Elections

Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason magazine, and Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, to discuss their expectations for the third Republican debate on Wednesday night. They also dug into and sorted through a blizzard of political news — particularly the new New York Times/Siena battleground-state polling with dreadful news for President Biden that has Democrats freaked out (again).Frank Bruni: Thank you both for joining me. While we’ll pivot in short order to the debate, I can’t shake that poll, whose scariness ranks somewhere between “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Exorcist.” I know my own head is spinning. I mean: Donald Trump ahead of President Biden in five of six crucial battleground states?How loud an alarm is this? Should Biden at this late stage consider not pursuing re-election? Would that likely help or hurt the Democrats in winning the White House? And if not Biden, who would give the party the best chance? Nate, let’s start with you.Nate Silver: Thanks for having me, Frank! It’s nice to be back in the (digital) pages of The Times! I think whether Democrats would be better off if Biden dropped out is very much an open question — which is kind of a remarkable thing to be saying at this late stage. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to trying to figure out why Biden doesn’t get more credit on the economy, for instance. And the answer might just be that he’s 80 years old, and that colors every impression voters have of him.Katherine Mangu-Ward: The voters in these polls just seem to be screaming, ‘He’s too old, and I feel poor!’ The most shocking finding was that only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent. Two percent! Less than 1 percent of voters under 30 said the economy was excellent. In Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, exactly zero polled respondents under 30 said the economy was excellent.Bruni: Nate, I take your point about “open question” — I have no crystal ball, and my God, I’ve never so badly wanted one, because the Democrats getting this right and blocking Trump is, well, incalculably vital to this democracy’s future. But if you were the party’s chief adviser and you had to make the call: Yes to Biden or no to Biden and an invitation to someone else?Silver: Well, I’m the probabilities guy — so I’ll usually avoid answering a question definitively unless you force me to. Really, the best option would have been if Biden decided in March he wouldn’t run, and then you could have a vigorous primary. If you actually invested me with all this power, I’d want access to private information. I’d like to do some polling. I’d want to canvas people like Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock about how prepared they are. I’d like to know how energetic Biden is from day to day.Bruni: And you, Katherine? Biden thumbs-up or thumbs-down? And if thumbs-down, tell me your favorite alternative.Mangu-Ward: If we’re picking up magical artifacts, a time machine would be more useful than a crystal ball. And you’d need to go back before the selection of Kamala Harris as vice president. A viable vice president would have been a moderate threat to Biden, but a weak one is a major threat to the party. If we’re scrounging around for an alternative, I don’t completely hate Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.Bruni: I’d settle at this point for a Magic 8 Ball. And Katherine, “don’t completely hate” in 2023 politics equals “want to marry and live with forever” in the politics of decades past. We’re a cynical lot!In any case, Nate mentioned age. How do you two explain that the same poll we’ve been talking about revealed that while 62 percent of Americans feel that Biden, 80, doesn’t have the mental sharpness to be effective, only 44 percent feel that way about Trump, 77. Only 39 percent said that Trump is too old to be president, while 71 percent said that Biden is. Do those numbers make any sense at all to you?Silver: There are at least three things going on here. First, the three-and-a-half-year difference between Trump and Biden is not nothing. It’s certainly something you start to notice if you have older friends, parents, relatives entering their late 70s or early 80s. Second, Biden’s manner of speaking and presentation just reads as being more old-fashioned than Trump’s, and that perception is reinforced by media coverage. Third, I wonder if younger voters feel like Biden’s a bit of a forced choice — there wasn’t really a competitive primary — so “old” serves as a euphemism for “stale.”Mangu-Ward: Because this election cycle has been largely bereft of serious policy debate, I also think age is one thing people can grab on to to justify their unease about a Biden second term.Bruni: I wrote a few months back about this: Trump is so deliberately and flamboyantly outrageous — such a purposeful cyclone of noise and distraction — that the normal metrics don’t apply to him. He transcends mundane realities like age. He’s Trump! He’s a horror-movie villain, a Saturday-morning cartoon, a parade float. Those things don’t have ages (or four indictments encompassing 91 counts).Silver: I like that theory. There’s a sense in which some voters feel like they’re in on the joke with Trump. Although I also don’t think that voters have quite shifted into general-election mode, and maybe the media hasn’t, either. Trump as candidate is a very different ball of wax than Trump as president, and that’s what Democrats will spend the next year reminding voters about.Bruni: Katherine, let’s say Biden stays in the race. Certainly looks that way. Can you envision a scenario in which Democrats grow so doubtful, so uncomfortable, that he’s seriously challenged for the nomination and maybe doesn’t get it? If so, sketch that for me.Mangu-Ward: As a libertarian (but not a Libertarian), I’m always cautiously interested in third-party challenges, and that seems more likely to me than a direct challenge for the Democratic nomination. After each election cycle, there’s a moment when pundits decide whether to blame a Green or a Libertarian or an independent for the fact that their pick lost, but an appealing outsider peeling off support from Biden or Trump seems more likely to be a real consideration this time around. We have a lot of noisy characters who don’t fit neatly into partisan boxes on the loose at the moment.Bruni: Veterans of Obama’s 2012 campaign are arguing that Obama was in a similar position to Biden a year out from the election in 2011. Nate, do they have a point? Or do their assurances ring hollow because Biden is not Obama, isn’t as beloved by the base, is indeed old, has been stuck in a low-approval rut for months now going back to 2021, or some combination of those?Silver: Certainly, it’s generally true that