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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

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      When Their Idea of Liberty Is Your Idea of Death

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      At the heart of the American ethos is the contested idea of freedom.In the video announcing his 2024 re-election bid — pointedly called “Freedom” — President Biden staked out his vision, declaring:Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life, while cutting taxes from the very wealthy, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.“The question we’re facing,” Biden told viewers, “is whether in the years ahead, we will have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer,” adding:Every generation of Americans will face the moment when they have to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. And this is our moment.The 2024 election shows every sign of becoming a partisan battle to claim ownership of the ideal of freedom, with each side determined to persuade voters that the opposition’s assertions are not just false but a threat to individual and group rights.This dispute is possible because freedom as an abstraction is fraught with multiple and often conflicting meanings. The debate over where to draw the lines between freedom, liberty, rights, democracy, responsibility, autonomy, obligation, justice, fairness and citizenship has been going on for centuries, but has steadily intensified with the success of the liberation movements of the past seven decades — the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and sexual rights revolutions.In sharp contrast to Biden, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in “The Courage to Be Free” — his campaign book, published in February — warns that “the threat to freedom is not limited to the actions of governments, but also includes a lot of aggressive, powerful institutions hellbent on imposing a woke agenda on our country.”The enemies of freedom, DeSantis contends, are “entrenched elites that have driven our nation into the ground,” elites that “control the federal bureaucracy, lobby shops on K Street, corporate media, Big Tech companies and universities.”These privileged few, DeSantis argues, “use undemocratic means to foist everything from environmental, social, and governance (E.S.G.) policies on corporations, forcing as well critical race theory on public schools,” in what the Florida governor calls “an attempt to impose ruling class ideology on society.”This debate fits into a larger context famously described by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 Oxford University speech, “Two Concepts of Liberty”:If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.Positive freedom, Berlin continued,derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object.Jefferson Cowie, a history professor at Vanderbilt, captured the intensity and depth of division over freedom during the civil rights movement in his book “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for history this week.Cowie wrote that the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, in his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” inaugural speech, on Jan. 14, 1963,invoked “freedom” 25 times — more than Martin Luther King Jr. used the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.”For Wallace, in other words, the right to maintain segregation was a form of freedom.The dichotomy between the notions of freedom promulgated by George Wallace and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to polarize the nation today.Rogers M. Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email in response to my inquiry about the contest over freedom:Biden stands in the liberal tradition going back to F.D.R., which holds that to be truly free, people have to be able to meet their material needs, so that they have opportunities for their diverse pursuits of happiness; and they also need democratic institutions giving them a share in shaping their collective destinies.Ronald Reagan, according to Smith, “thought freedom meant being largely free of government interference in people’s lives, whether through regulation or assistance. He did believe in freedom as democratic self-governance.”For Trump and DeSantis, Smith argued, freedom is more constrained and restrictive. For these two:Freedom means having governmental policies that protect the ways of life they favor against those they don’t. Their notion of freedom is the narrowest: in fact, it is primarily an argument for using coercive governmental power, and in Trump’s case private violence, against all who they see as threats to their preferred ways of life. They support democracy as long as, but only as long as, it produces the results they want.Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley, pointed out in his email that different types of freedom can impinge on each other as well as create different winners and losers:Negative liberty is freedom from external constraints, particularly from the government. This is the dominant idea, I think, in the Bill of Rights. It is linked to individualism and libertarianism. So I am free to carry a gun on the right, free to have an abortion or change my sex on the left. Positive liberty means the freedom to act to provide collective goods so it is easy to see that there can be a tension between the two.As with many political concepts, Citrin continued:There is an elasticity in this term that allows competing parties to stake a claim for their version of freedom. Biden paints Trump as a threat to one’s freedom to have an abortion or to vote; Trump claims the deep state is a threat to your