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      How Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats Have Reacted to Getting Pushed Back

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      In Iowa, Democrats politely accepted President Biden’s decision to push them back on the presidential nominating calendar. In New Hampshire, they’re fighting it with live-free-or-die stubbornness.A caucus location at Drake Fieldhouse in Des Moines in February 2020.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesVoters casting their ballots in a primary election in Hancock, N.H., in February 2020.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesWhen President Biden shook up his party’s presidential nominating calendar, Democrats in the two states that were bounced from the front of the line reacted in far different ways.New Hampshire Democrats are going down kicking and screaming, insisting on holding a primary as if they hadn’t just lost their opening spot.Iowa Democrats, ashamed by a 2020 fiasco that included a dayslong wait for results that were nonetheless riddled with errors, have meekly accepted their fate as primary season also-rans.In what is perhaps a case study in Iowa nice versus live-free-or-die New Hampshire stubbornness, one state is showing that it views its quadrennial parade of visiting presidential candidates as a political birthright, while the other appears to see that spectacle more as a lost perk.“The Iowa Democrats have made a mistake,” said David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, a position that has long been the ex officio guardian of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary status. “They’ve lost it for this year, and now the chain is broken.”Mr. Scanlan’s flinty resistance to changing New Hampshire’s primary date to suit party bosses in Washington has bipartisan appeal in the Granite State. Anyone involved in politics there can cite the 1975 state law requiring the state to hold the nation’s first presidential primary contest, codifying what is now a century-old tradition.New Hampshire and the Democratic National Committee are still quarreling over the state’s refusal to move its primary back. On Friday, the national party wrote to New Hampshire Democrats saying that the state’s “meaningless” primary could “disenfranchise and confuse voters.” The New Hampshire attorney general replied on Monday with a cease-and-desist letter saying the D.N.C.’s “meaningless” categorization violated the state’s voter suppression laws.Iowa has a much shorter history of going first, starting in the 1970s: The first president to owe his victory to the state was Jimmy Carter in 1976.Mr. Biden has little political loyalty to either state. In 2020, he placed fourth in Iowa’s caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. It was a victory in South Carolina, which he has now moved to the front of the Democratic calendar, that propelled him to the party’s nomination and ultimately to the White House.This year, New Hampshire is holding an early primary anyway, with 21 Democrats on its presidential ballot on Jan. 23 — but not Mr. Biden, who skipped the state. Rule-following Iowa Democrats, by contrast, will hold a mail-in primary and have until March to return their ballots.“As soon as Biden became the nominee, the writing was on the wall,” said Pete D’Alessandro, who was a senior Iowa aide for Senator Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns. “The grieving process had a little longer to go through, so we’re probably at a later stage than New Hampshire.”Pete D’Alessandro, who was a senior Iowa aide for Senator Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, said he had long expected President Biden to push back the state in the primary calendar.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIowa Democrats have long suspected that their time as a presidential proving ground was up. Even before the 2020 caucus-night meltdown, there were grumblings from inside and outside Iowa about how a nearly all-white state had such influence over how a racially diverse party picked its presidential nominees.While some old-timers cling to a hope that Iowa can regain the first spot in the 2028 cycle, a belief is growing among younger Democrats that the caucuses are a distraction from local organizing work, and that the party’s 2020 presidential candidates presented a left-wing vision of Democrats that helped lead to wipeout Republican victories in the state that year and again in 2022.“Iowa Democrats are really disappointed,” said Tom Miller, a former Iowa attorney general who was one of the first elected officials in the state to endorse Barack Obama in 2008, and then backed Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana in the 2020 caucuses. “The future is certainly not good.”New Hampshire’s opposition has paid off with a series of visits from ambitious Democrats. