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      Why Biden and Trump Are Courting Striking Autoworkers

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      The president and his leading Republican rival are heading to Michigan to address members of the U.A.W., whose political clout is growing.The political stakes grow as the U.A.W. strike drags on.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesBiden and Trump bid for blue collar votes In an extraordinary show of support, President Biden plans to join striking autoworkers on the picket line in Michigan on Tuesday. It comes a day before Donald Trump is expected to speak to union members in Detroit instead of participating in the second Republican primary debate.The competing visits come as the two home in on battleground states ahead of next year’s election. But their appearances also reveal a political battle to become the voice of blue collar workers at a time when both candidates are struggling to win over mainstream voters and even some within their own parties.Bidenomics is a conundrum for the president. Biden says he is “the most pro-union president in American history” and has overseen one of the biggest industrial policy shifts in decades through the Inflation Reduction Act, offering billions of dollars in subsidies to create new manufacturing jobs in a push to greenify the economy.But the president is getting little credit from voters. Approval ratings for his economic management are at career lows. And the I.R.A. is somewhat troublesome for him: It includes incentives for automakers to make more electric vehicles, which labor leaders say will depend on non-union jobs and require fewer workers.The United Automobile Workers union has held back from endorsing Biden. The group was an early supporter of his economic road map but broke with other big unions. “The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, wrote to members in May.Trump sees an opportunity to hammer Biden and the U.A.W. Trump, whose track record as a businessman and president often backed business over labor, will speak directly to workers, aiming to project himself as a protector of jobs. He has called the federal push for electric vehicles a “catastrophe for Michigan” that would cost American jobs, benefit China and raise prices for consumers.Fain has said Trump would be a “disaster” if re-elected. But the former president’s rhetoric and policies like rewriting trade agreements have appealed to some union members.Union votes could prove decisive in 2024. Trump won Michigan in 2016, but Biden took the state by more than 150,000 votes in 2020. In crucial swing states, even wooing a relatively small portion could be crucial. “In a strike situation, they’re all going out because they’re supporting their own economic interests,” said Alexander Colvin, the dean of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “That doesn’t mean they all think the same thing politically.”HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The F.C.C. is reportedly set to reinstate net neutrality rules. The regulator will revive Obama-era limits on broadband providers’ ability to unfairly interfere with internet traffic, after Democrats finally gained a majority among its commissioners, according to Bloomberg. Companies including AT&T and Comcast are likely to push back, arguing that such rules would be a big burden.All eyes are on striking actors as screenwriters prepare for a vote on their labor deal. Leaders of the Writers Guild of America are to vote on their tentative pact with studios on Tuesday, with members set to weigh in soon. But there are few signs that an agreement with the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union is close, meaning that Hollywood will remain largely shut for now. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA members voted to authorize a strike against video game companies.Fossil fuel use needs to fall more quickly to contain global warming, the International Energy Agency says. Adoption of cleaner energy technologies like electric vehicles and solar is growing, but the use of fossil fuels must shrink faster to avoid a climate catastrophe, the agency said in its latest report. Some industry watchers said that the I.E.A. is still too optimistic about the decline in demand for oil and coal.Senator Bob Menendez says he won’t resign. The New Jersey Democrat, accused of taking bribes, said he’d fight the corruption charges leveled by federal prosecutors. He didn’t address questions about bars of gold found on his property, but asserted that the $550,000 in cash found stuffed around his home was merely part of an emergency fund.Growth concerns hit the bond market Alarm bells are ringing for markets on both sides of the Atlantic. Investors have again sold off their sovereign bond holdings, especially Treasury notes and German bunds, pushing yields to highs last seen in 2007 just before the housing crisis and in 2011 during the European debt crisis.Growth concerns appear to be the culprit. Global trade fell in July at its fastest pace since the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic snarled global markets. According to the newest World Trade Monitor report, the decline is the latest signal that global demand for goods is deteriorating, as inflation and high interest rates remain at multi-decade highs.Jamie Dimon added fuel to the pessimistic outlook. The C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase warned of a kind of worst-case scenario in which the Fed is forced to keep raising its benchmark lending rate to combat inflation, further blunting growth. “I am not sure if the world is prepared for 7 percent,” he said in an interview with The Times of India, referring to the federal funds rate.Fed policymakers themselves don’t see such a scenario playing out. They released a forecast last week suggesting that one more interest rate increase was in the cards this year, and possibly two cuts next year, which would keep interest rates at around 5 percent by the end of 2024. But since the Fed meeting, the futures market has been pricing