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      Does Biden Really Believe We Are in a Crisis of Democracy?

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      Strip away the weird semi-fascist optics, the creepy crimson lighting and the Marines standing sentinel, and the speech Joe Biden gave on Thursday night outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall could have been given by other prominent Democrats throughout the Trump era.The song is always the same: On the one hand, dire warnings about Trumpian authoritarianism and the need for all patriotic Republicans and independents to join the defense of American democracy; on the other, a strictly partisan agenda that offers few grounds for ideological truce, few real concessions to beliefs outside the liberal tent.In this case, Biden’s speech conflated the refusal to accept election outcomes with opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — implying that the positions of his own Catholic Church are part of a “MAGA Republican” threat to democracy itself — while touting a State of the Union‌-style list of policy achievements, a cascade of liberal self-praise.The speech’s warning against eroding democratic norms was delivered a week after Biden’s own semi-Caesarist announcement of a $500 billion student-loan forgiveness plan without consulting Congress. And it was immediately succeeded by the news that Democrats would be pouring millions in advertising into New Hampshire’s Republican Senate primary, in the hopes of making sure that the Trumpiest candidate wins through — the latest example of liberal strategists deliberately elevating figures their party and president officially consider an existential threat to the ‌Republic.The ultimate blame for nominating those unfit candidates lies with the G.O.P. electorate, not Democrats. But in the debate about the risks of Republican extremism, the debate the president just joined, it’s still important to judge the leaders of the Democratic Party by their behavior. You may believe that American democracy is threatened as at no point since the Civil War, dear reader, but they do not. They are running a political operation in which the threat to democracy is leverage, used to keep swing voters onside without having to make difficult concessions to the center or the right.It’s easy to imagine a Biden speech that offered such concessions without giving an inch in its critique of Donald Trump. The president could have acknowledged, for instance, that his own party has played some role in undermining faith in American elections, that the Republicans challenging the 2020 result were making a more dangerous use of tactics deployed by Democrats in 2004 and 2016.Or his condemnations of political violence could have encompassed the worst of the May and June 2020 rioting, the recent wave of vandalism at crisis pregnancy centers or the assassination plot against Brett Kavanaugh as well as MAGA threats.Or instead of trying to simply exploit the opportunities that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has created for his party, he could have played the statesman, invoked his own Catholic faith and moderate past, praised the sincerity of abortion opponents and called for a national compromise on abortion — a culture war truce, if you will, for the greater good of saving democracy itself.You can make a case for Biden refusing these gestures (or a different set pegged to different non-liberal concerns). But that case requires private beliefs that diverge from Biden’s public statements: In particular, a belief that Trumpism is actually too weak to credibly threaten the democratic order, and that it’s therefore safe to accept a small risk of, say, a Trump-instigated crisis around the vote count in 2024 if elevating Trumpists increases the odds of liberal victories overall.For actual evidence supporting such a belief, I recommend reading Julian G. Waller’s essay “Authoritarianism Here?” in the spring 2022 issue of the journal American Affairs. Surveying the literature on so-called democratic backsliding toward authoritarianism around the world, Waller argues that the models almost always involve a popular leader and a dominant party winning sweeping majorities in multiple elections, gaining the ground required to entrench their position and capture cultural institutions, all the while claiming the mantle of practicality and common sense.As you may note, this does not sound like a description of the current Republican Party — a minority coalition led by an unpopular chancer that consistently passes up opportunities to seize the political center, a party that enjoys structural advantages in the Senate and the Electoral College but consistently self-sabotages by nominating zany or incompetent candidates, a movement whose influence in most cultural institutions collapsed in the Trump era.If Jan. 6 and its aftermath made it easier to imagine a Trumpian G.O.P. precipitating a constitutional crisis, they did not make it more imaginable that it could consolidate power thereafter, in the style of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or any other example. Which in turn makes it relatively safe for the Democratic Party to continue using crisis-of-democracy rhetoric instrumentally, and even tacitly boost Trump within the G.O.P., instead of making the moves toward conciliation and cultural truce that a real crisis would require.Such is an implication, at least, of Waller’s analysis, and it’s my own longstanding read on Trumpism as well.That reading may well be too sanguine. But in their hearts, Joe Biden and the leaders of his party clearly think I’m right.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It