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Representative Ro Khanna of California, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York and others have trekked to New Hampshire in recent months to address voters — just in case it might be useful down the road.The path to Iowa has been less traveled, with Gov. Tim Walz of neighboring Minnesota making a couple of trips, including for last summer’s Iowa State Fair.New Hampshire Democrats argue that it is obvious to future presidential candidates that the road to the White House still runs through the state’s town halls and diners. Mr. Scanlan on Monday pronounced himself unimpressed with South Carolina’s anointed spot at the front of the Democratic primary calendar.“I did a Google search for what kind of activity is occurring in South Carolina, and there really isn’t a lot of news there,” he said in an interview on Monday that took place at the exact moment Mr. Biden was delivering a campaign speech in South Carolina. “The only real action is in New Hampshire.”David Scanlan, left, New Hampshire’s secretary of state, with Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, as the congressman presented his candidacy form for the Democratic presidential primary race in Concord, N.H., in October. Mr. Phillips, unlike Mr. Biden, will be on the state’s primary ballot.Gaelen Morse/Getty ImagesDemocrats in both Iowa and New Hampshire harbor dreams — most likely to be unrequited with Mr. Biden in the White House — that when the rules for the next presidential primary process are set, they will regain their spots.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, predicted that the state’s fight for its place on the 2028 calendar would be much more intense than it was for 2024, with Mr. Biden’s renomination viewed by most of the party as an academic exercise.New Hampshire’s plan to win over D.N.C. members in the next cycle, Mr. Buckley said, would involve rallying the party’s progressive members, who remember that Senator Sanders won the state’s primary twice — even though he did not go on to win the nomination either time.“It’s not a secret that the establishment was very angry with New Hampshire for Bernie Sanders winning in 2016 and 2020,” Mr. Buckley said. “I think you’ll see a response from the progressive community across the country.”Iowa’s comeback plan is, as one might expect, a bit more polite.The Iowa Democratic chairwoman, Rita Hart, said she believed there would be “a level playing field” when it came to bidding for the early primaries in 2028. She said she did not expect Mr. Biden to put his thumb on the scale for South Carolina at Iowa’s expense.“We’ve had some really tough conversations with the D.N.C.,” she said. “We would not be where we are right now if we had not gotten reassurance that in 2028 we’ll have every opportunity to get back into the first tier.”Scott Brennan, a former Iowa Democratic Party chairman who was involved in the party’s losing bid to retain its early slot in 2024, said that unlike New Hampshire Democrats, if Iowa Democrats did not get their first-in-the-nation slot back, they would accept that decision.“I think we’ve earned the right to be there,” Mr. Brennan said. “If for nothing else, because the process gave us Barack Obama as president twice.” More

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      Setting the Stage for Iowa: ‘Trump Will Probably be Over 50 Percent’

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      Patrick Healy and The Republican caucuses in Iowa are just five days away, marking the official start of the 2024 presidential election season. To kick-start Opinion Audio’s coverage, Patrick Healy, the deputy editor of Times Opinion, and the Opinion editor Katherine Miller get together to discuss their expectations for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, where they think the G.O.P. is headed and Donald Trump’s continued dominance. Stay tuned for more on-the-ground analysis from “The Opinions” in the coming weeks.Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering by Issac Jones with mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      A Compromise on Immigration Could Help Rebuild Biden’s Democratic Coalition

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      The negotiations on Ukraine funding and stricter border protections have exposed a growing rift between President Biden and his own party. Republican hard-liners have demanded a bill that mirrors policies advanced during the Trump administration, especially ones related to asylum seekers, increased border security and the mandate that companies institute the E-Verify employment eligibility system.Democrats such as Representative Pramila Jayapal called the proposals “cruel, inhumane and unworkable,” but Republicans believe they have found solid ground with voters. Recent polling suggests the Republicans are right. A CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday found that 68 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of border security.There are many, both inside and outside his party, who believe that by agreeing to the Republican deal, Mr. Biden would be surrendering too much moral high ground and any future policy leverage. But in fact this is a chance for him to make meaningful border-security policy changes