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      Will It Be Morning in Joe Biden’s America?

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      If the midterm elections could be rerun this month, Democrats would probably end up in full control of Congress. President Biden’s approval ratings are rising. Inflation is down, and consumers are feeling more optimistic. And Americans are getting a better look at the G.O.P.’s actual policy agenda, which is deeply unpopular.OK, we don’t give politicians who lost an election the opportunity for a mulligan, even when they falsely claim that the election was stolen. But it is, I think, worth noting just how much the economic and hence political environment has shifted in the past few months, and to start thinking seriously about the possibility that Democrats might be in a startlingly strong position next year.It’s hard to overstate how bad things looked for Biden’s party on election eve. The last report on consumer prices released before the midterms showed inflation of 8.2 percent over the previous year, a terrible number by anyone’s reckoning. The unemployment rate was still very low by historical standards, but the news media was full of warnings about hard times ahead, and a large majority of likely voters believed (falsely) that we were in a recession.Given the perceived grimness of the economic environment, Republicans and many political analysts confidently expected a huge electoral red wave.Why didn’t that happen? Part of the answer may be that Americans weren’t feeling as bad about the economy as some surveys suggested. It’s true that the venerable University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment had fallen to levels last seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, during the worst slump since the Great Depression.But the Michigan index was probably distorted by partisanship: Did Republicans really believe, as they claimed, that the economy was worse than it had been in June 1980? (Back then the economy actually was in a recession, inflation was 14 percent, and unemployment was above 7 percent.)And another longstanding index of consumer confidence, from the Conference Board, was telling a quite different story, with consumers feeling pretty good about the economy. I’m not sure why these measures were so different, but the Conference Board measure seemed to do a better job of predicting the vote — although the backlash over Roe v. Wade, and against some terrible Republican candidates, surely also played a role.In any case, in mid-January — a bit over two months after the election, but three consumer price reports later — things look very different. There’s still no recession. Consumer prices actually fell in December; more to the point, they’ve risen at an annual rate of only 2 percent over the past six months.And while consumer expectations haven’t caught up with financial markets, which appear to believe that inflation will stay low for the foreseeable future, consumer expectations of inflation are back down to their levels of a year and a half ago.Which raises a question few would have asked even a few months ago: Is Joe Biden — who, for the record, had a much better midterm than Ronald Reagan did in 1982 — possibly headed for a “morning in America” moment?A few months ago I looked at the “misery index” — the sum of unemployment and inflation, originally suggested by Arthur Okun as a quick-and-dirty summary of the state of the economy. I used to think this index was silly; there are multiple reasons it shouldn’t make sense. But it has historically done a surprisingly good job of tracking consumer sentiment. And as I noted even then, the misery index seemed to be declining.Well, now it has fallen off a cliff. If we use the inflation rate over the past six months, the misery index, which stood at 14 as recently as June, is now down to 5.4, or about what it was on the eve of the pandemic, when Donald Trump confidently expected a strong economy to guarantee his re-election.Nor is that the only thing Democrats have going for them. The green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are leading to multiple new investments in domestic manufacturing; it’s unclear how many jobs will be created, but the next two years will give Biden many opportunities to preside over factory openings, giving speeches about how America is, um, becoming great again.Now, I’m not predicting a Democratic blowout in 2024. For one thing, many things can happen over the next 22 months, although I don’t think Republicans, even with cooperation from too many in the media, will convince Americans that the Biden administration is riddled with corruption. For another, elections often turn not so much on how good things are as on the perceived rate of improvement, and with inflation and unemployment already low, it’s not clear how much room there is for a boom.Also, extreme political polarization has probably made landslide elections a thing of the past. Republicans could probably nominate George Santos and still get 47 percent of the vote.But to the extent that the economic landscape shapes the political landscape, things look far better for Democrats now than almost anyone imagined until very recently.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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      In Pennsylvania, the 2020 Election Still Stirs Fury. And a Recount.

