argue, the Democratic Party already created a significant advantage for one candidate. Why, they wonder, couldn’t they change the game again?

One thing is for sure: If California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is running a remarkably efficient shadow campaign, decides to step from the Fox News greenroom into the presidential arena, all hell could break loose. Remember: Kamala Harris can’t run on a ticket with another candidate from the same state. If Biden steps aside, it’s every man, and woman, for themselves.

The Biden campaign, for its part, said there is zero scenario in which Biden decides to step down from the race in the next 10 days over doubts about his electability. “President Biden and Vice President Harris united the Democratic Party in 2020 to receive the most votes in American history, and they’ve united the party again with unprecedented, unified support for their reelection bid,” Biden campaign spokesperson T.J. Ducklo told me. “Their leadership is why the Biden-Harris administration has delivered historic results for American families on critical Democratic priorities, and why they will once again represent their party through the convention and Election Day when the American people send them back to the White House for a second term.”

There’s now reportedly an effort underway to take the inquiry away from Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and hand it to Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who is seen as a more methodical, theatrical investigator. (He was the lead defender of Trump during his impeachments.) But if Jordan becomes the next House Speaker—Semafor reports he has McCarthy’s backing—it’s more likely that the inquiry stays with Comer. We’ll see.

Either way, it doesn’t help Republicans that the appetite for impeachment seems to have faded amid the chaos of McCarthy’s defenestration. Most members just aren’t sure they’ll ever have the votes for impeachment. Perhaps Biden wins here thanks to the noise.

On Saturday, close observers of the esteemed, longest-serving Senate leader witnessed something new: McConnell’s deputies overruling him before an open conference lunch. It all happened while he was making an “impassioned plea for helping Ukraine” by including $6 billion in aid in the short-term funding bill. McConnell, who has long been revered in the conference and treated with deference, was quickly overruled by Minority Whip John Thune and conference chair John Barrasso, who argued for taking up the House bill, which didn’t include the funding. Meanwhile, McCarthy made it known that he had been negotiating directly with Thune the entire time, not McConnell. Anonymous sources told Punchbowl that McConnell was “outnumbered” and “out of step with the conference”—not the sort of things that Republicans typically say about the senator, even on background.

It was a significant moment for those following McConnell’s evolving leadership saga, which has been defined of late by a series of increasingly public health scares. For decades, McConnell’s aura has been his biggest strength; real or imagined, there’s always been a feeling that he was playing Vulcan chess while everyone else was playing checkers. Now, the signs are evident that the once-quiet jockeying to replace McConnell—whose leadership is up in 2024, with his term ending in 2026—is becoming more overt. So perhaps it’s not surprising to see two of the three Johns vying for leadership—Thune and Barrasso—taking advantage of the moment to make a big display of being in better touch with the conference.

Meanwhile, McConnell’s team is still in legacy-building mode, despite a serious fall in March and a series of public freezes. No one is suggesting that McConnell will be ousted, especially over Ukraine aid, but The Hammer, as he has been known, is starting to seem more like a thumbtack. “He’s not the same,” said a leadership aide. “Whether he would lay it out or not, people are frustrated. He’s been such a force, where he can get things done no matter what, we’re not seeing that anymore.”

The other issue for McConnell is that his conference is getting younger and more isolationist in its views. He doesn’t have the same reliable cohort of moderates, like Sens. Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, and Richard Shelby, to provide air cover. Being challenged by Rick Scott for leadership last year didn’t help fortify his standing.

Yes, his Senate Leadership Fund, run by Steven Law, is still one of the biggest fundraising games in town. But surely, as the ground slowly shifts under McConnell, the town’s power centers are also beginning to drift away from the Republican leader, who has so many of the political class on his payroll.