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    Analysis: Amid Biden’s Dismal Polling, Don’t Expect Him to Shift Strategy

    Officials in the president’s orbit say polls won’t change a strategy centered on comparing the Biden agenda with a Republican one, even as some allies feel betrayed by his policies.For weeks, polls have shown President Biden trailing his likely challenger, former President Donald J. Trump. Protesters have streamed through Washington, demanding that Mr. Biden call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Groups of key voters, including young people and voters of color, have suggested that they might not support Mr. Biden in the 2024 election.With so many troubling signals, what is a president seeking re-election to do? The answer, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, is to stay the course.Several officials in the Biden campaign and the White House are adamant that unflattering polls and vocal criticism from key constituents over Gaza, immigration and other issues simply have not been enough to shift a strategy that is centered on comparing the Biden agenda with policies favored by Republicans.The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would turn up the volume on that battle cry beginning in 2024.The polls — and the reams of what officials see as negative news coverage — have at times frustrated everyone, including Mr. Biden. But the polling has not changed the president’s mind on any of the issues that could bring political peril next year, including his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza or place conditions on military aid to Israel, the officials said.“They’re not freaking out,” Ted Kaufman, a longtime confidant to Mr. Biden, said in an interview about the president and his team. “When you signed up for this thing, you didn’t sign up to be at 80 percent in the polls. These are genuine veterans, and they’re picked because of their ability to be calm in difficult times.”This thinking is not likely to satisfy a cacophony of voices outside that small circle. Immigration has been one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities. In recent weeks, the White House has considered major new restrictions on migration to satisfy Republicans who refuse to approve aid for Ukraine or Israel without a crackdown at the border.Although members of Congress have not yet secured a deal, the fact that the White House has signaled openness to even some of the policies has drawn enormous criticism from progressives in his own party and immigration advocates who supported him in the past.“For the White House to endorse such cruel policies would be a betrayal to millions of Americans who believed President Biden’s campaign promises to restore our humanitarian leadership and the rule of law,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a refugee advocacy organization.Democrats are clamoring for the president to do more and say more about the threat Mr. Trump poses to democracy. Others want Mr. Biden to encourage the Israelis to end their large-scale campaign in Gaza. Still others say he is running out of time to make the strongest case possible for himself against an opponent who is skillful at commandeering a news cycle.A poll released by The New York Times on Tuesday showed widespread disapproval of Mr. Biden’s decisions around the war in the Middle East. But the polling also showed that those surveyed care much more about the state of the economy than they do about foreign policy, and that a majority of them still support providing military and economic aid to Israel.“The very real investments, resources and work we’re putting in right now aren’t for the next poll of the day — they’re to win an election next November,” said Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman.He also pointed to several other polls published this week that show better odds for Mr. Biden in 2024, including polling from The Times that showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump among likely voters.The plan for Mr. Biden to dig out of the bad news swirling around him in Washington, his advisers say, is to relentlessly focus on his agenda during visits to key states, like the one he made to Wisconsin on Wednesday.The state is crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects — he won there by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and recent polling suggests a close race in 2024. Ms. Harris chose the state to kick off a countrywide tour in support of reproductive rights, beginning in January.During a visit to Milwaukee on Wednesday, Mr. Biden did not focus on foreign policy or immigration or polls. Instead, he talked about investments in the business community during remarks at a Black chamber of commerce.Mr. Biden also said his administration had worked to forgive student loan debt — another point of criticism among Democrats — despite a Supreme Court decision that invalidated his plan for even more relief. According to figures released this month by the Education Department, the administration has wiped out $132 billion in debt for more than 3.6 million Americans.During his remarks, Mr. Biden highlighted Mr. Trump’s recent comments on immigrants “poisoning” the blood of the country, words that echoed Adolf Hitler’s comments about Jewish people.“Well, I don’t believe, as the president — former president — said again yesterday, that immigrants are polluting our blood,” Mr. Biden said. “The economy and our nation are stronger when we’re tapped into the full range of talents in this nation.”Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, said in an interview that the next year would be about addressing the concerns of different groups of voters but also about drawing a clear comparison with Mr. Trump.“Our job will be to make sure people know that they’ve been heard,” Mr. Wilker said, but also to present a comparison between Mr. Trump and “a seasoned leader who actually knows how to listen to people, bring people together and get things done.” In Wisconsin, the Biden campaign has hired a state campaign manager and piloted a volunteer program, with a focus on colleges and Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The program, which also has a pilot in Arizona, will focus on leveraging the social networks of volunteers rather than the door-knocking campaigns of past elections. (A graphic designer, Mr. Wilker said, is on hand to create shareable memes and graphics around topics — basically, an emoji-friendly version of a bumper sticker.)This week, the Biden campaign spent money on advertisements centered on Mr. Biden’s visit that promoted local investments that had come through infrastructure legislation. When Wisconsinites Google political news coverage, the Biden campaign will have paid for search results to surface local stories about the president’s visit.But Mr. Biden’s advisers know that he is a more important messenger than any campaign ad. On Wednesday, the president stopped twice to talk to reporters.In one exchange after landing in Milwaukee, Mr. Biden departed from his usual tendency to abstain when asked about the latest story swirling around Mr. Trump — a court ruling in Colorado that declared the former president ineligible to be placed on the primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection during the Jan. 6 attacks. Mr. Biden said it was “self evident” that his opponent was an insurrectionist, though he said whether Mr. Trump was on the ballot was up to the court.“You saw it all,” Mr. Biden told reporters. “And he seems to be doubling down on — about everything.”Then he acknowledged that his day job was calling.“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got to go do this event.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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    With Trump Declared an ‘Insurrectionist,’ His Rivals Pull Their Punches, Again