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      Election deniers in Lycoming County convinced officials to conduct a 2020 recount, a three-day undertaking that showed almost no change, but left skeptics just as skeptical.WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.A ballot cast for former President Donald J. Trump that was part of the county’s recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount.Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?It did not.“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections, oversaw the recount but opposed it as a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday.“It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancies between the hand recount and voting machine results to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.Lycoming County’s recount was part of the disturbing trend of mistrust in elections that has become mainstream in American politics, spurred by the lies of Mr. Trump and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian ridges in north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have firmly taken hold.The county’s election professionals spent months responding to the arguments of the election deniers in public hearings and fielding their right-to-know requests for the minutiae of voting records. Mr. Lehman said he did not think an encounter with the facts would change the views of some people.“You close one election-denying door, they’ll open a window,” he said.Mr. Trump hosted a campaign rally in Lycoming County at the Williamsport Regional Airport in October 2020. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOne of the residents who pushed for the hand recount, Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, the former chair of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Lycoming County, said he was happy the results matched the 2020 voting machine counts, though he said other questions needed to be addressed.“Our goal from Day 1 when we approached the commissioners, we said our goal here is not to find fraud — if we find it, we’ll fix it — we just want to restore voter confidence,” said Mr. Stroehmann, a founder of the far-right Lycoming Patriots group.He and Ms. DiSalvo were inspired by the debunked claims of a retired Army officer named Seth Keshel, who gained attention in 2021 with the assertion that there were 8 million “excess votes” cast for Mr. Biden. His analysis has been dismissed by professors at Harvard, the University of Georgia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.A petition circulated by Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann noted that registered Republicans grew their numbers in Lycoming County compared with Democrats from 2016 to 2020, but that Mr. Biden managed to win more votes than Hillary Clinton. Election deniers found this suspicious.“If Republicans GAINED voters and Democrats LOST voters — why did Biden receive 30% MORE votes in the November 2020 election than Hillary Clinton did in 2016?” their petition asked.Mr. Lehman called the argument nonsensical. Party registration does not dictate how someone will vote, he said. Mr. Biden outperformed Mrs. Clinton in nearly every Pennsylvania county in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump also raised his vote totals in the county by 16 percent.“The voters’ unpredictability — it makes democracy both majestic and messy,” Mr. Lehman told county commissioners at a hearing last year. The commission ultimately approved the recount two to one, along partisan lines.Mr. Lehman monitoring ballots being recounted in Williamsport on Wednesday.Pat Crossley/Williamsport Sun-GazetteElection officials at every level have been harassed and vilified since 2020, when election conspiracists echoing Mr. Trump blamed officials and helped inspire the “Stop the Steal” movement. On an election conspiracy show that was streamed on Rumble, Mr. Stroehmann called for an investigation into Mr. Lehman, who he said is “part of the steal.”“Our director of voter services is playing for the other team,” Mr. Stroehmann said on the show. “He’s as liberal as the day is long.”Richard Mirabito, a Lycoming County commissioner who is a Democrat, said there was no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing by Mr. Lehman. “He’s held in the highest esteem of integrity,” he said. “Those kinds of statements undermine the confidence of people in our system.”Mr. Mirabito voted against the recount but was overruled by the two Republicans on the board. Scott L. Metzger, a Republican and the chair of the county commission, also vouched for Mr. Lehman. “He’s done an outstanding job,’’ he said. After the 2022 midterms, requests for recounts in Pennsylvania races that were not close inundated counties, delaying the certification of some results. In Arizona and New Mexico, rural county commissions held up certifying primary or general election results last year.Across the country, a wave of Trump-backed election conspiracists who ran for statewide offices with control over voting lost their races. But some election deniers won races at the local level, where pressure by activists on officials has a better chance of yielding results.Officials in Lycoming County, a rural area of north-central Pennsylvania, were still estimating the final cost of the recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Metzger — one of the two Republicans on the commission who approved the recount — said that he voted for it after thousands of people signed petitions, and others approached him on the street saying they didn’t want to vote because they distrusted the system. Now that the recount matched what voting tabulator machines showed in 2020 and that there was no evidence of fraud, Mr. Metzger said, it was time to move on. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with it,” he said.Before the commissioners voted for the recount, Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann presented the results of what they called a door-to-door canvass of some county residences. The canvassing was conducted by volunteers from Audit the Vote PA, a group founded in 2021 under the false belief that Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, won Pennsylvania.Canvassers claimed to have found multiple “anomalies,” including votes that were tabulated from people in nursing homes who did not recall voting, as well as people who said they had voted, though there was no record of it.Mr. Lehman said he and his staff addressed each case. For those in nursing homes, the election office pulled records showing they had returned a mail ballot with their signature on the envelope. The canvass, he said, lacked rigor, adding that he was not surprised some people might have claimed to have voted in a face-to-face interview when they actually had not.Election deniers have no plans to stand down. They have requested reams of documents that they believe will expose fraud once and for all.“We’ve received a series of crazy records requests,” Mr. Lehman said. “You can quote me. They are insane.”Stacks of boxes containing ballots from the 2020 election, which are stored in a secure room of the county’s elections department. Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesElection deniers asked for copies of every application for a mail ballot, requiring Mr. Lehman and his staff to laboriously redact all personal information. They are pressing for copies of every ballot cast on Election Day 2020, and they have gone to court to seek digital data from the voting machines at each of the 81 county precincts.Though observers from both parties watched the hand recount this week, Ms. DiSalvo raised questions about the process, including that Mr. Lehman oversaw the adding up of the recounted votes.“We asked to see the tally sheets before the final processing and were denied,” Ms. DiSalvo said, referring to the paperwork used by ballot counters. The elections director, she added, had a “vested interest in making sure the numbers aligned.”Her group has filed a right-to-know request for the hand-count tally sheets.Mr. Lehman, a former Eagle Scout and teacher, displays two iconic photographs in his office. One shows Harry S. Truman in 1948 holding aloft the famously erroneous “Dewey Defeats Truman” newspaper headline. The other shows Lyndon Johnson solemnly taking the oath of office on Air Force One in 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy.“They’re both transitions of power,” Mr. Lehman said. “One is comic, the other tragic. We’ve managed to process them both as a country. I don’t know which category to put 2020 in. We need to get back to a place where we can process the outcomes of elections in a constructive, healthy way.” More

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      Will There Be a Biden Comeback?