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      I’ve watched Americans in recent years acclimate to some very grim realities. Especially since the ascension of Donald Trump, numerous tragedies and extreme policies have been met with little political consequence: schools targeted by mass murderers, immigrants treated as subhuman and autocratic regimes around the globe affirmed as allies. While Mr. Trump did fail in his re-election bid, a swing of just over 20,000 votes in the three states with the narrowest margins would have produced a win for him, and Democrats hold razor-thin majorities in the House and the Senate.In the weeks following the leak of a draft ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which all but guaranteed the end of abortion protections under Roe v. Wade, it initially seemed this pattern would hold. About three weeks after the leak, a CNN analyst claimed that “the Republican wave is building fast” heading into the midterm elections. In late May, the highly respected election analysts at the Cook Political Report increased their estimate of how many House seats the G.O.P. would gain. The discussion was not focused on whether the November general election would be a “red wave” but rather just how big of a wave it would be.But once the actual Dobbs decision came down, everything changed. For many Americans, confronting the loss of abortion rights was different from anticipating it. In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.One of the first big signs that things had changed came from Kansas. After voters there defeated a constitutional amendment that would have removed abortion protections in the state in a landslide, I sought to understand how activists could have accomplished such an astounding upset. While it takes several weeks for state election officials to produce full reports on who voted in any given election, there was an immediate clue. I looked at new voter registrants in the state since the June 24 Dobbs decision. As shocking as the election result was to me, what I found was more striking than any single election statistic I can recall discovering throughout my career. Sixty-nine percent of those new registrants were women. In the six months before Dobbs, women outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations. After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. Women were engaged politically in a way that lacked any known precedent.Repeating the Kansas analysis across several other states, a clear pattern emerged. Nowhere were the results as stark as they were there, but no other state was facing the issue with the immediacy of an August vote on a constitutional amendment. What my team and I did find was large surges in women registering to vote relative to men, when comparing the period before June 24 and after.The pattern was clearest in states where abortion access was most at risk, and where the electoral stakes for abortion rights this November were the highest. The states with the biggest surges in women registering post-Dobbs were deep red Kansas and Idaho, with Louisiana emerging among the top five states. Key battleground states also showed large increases, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, which are all facing statewide races in which the fate of abortion access could be decided in November.The surge in women registering and voting helped the Democrat Pat Ryan prevail over Marc Molinaro — one of the more credible Republican recruits this cycle — in New York’s fiercely contested 19th Congressional District last month. This is not the type of performance you would see in a red wave election. Among the mail and early votes cast in the district, women outnumbered men by an 18-point margin, despite accounting for about 52 percent of registered voters.With over two months until Election Day, uncertainty abounds. Election prognostication relies heavily on past precedent. Yet there is no precedent for an election centered around the removal of a constitutional right affirmed a half-century before. Every poll we consume over the closing weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we have no benchmark.The stakes are high. Going into the midterms this fall, the G.O.P. need only gain six seats in the House and one seat in the Senate to retake control of those chambers, thwarting any hope of advancing federal abortion protections or any number of other liberal priorities.Already, several Republicans seem to be sensing that they’re in trouble. In Arizona, the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, an ardent abortion opponent, recently wiped language advocating extreme abortion restrictions from his website.Whether the coming elections will be viewed as a red wave, a Roe wave or something in between will be decided by the actions of millions of Americans — especially, it seems, American women. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority decision in Dobbs: “Women are not without electoral or political power.” He was right about that. Republicans might soon find out just how much political power they have.Tom Bonier is a Democratic political strategist and the C.E.O. of TargetSmart, a data and polling firm. He teaches political science at Howard University and is a member of S.E.I.U. Local 500.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Downplay Trump and Abortion on Their Sites Before Midterms

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      For months, the campaign website for Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, greeted visitors with a huge banner exalting his endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump in all capital letters. Now, that information is nowhere on his home page.Representative Ted Budd, the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina, also made Mr. Trump’s endorsement far less prominent on his website last month. And Blake Masters, the party’s Senate nominee in Arizona, took down a false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump and softened his calls for tough abortion restrictions.Republican leaders are increasingly worried that both Mr. Trump and the issue of abortion could be liabilities in November, threatening the advantages the party expected from President Biden’s unpopularity and voters’ distress over inflation. At least 10 Republican candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to downplay their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust uncompromising stances on abortion. Some have removed material from their websites altogether.The changes to the websites for Mr. Laxalt and Mr. Budd have not been previously reported. Mr. Masters’s overhaul, in which he deleted, among other elements, a call for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment that would give fetuses the same rights as infants and adults, was first reported by NBC News and CNN. Other news outlets have identified editing by several House candidates, including Yesli Vega in Virginia and Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado, Bo Hines in North Carolina and Tom Barrett in Michigan.Candidates have long adjusted their messaging after winning primaries, appealing to general-election voters by toning down the hard-line stances they took to win over their party’s base. But now, such shifts are more visible. “Having all this stuff in writing makes it a little more challenging to make the pivot,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster who is working with a super PAC supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, among other groups. But, he added, “there are a couple of unusual elements that do make this a bit different, with the Dobbs decision and Trump’s continual prominence in the news.”Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who is working with several campaigns, including Mr. Masters’s opponent, Senator Mark Kelly, said that “the magnitude of the changes and the volume” among Republicans were well beyond what she had seen in past election cycles.Mr. Laxalt, who is running against Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in a race that Republicans see as one of their best chances to pick up a Senate seat, updated his website sometime between July 10 and Aug. 3, according to archived versions reviewed by The New York Times — putting the changes at least a month beyond his June 14 primary win.Adam Laxalt’s website on July 10.Mr. Laxalt’s website on Aug. 31.Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Mr. Laxalt, called inquiries about the website changes — which moved mention of Mr. Trump’s backing to an “endorsements” page — “ridiculous” and said, “We are proud of our Trump endorsement.”He added that the banner images on Mr. Laxalt’s Twitter and Facebook pages had “remained the same, emphasizing Trump’s endorsement.” Those banners, composite images of Mr. Laxalt, Mr. Trump and 12 other Republicans, feature Mr. Trump prominently but do not mention the endorsement.Mr. Budd updated his website in late July, well after North Carolina’s May 17 primary, according to archived pages reviewed by The Times.Until July 22, his home page featured a prominent, all-caps message that read “endorsed by President Donald J. Trump,” above a photo of Mr. Budd with the former president and a sign-up form urging voters to “join President Trump in supporting” him.Ted Budd’s website on July 22.Mr. Budd’s website on Aug. 31.But since July 23, it has instead featured a rotating slide show of endorsers, starting with Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina and circulating through former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee before reaching Mr. Trump. A viewer would need to look at that spot on the page for about 20 seconds to see Mr. Trump.“It’s pretty basic — general elections have different dynamics than primary elections,” Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Mr. Budd’s campaign, said in an email.“We face a female opponent, so we’ve added prominent female politicians who have endorsed Ted,” Mr. Felts said. (Mr. Budd’s Democratic opponent is Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.)Other differences have been more subtle. Mr. Budd, for example, has made no changes to a page that outlines his views on abortion, but he has moved the link to that page lower on his website’s list of his positions; it was second as of July 23, but is now fifth.J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, once listed abortion sixth on his “issues” page, but now lists it 10th.Sometime between Aug. 7 and Aug. 26, Mr. Vance also expanded his abortion language on that page to emphasize government support — including an expanded child tax credit — to ensure “that every young mother has the resources to bring new life into the world.” He has made no changes, however, to his description of himself as “100 percent pro-life.”Recent polls and elections underscore the dangers of the current political environment for Republicans. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and abortion bans took effect in many states, Democrats have exceeded expectations in four special House elections, and Kansans decisively rejected a constitutional amendment that would have paved the way for an abortion ban or major restrictions.And now, the widening F.B.I. investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents is shining a light on the former president when Republicans would rather have voters focus on the current one.A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that Mr. Biden’s approval rating, while still low at 40 percent, had increased nine percentage points since July and exceeded Mr. Trump’s 34 percent rating, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.The poll also found that 76 percent of respondents were following the news about the removal of classified documents from Mr. Trump’s home somewhat or very closely and that 64 percent considered the allegations against him somewhat or very serious.Eighty-three percent of Americans polled said it was important that candidates share their views on abortion, and 64 percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Republicans are not alone in recognizing the salience of the issue; Democrats have also taken note, adjusting their own messaging and spending millions of dollars on abortion-related advertising.“It could be the case that in a tight race, the abortion issue could tip the balance,” said Mary C. Snow, a Quinnipiac polling analyst. More

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      Did Biden Just School the Republicans or His Own Party?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Depending on whom you ask, Joe Biden’s decision to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans is either the Democrats’ political masterstroke or a major political gift to Republicans. What’s your take?