polling a year in advance of the election is not very predictive. But Biden’s situation is worse than Obama’s. His approval ratings are notably worse. The Electoral College has shifted against Democrats since 2012 (although it’s now not a given). And there’s the age thing. Remember, a majority of Democrats did not even want Biden to run again. I think the Democratic communications and strategy people have been shrugging off that data more than they maybe should.Mangu-Ward: Biden is definitely not Obama, and it’s definitely not 2012. The concerns about Biden’s age are valid. Though they would apply to Trump just as much in a sane world.Bruni: You’re both so admirably — or is that eerily? — calm. I need to get your diet, exercise or pharmaceutical regimen. Am I nuts to worry/believe that Trump’s return to the presidency isn’t just an unideal election outcome but a historically cataclysmic one? How much does that prospect scare you two?Mangu-Ward: That’s my secret, Frank. I’m always angry. Like the Hulk. I think the current offerings for president are deeply unappealing, to say the least. But that’s nothing new for someone who prefers to maximize freedom and minimize the role of the state in Americans’ personal and economic lives. I am concerned about the peaceful transfer of power, and Trump has shown that he and his supporters are more of a threat to that.Silver: On that, one thing I feel better about is that the reforms that Congress made to the Electoral Count Act made a repeat of Jan. 6 less likely. There’s also perhaps less chance of another Electoral College-popular vote split. If Trump wins the popular vote by three points and there’s no other funny business, I’m not sure what to say exactly other than that in a democracy, you often have to live with outcomes that you yourself would not have chosen.Bruni: Biden, theoretically, isn’t the only bar to Trump’s long red tie dangling over the Resolute Desk anew. I mean — again, theoretically — one of the candidates in this third Republican debate could be the nominee. Yes? Or is it time to admit that, barring a truly extraordinary development, the Republican primary is over?Silver: Prediction markets say there’s a roughly 75 percent chance that Trump is the nominee. That frankly seems too low — no candidate has been this dominant at this stage of the race before. I suppose there’s a path where Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley does relatively well in Iowa, the other drops out, and then — actually, I’m still not sure there’s a path. Maybe Trump’s legal trouble begins to catch up to him? As much as the early states tend to produce surprises, I think if you put all the numbers into a model, it would put the chances at closer to 90 percent than 75.Mangu-Ward: The Times/Siena poll is bad news for Biden, but it’s even worse news for the folks on the G.O.P. debate stage, because it suggests that they simply needn’t bother. Trump is doing just fine holding his own against Biden, so there’s no need to change horses midrace. Unless your horse goes to jail, I guess.The debate will be a primo demonstration of Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”Bruni: If one of the five people on the debate stage were somehow to overtake Trump, who would that be? Has Nikki Haley supplanted Ron DeSantis as the fallback?Silver: The one thing DeSantis originally had going for him was a perception of being more electable. But he’s pretty much squandered that by being an unappealing candidate along many dimensions. And Haley largely performed better than Trump in that new Times/Siena poll. Still, I’m not sure how many Republicans are going to be willing to oust Trump on the basis of a New York Times poll. And it’s not an easy argument to make to Republican voters when Biden looks vulnerable against anyone right now.Mangu-Ward: I appreciated Haley’s early debate appearances, where she put a lot of emphasis on the shared responsibility for budgetary malfeasance between the Democrats and Trump. But now she’s giving me 2012 Mitt Romney flashbacks. She’s a sane and competent Republican who has realized the best way to keep her primary campaign viable is to go hard on immigration restrictionism. She was never an open borders gal, but she did usually offer some warm fuzzies about our nation of immigrants followed by a “get in line.”Bruni: ​​Trump has said he doesn’t want a running mate from any of the people on the debate stage. Do you see anyone — like Haley in particular — who could force his or her way into at least serious consideration? And could possibly help him get elected?Mangu-Ward: The Harris debacle certainly offers lessons for Trump, but I’m not sure whether he’s in the mood to learn them.Silver: The conventional political science view is that V.P. choices do not matter very much unless they seem manifestly unqualified. But they probably ought to matter more for candidates as old as Biden and Trump. I do think Haley would represent some softening of Trump’s image and might appeal to Republicans who worry about a second term being a total clown show. Who would actually staff the cabinet in a second Trump administration, with Trump’s tendency to be disloyal and the legal jeopardy he puts everybody in his orbit in, is one of those things that keeps me up at night.Bruni: Nate, your cabinet question haunts me, too. The quality of Trump’s aides deteriorated steadily across his four years in the White House. And anyone who came near him paid for it in legal fees and the contagion of madness to which they were exposed. So who does serve him if he’s back? Do Ivanka and Jared make peace with him — power again!Silver: I don’t think I have anything reassuring to say on this front! I do think, I guess, that Trump has some incentive to assure voters that he wouldn’t go too crazy in a second term — in 2016, voters actually saw Trump as being more moderate than Clinton.Mangu-Ward: A second-term president will always have a different kind of cabinet than a first-termer, and a Trump-Biden matchup would mean a second-termer no matter who wins. But either way the cabinet will likely be lower quality and more focused on risk mitigation, which isn’t ideal.Bruni: So is there any reason to watch this debate other than, when the subjects of the Middle East in particular and foreign policy in general come up, to see Haley come at the yapping human jitterbug known as Vivek Ramaswamy like a can of Raid?Silver: TV ratings for the second debate were quite low. But I suspect the main audience here isn’t rank-and-file voters so much as what remains of the anti-Trump Republican establishment. If Haley can convince that crowd that she’s more viable than DeSantis, and more electable than Trump, that could make some difference.Mangu-Ward: Historically, debates have been my favorite part of the campaign season, because