Senate Democrats hope Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) decision to drop out of the crowded presidential field is a sign of things to come.

The anxiety in the Senate about the crowded race mimics the nervousness of Democratic voters who worry their party will blow a second presidential contest against President Trump and who see the 25-candidate race as a hindrance.

Democratic senators also see a potential silver lining to a narrowing field: They are holding out hope that candidates like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D), former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) could still run for the Senate.

“I’d like to get the debate into a one-night event. Right now, with 25 or whatever the number is, that’s hard to do,” said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.).

The top tier of the Democratic presidential primary is now reshaped around five candidates. The latest fundraising numbers prove it.

Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren raised about $100 million in the last three months combined. Together, they share a large majority of the public support.

They were already spending millions of dollars more than many lower-polling contenders have even raised. Now, in a powerful compounding effect for their campaigns, these top tier candidates are poised to plow that new money back into their field and digital operations — further reinforcing their fundraising and organizing advantages in the 23-candidate field.

It’s too early to be an inflection point, but late enough that the rest of the field needs to start worrying.

Steve Bullock, John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee are respected two-term Democratic governors, with proven records of accomplishment.

In this presidential primary season, that counts for next to nothing.

Bullock, the Montana governor, got shut out of the first debate. Inslee, the Washington governor, hasn’t cracked 2 percent in a national poll. Colorado’s Hickenlooper has hit even harder times — his senior staffers urged him to drop out of the race last month.

The three governors in the 23-candidate field are mired at the bottom of national polls for any number of reasons, though one reason appears to stand out more distinctly than the rest: Donald Trump.

The Battle of Grace Church What happened when Brooklyn’s oldest nursery school decided to become less old-fashioned? A riot among the one percent.

When you buy a home in Brooklyn Heights, you aren’t just purchasing real estate, you’re purchasing a lifestyle. The stately townhomes and converted carriage houses, with their window boxes of Algerian ivy winking over splendidly preserved original details — the Grecian columns, the soaring Romanesque windows offering a glimpse of curated furniture — connote a certain level of not just wealth and taste but respectability. These are houses not just for people who have money, but people who have values.

They’re also enormous, which is one reason that, from the 19th-century sea captains with their “great broods of future bankers and fashionable brides” (as Truman Capote put it in his famous essay, “A House on the Heights”) to the “urban, ambitious young couples” with their “Wall Street–whatever careers” that came after, the neighborhood has always been considered “a good place to raise children,” as Capote said.

Capote didn’t have children himself, though if he had, they would likely have attended the Grace Church School on Hicks Street and Grace Court. Located behind a bright-red door adjacent to the landmarked Episcopal church, the school is known as “the oldest preschool in Brooklyn.” And until recently, for as long as anyone in the neighborhood could remember, the school was run by Hope Prosky, who was something of an original fixture herself. Over the course of her 37-year tenure, Prosky gently encouraged generations of Brooklyn Heights children to “expand the cocoon of the little world of home to include and trust in the community.” So familial was the environment that a good number of graduates returned with their own broods to partake in the same whimsical traditions they had as kids: the Japanese Kite festival, the annual Holiday Sing. Of course, New York being New York, many families also left, making room for new families, who paid ever-higher prices for the same handful of properties. But even as the bankers got more bankerly and the wives got more fashionable, the neighborhood remained much the same. Insulated by its status as a historic district, it was unable to grow up, only out, and this Peter Pan quality was part of its charm for transplants from places like Manhattan. To them, Prosky and the fellow teachers at Grace Church — who played “Oh! Susanna” on guitars and dressed up as Pilgrims every year on Thanksgiving — were exemplars of the kind of authenticity they sought in moving to Brooklyn in the first place. “It was this sweet neighborhood school with this kind of loosey-goosey atmosphere,” recalls one.

Then one morning in 2015, one of the school’s 3-year-old charges walked several blocks to her home, surprising her parents, and loosey-goosey started to seem like a liability.

Not long after, Prosky announced her retirement and the rector of the church, which oversees the school, met with the Grace Church School Advisory Board, a volunteer body made up of parents and members of the church, and formed a search committee to find her replacement. Under Prosky, Grace Church had functioned as a “glorified playgroup,” as one parent put it. The children pressed leaves into paper, explored textures, and danced the Wiggle Worm. The atmosphere had often been compared to a “warm bubble bath,” and while this was lovely, there were some who felt the school could turn up the temperature a notch. The ideal director, the board noted in its advertisement, would “embrace our traditions” while being “informed and guided by current research regarding best practice in the 21st century.”