and redefine his party as the home of an aspirational multiethnic, working-class coalition.Securing the borders of a sovereign state isn’t racism — it’s among the first responsibilities of government. And many voters, including Democrats, are demanding that the Biden administration do a better job with that responsibility. A recent Fox News poll showed that fully 22 percent of Democrats favor Republican candidates on border security.More than any other group, Latinos have political views that correlate with — indeed, are racially and ethnically defined by — the immigrant experience. Yet even these voters are conveying growing concerns about border security. According to an April 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, about 44 percent of Hispanics and 48 percent of respondents overall think illegal immigration is a major problem, an increase of more than 15 percentage points since June 2020.The supposition among much of the Democratic establishment and progressive activists is that Latino voters prioritize more relaxed immigration policies over border security. To win re-election, President Biden must redefine the narrative that has become orthodoxy and lead his party toward supporting significantly enhanced border security measures.While this would be a prudent political move, such a shift would most likely lead to an internal Democratic civil war. While Biden’s election efforts in 2020 hinged on just enough White Republican suburban women leaving the G.O.P., the defection of traditional minority Democrats, notably Latino, Black and Asian voters narrowed his margin of victory. Younger voters and voters of color — a key coalition — has shown the largest drop in support. But brokering a deal with the Republicans could help him shore up the nontraditional alliance that got him elected four years ago.Latinos have flummoxed Democrats in recent elections by shifting right in three of the last four national elections. This shift is about far more than immigration reform, but it is undeniable that it has been pronounced in border communities, especially in Texas and New Mexico, where the crisis is most acute. The failure of Democrats to propose meaningful border security measures has led to them being vulnerable to Republican attacks of supporting “open borders.”Mr. Biden, whose campaign has only recently and reluctantly begun to acknowledge the slide in support by Latino (in fact, all nonwhite) voters for the Democratic Party, is facing growing pressure from advocacy groups to take a more progressive position on immigration than the party in past decades — even though polling and electoral data suggest Latino voters are moving in the opposite direction.The president will have to challenge the Democrats’ established doctrine on the border and party’s view of how Latinos view border policy — a move that will reposition the Democratic coalition to better benefit from the demographic changes among Latino voters in the short, medium and long term. The rightward shift among Latino voters has exposed an uncomfortable cleavage between the Latino immigrant-advocacy groups that rose to prominence in the 1990s and the views of their first- and second-generation children, who dominate the Latino voting population.President Biden’s re-election strategy is clearly not working — but it is fixable. Immigration, the undocumented and related issues have been overemphasized by institutional Democratic Latino voices, including consultants and organizations vested in an outdated narrative. Latino voters, meanwhile, are far more focused on basic economic concerns and public safety, issues where Republicans tend to poll better among working-class voters.The immigration measures that progressive and establishment Latino Democrats favor, while desperately needed and a moral imperative, are a nonstarter for House Republicans and not terribly important to Latino voters. Mr. Biden would be smart to agree to beef up border security, restrict asylum and move on to its economic messaging, precisely the issue Latino voters are telling pollsters they want to hear more of.The president finds himself and his re-election prospects at a crossroads. He can double down on a strategy of outwardly opposing increased border protection, or he can reframe the debate and begin to rebuild the ethnic and racial coalitions that brought him and Barack Obama to power. To do that, he must assert that a Latino agenda, as it exists, has grown far bigger than one predominantly focused on ethnic ties to immigration.Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      In South Carolina, Biden and Harris Test Policy-Heavy Pitch to Black Voters