privacy or legal rights. In addition, one group’s freedom constrains another’s.On April 29, Conor Friedersdorf published “Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom” in The Atlantic. As its headline suggests, the essay is a wide-ranging critique of the policies adopted under the DeSantis administration in Florida.Friedersdorf cited a recent DeSantis speech — “I don’t think you have a truly free state just because you have low taxes, low regulation, and no Covid restrictions, if the left is able to impose its agenda through the education system, through the business sphere, through all these others. A free state means you’re protecting your people from the left’s pathologies across the board” — which, Friedersdorf remarks, he would describe instead “as an anti-woke nanny state, not a state that values and protects freedom.”Friedersdorf does not, however, limit his critique to the conservative governor and quite likely presidential candidate, pointedly noting that in his own state of California, a Democratic bastion,Our dearth of freedom to build new dwellings has burdened us with punishing housing costs and immiserating homelessness. Our dearth of educational freedom consigns kids from poor families to failing schools. Our higher-than-average taxes do not yield better-than-average public services or assistance. And during the coronavirus pandemic, far from being a refuge of sanity, California responded with a lot of unscientific overzealousness, like the needless closure of beaches and parks.In practice, neither the left nor right has clean hands on the question of freedom.Conservative Republicans, including but not limited to DeSantis, have enacted restrictions on teaching about race and sex in public schools; have banned books in public libraries; barred cities from passing ordinances on the minimum wage, paid sick leave, firearms policy, plastic bags and marijuana decriminalization; and purposefully sought to suppress voting by minorities and college students.While certainly not equivalent, left-leaning students and faculty have led the charge in seeking to “cancel” professors and public figures who violate progressive orthodoxy, in disrupting conservative speakers on campuses and in seeking to bar or restrict teaching material considered hurtful or harmful to marginalized groups.Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, proposed in an email that Biden and the Democratic Party are well positioned to claim the freedom mantle:I want to suggest two reasons why this focus may not only be warranted but also have great appeal. The first is the battle over abortion rights. The second is the new attitude of Republicans toward the business community.On abortion, she continued, “I would argue that the ability to choose whether or not to have a child is a fundamental right,” adding her belief that:Before the Dobbs decision, we had found a workable compromise on this issue: no or limited abortions after fetal viability around 24 weeks. But the kind of six-week limit that is now the law in Florida and Georgia, not to mention the total ban in 14 other states, is an almost complete abrogation of the rights of women.On the treatment of business, Sawhill wrote: “Republicans have always been the party of corporate America, dedicated to limiting regulation and keeping taxes low. Gov. DeSantis’s attack on Disney and other so-called ‘woke’ companies is beginning to undermine the party’s reputation.”The bottom line, she concluded, was that “when Democrats talk about freedom, it’s not just rhetoric. There is substance behind the message.”Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, makes the case that the threats to freedom from the right are far more dangerous than those from the left.In an April 24 essay, “When Conservatives Used to be Liberals,” he argues that traditionally American conservatives differed from their European counterparts in “their emphasis on individual liberty, a small state, property rights and a vigorous private sector.” These principles, he continued, “defined the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, which wanted lower taxes, deregulation, federalism and multiple limits on state power.”This understanding of conservatism, Fukuyama writes, “has been upended with the rise of Trumpist populism.”The result: “American conservatives are now talking more like older European ones,” older ones “like Spain’s Francisco Franco or Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who were happy to see democracy abolished in their countries altogether.”Fukuyama acknowledged:There is plenty to criticize on the woke left, but this new type of conservative is not talking about rolling back particular policies; they are challenging the very premises of the liberal state and toying with outright authoritarianism. They are not simply deluded by lies about the 2020 election, but willing to accept nondemocratic outcomes to get their way.How, Fukuyama asks, could such a dire situation occur in this period of American history?The new illiberal conservatives talk about an “existential” crisis in American life: how the United States as traditionally understood will simply disappear under pressure from the woke left, which then justifies extreme measures in response.In fact, Fukuyama counters:It is hard to think of a time when the United States has been more free than it is in 2023. The much-feared tyranny of the woke left exists only in certain limited sectors of U.S. society — universities, Hollywood, and other cultural spaces, and it only touches on certain issues related to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity. It can be bad in these spaces, but most Americans don’t live there.Fukuyama is correct in citing