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      Something unusual happened to Joe Biden this week. A reputable poll, from The Economist and YouGov, showed him with a positive job approval rating — even hitting 50 percent approval among registered voters, against 47 percent disapproving.Maybe the poll was an outlier, a blip; Biden’s approval numbers have improved since his summertime nadir, but his polling average is still below 45 percent. Maybe any improvement will be undone by further revelations about stashed classified documents from his V.P. days — though it will be hard to top the comedy value of some of the papers being in the garage with his Corvette.But as congressional Republicans gear up for a year of internal knife fights and fiscal brinkmanship, it’s worth considering what it would take for a true Biden comeback, a return to actual popularity.Before the midterms I tried to identify three original sins in the Biden administration — three freely chosen, unnecessary courses that contributed to the president’s underwater numbers. They were the White House’s early decisions to limit energy production and roll back some Trump immigration policies (which were then followed by the gas-price spike and the border crisis), the surfeit of spending in the American Rescue Plan that contributed to the inflation surge and the failure to show any actual moderation on cultural issues to match Biden’s original moderate-Catholic-Democrat brand.One issue I didn’t include was the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, both because it wasn’t a major issue in the midterm campaign and because I thought the withdrawal itself was a necessary and gutsy decision, notwithstanding the disastrous execution. But if you look at the arc of Biden’s approval ratings, the fall of Kabul looks like a major inflection point, a moment that sowed the first serious doubts about the administration’s competence.So envisioning a Biden comeback requires imagining these liabilities being overcome or reversed, or just having their salience diminished. On the economy, such a scenario would run like this: The Republican House snuffs out any possibility of new inflationary spending, inflation continues to diminish without unemployment surging, China’s reopening helps normalize the global economy, Putin’s energy weapon proves to be a one-off blow rather than a continuing drag, and we get through this strange post-pandemic period without a real recession.On foreign policy, the Biden best case is probably further gains for the Ukrainians in the spring and then some kind of stable cease-fire, which would enable him to take credit for blunting Russian aggression and also successfully managing the risks of World War III. We may get more of a bloody stalemate instead, but the White House’s handling of the Ukraine war is probably its most successful policy to date; if it still looks successful in a year’s time, the memory of the Kabul breakdown should be fully washed away.On immigration and the border crisis, the Biden administration clearly thinks it’s pivoting rightward with new restrictions on asylum; the political effectiveness of the policy, though, will turn on whether it actually succeeds. On other cultural issues, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that Biden will execute any notable pivot — but the White House can hope that a divided government will effectively ease voter anxieties about wokeness without the administration needing to make any enemies to its left.The role of congressional Republicans generally is key to the recovery scenario. The Biden administration can look back on successful political rebounds by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that were clearly mediated by G.O.P. fecklessness. On the evidence of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership to date, history may be returning to those grooves.But with this important difference: Clinton and Obama were unusually talented politicians in the prime of their political lives, while Biden is something else — a likable-enough political insider who’s now conspicuously too old for his job.Occasionally this reality can be oddly advantageous for the White House. In cases like the classified-document revelations or the Hunter Biden imbroglios, the idea of Biden doing something shady accidentally or cluelessly, rather than with conscious corruption, is more plausible than in prior presidencies.But mostly Biden’s age creates challenges that the Clinton and Obama administrations didn’t have to worry about. When events turn against his administration, as they did in 2021 and certainly could again in 2023 if the above scenarios don’t pan out, this president can look especially overmastered, especially ill-equipped to lead or turn the ship around. And even when things are going relatively well — even in a clear rebound scenario — the shadow of Biden’s diminished capacities may still be a drag on his support.Presuming, that is, that the Republicans find an opposing candidate who draws clear contrast in vigor and capacity. If they return instead to a certain former president whom Biden beat once already — well, that’s the strongest comeback scenario, and the clearest path to another term.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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      Kellyanne Conway: The Case for and Against Trump

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      Donald J. Trump shocked the world in 2016 by winning the White House and becoming the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience. He upended the fiction of electability pushed by pundits, the news media and many political consultants, which arrogantly projects who will or will not win long before votes are cast. He focused instead on capturing a majority in the Electoral College, which is how a candidate does or does not win. Not unlike Barack Obama eight years earlier, Mr. Trump exposed the limits of Hillary Clinton’s political inevitability and personal likability, connected directly with people, ran an outsider’s campaign taking on the establishment, and tapped into the frustrations and aspirations of millions of Americans.Some people have never gotten over it. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. There is no vaccine and no booster for it. Cosseted in their social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness, the afflicted disguise their hatred for Mr. Trump as a righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country. So desperate is the incessant cry to “get Trump!” that millions of otherwise pleasant and productive citizens have become naggingly less so. They ignore the shortcomings, failings and unpopularity of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and abide the casual misstatements of an administration that says the “border is secure,” inflation is “transitory,” “sanctions are intended to deter” Putin from invading Ukraine and they will “shut down the virus.” They’ve also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 and not in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The obsession with Mr. Trump generates all types of wishful thinking and projection about the next election from both his critics (“He will be indicted!”) and his supporters (“Is he still electable?”). None of that is provable, but this much is true: Shrugging off Mr. Trump’s 2024 candidacy or writing his political obituary is a fool’s errand — he endures persecution and eludes prosecution like no other public figure. That could change, of course, though that cat has nine lives.At the same time, it would also be foolish to assume that Mr. Trump’s path to another presidency would be smooth and secure. This is not 2016, when he and his team had the hunger, swagger and scrappiness of an insurgent’s campaign and the “history be damned” happy warrior resolve of an underestimated, understaffed, under-resourced effort. It’s tough to be new twice.Unless what’s old can be new again. Mr. Trump’s track record reminds Republican primary voters of better days not that long ago: accomplishments on the economy, energy, national security, trade deals and peace deals, the drug crisis and the southern border. He can also make a case — one that will resonate with Republicans — about the unfairness and hypocrisy of social media censorship and alleged big tech collusion, as recent and ongoing revelations show. Mr. Trump, as a former president, can also be persuasive with Republican primary voters and some independents in making a frontal attack on the Biden administration’s feckless management of the economy, reckless spending and lack of urgency and competence on border control and crime.