    The blockbuster ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court would seem to give Donald Trump’s challengers an avenue of attack, but far behind in the polls, they are skirting the issue.A state high court’s decision that the Republican front-runner for the White House is disqualified from office might seem like a pretty good opening for his ostensible G.O.P. challengers.But in an era of smashmouth politics, ushered in by former President Donald J. Trump, only Mr. Trump appears capable of smashing anyone in the mouth. So, with under four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday — that Mr. Trump was disqualified from the state’s primary ballot under a section of the 14th Amendment that holds that “no person shall” hold “any office, civil or military” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” — was apparently off limits.Mr. Trump still seems to be the one setting the parameters for legitimate debate in the G.O.P., even if he doesn’t participate in the party’s actual debates.“We don’t need to have judges making these decisions,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is rising in the polls but still far behind Mr. Trump, told reporters in Agency, Iowa, on Tuesday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida not only refrained from attacking his chief rival, but he also spun out a conspiracy theory to suggest the ruling was a plot against him to aid Mr. Trump.“What the left and the media and the Democrats are doing — they’re doing all this stuff, to basically solidify support in the primary for him, get him into the general, and the whole general election is going to be all this legal stuff,” Mr. DeSantis said on Wednesday, speaking at the Westside Conservative Club Breakfast in Iowa.At a restaurant outside Des Moines, he asked reporters, “We’re going to be litigating this stuff for how many more years going forward? I think we’ve got to start focusing on the people’s issues.”Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who has clung most tightly to Mr. Trump’s pant legs throughout the primary season, went so far as to pledge solidarity and withdraw his own name from the Colorado ballot, and he demanded the other candidates follow suit. A biotech financier who has spent millions of his own dollars on his campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy railed against “the unelected elite class in the back of palace halls” as he sat in the back of his well-appointed campaign bus.Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whose long-shot run for the Republican nomination has centered on questioning the front-runner’s fitness for office, demurred, engaging not on the Colorado justices’ conclusions but their timing.“I don’t think a court should exclude somebody from running for president without there being a trial and evidence that’s accepted by a jury that they did participate in insurrection,” he said on Tuesday night during a town hall event in New Hampshire.The heart of the Republican primary season is now just weeks away: Voters in Iowa will caucus on Jan. 15, with the first primary of the year, New Hampshire’s, coming Jan. 23. If anything, the former president’s lead seems only to grow. He clobbers his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, in a new New York Times/Siena College poll, drawing 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide.Yet his rivals remain apparently unwilling to take any real risks that could shake the dynamic. Republican primary voters have overwhelmingly decided that each new legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s actions to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, each ruling in cases involving the way he has conducted business, treated women or handled classified material — all of it is simply not relevant to their votes.More than one in five Republican voters think Mr. Trump has committed crimes, and 13 percent of Republicans believe that he should be found guilty in court of trying to overturn the 2020 election, yet most of those voters also say they would still cast their ballots for him.So, his rivals figure, why dwell on it?“I guess that state has that right to remove Trump from the ballot if they feel like it,” Tim Robbins, 72, a farmer and Iowa Republican, said of the Colorado ruling after an appearance by Ms. Haley. “But I think the people need to decide. It’s the people’s decision, not the state’s decision.”He added that he agreed with Ms. Haley’s hands-off approach: “I don’t need somebody to tell me what to think of somebody else,” he said. “I’ll draw my own conclusions.”It seemed on Wednesday that only two people in the race for the White House wanted to talk about the Colorado ruling: Mr. Trump, who sent fund-raising appeals in emails with the subject lines “BALLOT REMOVAL” and “REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT,” and President Biden, who said Mr. Trump “certainly supported an insurrection.”“You saw it all,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision.”There is no evidence suggesting that Mr. Biden has any ties to the Colorado case, or that he has meddled in any of the four criminal cases pending against Mr. Trump. But on his social media network, Mr. Trump was spinning the story that has either paralyzed his rivals for the nomination or elicited hosannas from the competition.“BIDEN SHOULD DROP ALL OF THESE FAKE POLITICAL INDICTMENTS AGAINST ME, BOTH CRIMINAL & CIVIL,” he wrote. “EVERY CASE I AM FIGHTING IS THE WORK OF THE DOJ & WHITE HOUSE.”Michael Gold More

