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      The Backup Plan for Lost Voters

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      A central reality of the 2024 presidential election is taking shape: Voters may, once again, be faced with a choice between Donald J. Trump and President Biden.For months, Astead has been speaking with party insiders whose main question about the next election is which candidate will win. Speaking to voters, however, their question is: How come both parties seem poised to nominate the same man again?Voters across the country are dissatisfied with the choice, yearning for other options.Astead speaks with voters and the leaders of No Labels, an organization that’s working toward creating a “unity ticket” that they hope will appeal to those in the middle.Illustration by The New York Times. Photograph by Al Drago for The New York TimeAbout ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is The New York Times’s flagship political podcast. The host, Astead W. Herndon, grapples with the big ideas already animating the 2024 presidential election. Because it’s always about more than who wins and loses. And the next election has already started.Last season, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots voters and shifting attitudes among the bases of both political parties. This season, we go inside the party establishment.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Analysis: Durham Report Failed to Deliver After Years of Political Hype

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      A dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability in politically sensitive matters.The limping conclusion to John H. Durham’s four-year investigation of the Russia inquiry underscores a recurring dilemma in American government: how to shield sensitive law enforcement investigations from politics without creating prosecutors who can run amok, never to be held to account.At a time when special counsels are proliferating — there have been four since 2017, two of whom are still at work — the much-hyped investigation by Mr. Durham, a special counsel, into the Russia inquiry ended with a whimper that stood in contrast to the countless hours of political furor that spun off from it.Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.Predictably, the report’s actual content — it contained no major new revelations, and it accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias” rather than making a more explosive conclusion of political bias — made scant difference in parts of the political arena. Mr. Trump and many of his loyalists issued statements treating it as vindication of their claims that the Russia inquiry involved far more extravagant wrongdoing.“The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people,” Mr. Trump insisted on social media. “This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so. This totally illegal act had a huge impact on the Election.”Mr. Trump’s comparison was unintentionally striking. Just as his and his supporters’ wild and invented claims of election fraud floundered in court (Fox News also agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement for amplifying lies about Dominion Voting Systems), the political noise surrounding Mr. Durham’s efforts ultimately ran up against reality.In that sense, it was less that Mr. Durham failed to deliver and more that Attorney General William P. Barr set him up to fail the moment he assigned Mr. Durham to find evidence proving Mr. Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation.There were real-world flaws with the Russia investigation, especially how the F.B.I. botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser. But the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found those problems, leaving Mr. Durham with depleted hunting grounds.Indeed, credit for Mr. Durham’s only courtroom success, a guilty plea by an F.B.I. lawyer who doctored an email during preparations for a wiretap renewal, belongs to Mr. Horowitz, who uncovered the misconduct.At the same time, Mr. Horowitz kneecapped Mr. Durham’s investigation by finding no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. He also concluded that the basis of the Russia inquiry — an Australian diplomat’s tip related to the release of Democratic emails hacked by Russia — was sufficient to open a full investigation.Before Mr. Horowitz released his December 2019 report, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop that finding, arguing the F.B.I. should have instead opened a preliminary inquiry. When Mr. Horowitz declined, Mr. Durham issued an extraordinary statement saying he disagreed based on “evidence collected to date” in his inquiry.But even as Mr. Durham’s report questioned whether the F.B.I. should have opened it as a lower-level investigation, he stopped short of stating that opening a full one violated any rule.Mr. Durham also used court filings in those cases to insinuate that the Clinton campaign framed former President Donald J. Trump for collusion.Sophie Park for The New York TimesA remaining rationale for the Durham investigation was that Mr. Horowitz lacked jurisdiction to scrutinize spy agencies. But by the spring of 2020, according to officials familiar with the inquiry, Mr. Durham’s effort to find intelligence abuses in the origins of the Russia investigation had come up empty.Instead of wrapping up, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham shifted to a different rationale, hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for suspicions surrounding myriad links Trump campaign associates had to Russia.By keeping the investigation going, Mr. Barr initially appeased Mr. Trump, who, as Mr. Barr recounted in his memoir, was angry about the lack of charges as the 2020 election neared.But Mr. Barr’s public statements about Mr. Durham’s investigation also helped foster perceptions that he had found something big. In April 2020, for example, he suggested in a Fox News interview that officials could be prosecuted and said: “The evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”Mr. Trump and some of his allies in the news media went further, stoking expectations among his supporters that Mr. Durham would imprison high-level officials. Those include the former directors of the F.B.I. and C.I.A., James B. Comey and John O. Brennan, and Democratic leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.In fact, Mr. Durham only ever developed charges against two outsiders involved in efforts to scrutinize links between Mr. Trump and Russia, accusing them both of making false statements to the F.B.I. and treating the bureau as a victim, not a perpetrator.While in office, Mr. Barr worked closely with Mr. Durham, regularly meeting with him, sharing Scotch and accompanying him to Europe. When it became clear that Mr. Durham had found no one to charge before the election, Mr. Barr pushed him to draft a potential interim report, prompting Mr. Durham’s No. 2, Nora R. Dannehy, to resign in protest over ethics, The New York Times has reported.Against that backdrop, the first phase of Mr. Durham’s investigation — when he was a U.S. attorney appointed by Mr. Trump, not a special counsel — illustrates why there is a recurring public policy interest in shielding prosecutors pursuing politically sensitive matters from political appointees.But the second phase — after Mr. Barr made him a special counsel, entrenching him to remain under the Biden administration with some independence from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — illustrates how prosecutorial independence itself risks a different kind of dysfunction.The regulations empowered Mr. Garland to block Mr. Durham from an action, but only if it was “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established departmental practices that it should not be pursued” and required him to tell Congress. Mr. Garland gave Mr. Durham free rein, avoiding Republican accusations of a cover-up.Mr. Durham continued for another two and a half years, spending millions of dollars to bring the two demonstrably weak cases involving accusations of false statements; in each instance, a jury of 12 unanimously rejected the charges. One of Mr. Durham’s handpicked prosecutors resigned from his team in protest of the first of those indictments, The Times has reported.But Mr. Durham’s use of his law enforcement powers did achieve something else. He used court filings to insinuate a theory he never found evidence to charge: that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump for collusion. Those filings provided endless fodder for conservative news media.Even after Mr. Durham’s cases collapsed, some Trump supporters held out hope that his final report would deliver a bombshell. But it largely consisted of recycled material, interlaced with conclusions like Mr. Durham’s accusation that the F.B.I. had displayed a “lack of analytical rigor.”Attorney General William P. Barr bestowed Mr. Durham with special counsel status.