the right’s exaggerated fears of the “woke” political agenda to justify authoritarian assaults on democracy, but he underestimates the adverse consequences of what many voters view as the freedom-threatening excesses of unrestrained liberalism.These include progressive policies that support the release of potentially violent criminals without bail; progressive prosecutors who refuse to press gun cases; the presence of homeless camps with open drug dealing on the sidewalks of Democratic cities; and the mentally ill roaming urban neighborhoods.For many voters, the consequences of these policies and situations are experienced as infringing on their own freedom to conduct their lives in a safe and secure environment, protected from crime, disease and harassment.Homelessness has become the subject of an ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom, a debate taking place now in New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams provoked angry protests — even before the chokehold death of a homeless man, Jordan Neely, by a passenger on an F train in Manhattan on May 1 — with his call to “involuntarily hospitalize people” who are a danger to themselves.In city centers large and small across the country, advocates for the homeless argue that street people without homes should be allowed to live and camp in public places, while others argue that the state should be empowered to close camps that allegedly pose threats to sanitation and public health — with no resolution in sight.William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, argues in a 2005 essay, “Taking Liberty,” that “for much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders.”From Teddy Roosevelt’s expansion of “the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world” to F.D.R.’s redefinition “to include social protection from the ills of want and fear,” to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal to a “civil and political freedom that included all Americans,” Galston maintains that liberals have successfully argued that freedom often can “be advanced only through the vigorous actions of government.”Liberals began to lose command of freedom in the 1960s, Galston concludes:What began honorably in the early 1960s as the effort to expand freedom of speech and self-fulfillment was transformed just a decade later into an antinomian conception of freedom as liberation from all restraint. Enthusiasts could no longer distinguish between liberty and license, and so lost touch with the moral concerns of average citizens, especially parents struggling to raise their children in what they saw as a culture increasingly inhospitable to decency and self-restraint.“As progressives abandoned the discourse of freedom,” Galston writes, “conservatives were more than ready to claim it.”I asked Galston whether he stood by what he wrote 18 years ago. He replied by email:Mostly, but some of it is dated. I did not anticipate that a commitment to fairness and equality of results would morph into a culture of intolerance on college campuses and other areas where a critical mass of progressives has been reached.Looking toward Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, there are conflicting signs favoring both left and right in the competition to determine which side is a more effective proponent of freedom.On the right, conservatives can point to two positive developments, both reflected in polls.The first was the May 7 ABC News/Washington Post survey that suggested Joe Biden is more vulnerable than previously recognized. Both Donald Trump and DeSantis led Biden — Trump by 45 percent to 38 percent, DeSantis by 42 percent to 37 percent.The second survey was a May 5 Washington Post-KFF poll showing that “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children” and “Most Americans (57 percent) don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth.”By nearly two-to-one margins, respondents said, “trans women and girls should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls” — in high school sports, 66 percent to 34 percent, and in college sports, 65 percent to 34 percent.These data points are politically significant because Biden is a strong proponent of trans rights, committed to protecting the “fundamental rights and freedoms of trans Americans,” including challenges to state laws barring transgender students from “playing on sports teams” consistent with their gender identity.Conversely, there is no question that Republican state legislators and governors have initiated concerted attacks on freedoms supported by liberals, and that many of these freedoms have wide backing among the public at large.These attacks include book banning, opposed by at least four to one, and bans on abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy. A Wall Street Journal poll in September 2022 found that “62 percent opposed an abortion ban at 6 weeks of pregnancy that only included an exception for the health of the mother, and 57 percent opposed a ban at 15 weeks with an exception only for the health of the mother.”The outcome of the election will determine, at least for a brief period, the direction in which the nation is moving on freedom and liberty. Given the near parity between Republicans and Democrats, neither side appears to be equipped to inflict a knockout blow. But the ABC/Washington Post survey showing both Trump and DeSantis easily beating Biden is a clear warning signal to the Democratic Party and to liberals generally that they cannot — and should not — take anything for granted.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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      Biden’s Slow Start Worries Democrats. Aides Insist All Is Well.