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    Goodbye, George Santos. Hello, Politics Quiz.

    At a House committee hearing, James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, clashed with Jared Moskowitz, Democrat of Florida, who compared a Biden family loan issue with one involving Comer’s personal finances. We won’t go into the details, except that an irate Comer claimed Moskowitz looked like … More

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    Dean Phillips, an Upstart Challenger to Biden, Embraces ‘Medicare for All’

    A longtime moderate, the Democratic congressman now says he had been “convinced through propaganda” that calls for universal health care were “a nonsensical leftist notion.”As he mounts a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, Representative Dean Phillips says he has had an epiphany about American health care policy.Gone is his yearslong skepticism about adopting a national single-payer health care system. Now Mr. Phillips, a moderate Democrat from Minnesota, is embracing the “Medicare for all” proposal championed in two presidential campaigns by Senator Bernie Sanders — whose former top aide is now advising Mr. Phillips’s campaign.Mr. Phillips said in an interview on Tuesday that he would join as a co-sponsor to a House proposal that would expand Medicare by creating a national health insurance program available to all Americans, a shift that comes seven weeks into a presidential campaign that has yet to show significant progress in public polling.“I was a good example of someone who had been convinced through propaganda that it was a nonsensical leftist notion,” Mr. Phillips said. “It’s not. It really isn’t. And that’s I think that’s part of my migration, if you will, a migration of understanding and due diligence and intellectual curiosity and most importantly, listening to people.”Embracing the House bill is a low-stakes maneuver. With Republicans in control of the chamber, there is little chance it will come to a vote. Even when Representative Nancy Pelosi of California was speaker, Democrats never held a vote on proposals for Medicare for all that were championed by their progressive caucus — largely because President Biden didn’t support such a move, and centrist Democrats believed it was a bridge too far.Mr. Phillips — who spoke in the interview by videoconference, from an onscreen profile identifying him as “Generic Democrat” in a sly nod to the party’s best performer in polls — argued that his recent evolution on health care was not an effort to outflank Mr. Biden from the left.Instead, he said, he has become convinced that expanding Medicare, the government-run insurance program for older people, to cover all Americans would end up saving the federal government money and should attract support not just from progressives but also from conservatives — including backers of former President Donald J. Trump.“This is not a Hail Mary, by any stretch,” Mr. Phillips said. “It’s not an olive branch to progressives. You know what it really is? It’s an invitation to Trumpers.”Mr. Biden’s campaign spokesman, Kevin Munoz, declined to comment about Mr. Phillips.Mr. Phillips, a businessman who grew wealthy helping to run his family’s liquor distilling empire and later helped build a gelato behemoth, is a former board chairman of Allina Health, one of Minnesota’s largest health care systems. He said his beliefs began to change about 10 years ago, when his daughter Pia, then 13, received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he saw “the gaps between the haves and the have-nots.”In July 2020, as a first-term congressman, he embraced a “state public option” that would allow Americans to buy into Medicaid. More recently, he said, he has been consulting with Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who is a lead sponsor of the House Medicare for all bill, backed by more than half of House Democrats.Mr. Biden has moved the Democratic conversation about health care away from the idea of a single-payer plan, focusing instead on narrower issues like lowering drug costs and improving maternal health.“This is not a serious proposal in today’s environment,” Leslie Dach, the chair of the health advocacy group Protect Our Care and a former Obama administration official, said of Mr. Phillips’s switch. “We’re living in an era where it takes all of our energy to protect what we have from Republicans in Congress.” Mr. Phillips has not gained much traction. A poll last month from CNN and the University of New Hampshire found that he had support from about 10 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, the only state where he has a campaign apparatus. Mr. Biden’s name will not be on the ballot there, but the same CNN poll found that 65 percent of voters said they would write in his name.Mr. Phillips said he hoped to do well in New Hampshire before moving on to Michigan, where Mr. Biden’s approval ratings in recent polls have taken a hit from Black and Arab American voters who disapprove of his support for Israel in its war against Hamas.But Mr. Phillips offered little in the way of daylight between himself and Mr. Biden on that conflict, which has left Democratic voters fiercely divided. The congressman said that he would not call for an immediate cease-fire and that he did not consider Israel “an apartheid state,” as many on the left argue.Yet Mr. Phillips contended that Democrats were so disenchanted with Mr. Biden that when presented with another option, they would take it. “The good news is that 66 percent of the country does not yet hate me,” Mr. Phillips said, in a dig at the president’s dismal approval ratings. “America has already made up its mind about President Biden and Vice President Harris.” More