in higher policy rates for longer, and that’s adding volatility to the bond market.A potential U.S. government shutdown is also unnerving investors. The prospect that lawmakers will fail to reach a deal by Saturday’s deadline to fund the government is weighing on stocks, with U.S. futures in the red this morning. On Monday, Moody’s, the ratings agency, said a shutdown could lead it to downgrade the country’s credit rating — a warning that the White House seized upon in hopes of compelling the warring Republican factions to break their impasse on spending cuts.The good news: The uncertainty has put a lid on the oil rally, with Brent crude falling below $91 a barrel this morning, a two-week low.1.5 trillion — Gallons of water used in fracking by oil and gas companies in the U.S. since 2011. That’s equivalent to the amount of tap water used by the state of Texas each year, according to a Times investigation. The boom in fracking to meet growing energy demand poses a threat to the country’s aquifers, researchers say.ChatGPT, can you take on Alexa? Hours after Amazon announced a big bet on an artificial intelligence start-up — and days after it revealed plans to make its Alexa digital assistant smarter — one of the most prominent names in the A.I. race unveiled its plan to surpass those advancements.OpenAI said its ChatGPT chatbot can now listen to users’ spoken requests and respond vocally, among other new capabilities. It’s a reminder of how fast the race to advance A.I. is moving — and how high the stakes are.Voice is a more natural way of interacting with ChatGPT, according to OpenAI executives, who also said that their chatbot will feature voices that sound more natural than those of existing digital assistants. (The Times says that the voices sound better, but still come across as a little robotic.)OpenAI is adding other features to ChatGPT, including image recognition. One example that OpenAI demonstrated: Share an image of a bicycle with the chatbot and it will instruct the user how to lower the seat.Amazon seems aware of the risks of being outpaced by rivals. Unlike Alexa or Siri, which require users to ask specific commands, the latest version of ChatGPT is capable of more conversational interactions, including follow-up questions and clarifications. Wider adoption of that chatbot could risk Amazon losing its longtime dominance in the market for personal assistants.The Alexa announcement last week, in which Amazon said that it was incorporating the large language model technology into its assistant, is meant to address that eventuality — though ChatGPT’s new capability will be available sooner.With new capabilities come worries about new dangers. OpenAI executives said that they won’t let ChatGPT identify faces, though the software will be able to talk at length about other pictures it’s asked to analyze. There’s also the risk that greater use of ChatGPT will lead to potential mishaps involving the well-known A.I. weakness of inventing facts, known as hallucinating.And Amazon, perhaps leery of the well-publicized hitches that Microsoft and Google suffered in rolling out advanced A.I. features to the wider public, is making the new Alexa features available initially only to some users in the U.S.In other A.I. news: Meet the human workers training A.I. systems. Spotify says it won’t ban A.I.-produced music, but it will work with OpenAI to clone podcasters’ voices to produce versions of their shows in other languages. And New York Magazine asks whether Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., is the Robert Oppenheimer of the digital age.THE SPEED READ DealsAmerican Airlines appealed a federal court ruling that blocked its planned alliance with JetBlue. (Reuters)Vista Equity Partners now oversees more than $100 billion in assets, reflecting investor interest in the big tech deals that are the firm’s stock in trade. (Axios)What’s at stake as Disney and Comcast prepare to negotiate over the value of the streaming service Hulu, which they jointly own. (FT)PolicyTesla is reportedly a focus of European regulators’ inquiry into state subsidies for electric vehicles made in China. (Bloomberg)The Commerce Department has hired veterans of Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs and KKR to help run its semiconductor funding program. (Bloomberg)Best of the restSan Francisco residents say that their city is being unfairly pilloried as a decaying, crime-ridden metropolis. (NYT)Microsoft is looking to power its A.I. and cloud data centers with small nuclear reactors. (CNBC)How companies are pulling off four-day workweeks. (WSJ)“The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech” (404 Media)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Why Democrats Keep Winning Elections Despite Biden’s Negative Polling

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      Despite a flood of negative polls for Democrats, the party has delivered a string of strong results in special elections, which can be a useful gauge of the national political environment.For nearly two years, poll after poll has found Americans in a sour mood about President Biden, uneasy about the economy and eager for younger leaders of the country.And yet when voters have actually cast ballots, Democrats have delivered strong results in special elections — the sort of contests that attract little attention but can serve as a useful gauge for voter enthusiasm.In special elections this year for state legislative offices, Democrats have exceeded Mr. Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election in 21 of 27 races, topping his showing by an average of seven percentage points, according to a study conducted by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm for state legislative races.Those results, combined with an 11-point triumph for a liberal State Supreme Court candidate in Wisconsin this spring and a 14-point defeat of an Ohio ballot referendum this summer in a contest widely viewed as a proxy battle over abortion rights, run counter to months of public opinion polling that has found Mr. Biden to be deeply unpopular heading into his re-election bid next year.Taken together, these results suggest that the favorable political environment for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has endured through much of 2023. Democratic officials have said since the summer of 2022, when the ruling came down, that abortion is both a powerful motivator for the party’s voters and the topic most likely to persuade moderate Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates.“Dobbs absolutely changed the way that people thought about and processed things that they had perceived as a given,” said Heather Williams, the interim president of the D.L.C.C. “We continue to see voters recognizing what’s at stake in these elections.”Democrats are now using abortion rights to power races far down the ballot — an extension of how candidates in special elections at the congressional level have long used prominent national issues to fuel their campaigns.In January 2010, Scott Brown won a shocking upset in a Senate special election in deep-blue Massachusetts by running against President Barack Obama’s health care push. In March 2018, Conor Lamb won a special election to fill a House seat in a deep-red Pennsylvania district by campaigning as a centrist voice against Mr. Trump.Both the Brown and Lamb special elections served as indicators of the wave elections their parties won in subsequent midterm elections.Some of the special elections won by Democrats this year have involved relatively few voters: Under 2,800 ballots were cast in a New Hampshire State House contest last week.“The best evidence that a special election produces is whose side is more engaged on a grass-roots turnout level,” Mr. Lamb said in an interview on Monday. “That gives you some signal about who is bringing their turnout back next year.”Mr. Biden’s low approval ratings have illustrated a wide gap between how Democratic leaders view him and what voters think. But past presidents — including Barack Obama — have recovered from similarly sour numbers to win re-election, a point Mr. Biden’s aides repeat to seemingly anyone who will listen.Political operatives remain vexed about how much stock to put into the results of special elections. Such races tend to draw a fraction of the turnout in regular contests, and the voters skew older and more educated — a demographic that in the Trump era is more likely to favor Democrats.The party that wins special elections tends to trumpet their importance and predictive power, while the losing side writes them off as insignificant measures of voters’ mood.Last week, after Democrats won special elections to maintain control of the Pennsylvania House and flip a Republican-held seat in the New Hampshire House, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, emailed donors to say the results showed Mr. Biden’s political strength.“These aren’t just one-off election wins,” she wrote. “They prove that our message is resonating with voters — and that we can’t write off any corner of the country.”Officials with the Republican state legislative campaign arm did not respond to messages on Monday.The next chance for Democrats to prove their strength in down-ballot elections will come in Virginia. A slate of Democratic state legislative candidates are warning on the campaign trail that a Republican-controlled legislature and Gov. Glenn Youngkin would roll back abortion rights. Republicans are pitching the same menu of tax cuts and parental influence over schools that swept Mr. Youngkin into office two years ago.The elections are likely to serve as a solid arbiter of the parties’ strength heading into 2024. Under the state’s new legislative district lines, Mr. Biden would have won a majority of House of Delegates seats in 2020. But Mr. Youngkin carried a majority of the districts when he was elected in 2021.“These are competitive maps,” Ms. Williams said. “When we get to the other side of this November election and you look at all of these things combined, you’re going to see a very strong story for Democrats.” More

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      If Politicians Are Either Stainless or Shameless, Guess Which One Senator Menendez Is

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, you know how much I hate stereotypes, but — New Jersey! What is it about the state that seems to produce ethically challenged pols? I’m thinking about Harrison Williams and Bob Torricelli and Jim McGreevey and innumerable mayors and assemblymen and now Senator Robert Menendez, indicted — once again — for various corrupt practices, including taking bribes in the form of gold bars.Is it the mercury in the Hackensack River? The effects of Taylor Pork Roll? Lingering trauma over the Snooki pouf?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, the case has of course yet to be tried, but right now, whenever I see a picture of Bob Menendez, I imagine a little golden rectangle sticking out of his pocket.His career is over. However, let’s be fair. We can’t get all high and mighty about New Jersey when we live in a state where George Pataki, whose three terms ended in 2007, was the last elected governor to finish his political career without having to resign in disgrace.Bret: Maybe the eastbound sign on the George Washington Bridge should read, “Welcome to the Empire State, not quite as crooked as the state you’re leaving. But. …”Gail: I can think of some more states that could use similar signs, but I’ll be charitable today and refrain from making lists. Do you have a remedy? One thing that worries me is how uncool politics has become. You don’t see promising college students talking about their dream of going back home and running for City Council. Or even someday becoming president.I blame Donald Trump for that, of course. But I have to admit Joe Biden doesn’t exactly make politics look like an exciting career.Bret: My pet theory about modern American politics is that only two types of people go into it: the stainless and the shameless. Either you have lived a life of such unimpeachable virtue that you can survive endless investigations into your personal history, or you’re the