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Durham’s own analytical rigor was subject to scrutiny. At one point he wrote that he had found “no evidence” that the F.B.I. ever considered whether Clinton campaign efforts to tie Mr. Trump to Russia might affect its investigation.Yet the same page cited messages by a top F.B.I. official, Peter Strzok, cautioning colleagues about the Steele dossier, a compendium of claims about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia that, it later became clear, were Clinton campaign-funded opposition research. He wrote that it “should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform” and whoever commissioned it was “presumed to be connected to the campaign in some way.”As Mr. Horowitz uncovered and criticized, the F.B.I. later cited the Steele dossier in wiretap applications, despite learning a reason to doubt its credibility. But Trump supporters often go further, falsely claiming that the F.B.I. opened the entire Russia investigation based on the dossier.Mr. Durham’s report appeared to nod to that false claim, saying that “information received from politically affiliated persons and entities” in part had “triggered” the inquiry. Yet elsewhere, his report acknowledged that the officials who opened the investigation in July 2016 had not yet seen the dossier, and it was prompted by the Australian diplomat’s tip. He also conceded that there was “no question the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” that lead.Tom Fitton, a Trump ally and the leader of the conservative group Judicial Watch, expressed disappointment in the Durham investigation in a statement this week, while insisting that there had been a “conspiracy by Obama, Biden, Clinton and their Deep State allies.”“Durham let down the American people with few and failed prosecutions,” Mr. Fitton declared. “Never in American history has so much government corruption faced so little accountability.”But Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Mr. Strzok, said that while the special counsel accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias,” it was Mr. Durham who spent four years trying to find support for a preformed belief about the Russia investigation.“In fact, it is Mr. Durham’s investigation that was politically motivated, a direct consequence of former President Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, an effort that unanimous juries in each of Mr. Durham’s trials soundly rejected,” he said.Adam Goldman More

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      No Degree? No Problem. Biden Tries to Bridge the ‘Diploma Divide.’

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      President Biden is trying to appeal to working-class voters by emphasizing his plans to create well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.When President Biden told a crowd of union workers this year that every American should have a path to a good career — “whether they go to college or not” — Tyler Wissman was listening.A father of one with a high school education, Mr. Wissman said he rarely heard politicians say that people should be able to get ahead without a college degree.“In my 31 years, it was always, ‘You gotta go to college if you want a job,’” said Mr. Wissman, who is training as an apprentice at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia, where the president spoke in March.As Mr. Biden campaigns for re-election, he is trying to bridge an educational divide that is reshaping the American political landscape. Even though both political parties portray education as crucial for advancement and opportunity, college-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees are more likely to support Republicans.That increasingly clear split has enormous implications for Mr. Biden as he tries to expand the coalition of voters that sent him to the White House in the first place. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 61 percent of college graduates, but only 45 percent of voters without a four-year college degree — and just 33 percent of white voters without a four-year degree.“The Democratic Party has become a cosmopolitan, college-educated party even though it’s a party that considers itself a party of working people,” said David Axelrod, a top adviser to former President Barack Obama.Mr. Axelrod added that the perception that Wall Street had been bailed out during the 2008 recession while the middle class was left to struggle deepened the fissure between Democrats and blue-collar workers who did not attend college.The election of Donald J. Trump, who harnessed many of those grievances for political gain, solidified the trend.“There’s a sense among working-class voters, and not just white working-class voters, that the party doesn’t relate to them or looks down on people who work with their hands or work with their backs or do things that don’t require college education,” Mr. Axelrod said.Now, in speeches around the country, Mr. Biden rarely speaks about his signature piece of legislation, a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, without also emphasizing that it will lead to trade apprenticeships and, ultimately, union jobs.“Let’s offer every American a path to a good career whether they go to college or not, like the path you started here,” Mr. Biden said at the trades institute, referring to its apprenticeship program.The White House says apprenticeship programs, which typically combine some classroom learning with paid on-the-job experience, are crucial to overcoming a tight labor market and ensuring that there is a sufficient work force to turn the president’s sprawling spending plan into roads, bridges and electric vehicle chargers.Mr. Biden has offered incentives for creating apprenticeships, with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for states that expand such programs.“Biden is the first president that’s reducing the need to get a college degree since World War II,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian.Mr. Biden now rarely mentions his investments in infrastructure without citing trade apprenticeships that can lead to union jobs.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s approach is a shift from previous Democratic administrations, which were far more focused on college as a path to higher pay and advancement. Mr. Obama, during his first joint session of Congress, said that the United States should “once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, started a campaign encouraging Americans to go to college, at one point suggesting in a satirical video that life without higher education was akin to watching painting dry.Democrats have long walked a careful line on the issue. Mr. Biden has been a champion of higher education, particularly community colleges, and one of his most ambitious proposals as president was a $400 billion program to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for individuals who earn under $125,000 a year. Republicans have portrayed that proposal as a giveaway for elites.Mitch Landrieu, the president’s infrastructure coordinator, said Mr. Biden had always believed college was important, but “it is absolutely not the only way to build an economy.”