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    Kamala Harris Will Tour the U.S. in Support of Abortion Rights

    The vice president has been the administration’s most forceful voice for abortion rights in the year and a half since Roe v. Wade fell.Vice President Kamala Harris will tour the country next year to host events in support of abortion rights, a galvanizing issue for Democrats and one that has become a focus for the vice president in the months since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer.Ms. Harris, who for the past year and a half has embraced her role as a leader on the issue even as the White House remains hamstrung by what it can do to protect abortion rights, said that her tour would continue to push back on some of the proposals floated by Republican candidates, including national bans and threats to criminalize abortion providers.“Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies,” Ms. Harris said in a statement. “I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body — not the government.”For the tour’s first stop, Ms. Harris will travel to Wisconsin to mark the 51st anniversary of Roe on Jan. 22, according to her office. Wisconsin is crucial to President Biden’s re-election prospects — he won the state by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and it was a target of former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to spread falsehoods about illegal voting.Abortion rights supporters packed the rotunda in the Wisconsin State Capitol in January ahead of an election that gave liberals the majority on the State Supreme Court.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesJanet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by an 11-point margin.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDemocrats also hope that a series of victories for abortion-rights activists in Wisconsin could signal a wider trend in next year’s general election. In April, voters elected a liberal candidate to the state’s Supreme Court by an 11-point margin. And in September, Planned Parenthood began providing abortions again after a judge ruled that an 1849 state restriction against them — which had been invalidated by Roe until it fell — was not enforceable.The White House has few options beyond using the bully pulpit to spur support for reproductive rights from state to state. But Ms. Harris has used it repeatedly over the past year, starting in January, when she marked the 50th anniversary of Roe in Florida.“Let us not be tired or discouraged,” Ms. Harris said at the time. “Because we are on the right side of history.”Since then, she has made abortion rights a major part of her portfolio as she continues to define her role as vice president. Ms. Harris’s office pointed out on Tuesday that she had also traveled to college campuses across the country to reach young voters. During those interactions, Ms. Harris often fields questions on reproductive rights. More

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    Why Biden Could Lose Georgia Next Year