type of person who lacks the shame gene, so you don’t care what kind of dirt the media digs up about you. In other words, you’re either Mitt Romney or Donald Trump, Chuck Schumer or Anthony Weiner.Gail: Wow, first time I’ve thought about Anthony Weiner in quite a while. But go on.Bret: Point being, most normal people fall somewhere in the middle, and they don’t want to spend their lives under a media microscope. That’s why so many otherwise well-qualified and otherwise public-spirited people steer clear of political careers. Which brings us without stopping to the complete breakdown in the Republican House caucus.Gail: So glad you brought that up. I was of course going to ask — how much of this is Kevin McCarthy’s fault, how much the fault of Republican conservatives in general?Bret: Can’t it be both? McCarthy got his speakership by putting himself at the mercy of the lunatic fringe on his right, and now that fringe is behaving like … lunatics. In theory, what the Republican caucus is arguing about is government spending and whether a government shutdown can send a message about excess spending. In reality, this is about power — about people like Matt Gaetz showing that, with a handful of votes, he can bring the entire Congress to heel. It’s the tyranny of a small minority leveraging its will over a bare majority to hold everyone else hostage.Including, I should add, the Defense Department. If you had told me 10 years ago that the G.O.P. would purposefully sow chaos at the Pentagon to score points about government spending or abortion, I would have thought you were tripping. But here we are.Gail: Non-fan of the House Republicans that I am, I did not expect anything good when they won the majority last year. But I did expect them to be semi-competent in their attempts to do bad.Bret: Hehe.Gail: Instead, we have government by Matt Gaetz, or Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama senator who’s been holding up military promotions as a protest against … abortion rights?All this is good for the Democrats, who would have had to block any House budget that decimated critical services like health care. As things stand now, if we go into October without a national budget in place, all the ensuing crises will be blamed on the Republicans.Not saying I want that to happen, but if it does, glad the shame will go in the right direction.Bret: House Republicans have become a circular firing squad and I really have to wonder whether McCarthy will last another month as speaker, let alone to the end of this Congress. Although, whenever I think the Republicans are harming themselves, I turn to the Democrats. Granting almost 500,000 Venezuelans temporary protected status is the right thing to do, but the administration’s failure to get control of the border means it’s only a matter of time before grants at this scale happen as a matter of course. I just don’t understand how this is good policy or wise politics. Please explain it to me.Gail: Don’t think anybody feels the current border policies are anything close to perfect, but it’s a question of what else to do. Eager to hear any suggestions that don’t involve a stupid, embarrassing wall.Bret: Which I continue to favor — along with wide and welcoming gates — but OK. There’s also something called a “smart fence” that has excellent sensors to detect border crossings, but is less ugly, less expensive and more environmentally sensitive than a wall. But it would have to be manned continuously by armed patrols. We can also immediately return people arriving here illegally rather than let them stay in the United States while awaiting a court hearing, unless they are from countries where they are at mortal risk from their own governments. President Obama did that pretty robustly, and I don’t remember any of my liberal friends claiming it was an assault on human rights. And we need to enormously expand consular facilities throughout Latin America so people’s immigration claims can be processed abroad, not once they’ve crossed the border.Gail: Voting with you on greatly expanded consular services.Bret: It would be a start. And I’m saying all this as someone who believes deeply in the overall benefits of immigration. But a de facto open border doesn’t advance the cause of a liberal immigration policy. It undermines it. And it could take down a lot of the Democratic Party in the process.Gail: Arguing about the fence is sort of comforting, in a way. Takes me back to the old days when we could fight about politics without having to wring our hands over the likes of Kevin McCarthy.Bret: So true. Politics used to be debating ideas. Now it’s about diagnosing psychosis.Gail: Don’t know how depressed to feel about the deeply unenthusiastic, borderline terrifying polling numbers that Biden has been getting. On the one hand, it’s understandable that people are cranky about not having a younger, fresher, more exciting alternative to Trump. On the other hand — jeepers, the man has achieved a heck of a lot. And when you look at the inevitable alternative. …Bret: Liberals might see a lot of liberal policy achievements, but what conservatives and swing voters see is higher food and gas prices, higher mortgage rates, urban decay, an immigration crisis that only seems to get worse and a visibly feebler president. I really doubt we’d be having these anxieties over a potential second term for Trump if Biden simply stepped aside.Gail: But to get back to the House Republicans — an impeachment inquiry, starring Hunter Biden, yet again? This one, as you know well, is allegedly supposed to investigate whether the president did anything in 2015 to protect his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. Are you indifferent, bored or embarrassed?Bret: Angered. It’s outrageous to open an impeachment inquiry when there is absolutely no available evidence that the president committed impeachable offenses. By that preposterous standard, the police should open investigations into every parent in America whose children are louts.Gail: Speaking of louts — or at least uncouth dressers — how do you feel about Chuck Schumer’s