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      The president’s re-election campaign is looking to rekindle support among a group that was pivotal to his 2020 victory, in a state that revived his candidacy.As Democrats amplify their concerns about President Biden’s status with Black voters, South Carolina has emerged as a proving ground for his campaign: one where he can test his message to a predominantly Black electorate and use it as a largely ceremonial launchpad for his re-election.At events over the last few days, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris offered reverential, policy-heavy re-election pitches to largely Black audiences and celebrated the Black organizers and community leaders who helped deliver the White House to Democrats, starting with those in the Palmetto State.They also drew a contrast with former President Donald J. Trump and other Republican leaders, whose election denialism and efforts to “whitewash” history, they said, threaten the progress that Black Americans have spent generations fighting for.Black voters have expressed frustration with the Biden administration for falling short on key campaign promises, and have shown less enthusiasm for Mr. Biden’s re-election in polls and interviews. But in South Carolina, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris aimed to highlight the lesser-known victories their administration has notched over the last three years, and they argued that a second term would allow them to achieve even more. Black voters’ disaffection with Democrats, campaign aides and allies argue, is rooted in their lack of awareness of the White House’s accomplishments rather than in fundamental flaws with the Biden-Harris ticket.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump Says He Hopes Any Economic Crash Happens in 2024 Under Biden

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said in an interview on Monday that he believed the economy would crash — and that he hoped it would happen in the next year so the blame would fall on President Biden’s administration.“We have an economy that’s so fragile, and the only reason it’s running now is it’s running off the fumes of what we did,” Mr. Trump told the conservative commentator Lou Dobbs in an interview broadcast Monday evening on the MyPillow founder Mike Lindell’s platform. “It’s just running off the fumes. And when there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months, because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”President Hoover presided over the 1929 stock market crash that started the Great Depression.Mr. Trump is hoping to capitalize on voters’ economic concerns, as a number of polls have shown that voters trust him and other Republicans more than they trust Mr. Biden to handle the economy. In the interview, he criticized Mr. Biden’s and congressional Democrats’ spending on infrastructure and renewable energy.The Biden campaign has been frustrated by a disconnect between positive economic indicators — including strong G.D.P. growth, increasing jobs and higher wages — and negative public opinion. Many Americans are still struggling to get by, mortgage rates are high, and while inflation has fallen significantly from the peaks of 2022, those price increases still weigh heavily on voters’ minds.Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, condemned Mr. Trump’s comments hoping for a downturn and said the former president’s policies “would worsen inflation with tax giveaways to rich special interests.”“A commander in chief’s duty is to always put the American people first, never to hope that hard-working families suffer economic pain for their own political benefit,” Mr. Bates said. “Republican officials should welcome the economic progress President Biden is delivering, instead of revealing twisted true colors that would shrink the American middle class in the name of their own cynical self-interests.”Peter Baker More

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      Why Iowa Turned So Red When Nearby States Went Blue

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      With the Iowa caucuses six days away, politicians will be crisscrossing the state, blowing through small-town Pizza Ranches, filling high school gyms, and flipping pancakes at church breakfasts.What Iowans will not be seeing are Democrats. President Biden spoke Friday in Pennsylvania, and he and Vice President Kamala Harris both were in South Carolina over the weekend and on Monday. But Iowa, a state that once sizzled with bipartisan politics, launched Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and seesawed between Republican and Democratic governors, has largely been ceded to the G.O.P. as part of a remarkable sorting of voters in the Upper Midwest.There is no single reason that over the past 15 years the Upper Midwest saw Iowa turn into a beacon of Donald J. Trump’s populism, North and South Dakota shed storied histories of prairie populism for a conservatism that reflected the national G.O.P., and Illinois and Minnesota move dramatically leftward. (Sandwiched in between, Wisconsin found an uncomfortable parity between its conservative rural counties and its more industrial and academic centers in Milwaukee and Madison.)No state in the nation swung as heavily Republican between 2012 and 2020 as Iowa, which went from a six-percentage-point victory for Barack Obama to an eight-point win for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election.Deindustrialization of rural reaches and the Mississippi River regions had its