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      Some Democrats fear that the campaign’s early sluggishness shows a lack of urgency ahead of a possible rematch against Donald Trump. His aides say they know what they’re doing.Two weeks after President Biden unveiled his re-election bid, his campaign manager has yet to start the job, his seven co-chairs have not had a group discussion and his team has made little outreach to allies in Congress.For all the attention on Mr. Biden’s gauzy announcement video and the symbolism his campaign attributed to the day he entered the race — precisely four years after he began his 2020 bid and with the same message of saving the nation’s very soul — there is little evidence of the typical preparation for a national political campaign.Mr. Biden’s top advisers insist the limited-release nature of his 2024 campaign is boring by design. They say they are holding down costs by outsourcing as much as possible to the Democratic National Committee while the president’s senior staff members remain ensconced in top White House roles that allow them to engage in campaign strategy.“All of the pieces that should and need to fall into place will,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and Democratic megadonor and one of the Biden campaign co-chairs, said in an interview.But for an incumbent president in full control of his own re-election timeline, the decision to begin with such a skeletal operation has left even supporters confused. Democratic allies worry, some in public and more in private, that Mr. Biden and his political team — whose successes have come chiefly by running against Donald J. Trump rather than through organic liberal enthusiasm — are not displaying the necessary urgency for the coming battle.“Part of me is troubled that people are more enthusiastic about doing the often unglamorous work of government policymaking when there’s an extremely important political campaign that is staring us in the face,” said John Del Cecato, a strategist on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “I don’t know if that speaks to a belief that this will be a joyless campaign re-election effort or if it’s something else.”In the coming weeks and months, Mr. Biden will face two of the thorniest political issues of his presidency: an expected upturn of migrants at the Mexican border as a pandemic-era restriction on asylum requests expires this week and a looming debt limit crisis that threatens the American economy.A Trump-era immigration policy that led to the swift expulsion of many migrants at the southern border will lift on Thursday. Officials are bracing for an increase in migrants at the border.Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Mr. Biden is headed to a suburb of New York, where he will discuss the debt limit in the district of one of the 18 House Republicans who represent areas that the president carried. Then he will head to Manhattan for two fund-raisers.Representative Mike Lawler, the freshman Republican who represents the district, said that the president’s trip was not intimidating and that he had been invited and planned to attend.“I guess he’s trying to exert pressure in a district he won by 10 points,” Mr. Lawler said. “It speaks volumes that that same district elected me to represent it. And I ran on serving as a check and balance on the Biden agenda.”Money, Biden advisers say, was a driving factor in entering the race. The campaign has already entered into a joint finance agreement with 47 of the 50 state Democratic Parties, which will allow it to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time from individual donors.Top Biden officials dismiss the early concerns from inside the party as sideline sniping. In their view, they rightfully ignored naysayers to keep Mr. Biden in his Delaware basement during the early months of the pandemic, disregarded calls to knock on doors in the fall of 2020 and highlighted threats to democracy in the midterm elections last year despite pleas from many Democrats to focus on the inflation-racked economy.That string of victories has given Biden aides supreme confidence in their stay-the-course instincts, an ethos shared by Mr. Biden and top White House advisers including Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn.“We are meeting all of the goals and metrics we’ve set for ourselves to assemble another winning coalition in 2024,” said Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesman.Jim Messina, who served as Mr. Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, said the Biden team had some advantages that Mr. Obama did not, including a fully operational Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Obama had allowed to fall into a state of disrepair.