decision to drop the Senate dress code? Clearly a bow to John Fetterman, who has been known to show up in a hoodie and shorts.Bret: Schumer is one of the nicest men I know in political life, a real mensch whether you agree with him or not. But this is a case of him being too nice. The Senate is held in low enough repute already; we don’t need it looking like an Arby’s. I hope he rethinks this. What’s your view?Gail: Agree about Schumer and kinda think you’re also right on the dress code. He lost me at the shorts.Hey, one last question — any predictions for the Republican debate this week?Bret: I expect Ramaswamy to irritate, DeSantis to infuriate, Christie to needle, Pence to remind me of a beetle, Scott to smile and Haley to win by a mile. But I doubt it will move the dial.Otherwise, I’d rather spend the time watching people ice fish.Gail: Come on, there’s always something weird or ridiculous to reward you for watching. And some suspense — will Ron DeSantis say something truly stupid that will make him drop out? Will Tim Scott have any good I-wanna-be-veep moments? And it’s always fun to listen to Chris Christie slam into Trump.Bret: True. And let’s see what conspiracy theory Ramaswamy will endorse next, like: Did Joe Biden get his Corvette at a discount from George Soros?Gail: We can talk it over next week. Along with God-knows-what new political crisis. Looking forward already.Bret: Same here. And before we go, I hope our readers didn’t miss Ian Johnson’s extraordinary essay about the Chinese journalists and historians fighting to preserve the knowledge of China’s tragedies and atrocities in the face of the regime’s attempts to suppress it. It made me think of how badly our own sense of history, including events like Jan. 6, has eroded, and reminded me of my favorite Milan Kundera lines: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”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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      The Democratic Party Has an Old Problem and Won’t Admit It

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      President Biden’s advanced age (80) gets rehashed endlessly, because the human condition makes it inescapable. A deft politician can wait out almost any other liability: Scandals and gaffes fade over time; the economy bounces back; governing errors can be corrected. But Mr. Biden will never be (or appear) younger than he is today. The problem of his age will never fade.In our fixation on Mr. Biden’s age, we often gloss over the role the Democratic Party has played in promoting and lionizing its older leaders, then muddling through when illness or death undermines their ability to govern. The party’s leaders seem to believe implicitly in the inalienable right of their aging icons to remain in positions of high power unquestioned, long after it becomes reasonable to ask whether they’re risking intolerable harm.The party has come to operate more like a machine, in which lengthy, loyal service must be rewarded with deference. It is why Mr. Biden has not drawn a credible primary challenger, when polling and reporting alike suggest that Democrats are deeply anxious about his ability to mount a vigorous campaign and serve another full term.And it is that deference, from those who seek to protect Democratic leaders from all but the mildest criticism, that ensures that we keep reliving the same bad dream, where each subsequent election comes with higher stakes than the last. It leaves grass-roots supporters to see all their hard work — and democracy itself — jeopardized by the same officials who tell them they must volunteer and organize and donate and vote as if their lives depend on it. And for millions of younger voters, it becomes increasingly hard to believe that any of it matters: If defeating Republicans is a matter of existential urgency for the country, why is the Democratic Party so blasé about elevating leaders who are oblivious to the views of the young people who stand to inherit it?I peg the beginning of this recurring nightmare to the year 2009, when Senator Ted Kennedy’s death nearly derailed President Obama’s signature health care reform and ultimately deprived Democrats of their Senate supermajority, which they might have used to pass more sweeping legislation than they did. Eleven years later, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also died in office. Her death was a hinge point where history turned and swept much of her substantive legacy into the dustbin; worse, it left living Americans to toil indefinitely under the legacy that replaced hers.There were gentle behind-the-scenes efforts and a robust public persuasion campaign meant to convince Justice Ginsburg to retire when Democrats still controlled the Senate and President Obama could have appointed her replacement, but there were plenty of liberals urging her to stick it out. Christine Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, who was then the House minority leader, cheered Justice Ginsburg for ignoring the calls for her to step down. “You Go Ginsburg! Resist that sexist Ageism,” she wrote.Despite all of this terrible history, we face a similar challenge today: an aging party, and a Democratic establishment not just unwilling to take decisive action to stave off disaster but also reluctant to even acknowledge the problem.When Senator Dianne Feinstein of California (90) developed complications from shingles earlier this year and was unable to fulfill her duties, leaving Senate Democrats unable to swiftly advance judicial nominations, the elder Ms. Pelosi framed the calls for Ms. Feinstein to step aside as a form of injustice. “I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters.She herself has ignored years of (gentle, always gentle) hints that it was time to step aside in favor of younger leaders with less political baggage. She did finally relinquish her leadership role in 2022, after losing the House majority for the second time in 12 years, but earlier this month, she said she would run for her House seat again.The end of Ms. Pelosi’s speakership has reduced the overall risk level