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, allow me to take the middle road. Gee, I really do enjoy saying that. Makes me feel so … judicious.Politically, I think it’s more a winner than not. Tens of millions of people who have college debt in their family are going to be grateful; almost everybody else has other things to focus on. I doubt anybody who started last week liking Joe Biden’s agenda is suddenly going to turn on the Democrats.Bret: I wonder. This just seems to me like yet another case of Democrats getting on the wrong side of working-class America. Most Americans don’t have a bachelor’s degree, sometimes because they couldn’t afford it. Most Americans who did go to college either have paid their loans off or are paying them off. Now they have been turned into chumps for living within their means — while paying, through their taxes, for those who didn’t.Expect Republicans to run on this in the fall the way Democrats are running on abortion rights. What do you think of the decision on the merits?Gail: Policywise, I just wish it had been tied to some serious reforms of the current system that helped create all that debt in the first place.Bret: Agree. One-time student loan forgiveness isn’t going to get educational costs under control. If anything, it will create a moral hazard in which people take out student loans they may not be able to afford in the expectation of future loan forgiveness. What’s your reform proposal?Gail: First and foremost, a deep dive into for-profit schools. Many of them are total scams, and even the ones that aren’t often charge more for programs people can get elsewhere.Bret: I’d add that there are plenty of nonprofit schools also charging way too much for dubious degrees.Gail: After that, a serious look at overall price tags. The fact that loans are so easy to get has encouraged even very fine schools to charge too-high tuition in order to get money for programs that feed the ego of the administration more than the quality of the education.And then … well, hey. Your turn.Bret: It wouldn’t hurt, either, if colleges and universities started cutting down sharply on the army of administrators they’ve hired in recent years, who contribute a lot to fiscal and bureaucratic bloat and therefore to overall costs.Gail: Watch out, administrators — if Bret and I are in accord, you’ve probably got a problem.Bret: Longer term, we should help steer teenagers away from the idea that four-year college is their one and only ticket to prosperity, status and success. We should shift our funding toward community colleges, vocational schools and a wide range of adult-education programs. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of expanding opportunities for shorter enlistment times for young people who want to join any branch of the armed forces. It could help fund their future education, and it would make them more disciplined students when they do.Gail: While we’re being hard-nosed about what we want students to get out of college, I feel obliged to point out that some of the less practical aspects of higher education can be terrific experiences. I went to graduate school and got a master’s degree in government, which I don’t think has ever once convinced a potential employer I was a superior candidate. But I had a great time, met some fascinating people, including my future husband, and learned a lot.I paid for it through on-campus jobs, some of which you could argue amounted to a kind of public financing. Not saying this should be a universal goal. But when I’m cheerleading for the most practical possible approach to higher education, I feel obliged to toss it in.Bret: True and fair. Liberal-arts education is great when students are engaged and teaching quality is high. Wish that were more often the case.On another subject, Gail, any takeaways from the release of the redacted affidavit on the Mar-a-Lago search?Gail: Have to admit I was disappointed by all those redactions — I was hoping for something that looked a little larger. More dramatic. More specific. More … something. How about you?Bret: Here’s my hunch: Donald Trump has only a vague idea of what’s in all of these documents. The notion that he read through boxes and boxes containing hundreds of documents with classification markings and chose to take these particular items strikes me as … unlikely.Gail: Yeah, I hear he’s currently way too engrossed in rereading the collected works of Tolstoy.Bret: Right. He’s so upset by Anna Karenina’s suicide that he hasn’t been able to focus on anything.What is very much like Trump is that, as soon as the administration sought to recover the boxes, he saw an opportunity to set up a test of strength against Biden — one that would stoke the paranoia of his supporters, rally wavering Republicans to his side and set up the Justice Department to fall on its face barring some spectacular disclosure.So my bottom line is that the Justice Department had better come up with something very damning, not just a charge relating to mishandling classified documents. If it doesn’t, it will be the fourth or fifth time in six years that the F.B.I. has meddled in politics, only to cause irreparable damage to its own reputation.Gail: Congratulations, you’ve flung me into depression. I do agree with you that the story on Trump’s end is less likely a sinister plot than messy grabbiness, perhaps along with a reasonable paranoia that, given the number of things he’s done wrong, there’d be evidence of something bad somewhere.Bret: I’ve always maintained that with Trump, there are no deep, dark secrets: His absolute awfulness always stares you squarely in the face, like a baboon’s backside.Gail: Short term, this saga is just giving ammunition to the right. But I can’t envision a whole lot of people switching their allegiance to Trump because of it.Bret: Not among people who never voted for him. What worries me for now is that he’ll recapture wavering Republicans who were nearly done with him.Gail: Republicans who race to the polls because they’re outraged by the F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago adventure are going to be a fraction of the number of folks who’ll want to register their very strong feelings on behalf of abortion rights.Bret: We’ll see.Gail: But let me poke you on another federal agency that conservatives tend to find … problematic. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes about $80 billion to update the I.R.S. I think it’s a great idea, given its current pathetic state. Overworked agents sitting around stapling papers together aren’t going to be able to win a lot of battles with high-end accountants and lawyers protecting their rich clients from an audit.But as I’m sure you know, a lot of Republicans are howling about what the dreaded Ted Cruz calls a “shadow army” of I.R.S. agents. What’s your take?Bret: I recently read that the I.R.S. answers just 10 percent of calls. So if the money goes to making the agency more responsive to distressed taxpayers, I’m fine with it. My worry is that the agency will initiate lots of audits against people who don’t have the benefit of fancy accountants and lawyers and who are at the mercy of an agency that has almost limitless power and not much accountability.Gail, we’re getting to the end of summer, and some of our readers may be looking for a final book