“They’re staffed in the one place they need to be staffed,” Mr. Messina said of the party and its fund-raising operation, which is organizing the New York events.Polls show that a majority of Democrats want the party to nominate someone other than Mr. Biden. A gloomy Washington Post/ABC News survey released over the weekend found that 58 percent of Democratic-leaning adults felt this way.When it comes to raising money online, this lack of excitement has been a worry for Biden advisers, especially those who recall his 2019 struggles in that arena against his leading liberal rivals.Mr. Munoz declined to say how much money the campaign had raised in its first 24 hours, but ActBlue, the online portal for contributions to Democratic candidates, reported $6.1 million in donations in the first 24 hours after Mr. Biden announced his candidacy. That is about the same as the amounts that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas raised in the first day of their 2020 presidential campaigns.But not all of those ActBlue donations went to Mr. Biden; they make up the total given to every Democrat in the country that day.Mr. Biden is facing a looming showdown over the nation’s debt limit with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fractious Republican caucus. Al Drago for The New York TimesThe campaign is preparing to lean heavily on major donors in the first months of the race, and invited top bundlers to Washington on the first weekend of the campaign for a private briefing. Mr. Katzenberg said the campaign’s fund-raising would rely equally on Mr. Biden’s popularity among Democratic donors and a liberal fear that Mr. Trump could return to the White House.“The difference between passion and anxiety is not discernible,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “Whether somebody is doing this out of their passion and belief in the president — fantastic. If they’re doing it out of anxiety of what the alternative is — fantastic. The color of the green is the same.”Last week, Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn co-founder and one of the party’s most important financiers, organized a donor briefing at the Rosewood hotel in San Francisco, pulling in several dozen donors for the pro-Biden super PAC American Bridge, according to two attendees.Notably, the early television ads that the Biden campaign has announced were paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which had $28.7 million on hand at the beginning of April. For now, senior Biden officials are planning to push as many costs as they legally can to the party, which can raise far larger sums. The campaign does not have a physical headquarters yet; for now, aides are working out of the D.N.C.’s building in Washington.Mr. Biden’s New York trip will include two small fund-raisers that are being pulled together relatively hastily. Tony James, a former top executive at the private equity giant Blackstone, is hosting one event, where tickets begin at $25,000, according to invitations. Donors were told that Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, would also attend, and the goal for the two events was to bring in $3 million, according to a person briefed on the plans.For now, the White House seems happy to cede the national stage to the Republican primary race. Mr. Biden’s first television interview after his announcement, on MSNBC, was buried at 10 p.m. last Friday.“It would be unfortunate if they let the Republican nominee govern the conversation on a day-to-day basis,” said Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Mr. Sanders’s 2020 bid. “It feels like too much of a wild card to sit back. You’ve got to figure out a way to excite and energize people about your own conversation and to drive Donald Trump into that one.”Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, said she had yet to hear any outreach about the president’s re-election bid from Biden campaign aides or the campaign’s co-chairs. She said she had seen little excitement about Mr. Biden in her Dallas-area district and had told worried constituents to get behind the president’s re-election.“The stakes are too high for us to play chicken with this,” she said. “We all know that we’ve got issues with our family. But at the end of the day, I would not trade my family in for the alternative.”Mitchell Berger, a South Florida campaign bundler who has been involved in Democratic politics for decades, said the onus should not be on the Biden campaign to generate excitement. He said comparisons to Mr. Obama were not helpful.“President Biden is an exceptional political actor and he does very well with people, but, you know, the excitement generated by the Obamas is a once-in-a-generation kind of thing,” said Mr. Berger, who attended the campaign’s donor gathering in Washington last month.Mr. Katzenberg said Mr. Biden’s campaign had made a deliberate choice to begin without a full staff in place. The campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, remains in her White House job until next week, and other critical roles, including a finance director and a communications director, remain unfilled.“It’s not a question of whether it could or couldn’t have been done, it just wasn’t a priority,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “It’s simply not material, let alone essential, that it get done before.” More