“He sees that men and women like that have been left behind for a long time,” Mr. Landrieu said of people without college degrees. “They’ve always been part of the Democratic Party. It’s not until recently that’s changed.”The shift coincides with a stark political reality.The battleground states that voted for the winning candidate in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on higher-education levels, which means that Mr. Biden’s effort to appeal to those without a degree could make a real difference in 2024, according to Doug Sosnik, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.“You need to both try to mitigate losses with noncollege voters and at the same time try to exploit the advantage in those states with educated voters,” Mr. Sosnik said. “You can’t rely on the diploma divide solely to win. But it’s part of the formula.”Instructors at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia say they have noticed an increase in demand.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesA similar dynamic is playing out nationwide.Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, released campaign ads focused on expanding apprenticeships and removing requirements for college degrees for thousands of state government jobs — a pledge he made good on when he entered office. His fellow Democratic governor in New Jersey has also removed similar degree requirements, as have Republicans in Maryland, Alaska and Utah.Gov. Spencer Cox, Republican of Utah, said he was not only hoping to address a stigma attached to those who do not attend college but also appease employers increasingly anxious about persistent worker shortages.“We can’t do any of this stuff if we don’t have a labor force,” Mr. Cox said.Christopher Montague, 29, an Air Force veteran from the Philadelphia suburbs, who trained as an apprentice in drywall instead of going to college, said he had noticed an “awakening” by politicians on the upside of pursuing training in trades.“There is money in working with your hands,” he said.At the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia, instructors say they have noticed an increase in demand. Drew Heverly, an industrial painting instructor, said he typically had 10 apprentices working on construction projects in “a good year.”“We’ve definitely seen the ramp-up and the need for manpower,” Drew Heverly said about industrial painting.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesThis year, he has already sent nearly 40 apprentices to work on projects in Philadelphia that are partially funded by Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package.“We’ve definitely seen the ramp-up and the need for manpower,” Mr. Heverly said.The prospect of pursuing an education in trade while earning money on projects has also gained momentum among high school students, according to the Finishing Trades Institute’s recruitment coordinator, Tureka Dixon. Community colleges in the area are even reaching out to see if they can form joint partnerships to train students on trade.“Whether it’s cranes, high-rise buildings, bridges, that is trade work,” Ms. Dixon said as the apprentices in hard hats listened to a lesson on lead removals. “That is physical labor. That is the country, so I think people need to consider it more.”Mark Smith, 30, who is training as an apprentice at the institute, said learning a trade was not a fallback position for him — it was his preferred career.“School wasn’t for me,” Mr. Smith said. “I did the Marine Corps and then I started right in this. For me it was a waste of money.”Mr. Wissman, who has never voted in a presidential election and identifies as an independent, said he was not sure yet if the recognition from the White House would move him to finally vote in the 2024 election.“I want in office whoever is going to help me put food on my table,” said Mr. Wissman, whose girlfriend is pregnant with their second child. “At the end of the day, that’s all it’s going to come down to.” More

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      It’s Been a Week. What Does It Tell Us About 2024?

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      The presidential race has started to crystallize, with flawed standard-bearers, worried political parties and voters unhappy with their choices.Eighteen months is an eternity in politics.But rapid-fire and high-profile events over the past week have set the tone and clarified the stakes of a still nascent presidential race featuring an incumbent president and a Republican front-runner whom many Americans, according to polling, do not want as their choices — but may feel resigned to accept.The week began with a surprising poll — probably an outlier — that showed President Biden losing to both former President Donald J. Trump and his closest presumptive primary competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Then in quick succession came a jury’s verdict holding Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse, a raucous New Hampshire town hall that brought the former president’s falsehoods and bluster back into the spotlight, the lifting of pandemic-era controls at the U.S.-Mexico border, and a raft of endorsements for Mr. DeSantis — and an unscheduled visit to show up Mr. Trump — in Iowa that showed many Republican leaders are open to a Trump alternative.All of that left leaders, strategists and voters in both parties exceptionally anxious.“We’re in the midst of a primary that has yet to even really form, and meanwhile the opportunity to pound Biden into dirt with his incompetence is slipping,” said Dave Carney, a longtime Republican consultant in New Hampshire, where the first Republican primary votes will be cast in February. “It’s scattershot right now.”Democrats, who would be expected to rally around their standard-bearer, have spent the week expressing a divide on border security and questioning the president on key policy issues.Strategists have begged Democratic voters to get over their discontent and accept the president as the best they’re going to get.“Live in the real world,” Stuart Stevens, the longtime Republican political consultant who bolted from the party as Mr. Trump rose to power, exhorted after the New Hampshire town hall. “If you saw Donald Trump tonight and aren’t supporting Biden, you are helping elect Trump. It’s not complicated.”Representative Ro Khanna of California, a liberal Democrat often willing to say openly what other rank-and-file Democrats won’t, laid out a vision for economic renewal in a Friday speech in New Hampshire that contrasted the president’s more modest ambitions with his failure to secure the allegiance of white working-class voters whom Mr. Biden has said he is uniquely qualified to win back.