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAccomplishing this will not be easy. Mr. Trump has both political assets to carry him forward and political baggage holding him back. For Mr. Trump to succeed, it means fewer insults and more insights; a campaign that centers on the future, not the past, and that channels the people’s grievances and not his own; and a reclamation of the forgotten Americans, who ushered him into the White House the first time and who are suffering economically under Mr. Biden.A popular sentiment these days is, “I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality.” It is true that limiting the name-calling frees up time and space for persuasion and solutions. Still, it may not be possible to have one without the other. Mr. Trump would remind people, it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border; structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander; forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Vladimir Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine.When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. Much like the audio debate a few years ago, “Do you hear ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’?,” what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America’s interests.The case against Trump 2024 rests in some combination of fatigue with self-inflicted sabotage; fear that he cannot outrun the mountain of legal woes; the call to “move on”; a feeling that he is to blame for underwhelming Republican candidates in 2022; and the perception that other Republicans are less to blame for 2022 and have more recent records as conservative reformers.He also won’t have the Republican primary field — or the debate stage — to himself. If one person challenges Mr. Trump, it is likely five or six will jump into the race and try to test him, too. Possible primary challengers to Mr. Trump include governors with impressive records and huge re-election victories like such governors as Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Greg Abbott of Texas; those who wish to take on Mr. Trump frontally and try to move the party past him, like Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; those who can lay legitimate claim to helping realize Trump-era accomplishments like former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; others who wish to expand the party’s recent down-ballot gains in racial and gender diversity to the presidential level, like former Gov. Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott, both of South Carolina.These are serious and substantive men and women, all of whom would be an improvement over Mr. Biden. For now, though, these candidates are like a prospective blind date. Voters and donors project onto them all that they desire in a perfect president, but until one faces the klieg lights, and is subjected to raw, relentless, often excessive scrutiny, and unfair and inaccurate claims, there is no way to suss out who possesses the requisite metal and mettle.The main talking point against Trump 2024 seems to be that Trump 2022 underperformed and that it left him a less-feared and less-viable candidate. Mr. Trump boasts that his general election win-loss record was 233-20 and that he hosted some 30 rallies in 17 states and more than 50 fund-raisers for candidates up for re-election, and participated in 60 TeleRallies and raised nearly $350 million in the 2022 cycle for Republican candidates and committees.Republican voters should be pleased that Mr. Trump and other Republican luminaries showed up and spoke up in the midterms. Mr. Trump wasn’t the only one who campaigned for unsuccessful candidates. Mr. DeSantis rallied in person for Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano and Tim Michels. Mr. Pence, Ms. Haley, and Mr. Pompeo endorsed Don Bolduc, for example. Even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, seemed warm and hopeful about a few of the U.S. Senate candidates who came up short. In October 2021 Mr. McConnell claimed, “Herschel [Walker] is the only one who can unite the party, defeat Senator Warnock,” and in August 2022, “I have great confidence. I think [Mehmet] Oz has a great shot at winning [in Pennsylvania].”Damon Winter/The New York TimesContrast that to Joe Biden, who was unpopular and unwelcome on the campaign trail in the midterm elections. For seven years Mr. Trump hasn’t stopped campaigning, while one could say that Mr. Biden, who stuck close to home for much of 2020 and did relatively little campaigning in 2022, never truly started. It will be tough for Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris to avoid active campaigning when “Biden” and “Harris” are on the ballot.Any repeat by the 2024 Trump campaign of the disastrous mistakes in personnel, strategy and tactics of the 2020 Trump campaign may lead to the same 2020 result. With roughly $1.6 billion to spend and Joe Biden as the opponent, the 2020 election should have been a blowout. Instead, they proved the adage that the fastest way to make a small fortune is to have a very large one and waste most of it.Mr. Trump lost support among older voters, white men, white voters with a college degree, and independents, though he increased his vote share across notable demographics like Hispanics and Blacks. One wild card: Will the undercover, hidden 2016 Trump voter, those who wish to keep their presidential pick private from pollsters, return in 2024?Republicans must also invest in and be vocal about early voting. This is a competition for ballots, not just votes. As ridiculous as it was to vote nearly two months before Election Day and count the votes for three weeks thereafter, some of the state-based Covid-compelled measures for voting are now permanent. If these are the rules, adapt or die politically.Mr. Biden, for his part, will have his own record to run on, typical advantages of incumbency, powerful campaign surrogates who will join him in making the presidential race a referendum on Mr. Trump, and persistent calls for a third-party candidate who as a spoiler could do for Mr. Biden what Ross Perot did for Bill Clinton in 1992 — deliver the presidency to the Democrat with less than 45 percent of the popular vote.Whether the 2024 presidential election is a cage match rematch of Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, or a combination of other candidates remains to be seen. Each of them has defied the odds and beat more than a dozen intraparty rivals to win their respective primaries. Each of them now faces calls for change, questions about the handling of classified documents and questions about age. For voters, vision matters. Winning the presidency is hard. Only 45 men (one twice) have been president. Hundreds have tried, many of them being told, “You can win!” even as they lost. Success lies in having advisers who tell you what you need to know, not just what you want to hear. And in listening to the people, who have the final say.Kellyanne Conway is a Republican pollster and political consultant who was Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and senior counselor to President Trump from 2017 to 2020. She is not affiliated with his 2024 presidential campaign.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.