I’m in it for the policy. But G.O.P. primary voters have been pretty clear that policy is not a priority. I suppose I’ll also tune in to see Chris Christie scold the audience. This week’s spectacle of him telling a booing crowd “Your anger against the truth is reprehensible” was pretty wild.Bruni: OK, lightning round — fast and dirty. Or clean. But definitely fast. Will Trump ever serve a day in prison?Silver: I’d say no, although prediction markets put the odds at above 50 percent!Bruni: You and your prediction markets, Nate! You could have given me your own hunch. Or wish. My wish is a 10-year sentence. At least. My hunch is zip. Hulk?Mangu-Ward: He will probably serve time. He will certainly exhaust every avenue available to him before doing so. In general, the fact that there are many opportunities for appeal is a good thing about our justice system.Bruni: Which 2024 Senate race do you find most interesting?Silver: Undoubtedly Texas, just because it’s one of the only chances Democrats have to pick up a G.O.P. seat. Ted Cruz won fairly narrowly last time, and Colin Allred is probably a better candidate than Beto O’Rourke.Mangu-Ward: Peter Meijer just joined the Senate Republican primary race in Michigan. I appreciated his performance in the House — he’s quite libertarian and was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.Bruni: America’s medium-term future — are you bullish, bearish or, I don’t know, horse-ish?Silver: Everyone is so bearish now, you can almost seem like a bull by default just by pointing out that liberal democracy usually gets its act together in the long run. But the younger generation of voters takes a different attitude on a lot of issues, such as free speech, which has begun to worry me a bit.Mangu-Ward: Bullish, always. Politics ruins everything it touches, but not everything is politics.Bruni: Finally, should Democrats be brutally victory-minded and just swap out Joe and Kamala for Taylor and Travis?Mangu-Ward: I just said politics ruins everything it touches! Must you take Taylor from us, too?Bruni: Fair point, Hulk. You have me there.Silver: It would be a very popular ticket! Taylor Swift will turn 35 only a month before Inauguration Day in 2024, I’d note.Bruni: You both have my thanks. Great chatting with you.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and author of the forthcoming book “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. 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A long time ago in South Carolina, as Nikki Haley recalls when she talks to voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, she ran campaigns that nobody thought much of until, unexpectedly, suddenly, she was winning them. Is that what’s happening here? Is this real?She is gaining in the places that matter. And she is running the campaign she’s run before: hard-core conservative on fiscal matters and immigration, kitchen-table pragmatic on basically everything else. A plaintive quality in Ms. Haley’s voice joins up well with the grim statistics she shares about kids’ reading and math proficiency post-pandemic, and about what happens to veterans after they come home. She spends a good deal of time talking about U.S. support for Ukraine (and Israel) as bulwarks against further deterioration of the world order, while also outlining a hawkish “peace through strength” approach toward China.There’s a hundred little switches that would need to flip from now, in a big mousetrap-style path, toward victory. If a bloc of Republican voters’ support for Mr. Trump is as soft as some polling indicates, and if Ms. Haley could somehow continue to elevate herself the rest of the way, the race for the G.O.P. nomination would turn brutal — and volatile confrontation with Mr. Trump would be inevitable. Survivors of such moments have been rare, but for those who do, like Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, survival becomes a position of strength. Maybe people forgot Ms. Haley’s early campaigns in favor of the easy relationship she had with Mr. Trump, but they might prove instructive.In person, her campaign feels different than Mr. Trump’s and those of the other challengers; if she agrees with them on immigration, the tone and emphasis on much of the rest differ. This includes her general impulse toward knocking Washington (both Republicans and Democrats) rather than the cultural Marxists that animate most Republican visions of what ails the country. You are, in general, unlikely to hear at another national Republican event answers about access to contraceptives, the importance of attracting and training more mental health counselors or even a slight openness to the idea of businesses transitioning to the use of electric vehicles (if on a longer time frame than the Biden administration’s, and only after Ms. Haley goes on a long riff about calling out China and India). In Nikki Haley, these things flow fluidly alongside outlines of her plan to raise the retirement age for the youngest generation, or extended and hard comments about the border, including a reactionary “it only takes one” warning about terrorism.Ms. Haley remains the governor who, after promising during a campaign to keep the Confederate flag on state grounds, later leaned on Republicans to take it down, who signed a state law requiring businesses to check the federal E-Verify immigration status program and who gave a State of the Union response about the value and honor of immigrants that doubled as a rebuke to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. She then served in Mr. Trump’s administration, where she pursued sanctions on Russia. Depending on how you view Ms. Haley, these are evidence of a lack of core, or the subtleties of a realist with a long game. Either way, it’s indisputable that her career runs toward brisk, business-friendly sobriety and that she hasn’t lost before.Winning is on the mind of this campaign. The strategy looks like: Ms. Haley walking slow, subtle figure eights encircled by voters on a Thursday evening in Nashua, N.H. She spoke for 33 minutes in a well-lit space inside a building that’s seen better days; answered questions for 23 minutes; shook hands; signed posters and posed for photos with older couples in puffy jackets gently touching her back for at least another half-hour; stood and worked the room again until, essentially, she was the last person in it, touching up her own makeup to do a TV interview in the near dark as staff members broke down and packed up the remaining gear. That’s the logistical play here: grinding out fractions of percentage points, voter by voter, event by event, with low overhead and a distinct tone, elevated here and there by pointed moments on television.Ms. Haley speaking at a diner in Londonderry, N.H., on Thursday.Jacob Hannah for The New York TimesMs. Haley