“People are so desperate for some healing, for leadership that can unify,” Mr. Khanna told Democrats at a dinner in Nashua. “We do not need to compromise who we are to find common cause.”In an interview on Saturday, he said it was not meant to be a criticism. But it was “an appeal for a bolder platform that captures the imagination of working-class Americans and inspires them.”There’s no question that political predictions this far from an election are unreliable. Mr. DeSantis has yet to declare his candidacy for the White House, though he and Mr. Trump have been circling each other and competing in a shadow contest in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first contests for the Republican presidential nomination. Even Iowa voters tend not to tune in to the race until later in the year, noted David Kochel, a longtime Iowa Republican consultant.Still, the question of the moment remains: Where are we?Simon Rosenberg, who correctly predicted that a surge of Democratic activism would blunt the promised “red wave” of the 2022 midterms, said the “fear of MAGA” that powered Democratic victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022 had not diminished ahead of 2024. If anything, abortion bans rolling from state to state across the country, a disheartening surge in mass shootings and a Republican assault on educational freedom will only sharpen those fears, he said.Mr. Trump’s performance at a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening — in which the former president repeatedly lied about the 2020 election; mocked E. Jean Carroll, whose accusations of sexual abuse and defamation ended in a $5 million judgment against him; and promised a return to some of his least popular policies — only reiterated why Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans have turned away from the G.O.P. in the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.The Biden re-election campaign, now in full gear after his formal announcement last month, was making the case to reporters after the town hall, pointing to Mr. Trump’s pride in the overturning of Roe v. Wade; his dismissive take on the economic catastrophe that could ensue if the federal government defaults on its outstanding debt; his referring to Jan. 6, 2021, as “a beautiful day”; and his refusal to commit to accepting the 2024 election results.One Biden campaign adviser suggested that Mr. Trump had supplied a trove of material for attack ads. The campaign began posting videos almost immediately. Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, called the 70-minute performance “over an hour of nonsense.”The crucial question for both parties in 2024 is how to retain the voters they have and regain those they have lost.“It’s hard to understand how someone could vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, given that Trump is just going to get more Trumpy,” Mr. Rosenberg said, adding, “I’d still much rather be us than them.”Mr. Rosenberg’s assessment may be why 37 Republican officials in Iowa, including the State Senate president, Amy Sinclair, and the House majority leader, Matt Windschitl, endorsed Mr. DeSantis last week, as did the New Hampshire House majority leader, Jason Osborne.Republican consultants in both states said Mr. Trump’s universal name recognition and political persona might give him the highest floor for Republican support, but the same factors lower the ceiling of that support, giving Mr. DeSantis and other challengers a real chance to take him down, if they are willing to take it.The Trump campaign seemed aware of that dynamic last week as it attacked would-be rivals, not only those clearly preparing to enter the race but also some far from it. On Saturday, Mr. Trump laid into Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for being disloyal, just days after an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggested the governor was keeping his options open.Mr. DeSantis has had his own stumbles out of the gate. His war with Disney has provided fodder for rivals who have questioned a Republican’s intrusion into the free market. His signing of a six-week abortion ban and his state’s aggressive censorship of school textbooks have raised questions among would-be Republican donors and swing voters alike. But the Florida governor also has plenty of time to make his case.“There’s a lot of game left to play, and I don’t see anything gelling yet,” Mr. Kochel said. “There’s still a lot of room for candidates not named Trump.”What Republicans seem most amazed by is the docility of Democrats in the face of Mr. Biden’s obvious weaknesses. Age and infirmity are real issues, not Republican talking points, consultants say.A Washington Post-ABC News poll published on Monday showed Mr. Biden losing head-to-head races against Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis by between five and six percentage points. Democratic pollsters have dismissed those results, pointing to anomalies like the poll’s showing Mr. Trump winning young voters outright while dramatically closing the gap with Mr. Biden for Black and Hispanic votes.Even so, there was much in the poll to undermine Mr. Biden’s claim that he, more than any other Democrat, can vanquish a Republican comeback just as he defeated Mr. Trump in 2020.Republicans say that’s just not possible.Mr. Carney said the dynamic would get worse, not better, as the 2024 campaign took shape. Chaotic scenes from the southwestern border in the coming weeks will inflame Republican voters’ fears of an “invasion” of illegal immigrants; the Republican National Committee on Friday held the president responsible for 1.4 million “gotaway” migrants that it said had crossed the border and disappeared into the interior since he took office.More important, the situation at the border could crystallize a sense among swing voters that Mr. Biden is simply not in control. With erstwhile allies like New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, and Chicago’s outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot, pleading for assistance with a flood of migrants, that conclusion will not be contained to Republican voters.The brewing showdown over how to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit threatens to provoke a catastrophic financial crisis as soon as next month. And while voters might blame Republicans in Congress at first, economic turmoil eventually ends up in the president’s lap.Perhaps Mr. Biden’s voters will not defect back to Mr. Trump, Republicans agree, but they could simply stay home on Election Day.“Democrats keep saying, ‘Oh, Trump’s so bad it doesn’t matter,’” Mr. Kochel said. “I don’t know. I think it matters.” More

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      In Howard Address, Biden Warns of ‘Sinister Forces’ Trying to Reverse Racial Progress

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      The president’s commencement address at Howard University, a historically Black institution, came as Democratic strategists have expressed concerns about muted enthusiasm for Mr. Biden among Black voters.President Biden called white supremacy “the most dangerous terrorist threat” to the United States during his commencement speech at Howard University.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesPresident Biden declared on Saturday that white supremacy is “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland” and warned a predominantly Black audience that “sinister forces” embraced by his predecessor and putative challenger are trying to reverse generations of racial progress in America.Mr. Biden never named former President Donald J. Trump in his sometimes stark commencement address to the graduating class of Howard University, the nation’s most prestigious historically Black college. He alluded, however, to Mr. Trump’s past statements to link him to racist elements in American society and suggest that the presidential campaign that has just gotten underway will determine whether justice will prevail over hate, fear and violence.“There are those who demonize and pit people against one another,” Mr. Biden said. “And there are those who will do anything and everything, no matter how desperate or immoral, to hold onto power. That’s never going to be an easy battle. But I know this — the oldest, most sinister forces may believe they’ll determine America’s future. But they are wrong. We will determine America’s future. You will determine America’s future.”Wearing blue and white academic robes, the president sought to enlist the young graduates in what he presented as the cause of this moment. He cited the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, which touched off widespread protests against police brutality, and expressed empathy with Black drivers who are fearful when they are pulled over by officers.