somewhat. If she or Ms. Feinstein were to die in office, it wouldn’t be terribly destabilizing, the way it was when Mr. Kennedy and Justice Ginsburg died, and the way it would if Mr. Biden did. But it does feed the deeper and perhaps more insidious problem: a widespread sense of alienation among the young voters Democrats desperately need to turn out in elections.This should not go on. Liberals are apparently doomed to white-knuckle it through 2024, but there are affirmative steps Democrats could take to better allow younger leaders to displace older ones.Paradoxically, the G.O.P. may provide a model the Democrats can use. Although the Republican base is older, it does a better job insulating itself from gerontocracy than Democrats do. Republicans are obviously far from perfect champions of their own self-interest. Their penchant for personality cults has wedded them to Donald Trump, who also happens to be old, but they are vulnerable to charlatans of all ages. That’s in part because they take steps to reduce the risk that they lose power by the attrition of elderly leaders. Justice Anthony Kennedy timed his retirement so a Republican president could replace him; the House G.O.P. has cycled through several leaders over the past decade and a half, none of them terribly old. When Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear defeated the Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, encouraged his allies in the Kentucky Legislature to circumscribe Mr. Beshear’s appointment power — to ensure partisan continuity in Washington, should a Senate seat become vacant. So although Mr. McConnell seems committed to serving out his term, he has a succession plan.Democrats could adopt a similarly hard-nosed attitude about retiring their leaders in dignified but timely ways. Republicans term-limit the chairs of their congressional committees, which guarantees senior lawmakers cycle out of their positions and make way for younger ones.Even just acknowledging this issue — and encouraging good-faith dissent — would boost Mr. Biden’s credibility with younger voters. While a political conversation that sidesteps this uncomfortable topic, along with any number of others, might soothe anxious partisans, it will leave them unprepared for hard realities.Democratic Party actors may be able to convince themselves that there’s something high-minded about muzzling this discourse entirely — that vigorous intraparty criticism is self-defeating, and that complaining about Mr. Biden’s age when nothing can be done about it is a form of indulgent venting that only inflames public misgivings about the president. But they’d be wrong. We can see without squinting that his advanced age has created meaningful drag on his polling, and that it is a gigantic problem for the Democratic Party if younger voters, who are overwhelmingly progressive, come to view it as a lifestyle organization for liberals who have grown out of step with the times. Airing out widely held frustrations with the party’s gerontocracy might persuade younger voters that their leaders get it, and that their time in power will come to an end sooner than later.Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) writes Off Message, a newsletter about politics, culture and media.Source images by Liudmila Chernetska, Adrienne Bresnahan and xu wu/Getty ImagesThe 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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      Trump vs. Biden Would Be a Battle of Two Words

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      Politicians’ language can tell you a lot about the way they think, sometimes unintentionally.In this audio essay, Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada breaks down the significance behind Joe Biden’s favorite word for talking about America and how it contrasts with Donald Trump’s word of choice.Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Evan Vucci/Associated Press and Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe 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.This Opinion short was produced by Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing and original music by Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Polls Show Low Approval Ratings for Biden, and Trump Coasting in Primary

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      Surveys from NBC News and The Washington Post/ABC News pointed to a general election between two unpopular candidates.Two polls of the 2024 presidential race released on Sunday showed former President Donald J. Trump cruising through the Republican primary — and a general election between two unpopular candidates if, as seems likely, the nominees are Mr. Trump and President Biden.Each poll showed Mr. Biden with low approval ratings. One survey, from NBC News, showed the president’s disapproval rating at 56 percent, an all-time high for him in NBC polls. A second survey released on Sunday, by The Washington Post and ABC News, also showed 56 percent of voters surveyed as disapproving of his performance — though it included a general-election result that was far outside the range that other high-quality polls have found recently, which raised questions about the Post/ABC poll’s accuracy.But when it came to personal favorability, Mr. Biden still fared better than Mr. Trump in the NBC poll: 39 percent said they had a very positive or somewhat positive opinion of him, compared with 35 percent who said the same of Mr. Trump.In the Republican presidential primary race, the NBC poll had Mr. Trump leading his nearest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a gaping 43-point margin nationwide: 59 percent to 16 percent.The race does not seem to have tightened as criminal indictments have piled up against Mr. Trump. In fact, his margin expanded from the 29 points that the last edition of the same poll found in June. But more than half the voters surveyed expressed concerns about his indictments.The Washington Post/ABC News poll had some similar findings, with Mr. Trump leading Mr. DeSantis nationally by nearly 40 points.The NBC poll