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      Speaker, Speaker, What Do You See? I See MAGA Looking at Me.

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, remember “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” the unforgettable Lionel Shriver novel about a woman whose son murders his classmates? Maybe someone should write the sequel: “We Need to Talk About What They Did to Kevin.”Gail Collins: A book-length disquisition on Kevin McCarthy, Bret? I dunno. Always thought his strongest suit was that he was too boring to hate. But now that he’s apparently promised the Republican right wing everything but permission to bring pet ocelots to the House floor, I can see it.Bret: Too boring to hate or too pathetic to despise? I’ve begun to think of McCarthy almost as a literary archetype, like one of those figures in a Joseph Conrad novel whose follies make them weak and whose weakness leads them to folly.Gail: Love your literary allusions. But let’s pretend you’re in charge of the Republican Party — tell me what you think of him in general.Bret: A few honorable exceptions aside, the G.O.P. is basically split between reptiles and invertebrates. McCarthy is the ultimate invertebrate. He went to Mar-a-Lago just a short while after Jan. 6 to kiss the ring of the guy who incited the mob that, by McCarthy’s own admission, wanted to kill him. He hated Liz Cheney because of her backbone. But he quailed before Marjorie Taylor Greene because she has a forked tongue. He gave away the powers and prerogatives of the office of speaker in order to gain the office, which is like a slug abandoning its shell and thinking it won’t be stepped on. A better man would have told the Freedom Caucus holdouts to shove it. Instead, as a friend of mine put it, McCarthy decided to become the squeaker of the House.Gail: OK, Kevin is House squeaker forever.Bret: If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the whole spectacle has shown voters what they get for voting for this Republican Party.Gail: Hey, you’re still in charge of Republicans. Now that they’re sort of in command, do you have hopes they’ll make progress on your priorities, like controlling government spending? Without, um, failing to make the nation’s debt payments ….Bret: Buried in the noise about McCarthy’s humiliation is that his opponents had some reasonable demands. One of them was to give members of Congress a minimum of 72 hours to read the legislation they were voting on. Another was to limit bills to a single subject. The idea is to do away with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spending packages that Congress has lately become way too fond of.Gail: Yeah, I can buy into that one.Bret: On the other hand, the idea that this Republican clown show is going to accomplish anything significant — particularly since doing so would require them to work with a Democratic president and Senate — is roughly the equivalent of Vladimir Putin leaving the vocation of vile despot to become a … cannabis entrepreneur. Not going to happen.So what do Democrats do?Gail: Well, one plus is that we don’t have to worry about the Republican House passing some terrible, nutty legislation since the Senate is there to put a halt to it. Interesting how much better obstruction looks when your party is doing the obstructing ….Bret: It’s almost — almost — enough to be grateful to people like Herschel Walker and Blake Masters for being such deliriously awful candidates.Gail: When it comes to positive action, like keeping the government running, I’d like to think the moderate Dems and the moderate Republicans could get together and come to some agreement on the basics. Do you think there’s a chance?Bret: What was the name of that Bret Easton Ellis novel? “Less Than Zero.” Bipartisanship became a four-letter word for most Republicans sometime around 2012. If we can avoid another useless government shutdown, I’ll consider it a minor miracle.On the other hand, all this is good for Democrats. In our last conversation, I predicted that McCarthy wouldn’t win the speakership and that Joe Biden would decide against a second term. I was wrong on the first. Now I’m beginning to think I was also wrong on the second, in part because Republicans are in such manifest disarray. What is your spidey sense telling you?Gail: Yeah, Biden knows 80 is old for another run, but the chance to take on Donald Trump again is probably going to be irresistible.Bret: Assuming it’s going to be Trump, which, increasingly, I doubt.Gail: You really think it’s going to be Ron DeSantis? My theory is that if the field opens up at all, there’ll be a swarm of Republican hopefuls, dividing the Trump opposition.Bret: It’ll be DeSantis or you can serve me a platter of crow. Never mind that Trump still managed to seal the deal for McCarthy’s speakership by winning over a few of the last holdouts. It still took him 15 ballots.Gail: But about Biden — if he did drop out, Democrats would have to figure out what to do about Kamala Harris. A woman, a minority, with the classic presidential training job. Yet a lot of people haven’t found her all that impressive as a potential leader.My vote would be for him to announce he’s not running instantly, and let all the other potential heirs go for it.Bret: How do you solve a problem like Kamala? My initial hope was that she’d grow into the job. That hasn’t seemed to happen. My second hope was that Biden would give her a task in which she’d shine. Didn’t happen either. My third hope was that Biden would ask her to fill Stephen Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court and then nominate Gina Raimondo or Pete Buttigieg to the vice presidency, setting either of them up to be the front-runner in ’24 or ’28. Whoops again. Now Dems are saddled with their own version of Dan Quayle, minus the gravitas.Gail: Not fair to compare her to Dan Quayle. But otherwise OK with your plan. Go on.Bret: I also think Biden should announce he isn’t going to run, both on account of his age and the prospect of running against someone like DeSantis. But the argument is harder to make given the midterm results, Republican chaos, the sense that he’s defied the skeptics to pass a lot of legislation and the increasingly likely prospect that Ukraine will prevail over Russia this year and give him a truly historic geopolitical win.I just hope that if he does run, he switches veeps. It would … reassure the nation.Gail: So happy to hear you’re on a Biden fan track. Does that apply to his new plan for the Mexican border, too?Bret: Not a Biden fan, exactly, though I do root for a successful presidency on general principle. As for the border plan, the good news is that he finally seems to be recognizing the scale of the problem and promising tougher enforcement. It’s also good that he’s doing more for political refugees from oppressive countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.Gail: And next …Bret: The right step now is to start pushing for realistic bipartisan immigration reform that gives Republicans more money for border wall construction and security in exchange for automatic citizenship for Dreamers, an expanded and renewable guest-worker visa that helps bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and a big increase in the “extraordinary ability” EB-1 visas for our future Andy Groves and Albert Einsteins. What do you think?Gail: I was waiting for you to get to the border wall itself, which we disagree about. Terrible symbol, awful to try to maintain and not always effective.Bret: All true, except that it paves the way for a good legislative compromise and can save lives if it deters dangerous border crossings.Gail: Moneywise, the border states deserve increased federal aid to handle their challenges. A good chunk should go to early childhood education, which would not only help the new arrivals but also local children born into non-English-speaking families.The aid should also go to states like New York that are getting busloads of new immigrants — some from those Arizona and Texas busing plots, but a good number just because they’re the newcomers’ choice destination.I believe there was a bipartisan plan hatched in the House that included citizenship for Dreamers — an obvious reform that, amazingly, we haven’t yet achieved. But bipartisan plans aren’t doing real well right now.Bret: It’s still worth a shot. I’m sorry Biden didn’t invest the kind of political capital into immigration reform that he did into the infrastructure and climate change bills. And if Republicans wind up voting down funding for a border wall out of spite for Dreamers, I can’t see how that helps Republicans or hurts Democrats. Supporting them seems like smart politics at the very minimum.Before we go, Gail, one more point of note: We just passed the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. I was happy to see Biden honor the heroes of that day at a White House ceremony. Also happy to see the Justice Department continue to prosecute hundreds of cases. And appalled to watch Brazil’s right-wing loons try to imitate the Jan. 6 insurrectionists by storming their own parliament. Any suggestions for going forward?Gail: Well, what we really need to see is an effort by Republicans, some of whom were endangered themselves during the attack, but virtually none of whom have shown any interest in revisiting that awful moment — only one member of the party showed up for that ceremony.Now that Kevin McCarthy has his job in hand, let’s see him call for a bipartisan committee to come up with some suggestions. Ha ha ha.Sorry — don’t want to end on a snippy note.Bret: Not snippy at all. Truthful. We could start by requiring a civics course for all incoming members of Congress. Maybe some of them might learn that their first duty is to the Constitution, not to themselves.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 Marks 2nd Anniversary of Jan. 6 By Awarding 14 Presidential Medals

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      President Biden marked the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack by awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal to 14 people.Fourteen people who fought the violent mob at the Capitol two years ago and stood against election denialism in 2020 were awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesWASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday honored 14 people who stood against election denialism in 2020 and fought the violent mob at the Capitol two years ago, telling them in a White House ceremony that history “will remember your names, remember your courage, remember your bravery.”Speaking from the East Room, he awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to nine police officers — three of whom died after protecting the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and five local officials who were subjected to personal violence but resisted pressure to undermine the election in 2020.Together, Mr. Biden said, the individuals he honored represented the “extraordinary Americans” whose service to the country helped thwart the efforts of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies as they sought to keep Mr. Trump in power.“A violent mob of insurrectionists assaulted law enforcement, vandalized sacred halls, hunted down elected officials, all for the purpose of attempting to overthrow the will of the people and usurp the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Biden said. “All of it — all of it — was fueled by lies about the 2020 election. But on this day, two years ago, our democracy held because we the people, as the Constitution refers to us, we the people did not flinch.”A year ago, on the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Biden rejected the idea that Americans are “too bogged down by division to succeed,” though he added a grim, cautionary note: “Believe me, I know how difficult democracy is.”On Friday, as the president marked the second anniversary, those divisions were on full display in Washington.Twenty Republican lawmakers, most of them eager participants in the election lies that gave rise to the Jan. 6 attack, have repeatedly failed this week to elect a speaker, bringing the proceedings of democracy to a halt in the House.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Democracy, it seems, is as difficult as Mr. Biden predicted a year ago.Mr. Biden’s first speech about Jan. 6 was also more focused on Mr. Trump and his actions. Speaking from Statuary Hall in the Capitol in 2022, the president issued a scathing takedown of his predecessor and vowed to “stand in this breach” to ensure that no one places “a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”This time, Mr. Biden sought to draw attention not to Mr. Trump, but to the people who stood against the former president.He began by honoring nine police officers, all of whom fought against the surge of violence on Jan. 6 as lawmakers met to certify Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump.He praised Daniel Hodges, a Washington police officer who was injured during his first visit to the Capitol, for his bravery amid the chaos.