“Fearless progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” he said. “That’s because hate never goes away. I thought when I graduated that we could defeat hate. But it never goes away.”Likewise, Mr. Biden said that “after the election and re-election of the first Black American president, I had hoped the fear and violence and hate was significantly losing ground.”He discovered otherwise, he said, when neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, and he recounted Mr. Trump’s reaction. “What did you hear?” he asked. “That famous quote: ‘There are very fine people on both sides.’ That’s when I knew, and I’m not joking, that’s when I knew I had to stay engaged and get back into public life.”Mr. Trump’s supporters have said his line has been distorted and note that he did at one point condemn neo-Nazis. But as he has opened a campaign to recapture the presidency, Mr. Trump has more openly embraced racist and extremist elements in American life. Last winter, he hosted for dinner the rap artist Ye, who has made antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist who attended the far-right Charlottesville rally.The choice of Howard offered Mr. Biden an opportunity to shore up support in the most loyal constituency in the Democratic Party, one that he needs to win re-election next year. While polls show continued strong support for Mr. Biden among Black voters, political analysts and party strategists have expressed concern about an enthusiasm gap that could complicate prospects for the president, who needs high turnout from his base.Mr. Biden has been stymied on goals like cracking down on police brutality and bolstering voting rights. He did sign an executive order on federal law enforcement last year, although crucial pieces of the order have not been implemented. Many supporters say he has fallen short on his pledge to make systemic changes to the criminal justice system.But he chose Kamala Harris (a Howard graduate) as the first Black vice president; appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson; and has put more Black women on the federal bench than every other president combined. Unemployment among Black Americans fell to a record low of 4.7 percent in April, and the gap between white and Black jobless rates shrank to its smallest ever measured.Of particular interest to his audience on Saturday, Mr. Biden has developed a program to forgive $400 billion in student loans over the next few decades, wiping out up to $20,000 apiece for those who qualify. But the Supreme Court appears poised to invalidate it.Mr. Biden won 92 percent of Black voters in 2020, but only 58 percent said they approved of his performance in the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. A May survey by The Economist and YouGov put his approval among Black adults at 71 percent, but only 46 percent wanted him to run again.Mr. Biden found a friendly but not exactly exuberant crowd on Saturday. Graduating seniors and their families filled much of Capital One Arena, the home of the Washington Capitals and Wizards, and greeted him warmly, although a dozen stood in protest, some holding signs about issues like military research. The ambivalence among students and graduates was evident in interviews on campus before the ceremony.“He’s a pretty good person,” Mariah Davis, 19, a mechanical engineering major, said of Mr. Biden. “He’s just really trying to advocate for a lot of groups of people who are unheard.”But some students said they were not sure they could connect with him. “We feel a little strange about him coming to commencement because obviously he can teach us things about values, but what is he going to say that hasn’t been said before?” said Alisa Drake, 19, a sophomore. “What can Biden say to us as Black students going out into the work force?”If the choice next year was between Mr. Biden and a Republican, she said she would vote for Mr. Biden. But she was lukewarm about it. “I’m not really excited,” she said. “I feel like there hasn’t been a candidate recently that has just caught my eye, that is just like, ‘Wow, they’re really about something and interested in helping my generation.’” More

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      Immigration Politics Return to the Forefront as the 2024 Race Picks Up Pace

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      Donald J. Trump rode border security to the presidency in 2016. Republicans hope the issue will be at the center of the debate again.Border security, the issue that largely defined Donald J. Trump’s victorious 2016 campaign, is back on the national agenda, a potential boost for Mr. Trump — and, for President Biden, a headache with no simple remedy in either policy or politics.The termination of a pandemic-era program that allowed officials to swiftly expel migrants was expected to draw an additional 7,000 unauthorized people a day, adding to already record levels of migrants, from Latin America and elsewhere, driven north by poverty and violence and by perceptions of a more welcoming border under Mr. Biden.At a televised town hall this week, Mr. Trump predicted that Friday would be a “day of infamy” as the policy known as Title 42 that he first put in place came to an end. He used the same fear-mongering rhetoric of his earlier campaigns to describe migrants in broad and inaccurate strokes as “released from prisons” and “mental institutions.”The Biden administration announced policies beginning in February to blunt the surge, and so far there have not been signs of disorder since the policy expired. But Mr. Trump — along with Republican officials and conservative media — in recent days have escalated their yearslong attacks over border security, claiming that Mr. Biden has ignored a burgeoning crisis.Then President Donald Trump tours progress in the construction of the southern border wall near Alamo, Texas, a city in the Rio Grande Valley near the U.S-Mexican border in January 2021.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFox News employed a countdown clock to observe the end of Title 42, while broadcasting overhead video from a “Fox flight team” of thousands of migrants in a tent camp that a correspondent said were “waiting until Title 42 drops to cross over illegally.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and 2024 presidential candidate, told the far-right outlet Newsmax that what she saw on a border visit was “unbelievable,” citing cartels trafficking people and fentanyl, the lethal opioid that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and has become a primary theme of Republican attacks on Mr. Biden’s policies.“Along with inflation, an out-of-control border is one of the administration’s greatest vulnerabilities,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “If you watch Fox News, there are few other issues that are as important for the federal government to address.” The lifting of Title 42, he added, was an issue “gift-wrapped with a beautiful bow” for Mr. Trump.White House and Biden campaign officials largely scoffed at this analysis, citing past efforts by Republicans and conservative media to turn caravans of migrants heading toward the border into election-year crises. For the most part, Mr. Biden himself has avoided focusing attention on the border, with polls showing that immigration motivates far more Republican voters than Democrats.Still, there is a broad recognition even among Mr. Biden’s allies that perceptions of chaos at the southern border are a political liability — though strategists are optimistic that by the time 2024 ballots are cast voters will have moved on to other topics.The expected migrant surge is “coming at a good time because it’s not coming in June or May of ’24,” said Matt Barreto, who conducts polling for Mr. Biden’s White House. “The election is not happening in June of ’23. So you’re going to see an extremely well-managed process with the resources we have.”But while there is potential for the administration to spin the handling of the