To listen to the way some Republicans tell it, America is a pretty awful place these days.
"A hell hole," as Donald Trump has put it. Our leaders are "babies" who are "so stupid" they can only watch helplessly as we become "a third-world country."
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sees evil menacing America not just from within, like the "tyranny" and "lawlessness" of jailing a county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, but from the outside as well. As he condemned the Obama administration's nuclear pact with Iran last week, Cruz warned, "Americans will die."
These dark diagnoses of the country's condition have become an especially powerful part of the message sounded by several Republicans seeking their party's nomination for presidency this election cycle.
Their damning assessments — that the country is diminished and unrecognizable, menaced by forces foreign and domestic — seem to resonate with voters already feeling angry, alienated and under threat.
Appeals to voters' insecurities and anxieties have always been part of politics. But what is striking about the current dynamic inside the Republican Party is how pervasive the sense has become that the country is slipping, and maybe irretrievably so.
"You've got elements of all the different branches of the Republican Party that see darkness now," said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. "Social conservatives have been at the forefront of that for a long time. But now the foreign policy and economic types feel like we face serious risk of decline."
The mood of the country is certainly grim. About two-thirds of Americans believe the country is adrift, according to recent public opinion surveys from a variety of news organizations and independent firms. That sentiment has remained stubbornly high for most of the Obama presidency, with strong majorities of Americans consistently saying the country is on the wrong track for the last five years, according to polling by The New York Times and CBS News.
After years of slow economic growth, stagnant incomes, political dysfunction and worsening threats from abroad, many Republican pollsters and analysts are asking themselves whether there has been a fundamental change in how Americans, historically an optimistic people, now see themselves. And they are wondering whether, as a consequence, 2016 will be a year when voters turn to someone whose message is mainly focused on what is wrong with the country.
"Today, conservatism is much more mean-spirited, angry, not optimistic and much more viscerally divisive," said Matthew Dowd, a former top strategist for President George W. Bush.
The dark imagery emanating from Trump and others collides with the long-held Republican conviction that a message of optimism and uplift is essential to winning elections and leading the country. That belief also aligns with their view of America as a special and divinely inspired nation, always capable of renewal.
"I believe we're on the verge of the greatest time to be alive," says Jeb Bush, the candidate who always boasts about the "joy" that infuses his campaign and whose slogan, "Right to Rise," implies an upward trajectory for the American people.
Optimism and a sunny spirit came to define Reagan, and in this race, Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio are trying to channel some of that same brightness.
Rubio often asks people what nation on earth they would trade places with. After the answer comes back an emphatic "No one!" as it did at a casino in northern Nevada he visited earlier this month, he offers his own cheerful explanation. "Ours is the story of 230-some-odd years of perpetual improvement, of a nation where each generation did what they needed to do to leave the next better off."
Kasich repudiates "mad as hell" politics when he talks to voters. "If it takes angry and mean, count me out," he said recently in New Hampshire.
Campaigning on dark and despairing themes does not necessarily square with reality. Despite the country's challenges, job growth is up, unemployment is down and the economy is in vastly better shape than it was in the last election without an incumbent president. Some Republicans worry that a strategy of telling voters, in effect, that things are much worse than they thought is a losing one. They point to how candidates like George W. Bush, who ran in 2000 as the amiable "compassionate conservative," were almost always upbeat.
"Americans like optimistic brands. We like brands that lead us into the future," said Alex Castellanos, a Republican messaging strategist who has offered informal advice to several of the candidates running for president this year. Quoting something he said George W. Bush had once told him, Castellanos added, "Nobody ever bought a product that made them feel worse."
After the 2014 midterm elections, Castellanos commissioned research for a project he is leading on reinventing his party's brand called "New Republican." It looked at three states where Republicans took Senate seats from Democrats and one where they lost.
In the three winning states — Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina — voters said they thought the Republican was the more optimistic candidate. Only in the state Republicans lost, New Hampshire, did voters say they felt the Republican, Scott Brown, was the more pessimistic candidate. Still, some Republicans question the power of optimism, noting that voters picked the candidate of hope and change in 2008 and that many are unhappy with the results.
"I know, everyone should be optimistic, everyone should be sunny and cheerful," said Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. "And there's something weird and wrong if you're not. But really? Is the country on the right track or the wrong track?"
"We should all be joyous?" he added.
Indeed, some Republicans are now debating how great the country is (or isn't), whether it needs to be made great again and who can best do that. And like many debates among Republicans, this one returns to the legacy of Reagan.
Trump and Cruz both use old Reagan lines, and both say they model themselves after him. Cruz often refers to his leadership style the way Reagan once did: "raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors." But with admonitions like "The world is on fire," he is not always so cheery. Trump's campaign slogan is "Make America Great Again," which Reagan used in his 1980 race against Jimmy Carter.
But Rubio has taken to criticizing Trump for using Reagan's words to imply the country is not great. "I would remind everyone America is great," he told a crowd in Nevada recently. "The issue is not that we're not great. The issue is whether we will remain great."
Some of Reagan's former aides echo Rubio's concern. While Reagan was not naïve about the threats facing the United States domestically and abroad, he was never dour about it, they say. "To appropriate Ronald Reagan's language and suggest that America is going to hell, those are contradictory impulses," said Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter who is now with the Hoover Institution.
Looking at the presidents that most Americans would consider great leaders, Castellanos, the Republican brand strategist, said they all shared one theme: an optimistic vision for where the country was headed. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal; John F. Kennedy, the New Frontier; Reagan, the "rendezvous with destiny"; Bill Clinton, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow."
"There are different ways to win the nomination," Castellanos added. "One is to go small and say, 'I'm going to take up this aggrieved section of the party and cobble it together with this other angry section of the party."
"But the risk of that," he continued, "is you make yourself dark and too small to be president."