“Sprayed with poison, pinned and crushed, eye almost gouged out — he didn’t break,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Hodges.Mr. Biden honored Michael Fanone, a Capitol Police officer who he said was “beaten, beaten, not pushed around, beaten” and yet “defended our democracy with absolute courage.” And Mr. Biden also paid tribute to Caroline Edwards, the first law enforcement officer injured by the rioters, saying she was knocked unconscious by rioters but “got back up to help hold the line.”Mr. Biden also awarded the medal to Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who faced racial slurs and harassment on Jan. 6; Aquilino Gonell, a sergeant with the Capitol Police who was injured in the attack; and Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer who led a pro-Trump mob away from the entrance to the Senate chamber.Three officers Mr. Biden honored on Friday died after the Jan. 6 attacks: Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who died of a stroke a day after the attacks; Howard C. Liebengood, who died by suicide three days after the attack; and Jeffrey L. Smith, a Metropolitan Police officer who also died by suicide after helping to protect the Capitol.Speaking to the family members of the honorees, who accepted the medals on the men’s behalf, Mr. Biden offered condolences and a sense of understanding about the grief they are still struggling to deal with.“Boy is it hard,” he said. “I know how proud I am when my son Beau is honored on the anniversary of his death as a consequence of burn pits in Iraq. But it brings everything back like it happened that moment.“I want to thank you for having the courage to be here today,” he added.In addition to the police officers, Mr. Biden awarded the medals to five local officials, each of whom refused to do the bidding of those who insisted that the election had been rigged.Two of them — Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who is her daughter — received the awards for serving as poll workers in Atlanta, where they were subjected to abuse by Trump supporters who falsely accused them of participating in election fraud.“Both of them were just doing their jobs, and they were targeted and threatened by the same peddlers of a lie that was fueling the insurrection,” Mr. Biden said. “They were literally forced from their homes and faced despicable racist taunts.”Mr. Biden also praised Al Schmidt, who was a city commissioner on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections in 2020, noting that he “did not bend, he did not bow, he did not yield to the political threats and pressure.” And he hailed Jocelyn Benson, who served as the Secretary of State of Michigan during the 2020 election, and Rusty Bowers, the Republican House speaker in Arizona. All three resisted pressure from those seeking to overturn the results in 2020.Mr. Biden called Ms. Benson “a true leader in our nation” and said Mr. Bowers shows people “what integrity is all about.”A year ago, with the events of Jan. 6 looming in the more recent past, Mr. Biden expressed greater worry about the future of the country, saying that “as we stand here today — one year since Jan. 6, 2021 — the lies that drove the anger and madness we saw in this place, they have not abated.”But on Friday, he returned to the optimism that has often characterized his speeches.“We’re not a land of kings and dictators, autocrats and extremists,” he said. “As we see in today’s honorees, we’re a nation and we the people that toughen our fiber, renew our faith and strengthen our cause. There’s nothing beyond our capacity, if we act together.” More

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      Democrats Face Obstacles in Plan to Reorder Presidential Primary Calendar

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      The party is radically reshuffling the early-state order, but Georgia and New Hampshire present challenges.Democratic efforts to overhaul which states hold the first presidential primaries entered a new and uncertain phase this week, with hurdles to President Biden’s preferred order coming into focus even as several states signaled their abilities to host early contests, a key step in radically reshaping the calendar.But in Georgia, Democrats face logistical problems in moving up their primary. And New Hampshire, the longtime leadoff primary state, has officially indicated that it cannot comply with the early-state lineup endorsed by a D.N.C. panel, under which the state would hold the second primary contest alongside Nevada.That panel backed a sweeping set of changes last month to how the party picks its presidential nominee, in keeping with Mr. Biden’s vision of putting more racially diverse states at the beginning of the process.Democratic nominating contests have for years begun with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Under the new proposal, the 2024 Democratic presidential primary calendar would begin in South Carolina on Feb. 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on Feb. 6, Georgia on Feb. 13 and then Michigan on Feb. 27.Those states — several of which played critical roles in Mr. Biden’s 2020 primary victory — had until Thursday to demonstrate progress toward being able to host contests on the selected dates. According to a letter from the co-chairs of the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, Nevada, South Carolina and Michigan have met the committee’s requirements for holding early primaries.Both Georgia and New Hampshire are more complex cases.In the letter, sent on Thursday, the committee’s co-chairs recommended that the two states be granted extensions to allow for more time to work toward meeting the requirements of the new calendar.“We expected both the New Hampshire and Georgia efforts to be complicated but well worth the effort if we can get them done,” wrote Jim Roosevelt Jr. and Minyon Moore, in a letter obtained by The New York Times. They added, “We are committed to seeing out the calendar that this committee approved last month.”Under the new D.N.C. proposal, Georgia would host the fourth Democratic primary in 2024. A onetime Republican bastion that helped propel Mr. Biden to the presidency, Georgia also played a critical role in cementing the Democratic Senate majority and has become an undeniably critical battleground state. Atlanta has been vying to host the Democratic National Convention and is considered one of the stronger contenders.President Biden, if he seeks re-election, could decide against filing in the New Hampshire primary, a state where he came in fifth place in 2020.David Degner for The New York TimesBut there are challenges in moving up Georgia’s Democratic primary. Republicans have already agreed to their own early-voting calendar, keeping the order of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, and rules from the Republican National Committee are clear: States that jump the order will lose delegates, and party rules have already been set (though the R.N.C. is in a period of tumult as its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, faces a challenge to her leadership).In Georgia, the primary date is determined by the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. Officials from his office have stressed that there is no appetite to hold two primaries or to risk losing delegates.