has said that a presidential election is about relationships and trust.Jacob Hannah for The New York Times“Eight years ago, it was good to have a leader who broke things,” she told the Republican Jewish Coalition late last month, part of a highly pro-Israel speech that drew some attention. “But right now, we need a leader who also knows how to put things back together.”From here, Ms. Haley would need to continue accruing steady, modest gains; serious money would have to come through to pay for TV ads that really land; donors would have to give up their eternal dream of Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor who a number of Republican donors envision as the candidate to wait for. More current candidates, and especially Chris Christie, would need to drop out before, not after, the New Hampshire primary. She’d need to flip some senators, governors or conservative talk radio types — who knows who — into believers and for their belief to be persuasive with a real segment of Trump-leaning conservatives. Independents and, because every vote counts, the Romney-to-Biden crowd would need to prioritize her candidacy in states where they can vote in primaries like New Hampshire and South Carolina, and in many of the Super Tuesday states.She’d need to continue dominating debates; she’d need to not fade or completely lose it when Mr. Trump turns a real attack on her; and more than anything she’d need a substantive critique, even if gently delivered, of Mr. Trump to feel true and land with people. Maybe it’s that idea of putting things back together, which she did not repeat in New Hampshire last week, that has the virtue of matching Ms. Haley’s vibe, while also responding to the widespread feeling the earth is falling apart. A win in Iowa or New Hampshire for Ms. Haley would reset the entire primary.This, or some array of similar conditions, still seems very unlikely. But it’s a lot less unlikely than it was six months ago. And it’s more or less what happened, on a smaller scale, for Ms. Haley in 2004 and 2010 when she ran for the South Carolina Legislature and then for governor. Those campaigns started off seeming ridiculous and involved Ms. Haley, holding doughnuts, knocking on doors for votes (though that is what it looks like when someone runs against a longtime incumbent). Then those campaigns gradually caught on, brought in such disparate backers as Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, and — though she didn’t mention it when she talked about those campaigns last week — when they became competitive, the campaigns ended in brutal attacks on her, and Haley wins.Last winter, when she announced, a lot of people considered her campaign a waste of time. Even more, they argued that her glossy corporateness was out of touch with today’s G.O.P.; that she must be running for vice president. That response likely derived from the ridiculous period after Jan. 6, when Ms. Haley criticized Mr. Trump harshly, then seemed to dial it back. Part of it is the smooth, pain-free way Ms. Haley entered and extricated herself from the Trump administration, after criticizing him in 2016 and endorsing Marco Rubio. Some of it’s the fluid way she talks and the clothes, too, even if they likely harken back to a not-Ivy-League facet of her life: growing up working in a clothing store in the small-town South. This picture of Ms. Haley culminated in Vivek Ramaswamy congratulating her on her future on the Raytheon board.But the full Haley story has a lot of brutal moments in it; hers is not a soft career. She really brings something out in people: guys who used slurs to describe her; the former Democratic Party official who in 2013 compared her to Eva Braun and said she should go back where she came from, then clarified to say he meant “being an accountant in her parents’ dress shop”; Rex Tillerson, who used a sexist term to describe her, according to the writer Tim Alberta. There have been people who have said she lies about her religion. The political consultant Stuart Stevens recently told The New Yorker that the only difference between Ms. Haley and Marjorie Taylor Greene was “purely aesthetic.”In 2004, when she was running for the state legislature, people sent racist mailers about her parents, who had lived in South Carolina for 30 years, had painted an American flag on the ceiling of their clothing store and had organized a local international night and science programs in their small town. Except voters in the district felt as if they knew her. “By that point, Nikki had already met every single voter who got those mailers,” the former state party chairman Katon Dawson told Mr. Alberta. “They all had talked to her. It made a lot of those people angry on her behalf.”When she ran for governor, multiple men claimed to have had affairs with Ms. Haley, who denied this. Voters felt as if she got a bad shake. In this way, one consistency in the Haley story is the way pain can be transformed into a political weapon — used to prevail in elections, or push another Republican to vote to take the Confederate flag down.It’s a hypothetical on top of a hypothetical to think about what would happen if Mr. Trump attacked a candidate who’s polling, at best, 19 percent in New Hampshire right now. But there’s no total glide path to defeating Mr. Trump; he will force confrontation, and Ms. Haley’s campaign seems engineered to bring that about, but only at the end. Would it work the same way as before for her?There is the possibility that no matter what Ms. Haley does, this ends with an emphatic defeat, with voters primed to have their better impulses wrecked by Mr. Trump, with people in media and politics waiting to have every suspicion about her oscillations affirmed. Maybe this moment is the ceiling, and Ms. Haley fades. Maybe she’ll pull up stakes and endorse Mr. Trump in the end, accepting reality but invalidating the interest and trust people on one side of the party might have in her. Or it’s the others: Candidates won’t drop out; the money and endorsements don’t come through; voters won’t take the chance.But, perhaps, the alchemy works the same way: The candidate keeps gaining and doesn’t fold at the decisive moment, and people walk away more secure in their vote and even protective. That happened with Mr. Kemp in Georgia, and it’s happened with Ms. Haley before.And yes, this is all horse race — who’s up, who’s down, about winning the presidency over being president. But resolving the Trump candidacy through political, persuasive means is actually an important civic project, one that could end with an imitation of Mr. Trump, or someone else. Ms. Haley clearly thinks there’s a way to do this that combines enough of what hard-line and moderate conservatives care about in real life, that joins the hard-liners’ desire to win and the moderates’ desire to move on from Mr. Trump. The biggest enemy she will have to defeat is people’s idea of what other people want from politics now.In a diner in Londonderry, N.H., last week, a voter asked Ms. Haley for her help in his defending her against some specific claims. “Absolutely,” she said. “First of all, you need to think of a presidential election — at least the way I look at it — it’s about relationships and trust. Right?”