recommendation before Labor Day. I know you’re working on a memoir, but are there any books you’d suggest?Gail: The last time we talked books I said I was enjoying the novel “A Gentleman in Moscow.”Now you’re giving me a chance to share a letter I got from a reader, John Burgess, saying he’d put in a request for it at his local library, He continued: “The day I picked it up, my son tested positive for Covid. Now I am sequestered in my house (my son lives with me), reading about a Russian noble who was imprisoned in the Metropol hotel in Moscow in 1922. The setting could hardly be more perfect.”See, you never can tell when a novel you read is going to parachute into your real life.On the nonfiction front, I just happily finished “Thank You for Your Servitude” by our former colleague Mark Leibovich, one of the latest in what looks like a banner year for retrospectives on the Trump presidency.How about you?Bret: I spent part of the summer reading books by friends. I devoured Jamie Kirchick’s riveting “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” a landmark that deserves companion histories for London, Paris and other capitals. I was deeply moved by “When Magic Failed,” the posthumous memoir of Fouad Ajami, with its heartbreaking depictions of village and city life in his native Lebanon.I read an advance copy of Lionel Shriver’s forthcoming nonfiction collection, “Abominations,” appropriately subtitled “Selected Essays From a Career of Courting Self-Destruction,” which should be mandatory reading for college freshmen. And I finally got around, albeit 20 years late, to my old friend Mindy Lewis’s stunning memoir, “Life Inside,” centered on her institutionalization as a teenager in the late 1960s in a psychiatric hospital in New York. It deserves to be reissued in this new era of mental health crisis among younger people.Gail: I knew your summer list would be high quality and longer than mine. I like the idea that my excuse is that I’m writing a book, so there’s not much time for reading. But maybe if I stopped watching “Sopranos” reruns before bed …Bret: Can’t wait for your book. We’ve been revisiting some favorite French farces. Highly recommend “Le Dîner de Cons” and “Le Placard.”Gail: Next week we’ll be off, celebrating Labor Day with our readers, Bret. Then it’s on to September and the midterm election homestretch. Lord knows what’s going to happen, but it’s nice to know that whatever it is, I’ll get to talk about it with you.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Donald Trump’s Death Grip Has Upended the G.O.P. Senate Map

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      As today’s politicians go, Senator Michael Bennet is kind of boring. Ideologically moderate. Dispositionally low-key. Scandal-free. A sensible technocrat rather than a charismatic ideologue. Heck, when Mr. Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, ran for president in 2020, he joked that a perk of electing him would be that people could simply forget about him for days on end.It is a tribute to the weirdness of this political season, then, that Mr. Bennet’s re-election race is shaping up to be one of the midterms’ more interesting and illuminating contests. It isn’t considered a first-tier nail-biter like Georgia’s or Nevada’s, but it promises to be a more serious fight than many had anticipated in largely blue Colorado.Like Democratic candidates everywhere, Mr. Bennet had already been bracing for electoral headwinds having little to do with his job performance. Among the big-picture fundamentals working against his party are inflation, pandemic fatigue, President Biden’s unpopularity and a thermostatic electorate that, even in less surly times, tends to punish a first-term president’s team in the midterms.More recently, though, Mr. Bennet’s fortunes have been threatened because of trouble brewing on the Republican side. Specifically, this November’s Senate election map has grown more pear-shaped for the G.O.P. A mix of broad political developments (more on those in a minute) and weak nominees in key battlegrounds is making Republican leaders twitchy — they need a net gain of one seat to control the Senate — prompting them to look around for other places where they could flip Democratic-held seats. Colorado is one of those places. And so Mr. Bennet finds himself navigating the unpredictable crosscurrents roiling the national scene and making this election cycle unsettling for both parties.Things weren’t supposed to be this complicated. Cruising into the summer, Republicans were feeling feisty, their heads filled with visions of total congressional domination. But then the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade, firing up many, many women voters. Gas prices started creeping down. Congressional Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act (which is more about tackling climate change and the price of prescription drugs than reducing inflation, but why quibble?). The next thing you know, Democratic voters are feeling more motivated to go to the polls, shrinking the so-called enthusiasm gap between the parties.Now layer onto this a G.O.P. roster of not-so-sparkling Senate nominees — for which Republicans overwhelmingly have a certain ex-president to thank.In some cases, Donald Trump’s death grip on his party hurt efforts to recruit broadly appealing candidates. The most notable failures were in New Hampshire and Arizona, where the states’ Republican governors declined to debase themselves in the manner required to woo the Trump-addled base in Senate runs.Worse, the primary process — in which Mr. Trump meddled heavily — served up multiple nominees of questionable experience, appeal or basic competence.Take Blake Masters, Mr. Trump’s man in Arizona. A darling of the hard right, Mr. Masters has a tendency to do things like blame Black people for America’s gun violence and accuse Democrats of trying to change “the demographics of our country” by flooding it with immigrants. (For a really wild ride, check out his online musings circa 2007.) Playing footsie with racists and replacement-theory nutters may delight many in the MAGAverse, but it feels a little edgy for a purple state like Arizona.In Pennsylvania, the Trump-approved Dr. Oz is getting pantsed pretty much every week for being a rich, out-of-touch celebrity carpetbagger. (Crudité, anyone?) In Ohio, J.D. Vance has so far run such a nothingburger of a campaign that one could be excused for forgetting that he is the nominee. And, lordy, what is there to say about Herschel Walker in Georgia? Come for the abuse allegations and incoherent babbling. Stay for the candidate’s fountain of fabrications about his academic achievements and business record.Recent polling shows Dr. Oz, Mr. Masters and Mr. Walker trailing their Democratic opponents. A couple of public polls show Mr. Vance with a strikingly narrow lead in solidly red Ohio, while FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has him one point behind. Also lagging is Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who lost his soul — and his grip on reality — to Trumpism and has spent the past couple of years as the Senate’s foremost conspiracymonger.Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, sounds less smug than usual, recently noting that flipping the chamber could prove challenging, in part, because of “candidate quality.”It’s hard to think of a defeated president who has taken a more aggressive role in undermining his party’s electoral edge. Well played, sir.In the midst of this Trump-fueled chaos, Colorado has caught Republicans’ eye. In a departure from the cycle’s norm, Republicans there chose a Senate nominee who isn’t a MAGA wing nut: Joe O’Dea, a self-made construction magnate. By the standards of today’s G.O.P., his politics are moderate, and he has little patience for Mr. Trump’s shenanigans. Mr. O’Dea has rejected the election-denial insanity and said he hopes Mr. Trump does not run again in 2024. Mr. O’Dea is pitching himself as a political outsider above rank partisanship.This is precisely the kind of challenger that Democrats did not want to be facing — and fought to avoid. As they did in multiple states, Democrats tried to manipulate Colorado’s Republican primary, in this case spending millions to paint Mr. O’Dea as a wishy-washy RINO. The presumed aim was to drive conservative voters into the arms of a more MAGAfied candidate who, Democrats figured, would be easier to beat in a general election.Whatever your views on the overall strategy, it flopped in Colorado. And Mr. Bennet is now saddled with a Republican opponent whom members of his own party worked to brand as a reasonable moderate.Eager to redefine Mr. O’Dea, Team Bennet is turning to the hot topic of abortion, hitting the Republican as an enemy of reproductive rights. This brings its own challenges, since Mr. O’Dea says he supports abortion access up to 20 weeks and beyond that under extenuating circumstances. Team Bennet is stressing that Mr. O’Dea would have voted to confirm the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe and is clearly looking for the post-Roe energy to drive voters away from the G.O.P. in general.Suddenly, even the most cautious Democrats are aspiring culture warriors.Election Day is still a political eternity away, and it’s tough to know how seriously Republicans will wind up playing in Colorado. Last month at a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser for Mr. O’Dea, Mr. McConnell pledged to go “all in” on the Colorado race. In early August the National Republican Senatorial Committee threw a bit of money into advertising there — a modest quarter million but enough to serve as a warning shot. In mid-August the race got shifted from “likely Democrat” to “leans Democrat” by the handicappers at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.Colorado is still Colorado. And Mr. O’Dea is still the underdog. But Mr. Bennet and his party have been put on notice not to take this race for granted. In this highly fluid political moment, not even solid, inoffensive incumbents are safe.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Women’s Work Is Never Done

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      WASHINGTON — It’s nice to see that the Democrats are back on track.It only took an upheaval turning women into second-class citizens, the possibility that the Orange Menace could be re-elected, and an out-of-control Supreme Court.With all that, the Dems seem to be pulling even.There’s still a better than even chance that they could lose the House. If they’re lucky, they’ll hold onto the Senate; and for that they would have to thank the Republicans for putting forward horrible candidates.President Biden’s ratings have gone up, from very bad to not good, with the base cheering on Dark Brandon. But the really positive news is that most Democratic Senate candidates are more popular than he is.The Democrats have managed to come alive in the last few weeks, actually passing stuff in Congress. After watching the country drown and burn, Joe Manchin freaked out that he would be single-handedly blamed for climate change and made a deal with Chuck Schumer.But the Democrats are still barely keeping their heads above water.They just can’t match the Republican crazy. Unfortunately, a considerable chunk of this country is acting insane, believing that Democrats are all pedophiles who are drinking babies’ blood.Democrats have to stop fighting a conventional war. It’s just not a conventional time.Ironic that Friday was Women’s Equality Day, designated so by Congress in the ’70s. At a time when women all over the world should be blossoming, we’re seeing stunning setbacks. There’s a bizarre trend of punishing women, Saudi-style, for their sexuality.Sanna Marin, Finland’s 36-year-old prime minister, is under fire for dancing with her friends in a country that always gets named “the happiest country in the world” in the United Nations-sponsored World Happiness Report. What a grim, still-sexist world this is, when Marin is forced to tearfully apologize — and take a drug test — after video leaked of her letting loose.The Helsinki Times tut-tutted that she was the “Prom Minister” and dismissed the music she was dancing to as “plebeian.” But the amazing Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, defended her Finnish counterpart, asking, “How do we constantly make sure that we attract people to politics, rather than — perhaps as has been historically the case — put them off?”Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, tweeted about the double standard: The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was cheered for chugging beers at a public concert while Marin was under fire for dancing at a private party. “Everyone just back off!” Emanuel wrote.