impact, as did the hollowing out of institutions, from civic organizations to small-town newspapers, that had given the Upper Midwest a character separate from national politics.Susan Laehn, an Iowa State University political scientist who lives in the small town of Jefferson, Iowa, recounted how an issue that once would have been handled through discussions at church or the Rotary Club instead became infected with national politics, with her husband, the libertarian Greene County attorney, stuck in the middle: New multicolored lighting installed last summer to illuminate the town’s carillon bell tower prompted an angry debate over L.G.B.T.Q. rights, leaving much of the town soured on identity politics that they largely blamed on the national left.Another issue: Brain drain. The movement of young college graduates out of Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul made a mark on the politics of all five states.Michael Dabe, a 19-year-old business and marketing major at the University of Dubuque, near the western bank of the Mississippi River, has found a comfortable home in Iowa, where life is slower and simpler than in his native Illinois and politics, he said, are more aligned with his conservative inclinations.But he expressed little doubt what he will be doing with his business degree once he graduates, and most of his classmates are likely to follow suit, he said.“There are just so many more opportunities in Chicago,” he said. “Politics are important to me, but job security, being able to raise a family more securely, is more important, for sure.”Michael Dabe, a freshman at the University of Dubuque, in his room at his parents’ home on Sunday. He expects to move to Chicago after graduation.Kayla Wolf for The New York TimesAn analysis in 2022 by economists at the University of North Carolina, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago of data gleaned from LinkedIn showed how states with dynamic economic centers are luring college graduates from more rural states. Iowa loses 34.2 percent of its college graduates, worse than 40 of the 50 states, just below North Dakota, which loses 31.6 percent. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more than it produces.Even when young families look to move back to the rural areas they grew up in, they are often thwarted by an acute housing shortage, said Benjamin Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota extension in St. Cloud, Minn.; 75 percent of rural homeowners are baby boomers or older, and those older residents see boarded-up businesses and believe their communities’ best days are behind them, he said.As such older voters grow frustrated and more conservative, the trend is accelerating. Iowa, which had a congressional delegation split between two House Republicans, two House Democrats and two Republican senators in 2020, now has a government almost wholly under Republican control, which has enacted boldly conservative policies that ban almost all abortions and transition care for minors, publicly fund vouchers for private schools and pull books describing sexual acts from school libraries. (The library and abortion laws are now on hold in the courts.) The congressional delegation is now entirely Republican after a 2022 G.O.P. sweep in House races and the re-election of Senator Charles E. Grassley.Meantime on the east bank of the Mississippi, in Illinois, high-capacity semiautomatic rifles have been banned, the right to an abortion has been enshrined in law and recreational marijuana is legal. Upriver in Minnesota, pot is legal, unauthorized immigrants are getting driver’s licenses, and voting access for felons and teens is expanding.Such policy dichotomies are influencing the decisions of younger Iowans, said David Loebsack, a former Democratic House member from eastern Iowa.“These people are going, and I fear they’re going to keep going, given the policies that have been adopted,” he said.The politics of rural voters in the Upper Midwest may simply be catching up to other rural regions that turned conservative earlier, said Sam Rosenfeld, a political scientist at Colgate University and author of “The Polarizers,” a book on the architects of national polarization. Southern rural white voters turned sharply to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as Black southerners gained power with the civil rights movement and attendant legislation, he noted.But rural voters in the Upper Midwest, where few Black people lived, held on to a more diverse politics for decades longer. North Dakota, with its state bank, state grain mill and state grain elevator, has retained vestiges of a socialist past, when progressive politicians railed against rapacious businessmen from the Twin Cities. Even still, its politics have changed dramatically.