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The actor will appear in performances meant to benefit a group that wants to save West Park Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side from demolition.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at how a campaign to save a church from demolition — despite church leaders wanting the building torn down — lined up the actor Matt Damon for a fund-raiser.Julia Nikhinson/Associated PressHow do you get a star like Matt Damon to appear in a benefit performance of a play in a church on the Upper West Side?“You ask him,” said Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote the play in question, “This Is Our Youth.”Damon will appear in a performance of “This Is Our Youth” on Nov. 16. The show is a fund-raiser for the Center at West Park, which leases the West Park Presbyterian Church, on West 86th Street at Amsterdam Avenue. Tickets start at $500. The top price for a second performance, on Nov. 17, will be $250, and there will be no fixed admission for some seats; those who attend can pay what they wish.Damon is the latest celebrity to support the center and its campaign, against the congregation’s wishes, to prevent the demolition of the Romanesque Revival-style church. The actors Mark Ruffalo and Wendell Pierce; the comedian Amy Schumer; and the rapper and actor Common have also gotten involved in the cause.Together, they are lending their boldface names to an effort to raise money for the center, including to make repairs to the building that are necessary so that the scaffolding and sidewalk shed that have long covered the property can be removed.Debby Hirshman, the center’s executive director, said the goal was to bring in more than $300,000 from the “This Is Our Youth” performances. That would be in addition to a new capital campaign meant to raise $2 million for repairs to the building — a sum that opponents of demolition say would cover the cost of work outlined in a recent report by an engineering consultant for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.A spokeswoman for the church challenged that analysis, calling it “a Band-Aid solution” that would not pay for interior work that is needed to satisfy fire safety rules and accessibility regulations, just as a lawyer for the center disputed a financial analysis done for the landmarks commission.That document said the building, in the hands of an owner other than the congregation, could not earn a reasonable return. Hirshman said she had met with church officials last summer and had offered to make the church “financially whole” if it withdrew a hardship application it filed with the landmarks commission last year.The application was a first step toward demolishing the building as part of a real estate deal that would give the congregation space in what would be a new apartment building on the site. The church — which was designated a city landmark, over the congregation’s objections, in 2010 — stands to receive $30 million from a developer it signed a binding contract with in 2022.Hirshman said church leaders had rejected her proposal.The center had offered earlier to buy the building; a spokesman for the church said that “none of the offers have been feasible or realistic, given the cost of repairs.” The spokeswoman also questioned the center’s “ongoing inability to raise sufficient funds” to pay for repairs.The landmarks commission has not scheduled a vote on the church’s application.As for Damon’s appearances in “This Is Our Youth” next week, Lonergan turned to him because Josh Hamilton, who had appeared in the original Off Broadway production, was unavailable. The rest of the cast was already set — Ruffalo, reprising his breakout role from 1996, and Missy Yager, along with the director Mark Brokaw. Ruffalo became involved with the center last year and even buttonholed Mayor Eric Adams at the Tribeca Film Festival to argue for saving the building.It helped that Damon and Lonergan knew each other, and that Damon knew the play: He appeared in a London production of it for two months in 2002.“I explained the situation to him and immediately he said, ‘I’m in,’ which is what I thought he would say if he was available,” Lonergan said, “and as a matter of fact, he had an apartment one block away from the church for a year or two, maybe. This is going back a ways.” He said Damon wanted to “keep what’s special about the neighborhood special.”WeatherEnjoy a mostly sunny sky today with high temperatures around the low 50s. In the evening, prepare for a chance of rain and temps near the high 40s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Veterans Day).The latest New York newsFlaco perching inside an East Village sculpture garden on Monday. His life on the loose could be entering a dangerous new phase.Jacqueline EmeryLocal newsFeathered fugitive: Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl, whose escape from the Central Park Zoo captured the public’s attention, turned up in Manhattan’s East Village, about five miles from the wooded park area he had settled into since flying free nine months ago.Code of conduct: New Yorkers are reacquainting themselves with the unofficial subway rules — no eye contact; no stinky food — as the city rebounds from the Covid-19 pandemic.Sunny-day flooding: As high tide floods increase in some parts of the city, residents are asking themselves: When does a place become unlivable?ICYMI: Trump’s testimonyTakeaways: Former President Donald J. Trump took the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday as he tried to preserve the business empire that made him famous. Here’s what we learned.Understanding Trump’s defense: Christopher M. Kise and Alina Habba, the two lawyers who joined the former president at the defense table, represent different aspects of what their client seeks in a defender.In South Brooklyn, a Democrat defeats an ex-DemocratAnna Watts for The New York TimesDemocrats held onto a City Council seat in Brooklyn that had shown signs of drifting away. Justin Brannan, a Democrat who is the Council’s powerful finance chairman, defeated his Republican opponent, Ari Kagan, according to The Associated Press.Both are sitting Council members who found themselves facing off in the same district because of redistricting. Kagan, a former radio and television host from Belarus who was elected as a Democrat in 2021, switched parties last year.On Tuesday, Brannan called his victory a triumph over “toxic tribalism” and promised to serve all constituents, regardless of their political affiliations.In another Brooklyn district, created to amplify the voices of Asian voters, the Democrat, Susan Zhuang, defeated Ying Tan, the Republican. Both candidates built their campaigns around the issues of crime, education and the quality of New York City life.Elsewhere in the city, many Democrats ran unopposed, including Yusef Salaam, one of the so-called Central Park Five defendants, Black and Latino men who were exonerated in 2002 in the rape and assault of a female jogger in Central Park 13 years earlier. He won a contested primary in Harlem this past summer.As Salaam prepared to give his victory speech on Tuesday, my colleague Jeffery C. Mays noted, it was not lost on him that former President Trump was facing multiple criminal trials. Trump had called for the reinstatement of the death penalty after Salaam’s arrest.