“This needs to be equitable to both political parties and held on the same day to save taxpayers’ money,” Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, said in a statement this week.Georgia Democrats hoping that the money and media attention that come to an early primary state might persuade Gov. Brian P. Kemp, a Republican, to intercede for them may be disappointed, too.“The governor has no role in this process and does not support the idea,” Cody Hall, an adviser to Mr. Kemp, said on Wednesday night.The situation is fraught for different reasons in New Hampshire, which has long held the nation’s first primary as a matter of state law. Neither the state’s Democrats nor its Republicans, who control the governor’s mansion and state legislature, are inclined to buck the law, playing up the state’s discerning voters and famed opportunities for small-scale retail politicking.That tradition puts New Hampshire’s Democrats directly at odds with the D.N.C. mandate to host the second primary in 2024. Officials in the state have signaled their intent to hold the first primary anyway, risking penalties.In a letter to the Rules and Bylaws Committee before the deadline extension, Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, wrote that the D.N.C.’s plan was “unrealistic and unattainable, as the New Hampshire Democratic Party cannot dictate to the Republican governor and state legislative leaders what to do, and because it does not have the power to change the primary date unilaterally.”He noted a number of concessions New Hampshire Democrats would seek to make, but urged the committee to “reconsider the requirements that they have placed,” casting them as a “poison pill.”The early-state proposal is the culmination of a long process to reorder and diversify the calendar, and Mr. Roosevelt and Ms. Moore said later Thursday that the tentative calendar “does what is long overdue and brings more voices into the early window process.”D.N.C. rules stipulate consequences for any state that moves to operate ahead of the party’s agreed-upon early window, as well as for candidates who campaign in such states.If New Hampshire jumps the line, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, assuming he runs, could decide against filing in the New Hampshire primary, a state where he came in fifth place in 2020.While few prominent Democratic officials expect, as of now, that he would draw a major primary challenge if he runs — making much of the drama around the early-state calendar effectively moot in 2024 — a lesser-known candidate could emerge and camp out in New Hampshire, some in the state have warned.The eventual calendar is not set in stone for future elections: Mr. Biden urged the Rules and Bylaws Committee to review the calendar every four years, and the committee has embraced an amendment to get that process underway.And there are still a number of steps this year.The Rules and Bylaws Committee is expected to meet to vote on the proposed extensions. The D.N.C.’s. winter meeting, where the five-state proposal must be affirmed by the full committee, is scheduled for early February in Philadelphia, and there is certain to be more jockeying ahead of that event.“The first real inflection point is the meeting of the full D.N.C.,” Mr. Roosevelt said in an interview late last month. More

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      Biden Will Mark Jan. 6 With Presidential Medals for Election Officials

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      The Presidential Citizens Medal will honor those who resisted efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including law enforcement officers and Rusty Bowers, the former House speaker in Arizona.WASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday will mark the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal to a dozen people who resisted efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Mr. Biden will present the award, which is among the nation’s highest civilian honors, at a ceremony at the White House, officials said. The award is given to people who have “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”The group to be honored is a who’s who of figures that defended the 2020 election results in the face of threats from Donald J. Trump and his most fervent supporters.It includes leading Republicans, like Rusty Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, and Al Schmidt, a city commissioner in Pennsylvania, who helped confirm Mr. Trump’s defeat in their states by insisting all absentee ballots be counted. Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, oversaw an extended process to tabulate votes in Detroit.Mr. Biden will also honor Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, who processed ballots during the 2020 election for the Fulton County, Ga., elections board. They were falsely accused of manipulating ballots by Mr. Trump, his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit.The two women later sued The Gateway Pundit and Mr. Giuliani, and Ms. Freeman, like several of the other honorees, testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.The president will also honor seven police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, including Brian Sicknick, who died of a stroke a day later.The ceremony comes two years after the attacks by Trump supporters, who violently forced their way into the Capitol with the intent to stop lawmakers from formally certifying Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump.Since then, Mr. Biden has repeatedly warned that the day’s events — and the broader effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in the election — represent a significant threat to American democracy.“For the first time in our history, a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol,” Mr. Biden said during a speech on the first anniversary of the attacks.In those remarks, Mr. Biden vowed to work against the forces who enabled the attack on that dark day in American history.“I will stand in this breach,” he said, speaking from the Capitol. “I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”This year, Mr. Biden’s speech will focus on the people who attempted to defend democracy.Other awardees include:Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who faced racial slurs and harassment on Jan. 6.Caroline Edwards, the first law enforcement officer injured by the rioters.Michael Fanone, a Washington police officer who was injured in the attack.Aquilino Gonell, a sergeant with the Capitol Police who was injured in the attack.Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer who led a pro-Trump mob away from the entrance to the Senate chamber during the attack.Daniel Hodges, a Washington police officer who was injured in the attack. According to the White House, Jan. 6 was his first time in the Capitol. More