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      An Outlier Poll on Trump vs. Biden That Still Informs

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      A seven-point Trump lead in an ABC/Post survey is an aberration but points to some Biden weaknesses.Is Donald Trump really leading President Biden?Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThere’s usually a simple rule of thumb for thinking about outlying poll results: Toss it in the average, and don’t think too hard about it. After all, outlying poll results are inevitable, simply by chance. When they occur, it shouldn’t be any surprise.But sometimes, that guidance gets a little hard to follow. The most recent ABC/Washington Post poll is proving to be one of those cases.In a startling finding, the poll found Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis each leading President Biden by seven percentage points, with Mr. Biden trailing among young people and struggling badly among nonwhite voters. After a few days of relentless media conversation, even I’ve been forced to abandon the usual rule of thumb.Make no mistake: This survey is an outlier. The Post article reporting the result acknowledged as much. But of all the cases over the last few years when an outlier has dominated the political discourse, this may be one of the more useful ones. For one, it may not be quite as much as an outlier as you might assume. Even if it is, it may nonetheless help readers internalize something that might have been hard to believe without such a stark survey result: Mr. Trump is quite competitive at the outset of the race.To the extent the usual rule of thumb would mean dismissing the poll result and returning to an assumption that Mr. Trump can’t win, the usual guidance might be counterproductive.Before I go on, I should acknowledge that I do have a few gripes with this survey. It reported the results among all adults, not registered or likely voters. The question about the presidential matchup explicitly offered respondents the option to say they’re still undecided, which could tend to disadvantage the candidate with less enthusiastic support. For good measure, the matchup was buried 16th in the questionnaire, following other questions about the debt ceiling, abortion, the presidential primary, the allegations against Mr. Trump and so on.But my various gripes probably don’t “explain” Mr. Trump’s strength. The poll actually did report a result among registered voters and still found Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis ahead by six. And just a few months ago, an entirely different ABC/Post survey asked about the presidential matchup among registered voters in the typical way, without offering undecided as an option. What did they find? Mr. Trump still led by three points among registered voters. Similarly, they found him leading by two last September.Interestingly, the January and September surveys showed all of the same peculiar results by subgroup — Mr. Trump’s lead among young voters (18 to 39), and the staggering Democratic weakness among nonwhite voters. And while this was not included in the most recent poll, Mr. Trump led among voters making less than $50,000 per year, historically a Democratic voting group. No other high-quality survey has consistently shown Mr. Biden performing so poorly, especially among young voters.All of this means that the ABC/Post poll isn’t quite like the usual outlier. This consistent pattern requires more than just statistical noise and random sampling. Something else is at play, whether that’s something about the ABC/Post methodology, the underlying bias in telephone response patterns nowadays, or some combination of the above. It should be noted that the ABC/Post poll is nearly the last of the traditional, live-interview, random-digit-dialing telephone surveys that dominated public polling for much of the last half-century. So it’s easy to understand why it could produce different results, even if it’s not obvious why it produces them.But if no other survey has matched the ABC/Post poll, it would probably be wrong to say that it’s entirely alone in showing a weak Biden. Yes, it’s alone in showing Mr. Trump ahead by seven (counting leaners). But even the last Times/Siena poll, in October, showed Mr. Trump ahead by one point among registered voters. So far this year, the average of all polls has shown an essentially tied race.And virtually all of the polling shows an admittedly more muted version of the same basic demographic story, especially among nonwhite voters. Even excluding ABC/Post polling altogether (in clear violation of the “toss it in the average” rule), Mr. Biden still has a mere 49-37 lead over Mr. Trump among Hispanic voters and just a 70-18 lead among Black voters. In each case, Mr. Biden is far behind usual Democratic benchmarks, and it comes on the heels of a midterm election featuring unusually low Black turnout.If the lesson from the ABC/Post poll is that Mr. Biden is vulnerable and weak among usually reliable Democratic constituencies, then perhaps the takeaway from an outlying poll isn’t necessarily a misleading one. More