“Karma is real, and we have to remember that,” Salaam said.METROPOLITAN diaryJob at Macy’sDear Diary:One thing I always wanted to do was work at Macy’s in New York City. I got the opportunity when things slowed down at my actual job and management asked for volunteers to take unpaid time off.I took a month, and my husband and I went to New York City. We found a short-term apartment and I applied for a job at Macy’s during the Christmas season. I did not say I only planned to work there a month.I was in my 50s at the time and I started working with a group of men and women who were much younger.I spent my first day learning how to operate the cash register and where everything in the store was. It was so exciting.When it was time for lunch, some of the younger women asked me to go to lunch with them at McDonald’s. Wow. Of course I went. They mostly spoke Spanish. I didn’t understand them, but I didn’t care.I couldn’t have been any more excited when the day was over and I clocked out and headed to the door. Outside, the young women yelled out to me: Come on, Alice. It’s this way to the subway.They wanted me to come with them, but I just said no, thank you. I lived right across the street.— Alice RedmondIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Kellina Moore and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected] up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

A look at last night’s election results. Yesterday’s elections went well for the Democratic Party.Gov. Andy Beshear won re-election in normally red Kentucky, 53 percent to 48 percent, by emphasizing his support for abortion rights and the economic benefits of Biden administration policies.In increasingly red Ohio, voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that keeps abortion legal until roughly 23 weeks of pregnancy. The vote was 57 percent to 43 percent. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, all seven states to have voted on abortion rights have chosen to protect or expand them.In Virginia, Democrats flipped the House of Delegates and kept control of the State Senate, albeit narrowly. That will likely doom Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of passing a 15-week abortion ban. It may also quiet some Republicans’ calls for Youngkin to run for president, given that he had trumpeted his approach to abortion as a sensible middle ground for his party.“Democrats, to their credit, made this their signature issue of this campaign,” J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst at the University of Virginia, said of abortion. “It’s still a very potent energizer.”In New Jersey, Democrats are expected to keep their comfortable majorities in the state legislature, with Republican candidates losing even in more conservative parts of the state.In Pennsylvania, Democrats won a seat on the state Supreme Court, padding their majority. The court would have jurisdiction over lawsuits related to the 2024 election in a key swing state.It wasn’t a perfect night for Democrats. In Mississippi, Brandon Presley, a state official who ran for governor on a platform of expanding Medicaid, lost to Tate Reeves, the Republican incumbent. In New York, a Republican flipped the Suffolk County executive’s office for the first time in two decades. A Republican-backed candidate also flipped the mayor’s office in Manchester, N.H.Nationwide, though, Democrats continued a strong recent electoral run that dates to last year’s midterms and has continued through most special elections (which are held to fill unexpectedly vacant posts) this year. Democrats have done well despite President Biden’s low approval ratings for several reasons.One, Donald Trump and the so-called MAGA movement are also unpopular, and candidates aligned with him have fared poorly. Two, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe — and subsequent Republican-passed abortion bans — have upset many voters. Three, college graduates and affluent professionals increasingly vote Democratic and also have higher turnout in off-year elections. Four, many Democratic politicians — like Beshear in Kentucky — have managed to remain more popular than Biden.In the rest of today’s newsletter, we’ll walk through other results from last night.Notable racesMarijuana: Ohio became the 24th state to legalize recreational marijuana. Voters approved the initiative 57 percent to 43 percent.Mayoral races: Cody Smith, a former mayor of Uvalde, Texas, won the office again, defeating the mother of a girl killed in last year’s school shooting there. Philadelphia and Des Moines elected their first female mayors. And two Democrats — a liberal and a moderate — will compete in a runoff next month for Houston mayor.Affordable housing and homelessness: Voters in Seattle and Santa Fe, N.M., passed initiatives to fund affordable housing. In Spokane, Wash., voters approved a measure to let the police issue tickets to people who camp near schools, parks and playgrounds.Education: Liberals led school board races in suburban Philadelphia and Northern Virginia, where gender issues have been central. In Pella, Iowa, voters narrowly rejected a measure that would have given the City Council more control over the public library, which had resisted efforts to ban an L.G.B.T.Q. memoir.Criminal justice: In Allegheny County, Pa., Stephen Zappala, a Democrat-turned-Republican, defeated a progressive candidate in the district attorney race.Democracy: Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state easily won re-election; he previously rejected Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. And in Derby, Conn., a Republican charged with trespassing at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 lost his race for mayor.For more“The night’s results showed the durability of Democrats’ political momentum,” our colleagues Jonathan Weisman and Reid Epstein write. Read their other takeaways.Politico described the results as a “banner year” for Democrats. “They really needed it,” The Washington Post wrote.Republican attacks on transgender rights appeared to fizzle. In Virginia, voters elected the South’s first transgender state senator.Ohio’s referendum on abortion won outright in 18 counties Trump won in 2020. Democrats hope abortion will energize their base in 2024.Republican donors hoped Glenn Youngkin would enter the presidential race, taking control of the party from Trump. Virginia’s elections were a dose of reality.THE LATEST NEWSIsrael-Hamas WarA month into the fighting, Israel said its ground forces have reached deep into Gaza City.Northern Gaza, including the city, still contains hundreds of thousands of people.Hamas’s leaders said the group attacked on Oct. 7 because they believed the Palestinian cause was slipping away. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table,” one told The Times.Response to the WarForeign ministers from G7 countries, including the U.S., called for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.Leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have asked the U.S. to help broker a cease-fire. They fear the war could destabilize their countries.The White House cautioned Israel against reoccupying the Gaza Strip.The House of Representatives censured Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, for comments that seemed to call for the eradication of Israel. More than 20 Democrats voted against Tlaib.South Africa has recalled all its diplomats from Israel.PoliticsQuestions asked by Supreme Court justices suggested that they are likely to uphold a federal law meant to stop domestic abusers from getting guns, despite the conservative majority’s friendliness to gun rights.The Senate confirmed Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon, to lead the National Institutes of Health.ClimateWildfires are burning across the South, caused by drought, warmer-than-normal temperatures and possibly arson.Nations that have promised to address climate change are expanding fossil fuel drilling.Other Big StoriesLessie Benningfield RandleMichael Noble Jr. for The New York TimesLessie Benningfield Randle survived the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. At nearly 109, she’s still waiting for her day in court.The prime minister of Portugal resigned unexpectedly after police officers on a corruption inquiry put out an arrest warrant for his chief of staff.The number of infants born with syphilis is growing, the C.D.C. says.The journal Nature retracted a high-profile paper claiming to have found a superconductor that worked at room temperature.A pod of orcas sank a boat for the fourth time in two years, this one near Morocco. Sailors are worried.OpinionsThe American left’s celebration of Hamas’s atrocities has shown Jewish people who their friends are not, Bret Stephens writes.Here is a column by Thomas Edsall on the Democratic Party and Israel.MORNING READSGalaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster.European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. AnselmiStarry skies: The first images from Euclid, the European Space Agency’s new telescope, offer ethereal views of the cosmos.Health: Many popular nicotine vapes look like toys. Experts worry that could entice young users.Eruption: An undersea volcano is building a new island in Japan.Lives Lived: Mortimer Downey helped revive New York City’s subway, bolstered Amtrak and secured federal funds for public transit. He died at 87.SPORTSN.F.L.: The Dallas Cowboys signed the receiver Martavis Bryant, recently reinstated after serving a five-year suspension for substance abuse issues.Michigan: The Wolverines told the Big Ten yesterday that they had evidence of other teams sharing information on their own signs.ARTS AND IDEASThis was in 2018.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press21st-century Springfield: Over its three decades on the air, “The Simpsons” has changed to meet evolving sensibilities. The show stopped making fun of gay characters, for instance, and stopped using a white actor to voice Black and Indian characters. Now, it is abandoning the long-running joke in which Homer Simpson strangles his son, Bart. “I don’t do that anymore,” Homer said on a recent episode. “Times have changed.”A recent article in Vulture — titled “The Simpsons” Is Good Again — argues that such willingness to change has made the show fresh and funny for the first time in years.More on cultureClimate protesters took hammers to the glass covering an 18th-century painting by Diego Velázquez at the National Gallery in London, causing “minimal damage” to the canvas.Jimmy Fallon mocked tonight’s Republican debate.THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …Ryan Liebe for The New York TimesBrowse the best Thanksgiving recipes.Set a beautiful table.Secure early Black Friday deals on Wirecutter-approved items.GAMESHere is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were hometown and townhome.And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David and IanCorrection: Monday’s newsletter misstated the Ukrainian president’s response to a Russian attack on a military ceremony. He called it a crime, not a war crime.P.S. Erica Green, who has covered education and domestic policy for The Times, is now a White House reporter.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected]. More

Ohio’s referendum on abortion rights drew support from both liberal and conservative areas of the state and won outright in 18 counties that President Donald J. Trump won in 2020, signaling the issue remains a weakness for Republicans. How Ohio counties voted on Issue 1 Yes, for abortion rights No, against abortion rights Cincinnati Shaded […] More