found a hypothetical general election between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden tied, with each candidate at 46 percent. It is the same picture that survey after survey has shown for months, underscoring how impervious partisan polarization remains to the influence of current events — and, for that matter, to opinions of individual candidates. At the same time, a series of special elections across the country has pointed to a more positive picture for Democrats, who have overperformed 2020 and 2016 presidential results by double digits.But in the likely general election matchup, the Post/ABC News survey drew attention for how drastically it differed from what is otherwise a fairly steady consensus in recent polling.The poll showed Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden by 10 percentage points, a margin that no president has won by since Ronald Reagan in 1984. There were additional implausible results among subgroups of respondents: For example, the poll found Mr. Trump ahead by 20 points among voters younger than 35, a group Mr. Biden won by double digits three years ago.The Post itself took the unusual step of describing its own result as an outlier.Kevin Muñoz, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, dismissed it as well.“President Biden is delivering results, his agenda is popular with the American people and we are mobilizing our winning coalition of voters well ahead of next year’s general election,” he said, adding, “We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about polls.” More

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      The Permanent Migration Crisis

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      On Wednesday the Biden administration announced that it will offer work permits and deportation protections to over 400,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States since 2021. On paper this is a humanitarian gesture, a recognition of the miseries of life under the Maduro dictatorship. In political practice it’s a flailing attempt to respond to a sudden rise in anti-immigration sentiment in blue cities, particularly New York, as the surge of migrants overwhelms social services and shelters.I say flailing because the fundamental problem facing the Biden administration is on the southern border, where every attempt to get ahead of the extraordinary numbers trying to cross or claim asylum has been overwhelmed.In Eagle Pass, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reports that in a week, an estimated 10,000 migrants have entered the city, whose entire population is less than 30,000. The subsequent movement of migrants to places like New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been encouraged by red-state governors, but under any circumstances such crowds in Eagle Pass would eventually mean rising numbers in big cities. And policies that make it easier to work in those cities, like the Biden move, are likely to encourage more migration until the border is more stable and secure.The liberal confusion over this situation, the spectacle of Democratic politicians like Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul sounding like Fox News hosts, is a foretaste of the difficult future facing liberals across the Western world.For decades, liberal jurisdictions have advertised their openness to migrants, while relying on the sheer difficulty of international migration and restrictions supported by conservatives to keep the rate of arrivals manageable, and confine any chaos to the border rather than the metropole.What’s changed, and what will keep changing for decades, are the numbers involved. Civil wars and climate change will play their part, but the most important shifts are, first, the way the internet and smartphones have made it easier to make your way around the world, and second, the population imbalance between a rich, rapidly-aging West and a poorer, younger Global South, a deeply unstable equilibrium drawing economic migrants north.All of this is a bigger problem for Europe than the United States — European aging is more advanced, Africa’s population will boom for decades (in 50 years there may be five Africans for every European) while Latin America’s birthrates have declined. The European equivalent of Eagle Pass is the island of Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost possession, where the number of recent migrants exceeds the native population. This surge is just the beginning, Christopher Caldwell argues in an essay for The Spectator on the continent’s dilemmas, which quotes a former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy: “The migration crisis has not even started.”America’s challenge is less dramatic but not completely different. The world has shrunk, and there is no clear limit on how many people can reach the Rio Grande. So what’s happening this year will happen even more: The challenges of mass arrivals will spread beyond the border, there will be an increased demand for restrictions even from people generally sympathetic to migrants, but the sheer numbers will make any restrictions less effectual.This combination can yield a pattern like what we’ve seen in Britain after Brexit and Italy under Giorgia Meloni: Politicians are elected promising to take back control of borders, but their policies are ineffective and even right-wing governments preside over high migration rates. The choice then is to go further into punitive and callous territory, as the Trump administration did with its family-separation policy and its deal with Mexico — or else to recoil as many voters did from Trump’s policies, which encouraged the Democrats to move leftward, which left them unprepared to deal with the crisis when they came to power, which now threatens to help elect Trump once again.In a sense you might distill the challenge facing liberals to a choice: Take more responsibility for restricting immigration, or get used to right-wing populists doing it for you.But in fact the problems for both left and right will be messier than this. The populists themselves will not always know how to fulfill their promises. The interests of liberals in immigrant destinations like New York City may diverge from liberals in college towns or suburbs. The scale and diversity of migration will create unexpected alliances (a lot of Venezuelan migrants might vote for Trump if given the chance, after their experience with socialism) and new lines of internal fracture.Most likely there will be neither a punitive end to the crisis nor a successful humanitarian means of managing it. There will be a general rightward evolution, a growing tolerance for punitive measures (“Build the wall” could be a liberal slogan eventually), that has some effect on the flow of migration — but doesn’t prevent it from being dramatic, chaotic and transformative, on the way to whatever new world order may await.