“Until relatively recently, there was a Midwestern rural white voter who was distinct from a southern rural white voter,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “There was a real progressive tradition in the Midwest uncoopted by Jim Crow and racial issues.”The rural reaches of Iowa now look politically similar to rural stretches in any state, from New York to Alabama to Oregon. And rural voters simply appreciated what Mr. Trump did for them, said Neil Shaffer, who chairs the Republican Party of Howard County, Iowa. Located along the Minnesota border, it was the only county in the nation to give both Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump 20-percentage-point victories.Iowans like outsiders, and Mr. Obama’s charisma was winning, Mr. Shaffer said. But the self-employed farmers and small-business owners of Howard County were burdened by the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s regulation of fresh water runoff, and depressed commodity prices.There was skepticism of Mr. Trump and his abrasive, big-city behavior, Mr. Shaffer said, “but there’s that individual spirit in the Midwest that likes the Don Quixote railing against the big bad government, And people knew what they were getting.”Kyle D. Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics explains polarization as a tale of the top half versus the bottom half of the population scale. If more than half a state’s vote comes from dominant metropolitan areas, as is the case in Illinois and Minnesota, states tend to be Democratic. If smaller, rural counties dominate, states tend to move right.Of the nine largest counties in Iowa, only one, Dubuque, switched from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump in 2016. President Biden’s margin in those counties in 2020 was only three percentage points lower than Mr. Obama’s winning 2012 margin.But Mr. Obama also carried 31 of the 90 smaller counties; Mr. Biden won none. As a group, Mr. Obama lost those rural counties by 2.5 percentage points to his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. Mr. Biden lost them to Mr. Trump by nearly 30 percentage points.Former President Barack Obama carried Iowa in 2008 and 2012, while President Biden lost it by 8 percentage points in 2020.Joshua Lott for The New York TimesMr. Kondik attributed some of that to Mr. Trump, whose anti-immigrant, protectionist policies diverged from traditional Republican positions. “He was a good fit for the Midwest,” he said.Laura Hubka, who co-chairs the Howard County Democrats, remembered high school students driving trucks around town in 2016 with large Trump flags. It felt intimidating, she said.“It was scary for a lot of people and scared a lot of Democrats inside,” Ms. Hubka said. “Trump spoke to a certain kind of people. People who felt like they were left behind.”Chased by the shifting politics, she said, at least one of her children now plans to move his family across the border to Minnesota.But the sweeping Republican victories in Iowa in 2022, when Mr. Trump was not on the ballot and the G.O.P. faltered in much of the country, point to other factors. Christopher Larimer, a political scientist at the University of Northern Iowa, again pointed to demographics. The huge groundswell of first-time 18-year-old voters who propelled Mr. Obama in 2008 were 22 and graduating college in 2012. By 2016, many of them had likely left the state, Mr. Larimer said.“I don’t know if Iowa is any different from anywhere else; it’s caught up in the nationalization of politics,” he said. “Young people are moving into the urban core, and that’s turning the outskirts more red.”If that urban core is in state, statewide results won’t change. If it is elsewhere, they will.Mr. Winchester, the rural sociologist, said the perception of rural decline is not reality; regional centers, like Bemidji, Minn., or Pella and Davenport, Iowa, are thriving, and even if small-town businesses have closed, housing in those towns is filled.But, he said, “many towns don’t know their place in the larger world. That concept of anomie, a sense of disconnection, is out there.”Gary Hillmer, a retired U.S. Agriculture Department soil conservationist in Hardin County, Iowa, has drifted away from his Republican roots and said he struggled to understand the views of his Trump-supporting neighbors in the farm country around Iowa Falls.“It’s hard to have a conversation with them to figure out why,” he said. “It’s frustrating, in that regard, because we ought to be able to talk to each other.”Charles Homans More

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      Joe Biden Is Trying to Jolt Us Out of Learned Helplessness About Trump

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      After Joe Biden’s speech on Friday marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection and laying out the democratic stakes of the next election, Mitt Romney pronounced himself unimpressed. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the ‘threat to democracy’ pitch is a bust,” the Utah Republican told a New York Times reporter. “Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”If he is right, it’s as much an indictment of America — including the American media — as of the Biden campaign. It would mean that Donald Trump has already broken us, so frying America’s circuits that we can no longer process the authoritarian peril right in front of us.Whether or not it was savvy for Biden to center his first campaign speech of the year on the danger Trump poses to democracy, his words had the virtue of being true. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past,” Biden said in the speech. “It’s what he’s promising for the future. He’s being straightforward. He’s not hiding the ball.”Romney almost certainly shares Biden’s sense of foreboding; as his biographer McKay Coppins wrote, after Jan. 6, Romney became obsessed with the fall of great civilizations throughout history. “This is a very fragile thing,” he said of America’s democratic experiment. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”That’s fundamentally what the 2024 election is about. But even though Romney appears to agree with Biden about the existential danger of another Trump presidency, he, like many others, seems worried that when it comes to the future of American self-government, a cynical and exhausted populace can’t be made to care.This fear could easily become self-fulfilling, as commentators treat Trump’s plot against America as a given instead of a major, still-unfolding story. On Saturday, CNN’s Chris Wallace analyzed Biden’s speech, in which the president noted, correctly, that Trump’s rhetoric about migrants echoed “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Wallace asked one of his panelists, “Is Biden smart to go this hard at Trump?” Surely the more important question is whether Biden’s alarming warning about his predecessor is accurate. The #Resistance-era warning against “normalizing” Trump might now seem hokey, but it’s still apt. The alternative is to let Trump redefine our sense of what is shocking and aberrant in American politics.There was a line in the Biden speech that puzzled me: Trump “proudly posts on social media the words that best describe his 2024 campaign, quote, ‘revenge’; quote, ‘power’; and, quote, ‘dictatorship.’” I follow politics closely but didn’t know what Biden was talking about. It turns out that the day after Christmas, when I was on vacation and only briefly glancing at headlines, Trump posted to his Truth Social account a word cloud illustrating the terms voters in a survey most often associated with his political goals. In the center, in large, red-orange letters, are “power,” “dictatorship” and, most prominently of all, “revenge.” But Trump’s implicit boast about his authoritarian image was just a blip; by the time I got back online on Dec. 29, it had disappeared from the news cycle, much as the memories of so many other Trumpian outrages against the civic fabric have disappeared. All this forgetting is a result of Trump’s singular talent, which is to transgress at such speed and scale that the human mind can’t keep up.Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s exhausting provocations. This is not, despite the fatalism of people like Romney, a doomed project. Congress’s Jan. 6 hearings demonstrated that a sustained focus on Trump’s wrongdoing can move at least some fraction of the public. Right now, the ex-president benefits from being largely out of the spotlight — his ejection from Twitter has, ironically, been a great boon to him — but the more Trump is in people’s faces, the less they like him. (That’s why his Covid news conferences were so disastrous for him.) It’s thus incumbent on Biden to try to make people pay attention to a man many of us would rather never think about again.On Monday, Biden gave his second campaign speech of the year, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., site of a racist mass murder in 2015. It was ostensibly about white supremacy, but its real theme was truth, and the way historical fictions from the Lost Cause of the Confederate South to Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election license tyranny and oppression.“The truth is under assault in America,” said Biden. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country, because without the truth, there’s no light. Without light there’s no path from this darkness.”We won’t know until November whether this approach works, but given where we are, it’s hard to imagine a better one. I’d love to have a candidate who makes voters feel inspired, giving them something to vote for instead of against. But after three years in office, Biden probably won’t be able to talk Americans into feeling excited about him, and the pro-Palestinian demonstrators who interrupted him are a reminder of how disillusioned many progressives are by his Israel policy.To be sure, Biden’s presidency has been full of serious accomplishments; he spoke about some of them on Monday, including lowering the cost of insulin and canceling student debt for more than 3.6 million people. But ultimately, the best reason to vote for Biden is to stave off the calamity of an encore Trump administration, in which a lawless would-be dictator, proclaiming his own immunity from prosecution and lionizing the violent mob that tried to keep him in power, enacts an orgy of retribution against small-d democrats. If hammering away at this reality is an ineffective campaign strategy, we’re already lost.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Why Donald Trump Will Soon Be Attacking the Fed