So about that poll. You know the one: the Times/Siena poll showing Donald Trump with an edge over President Biden in five out of six swing states, and suggesting a softening of support for Mr. Biden among Black, Latino and young voters.The results have been met in Democratic and other anti-MAGA circles with horror, disbelief and panic. How could they not be? Whatever disappointment voters have with Mr. Biden, the idea that any of his 2020 backers would give his predecessor another shot at destroying democracy feels like pure lunacy.It is best to take horse-race polling this far out from Election Day with a boatload of salt. There are too many moving pieces. Too much that could happen. Too much of the public is not paying attention.But some of the data points to the unusual dynamics at play with a defeated president challenging the guy that America dumped him for. It isn’t just that Mr. Biden has weakness among less engaged voters, or that some respondents weren’t embracing Mr. Trump so much as rejecting Mr. Biden. What struck me is that despite his own raging unpopularity, Mr. Trump is positioned to serve as the repository for protest votes, nostalgia votes and change votes, a weird but potentially potent mash-up of support that could make up for a multitude of weaknesses. He could wind up beating Mr. Biden almost by default.A re-election campaign is fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. And for all his accomplishments, Mr. Biden is presiding over a rough time. Inflation is still taking its bite out of people’s paychecks. The nation is still in a twitchy, sour mood post-pandemic. People are worried about crime and homelessness and the surge of migrants at the southern border. They are still dealing with the toll Covid took on their kids. And the broader mental health crisis. And the opioid scourge. And the two wars in which America is playing a supporting role. Of course a big chunk of the electorate sees the country as headed in the wrong direction.When Americans are feeling pessimistic, the president gets blamed. The degree to which Mr. Biden’s policies have helped or hurt does not much matter, especially on the economy. He owns it. And here’s the thing: You can’t argue with voters’ feelings. Even if you win the debate on points, you’re not going to convince people that they or the nation is actually doing swell. Trying, in fact, often just makes you look like a condescending, out-of-touch jerk.In such gloomy times, many voters start itching for change, for someone to come in and shake things up. This commonly means giving the out party a chance. Think Barack Obama in 2008, after eight enervating years of George W. and Dick Cheney.This time, instead of a fresh face, the Republican Party looks poised to offer a familiar one. This has its downsides. Mr. Trump’s defects are excruciatingly well known — and ever more so as the multiple cases against him wend their way through the courts. But no one denies that he likes to shake things up. And just as Mr. Biden sold himself in 2020 as a break from the chaos of Trumpism, Mr. Trump can now position himself as the change candidate. To borrow a cliché from Mr. Biden, Americans won’t be comparing Mr. Trump to the Almighty but to the alternative. And for many voters, the alternative in 2024 is a Biden status quo they consider unpalatable.It does not help Mr. Biden that he comes across as doddering and frail. This opens him up to one of Republicans’ favorite charges against Democrats: weakness. And political smears resonate more when they fit within an existing framework.At an even more basic level, Mr. Trump doesn’t have to promise positive change so much as the chance to stiff-arm the current leadership. Plenty of protest voters may not be looking to punish Mr. Biden for a particular action, or inaction, so much as for their inchoate disenchantment with the way things are. The economy should be better. Life should be better. The people in charge should be doing better.Some protest voters will turn out to support anyone running against the object of their distaste. This is what plenty of people did with Mr. Trump in 2016 to express their lack of love for Hillary Clinton. Others, especially inconstant voters, may simply decide to sit out the race. If this happens disproportionately among groups who went for Mr. Biden in 2020, such as young and nonwhite voters, it works to Mr. Trump’s benefit. This is the low-turnout specter keeping Democrats up at night.Then there is the nostalgia factor. Political nostalgia is a real and powerful thing. People are wired to romanticize the way things used to be and, by extension, the leaders at the time. Usually, voters dissatisfied with a president do not have the opening for such a direct do over. Rarely does a president who loses re-election attempt a comeback, and only one, Grover Cleveland, has ever done so successfully. But this election, rather than exchanging the incumbent for an unknown quantity, voters can choose to go back to a devil they know, who hails from a pre-Covid age of golden elevators and cheap mortgages.Now factor in thermostatic voting, the fancy name for a kind of generic buyers’ remorse you see as voters frequently veer toward the opposite party from the one they backed in the previous election. Virginia, for instance, picks its governor the year after a presidential election, and its voters typically go with the candidate whose party did not win the White House. You also see this nationally in midterm elections, in which voters often punish the president’s team.Mr. Trump has the added advantage of the economy having been humming before the pandemic upended his last year in office. Inflation was practically nonexistent. Unemployment was low. The nation wasn’t neck deep in scary, sticky wars. Sure, he was a supertoxic aspiring autocrat who tried to subvert democracy by overturning a free and fair election and who is now facing dozens of criminal charges, not to mention a civil suit for fraud. But if, come fall of 2024, he asks voters that most basic of political questions, “Weren’t you better off when I was president?” an awful lot may answer, “Hell, yeah.”Twelve months is several eternities in politics. And none of this is to downplay Mr. Trump’s glaring flaws — or his manifest unfitness for office. But there are some political fundamentals working in his favor that go beyond his specific pros and cons. Anyone who isn’t at least a little afraid isn’t paying attention.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the share of votes reported and the number of remaining votes, based on historic turnout data and reporting from results providers. These are only estimates, and they may not be informed by reports from election officials. The Associated Press also provides estimates for the share of votes reported, which are shown for races for which The Times does not publish its own estimates.Produced by Michael Andre, Cam Baker, Neil Berg, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Charlie Smart, Isaac White and Christine Zhang.
Reporting by David W. Chen, Emily Cochrane, Nicholas Fandos, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, J. David Goodman, Jeffery C. Mays, Amelia Nierenberg, Rick Rojas, Dana Rubinstein, Edgar Sandoval, Tracey Tully, Michael Wines and Kate Zernike. Editing by Wilson Andrews, Felice Belman, William P. Davis, Dean Chang, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski, Allison McCartney, Esha Ray and Dagny Salas. More

With Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, limited to two terms, Cherelle Parker, a fellow Democrat who is a former state legislator and City Council member, is favored to win in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1. If elected, she would become the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold […] More