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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      UAW Strike: Biden to Visit Michigan to Support Autoworkers on Picket Line

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      In an extraordinary show of support for organized labor, President Biden said he would join workers in Michigan on the front lines of their strike against leading automakers.President Biden announced that he would travel to Michigan on Tuesday to “join the picket line” with members of the United Automobile Workers who are on strike against the nation’s leading automakers, in one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of U.A.W. as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Mr. Biden wrote on Friday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.The trip is set to come a day before Mr. Biden’s leading rival in the 2024 campaign, Donald J. Trump, has planned his own speech in Michigan, and was announced hours after Shawn Fain, the union’s president, escalated pressure on the White House with a public invitation to Mr. Biden.“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket lines, from our friends and family all the way to the president of the United States,” Mr. Fain said in a Friday morning speech streamed online.It was not immediately clear where Mr. Biden would go in Michigan. The White House had already announced plans for Mr. Biden to fly to California on Tuesday as part of a three-day trip to the West Coast. Mr. Biden made the decision on Friday, after Mr. Fain’s public invitation, according to two people familiar with the White House deliberations.Mr. Fain on Friday announced the expansion of the U.A.W.’s work stoppage from three facilities to 38 assembly plants and distribution centers in 20 states, including six — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — that are expected to be presidential battlegrounds in next year’s election.Michigan, the home of the American automotive industry, is home to the bulk of the facilities and striking workers.There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line.Seth Harris, a former top labor policy adviser for Mr. Biden, said he was not aware of any president walking a picket line before.“This president takes seriously his role as the most pro-union president in history,” Mr. Harris said. “Sometimes that means breaking precedent.”Earlier Friday, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign posted on social media a video of Republican presidential candidates and Fox News anchors bemoaning his support for unions. The caption from Mr. Biden read: “Yes.”Mr. Fain’s invitation came a week into an expanding work stoppage by autoworkers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis plants. The union president announced on Friday that the strike, which began last week at three plants in the Midwest, would expand to 38 more locations in 20 states across the country. He said that talks with General Motors and Stellantis had not progressed significantly, but that Ford had done more to meet the union’s demands.Mr. Biden has defended the striking autoworkers since the stoppage began last week, and the White House has dispatched Julie Su, the acting secretary of labor, and Gene Sperling, a top White House economic adviser, to seek an end to the strike.Mr. Biden has referred to himself as “the most pro-union president in American history” and has long made his alliances with and support for organized labor a central part of his political identity. But his administration’s push for a transition to electric vehicles has put him at odds with the U.A.W., because electric vehicles require fewer workers to produce.The U.A.W. has broken with other major unions in so far declining to endorse Mr. Biden’s re-election bid.Mr. Trump is skipping next week’s Republican presidential primary debate and instead delivering a speech in Michigan before current and former union workers. Mr. Trump pulled away significant portions of union workers from Democrats in his 2016 victory by denouncing international free trade agreements. In his current campaign, he has staked out a position against the federal push for more electric vehicles.Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said Mr. Biden would not be going to Michigan if Mr. Trump had not announced a trip there first. On social media, he called Mr. Biden’s visit “nothing more than a cheap photo op as he finds himself between a rock and a political hard place.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — who, like the rest of the Republican presidential candidates, trails far behind Mr. Trump — sought to inject himself into the news cycle about the strike this week by suggesting that the autoworkers should be fired, a move the companies are legally prohibited from carrying out.On Thursday, the U.A.W. postured back by filing a complaint against Mr. Scott with the National Labor Relations Board (such complaints are often dismissed). On Friday, Mr. Scott called the U.A.W. “one of the most corrupt and scandal-plagued unions in America” and said the union’s contract proposal would lead to government bailouts.Mr. Fain, who appeared at a rally with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont when the strike began, has been critical of Mr. Trump and Republicans. More