“She’s getting hit for being immature,” Emanuel told me. “But she’s mature enough to lead Finland into NATO. That’s a hard day’s work. I’d need a little party, too!”Joe Biden seemed to see how abnormal things were when, at a rally in suburban Washington the other night, he got bold enough to denounce the MAGA gang for a philosophy that is “almost like semi-fascism.”But, keening about Roe’s reversal, he oddly said of Mitch McConnell: “Even if he’s not as extreme as some,” he “was able to, quote, ‘pack the court’ legitimately.”It is wrong to say McConnell acted legitimately just because he didn’t break the law. McConnell bent and broke the rules; he held off an Obama nominee for a year and then, with a week to go before the 2020 election, jammed the religious zealot Amy Coney Barrett onto the court.Barrett was a “handmaid” in a Christian group called “People of Praise,” in which men are decision makers over their wives. Now, Barrett is making decisions for all the women in the country, and it’s an outrage. The Guardian reported on another leaked video of a recent get-together — far more scary than Marin’s. It shows the wife of the tyrannical leader of “People of Praise” saying that some women in the group cried so intensely because of their subservient roles, they had to wear sunglasses.Women who thought that Roe would never really get tossed out, or if it did, it wouldn’t have that much impact, are now realizing what an earthquake this is.Tudor Dixon, a Donald Trump acolyte who is the Republican nominee for governor in Michigan, told a local Fox station that abortion should be illegal even in the case of minors who are raped. She suggested that having the baby could be “healing.”Many women are angry and many are registering to vote. Trump seems nervous, but he has wiggled out of a lot of jams. Democrats can’t rely on his spontaneous combustion. Just as women boosted Biden into the White House, now women have to rescue us again, from a bunch of crazy conservatives determining our health care — and how we live our lives. And maybe soon, whether we can be Dancing Queens.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Louisiana woman denied abortion despite fetus’s fatal abnormality to travel to North Carolina

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      Louisiana woman denied abortion despite fetus’s fatal abnormality to travel to North CarolinaHospital feared loss of license as state law did not explicitly allow the procedure for this rare condition An expectant Louisiana woman who is carrying a skull-less fetus that would die almost immediately after birth has cemented plans to travel to North Carolina to terminate her pregnancy, she said on Friday.Nancy Davis, 36, has been facing a choice of either carrying the fetus to term or traveling several states away for an abortion after she says her local medical provider would not perform the procedure amid confusion over whether the state’s abortion ban outlawed it.Standing on the steps of Louisiana’s capitol building in her home town of Baton Rouge, Davis announced that her trip would be next week. The trip is being financed by more than $30,000 in donations raised by an online GoFundMe campaign that was launched after she went public with her plight earlier this month.Her lawyer, the prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, also called on Louisiana’s lawmakers to at least clarify the wording of their abortion ban – or to repeal it altogether – to prevent anyone else there from enduring what Davis and her family had during the last several weeks. He said the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, should call a special legislative session in advance of the regular one scheduled to begin in April of next year to do that if necessary.“Louisiana lawmakers inflicted unspeakable pain, emotional damage and physical risk upon this beautiful mother,” Crump said, gesturing at Davis, who was accompanied Friday by her partner, Shedric Cole, their young daughter and her two stepchildren. “They replaced care with confusion, privacy with politics and options with ideology.“Ms Davis was among the first women to be caught in this crosshairs of confusion due to Louisiana’s rush to restrict abortion. But she will hardly be the last.”Louisiana is among the American states that have outlawed abortion with very few exceptions following the US supreme court’s decision in June to strip away nationwide abortion rights that had been in place since the 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade.Davis was about 10 weeks pregnant in late July when an ultrasound at Woman’s hospital in Baton Rouge revealed that her fetus was missing the top of its skull, a rare but devastating condition known as acrania that kills babies within days – if not minutes – of birth.Because Louisiana’s list of conditions justifying an exception from the state’s abortion ban did not explicitly include acrania, hospital officials turned down terminating Davis’ pregancy, apparently fearing they could be subject to prison time, costly fines and forfeiture of their operating licenses if they performed the procedure.“Basically, they said I had to carry my baby to bury my baby,” Davis remarked Friday.Her providers said her Medicaid insurance would not cover the procedure anyway and directed her to an abortion clinic.Yet Louisiana’s abortion clinics have announced plans to leave the state amid brewing legal battles over whether the ban can constitutionally be enforced.After Davis went public with her story and retained Crump to help her sort out her options, the state senator who authored Louisiana’s abortion ban, Katrina Jackson, has insisted that Woman’s hospital could have legally terminated Davis’s pregnancy. The statute contains a general exception for fetuses that cannot survive outside their mothers’ wombs.However, Crump said, that exception was clearly not worded in a way that gave Davis’s providers confidence that they could proceed without potentially being heavily penalized.Davis instead raised money through a GoFundMe that attracted more than 1,000 donors and booked arrangements to travel with Cole, her partner, to North Carolina. That state – more than 900 miles from Baton Rouge – allows abortions up to the 20th week of pregnancy.“The law in Louisiana is clear as mud,” Crump said. “We’re going to prepare ourselves to go out of state and trust the people who are saying they can perform the termination of the pregnancy safely and without anybody having to risk going to prison.”Cole on Friday asked the public to imagine what Davis and the rest of her family had experienced since learning of their baby’s fatal diagnosis and being forced to make the decision to head to North Carolina to abort the baby whom the couple had been expecting.“It’s really complex – it’s really difficult,” Cole said. “From afar, it’s really easy to have an opinion about something … but you don’t understand how complex it is” until you personally go through it.Davis, for her part, said: “This is not fair to me, and it should not happen to any other woman.“Being a mother starts when the baby is inside the womb, not on the outside, [because of] the attachment and everything that comes with it. As a mother, as a parent, it’s my obligation to have my children’s best interests at heart.”TopicsAbortionUS politicsLouisiananewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats Might Get Exceptionally Lucky This Fall, and They Should Be Ready for That