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      Interest rates are heading down. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of this year (at least).Why? Because there are very good reasons for the Federal Reserve, which controls short-term interest rates — that’s how it makes monetary policy — to start reversing the sharp rate hikes it carried out beginning in March 2022. There’s a vigorous debate about whether those rate hikes were excessive, which I’m not going to litigate here. Whatever you think about past policy, the case for cuts going forward is very strong, and I hope the Fed will act on that case.What I don’t know is whether the Fed is ready for the political firestorm it’s about to face, and whether it will stand up to the pressure to keep rates too high for too long. Because it’s a safe prediction that Donald Trump and his supporters will scream that the coming rate cuts are part of a deep-state conspiracy to re-elect President Biden.Let’s talk first about the economics, which should — but might not — be the only thing guiding the Fed’s decisions.The Fed raised rates in an attempt to rein in inflation, which was running hot at the time — its preferred measure of underlying inflation was running far above its target rate of 2 percent. It kept raising rates until the middle of 2023, trying to cool off the economy and ensure that inflation came down.As it turns out, the economy still hasn’t cooled much, at least by the usual measures; the unemployment rate remains near a 50-year low. But inflation has plunged. Over the past six months, the core personal consumption expenditures deflator — try saying that five times fast — has risen at an annual rate of only 1.9 percent, below the Fed’s target, and more complex measures are close to 2 percent. Basically, the war on inflation is more or less over, and we won.So why keep interest rates this high? Right now the labor market looks a lot like it did on the eve of the pandemic, with both unemployment and other measures of market heat, like the rate at which workers are quitting, similar to what they were in late 2019. The Fed is projecting higher inflation over the next year than it was in 2019, but only slightly higher.Back then, however, the federal funds rate — the interest rate the Fed controls — was 1.75 percent. Now it’s 5.5 percent. It’s really hard to come up with a good reason it should stay that high.True, high rates haven’t produced a recession — yet. But there are hints of economic weakness, and the Fed is supposed to try to get ahead of the curve. So it’s time to start cutting rates.But rate cuts will have political implications. They will be good for Biden, although not exactly for the reasons you might think.I don’t know what the unemployment rate or the rate of economic growth will be in November, but because monetary policy works with a lag, what the Fed does in the next few months won’t have much effect on these numbers.Biden, however, is already presiding over a very good economy by normal standards, with solid job growth and plunging inflation. What he needs is for more Americans to accept the good news. And Fed rate cuts will help him with that. They will signal to the public that inflation really is under control; they will lead, other things being equal, to higher stock prices and lower mortgage rates.So we can expect howls from Trump and his allies that politics, not economics, is driving the coming rate cuts — even though Trump himself appointed Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair.Why do we know this will happen? Partly because paranoia is MAGAworld’s normal condition: It sees sinister conspiracies everywhere.Beyond that, Trump and his allies constantly engage in projection, assuming that their opponents are doing or will do what they themselves would do or have done, like weaponizing the Justice Department for Trump’s own political ends.And when it comes to interest rate policy, Trump has a track record of doing exactly what I’m sure he will accuse Biden of doing: trying to manipulate the Fed. Ever since Richard Nixon pressured the Fed to keep rates low in 1972, possibly helping to set the stage for the stagflation that followed, it has been traditional for the White House to respect the Fed’s independence. But in 2019 Trump attacked Powell and his colleagues as “boneheads” and demanded that they cut interest rates to “ZERO, or less.”So we know that Trumpist attacks on the Fed for cutting interest rates are coming. What we don’t know is how the Fed will react.In a recent dialogue with me about the economy, my colleague Peter Coy suggested that the Fed may be inhibited from cutting rates because it’ll fear accusations from Trump that it’s trying to help Biden. I hope Fed officials understand that they’ll be betraying their responsibilities if they let themselves be intimidated in this way.And I hope that forewarned is forearmed. MAGA attacks on the Fed are coming; they should be treated as the bad-faith bullying they are.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More