situation as a show of competence, Mr. Biden’s record will be scrutinized. On his first day in office, he proposed an immigration package that offered a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented residents, protected so-called Dreamers and added technology to help secure the southern border. The bill, faced with solid Republican opposition, went nowhere. As a candidate, Mr. Biden had promised not to separate families at the border, as Mr. Trump did in 2018 — and which the former president suggested this week he would reinstate if elected in 2024. Mr. Biden’s more humane message and policies, along with the waning of the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to a rise in the number of people trying to enter the country unlawfully, contributing to a large increase in border apprehensions. Now, with the end of Title 42, the administration has introduced stricter asylum rules to turn back those crossing without permission and sent 1,500 active-duty troops to support the Border Patrol. And while pressure along the border built earlier this week — on some days more than 11,000 people crossed the southern border unlawfully and were taken into custody — according to internal agency data obtained by The New York Times, that number dropped somewhat to fewer than 10,000 people on Thursday.But even some Democrats aligned with Mr. Biden have criticized him for not doing more to control the border and for failing to highlight his policies more forcefully. “All of us who work in Democratic politics have been dreading this moment for two years,” said Lanae Erickson, who runs the public opinion and social policy division at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “It is very evident that Republicans still have an upper hand on immigration and people don’t think that Democrats particularly care about securing the border.”Progressives seem to agree. “They should have undone Title 42 on the first day in office. They didn’t,” said Chris Newman, the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Los Angeles. “Now they have to do what they should have done in the first day of office, and they’re doing it poorly.”Polls show broad dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of immigration. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll earlier this year, just 28 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the southern border. In a Fox News poll in April of registered voters, 66 percent of white voters without a college degree said that the White House was not tough enough on unlawful immigration. A majority of Hispanic voters, 55 percent, also said the president was not tough enough. “Biden won the 2020 election not just because he got big shifts among white college voters, but he stopped the bleeding among white working class voters,’’ said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “What happens with those voters now that he’s going into 2024 with approval ratings in the low 40s, and then you add to that an emerging immigration problem — a problem these voters very much think matters?”Other polling is more favorable to the administration. In Mr. Barreto’s recent surveys, conducted in seven battleground states for Immigration Hub, a pro-immigration group, there was broad support for Mr. Biden’s policies, including reversing Trump-era child separation and developing pathways to citizenship for Dreamers. Democrats point to recent electoral history as a counter to predictions that new scenes of disruption on the border will exact a political price. Republicans and their allies in the media have turned the prospect of caravans of migrants approaching the nation’s southern border into biennial programming designed to motivate a conservative base. But Democrats won convincing victories in 2018, Mr. Biden won the presidency in 2020 and the party over-performed expectations in last year’s midterm elections.Migrants are seen at the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge as U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents take down their information in Hidalgo, Texas on Thursday.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesPart of the problem for Democrats is that their border policies tend to be more nuanced than Republicans’ blunt calls to get tough, such as Mr. Trump’s continued focus on building a wall. The Republican approach fires up the party’s base, while Democrats have focused more energy on issues like abortion rights and the economy, which can motivate theirs. Mr. Biden is also cross-pressured in his own party, with centrist Democrats calling for tougher measures and progressives warning of the dangers faced by expelled migrants and insisting on due process rights for asylum seekers. “The majority of the American people are with us on this,” said Maria Cardona, a longtime party strategist for the Democrats. “It would be easier to explain if they actually explain it, which is we are for strong border security and humane pathways to legalization.”Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist who works in Arizona, said that the latest surge of migrants was severely straining government services in parts of the border state and that the issue could play a role in tipping Arizona away from Mr. Biden in 2024, after he defeated Mr. Trump there by the slimmest of margins. Arizona’s large bloc of independent voters view immigration through a lens that is less ideological and more about government competency, Mr. Seaton said. “These images are not just on Fox News, they’re on local news, they’re fairly pervasive,” he said of scenes of people crossing the border and filling the streets of U.S. border cities. “When they see things like what’s happening, it’s really a potential problem for President Biden and his re-election, and for Democrats up and down the ticket.”Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting. More

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      Fact-Checking Trump on CNN’s Town Hall

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      Former President Donald J. Trump misleadingly and wrongly described his own record, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, his handling of classified documents, foreign policy and the economy.Former President Donald J. Trump almost immediately began citing a litany of falsehoods Wednesday night during a town hall-style meeting in New Hampshire broadcast on CNN.After incorrectly characterizing the 2020 presidential election as “rigged,” Mr. Trump repeated a number of other falsehoods that have become staples of his political messaging. He misleadingly and wrongly described his record, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, his handling of classified documents, foreign policy, immigration policy, the economy and a woman whom a jury found he sexually abused.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What WAS Said“We got 12 million more votes than we had — as you know — in 2016.”This is misleading. Mr. Trump received 74 million votes in the 2020 presidential election, 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election. But, of course, President Biden received even more votes in 2020: 81 million.Mr. Trump then repeated his lie that the 2020 election was rigged. As the CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins noted, no evidence has surfaced to support his false claims of an army of people voting multiple times, dead people voting and missing ballots.What WAS Said“I offered them 10,000 soldiers. I said it could be 10, it could be more, but I offered them specifically 10,000 soldiers.”This is false. Mr. Trump was referring to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when his loyalists stormed the Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Mr. Biden’s election victory. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump ever made a request for 10,000 National Guard troops or that the speaker of the House at the time, Nancy Pelosi, rejected such a demand. The speaker does not control the National Guard.Mr. Trump also claimed that the acting defense secretary at the time, Christopher C. Miller, backed up his account. Vanity Fair reported in 2021 that Mr. Trump had floated the 10,000 figure to Mr. Miller the night of Jan. 5. But in 2022, Mr. Miller told a House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 that he was “never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature.”There is no record of Mr. Trump making such a request either. The Pentagon’s timeline of events leading up to the riot notes that the Defense Department reviewed a plan to activate 340 members of the District of Columbia’s National Guard, “if asked.” But the timeline makes no mention of a request for 10,000 troops by Mr. Trump. Nor did a Pentagon inspector general report on the breach, which instead referred to suggestions by Mr. Trump that his rally on Jan. 6 had been conducted safely. A Pentagon spokesman also told The Washington Post that it had “no record of such an order being given.”What WAS SaidFormer Vice President Mike Pence “should have put the votes back to the state legislatures, and I think we would have had a different outcome.”This is false. The vice president does not have the power or legal authority to alter the presidential election, as Mr. Pence has repeatedly and correctly noted.A House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol found that John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who was the chief architect of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, had admitted to Mr. Trump two days before Jan. 6 that his plan to have Mr. Pence to halt the vote certification process was illegal.What WAS Said“This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”This is false. A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found that Mr. Trump had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, a writer. Regardless of whether Mr. Trump remembers meeting Ms. Carroll, there is clear evidence that the two have met: a black-and-white photo of the two along with their spouses at the time.What WAS Said“We created the greatest economy in history. A big part of that economy was I got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.”This is false. Average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic battered the economy, was lower under Mr. Trump than under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.Nor were the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 the “biggest” ever. According to a report from the Treasury Department, the 1981 Reagan tax cut is the largest as a percentage of the economy (2.9 percent of gross domestic product) and by the reduction in federal revenue (a 13.3 percent decrease). The Obama tax cut in 2012 amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year. By comparison, Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut was about $150 billion annually and amounted to about 0.9 percent of gross domestic product.Mr. Trump also claimed to have presided over “zero” inflation. Although some months had zero inflation or even price declines as the coronavirus pandemic hit, the Consumer Price Index increased 1.2 percent overall in 2020, the last full year he was in office, and had risen at a 1.4 percent annual rate in January 2021, his last month as president.What WAS Said“If you look at Chicago, Chicago has the single toughest gun policies in the nation. They are so tough you can’t breathe, New York, too, and other places also. All those places are the worst and most dangerous places so that’s not the answer.”This is misleading. Opponents of firearm restrictions frequently cite Chicago as a case study of how tough gun laws do little to prevent homicides. This argument, however, relies on faulty assumptions about the city’s gun laws and gun violence.There were more gun murders in Chicago than in any other city in the United States in 2020, fueling the perception that it is the gun violence capital of the country. But Chicago is also the third-largest city in the country. Adjusted by population, the gun homicide rate was 25.2 per 100,000, the 26th highest in the country in 2020, according to data compiled by the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety.The three cities with the highest gun homicide rates — Jackson, Miss., Gary, Ind., and St. Louis — had rates double that of Chicago’s. All are in states with more permissive gun laws than Illinois.Chicago’s reputation for having the strictest gun control measures in the country is outdated. The Supreme Court nullified the city’s handgun ban in 2010. An appeals court also struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois in 2012, and the state began allowing possession of concealed guns in 2013, as part of the court decision.Today, Illinois has tougher restrictions than most states, but it does not lead the pack, ranking No. 7 in Everytown’s assessment of the strength of state gun control laws, and No. 8 in a report card released by the Giffords Law Center, another gun control group. Conversely, the state ranked No. 41 in an assessment on gun rights from the libertarian Cato Institute.Gun control proponents have also argued that the patchwork nature of gun laws in the country makes it difficult for a state like Illinois with tough restrictions on the books to enforce those in practice. A 2017 study commissioned by the City of Chicago found, for example, that 60 percent of guns used in crimes and recovered in Chicago came from out of state, with neighboring Indiana as the primary source.What WAS Said“I built the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall and I finished it.”This is false. The Trump administration constructed 453 miles of border wall over four years, and a vast majority of the new barriers reinforced or replaced existing structures. Of that, about 47 miles were new primary barriers. The United States’ southwestern border with Mexico is over 1,900 miles, and during his campaign, Mr. Trump had vowed to build a wall across the entire border and make Mexico pay for it. Mexico did not pay for the barriers that had been constructed.What WAS Said“I got with NATO — I got them to put up hundreds of millions of dollars that they weren’t paying under Obama and Bush and all these other presidents.”This is misleading. Under guidelines for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, members agreed to commit a minimum of 2 percent of G.D.P. on their own defense, but few nations actually do so. They do not “pay” the alliance directly.NATO members agreed that nations currently not meeting the 2 percent goal would do so in the next decade, and that nations meeting it would continue to do so — but they made this pledge in September 2014, years before Mr. Trump became president.