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      Republicans are still favored to gain seats in the midterm elections but are not as favored as you might have thought.They have lost their lead in the generic congressional ballot and face longer-than-expected odds to win the Senate as a result of flawed, extreme and extremely flawed nominees in Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And while Republicans are heavily favored to win control of the House of Representatives, Democrats, according to the forecast at FiveThirtyEight, are still in the game, with a one in five chance to keep their majority,This is, for comparison’s sake, just a notch lower than Donald Trump’s odds of winning the White House in 2016. Recent election results — like the Democratic victory in a special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District — provide even stronger evidence that the national environment may have shifted away from the Republican Party.There is a real chance, in other words, that Democrats could enter the next Congress with their majority intact, a major change from earlier this year, when it looked as if Republicans would ride a red wave to victory in November. And if Democrats get exceptionally lucky — if conditions break just the right way in their favor — then there’s a chance that they begin the new year with a larger majority in the Senate in addition to a majority in the House.The question is: In the unlikely event that Democrats enter 2023 with a stronger majority than they’ve had the past two years, what should they do? There has been plenty of discussion about what Republicans should do with their putative future majorities, but what should the Democrats do with theirs?The easy answer is: everything Democrats couldn’t do in the previous Congress. But as we’ve seen, time is precious, and success depends as much on the willingness to set priorities as it does on the ability to find consensus. What, then, should Democrats prioritize?If the legislative story of the past two years — of the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — is the return of industrial policy, then the legislative story of the next two years must be the return of social policy, as well as an all-out effort to protect and secure the rights that are under assault by the Republican Party and its allies on the Supreme Court.This might sound expansive, but it amounts to just a handful of proposals. On social policy, Democrats should fight to make a child allowance a permanent feature of the social safety net. We already know it works; in just its first round of payments, President Biden’s child tax credits — enacted under the American Rescue Plan — brought more than three million children out of poverty.The Biden plan expired at the end of 2021, but there are still proposals on the table. Last year, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah introduced a plan to give every family a monthly benefit of up to $350 per child for children 5 and under and $250 per child for children 6 to 17. If passed into law, Romney’s plan would, according to the Niskanen Center, cut child poverty by roughly a third. The latest version of the Romney plan isn’t as generous as the original, but it would still put a significant dent in America’s rates of child poverty. There aren’t many policies as clearly good and necessary as a permanent child allowance, which would improve the lives of millions of Americans as well as help Democrats appeal to working- and middle-class voters. They absolutely have to do it.On the question of rights, there are three places Democrats should act as quickly as possible. The first is abortion and reproductive health. In this future in which Democrats still control Congress, they will almost certainly owe their majority to the backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the subsequent drive to criminalize abortion in Republican-led states.In a sense, Democrats would have no choice but to codify abortion rights into law, most likely using the framework developed in Roe v. Wade. There’s actually a bill that would do just that — the Women’s Health Protection Act, which passed the House last year. A less expansive bill, the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, is pending in the Senate.Passing abortion rights into federal law isn’t just the smart thing for Democrats to do; it is the right thing to do — the only way to show the public that the party is willing and able to live up to its rhetoric on reproductive freedom.You can say the same for the other two issue areas that Democrats must address if they somehow keep their majority: labor and voting rights. Both are under assault from right-wing judges and politicians, both need the protection of the federal government, and both are fundamental to the maintenance of a free and fair society. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would strengthen the right of workers to form unions and bargain with their employers, is still on the table, as are proposals to revitalize the Voting Rights Act and end partisan gerrymandering.Of course, to pass any of these laws, Democrats will have to kill the legislative filibuster. Otherwise, this agenda or any other is dead in the water. If Democrats win a Senate majority of 51 or 52 members, they might be able to do it. And they should.It is not often that a political party gets a second bite at the apple. If Democrats win one, there is no reason to let the filibuster — a relic of the worst of our past — stand in the way of building a more decent country, and a more humane one at that.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More