“And the reason for this is not Donald Trump — it’s Vladimir Putin, Russia’s actions in Crimea and aggressive stance,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a NATO ambassador under President Barack Obama, previously told The New York Times.What WAS Said“You know who else took them? Obama took them.”This is false. Mr. Trump has repeatedly and wrongly compared his handling of classified documents with that of his predecessor.After his presidency, Mr. Trump took a trove of classified documents — including some marked top secret — to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.In contrast, the National Archives and Records Administration, which preserves and maintains records after a president leaves office, has said in a statement that Mr. Obama turned over his documents, classified and unclassified, as required by law.The agency has also said it is not aware of any missing boxes of presidential records from the Obama administration.Mr. Trump then falsely claimed that Mr. Biden “took more than anybody,” about 1,800 boxes. But that number refers to a collection of documents Mr. Biden had donated to the University of Delaware in 2012 from his tenure as a senator representing the state from 1973 to 2009. Unlike presidential documents, which must be released to the National Archives once a president leaves office, documents from members of Congress are not covered by the Presidential Records Act. It is not uncommon for senators and representatives to give such items to research or historical facilities.The university agreed not to give the public access to Mr. Biden’s documents from his time as senator until two years after he retired from public life. But the F.B.I. did search the collection in February as part of a special counsel investigation and in cooperation with Mr. Biden’s legal team. The Times reported at the time that the material was still being analyzed but did not appear to contain any classified documents.What WAS Said“I didn’t ask him to find anything. If this call was bad — I said you owe me votes because the election was rigged. That election was rigged.”This is false. In a taped January 2021 call, Mr. Trump said the words “find 11,780 votes” as he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia to overturn election results in his state.“All I want to do is this,” he said in the call. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”Mr. Trump also accused Mr. Raffensperger of “not reporting” corrupt ballots and ballot shredding (there is no evidence that this happened in Georgia), and told him that “that’s a criminal offense.” More

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      The Panic Over Joe Biden’s Age Is Manufactured

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      The relationship between political campaigns, the news media and the public isn’t exactly an interplay between independent actors. It’s a web of influence.This dynamic is particularly relevant when it comes to the avalanche of headlines and polls about President Biden’s age.The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 63 percent of those surveyed thought Biden didn’t have the mental sharpness to serve effectively; 43 percent said the same of Donald Trump, even though their ages are only a few years apart.Let me say up front that a candidate’s age and competency are always fair game in politics. It’s not ageist to acknowledge the scientific reality that our bodies and minds decline in capacity as we age. It’s not ageist for voters to factor that into their electoral decisions. And aging is individual: Some people appear vibrant at 80 and others worn at 50.But there are also other truths that must be considered. Headlines and polls don’t just measure and reflect public sentiment, they also influence it. The persistence of a theme elevates and validates that theme.As Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at Pew Research Center, told me: “As with anything in journalism, more broadly, as there’s a great deal of a spotlight on a topic, it raises the salience of that topic for the public, and people are more likely to consider things that are in the news as important.”I also think that we as citizens and consumers of media like to think that we come to our opinions and beliefs completely on our own, and we resist the notion that those opinions have been influenced or manipulated by outside forces. But there is a growing body of research that demonstrates the opposite. We are, unquestionably, influenced by the media.This brings me to the coverage of Biden’s age. It’s true that if he’s re-elected, Biden would be the oldest president we’ve ever had. But he was already the oldest president the first time he was elected. What changed?I’d argue that the biggest change wasn’t the simple passage of time, but the decision of some Republican leaders to focus like a laser on Biden’s age as the factor weighing against him. In an April interview, the former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, said it was unlikely Biden would “make it” through a second term. In this year’s Republican response to the State of the Union address, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas noted that she’s half Biden’s age.Some observers contend that voting for Biden is essentially voting for Vice President Kamala Harris to be president, because Biden may not last another term. For Republicans, that notion offers the added benefit of allowing them to campaign against the trifecta of their disdain — a liberal who’s a minority and a woman.Which brings us back to the web of influence: Campaigns elevate an issue, pollsters and journalists ask whether the issue is having an effect on a race, stories are written about that effect and as a result of the coverage, the effect is often intensified. That is the chain of custody for a political attack, but far too often that connection and context isn’t made clear. It’s often presented as if these types of concerns just spring forth in voters’ minds and aren’t influenced by campaigns and news coverage.This happens all the time in politics.Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump decided once again to whip up Americans’ xenophobia by harping on a caravan of migrants, an “invasion” he called it, heading for our southern border.Less than a month before those midterms, The Times reported, “For the last two weeks, Mr. Trump and his conservative allies have operated largely in tandem on social media and elsewhere to push alarmist, conspiratorial warnings about the migrant caravan more than 2,000 miles from the border.” The Times concluded that they had largely succeeded in animating Republican voters “around the idea of these foreign nationals posing a dire threat to the country’s security, stability and identity.”This caravan drew headlines and consumed airtime. And there was at least one poll taken about the threats people thought the caravans posed. According to Politico, Trump “seized” on the caravan issue after his team reviewed polling from congressional districts that were competitive in the 2016 election and found that border issues resonated with voters in those districts.But when the midterms were over, Trump backburnered the caravan issue and so did the media, as Quartz reported. And as the publication pointed out, “Attention from Trump and other Republicans helped drive the media coverage of the caravan, and cable news and newspapers either repeated the calls of alarm, or sought to ease concerns.”If the caravans had been entirely of organic interest to the public, more robust coverage probably would have continued. Instead, in that case, we saw how a political party weaponized a topic and the media helped deploy the weapon.This doesn’t mean that immigration and border security aren’t independently newsworthy, but rather that the media doesn’t simply cover campaigns; editorial decisions can be influenced by those campaigns and coverage can influence voters as much as it informs them.This is playing out again. The idea that voters are worried about Biden’s age and capacity has been repeated so often that it no longer requires any proof beyond polling that reflects what respondents have consumed: reports that they’re worried about Biden’s age and capacity.There’s a real chicken-egg conundrum here.And as Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, who generally believes media should “focus more and not less on the health and mental fitness of elected officials,” told me via email, it’s unclear how much the age issue will affect votes for Biden, anyway. As Silver put it: “In the abstract, voters raise high levels of concern but — they also did so in 2020 and he won both the primary and the general. And his approval ratings, while not great, are roughly in line with what you might expect given high polarization and high inflation.”Breathless headlines have created a sense that worry about the president’s age is common knowledge and common sense, when in fact it is, at least in part, fueled by political manipulation and media complicity.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More