    Far from the hustle of modern Atlanta and its rapidly growing suburbs is an older Georgia, a rural land of cotton fields and vacant storefronts, of low-wage jobs and shuttered swimming pools, of underfunded Black colleges and American promises ever deferred.In 2020, strong turnout among Black voters in these isolated regions of the state was key to the coalition that turned Georgia blue and ousted Donald Trump from office. Though Atlanta and its suburbs have drawn much of the national attention, Black Democrats in rural Georgia were just as critical: Voting in large numbers in 2020, they reduced the margin of victory in Republican strongholds.Three years later, ahead of a presidential election that could determine whether the United States slides toward autocracy, there are signs this coalition is on the brink of collapse. Many Black voters say President Biden and the Democratic Party have so far failed to deliver the changes they need to improve their lives, from higher-paid jobs to student debt relief and voting protections. They want Mr. Trump out of the White House for good. But indifference and even disdain are growing toward a Democratic Party that relies assiduously on Black Americans’ support yet rarely seems in a hurry to deliver results for them in return.“The Black Hills,” a print by Jason Hunt, hangs at Major’s Barber & Beauty in Fort Valley, Ga.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesA shuttered business in downtown Fort Valley.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York Times“What does he know about my life?” Kyla Johnson, 19, told me of Mr. Biden outside the Dollar General grocery store in Fort Valley, a tiny town in central Georgia home to Fort Valley State University. Ms. Johnson said she had no plans to vote next year.To better understand this discontent, I set out to talk to Black voters across rural Georgia. What I found were many people who are largely living in poverty and say they feel forgotten by Mr. Biden and national Democrats, though almost all did vote for Mr. Biden in 2020. They say they won’t vote for Republicans, whom they see as embodying the spirit of the Old South. But so far, many voters told me, they have seen and heard nothing to suggest that the Democratic Party understands their problems, is committed to improving their lives or even cares about them at all.In dozens of interviews across rural Georgia, younger Black Americans in the region said they are struggling to put food on the table amid soaring prices. They are grappling with suddenly surging housing costs in areas that had long been affordable. Many are carrying tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, debts they have no idea how they can repay working the jobs available in the region, which are extremely limited and low paying. The bounty from a booming Wall Street is nowhere to be found.In Peach County, home to Fort Valley, nearly one in three Black Americans is living below the federal poverty line, according to U.S. census data, compared to 16 percent of white residents in the county and 12.5 percent of Americans nationally. In Lowndes County, which includes Valdosta, about one in three Black Americans is living below the poverty line, compared to just 12.5 percent of white residents.Ms. Johnson’s friend Zayln Young, 18, said she would consider voting, but had so far heard nothing from Mr. Biden about the issues she cared about the most. “For instance, I can’t get food stamps because I’m on my meal plan. Why?” Ms. Young asked, adding that her school meal plan at Fort Valley State University is hard for her to afford and doesn’t provide enough food. (Under federal rules, students who receive the majority of their meals from a school meal plan are ineligible for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.)Inside the grocery store moments later, Kem Harris, a social worker, told me she had come to buy items to make gift baskets for Fort Valley State University students who were in need. “Some of them don’t have family nearby and they can’t afford basics, like food,” said Ms. Harris, 56. “Today is toiletries, like toothpaste.”In national polls, Black voters appear to be moving away from Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party while expressing growing support for Mr. Trump. In one October poll, just 71 percent of Black voters in battleground states said they would vote for Mr. Biden, compared to the 87 percent that voted for him nationwide in 2020. Nearly a third of Black men said they support Mr. Trump, while 17 percent of Black women do. In another poll, one in five Black voters said they wanted someone other than Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden.What’s going on? Trumpism has proved to be a powerful force in American politics, so it should come as little surprise that some Black Americans — especially Black men — might also be drawn to its authoritarianism, faux populism and toxic masculinity, as so many White Americans have been, particularly as the economy has grown increasingly unequal.Given Mr. Trump’s open embrace of white supremacy, however, that appeal is severely limited. What’s more likely is not a widespread shift of Black voters toward Mr. Trump but a vote of no confidence in Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Black Americans know they make up the backbone of the party. They believe — correctly — that it has long taken them for granted. And now they seem to be reaching a breaking point.Melinee Calhoun.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York Times“Overall, I hear this sense of apathy,” said Melinee Calhoun, the state organizing manager for Black Voters Matter, a nonpartisan voting rights group with a large presence in rural Georgia. “It’s: We did what we were asked to do, and nothing has changed.” In many communities, organizers like Dr. Calhoun are the only ones building a relationship with Black voters.Biden campaign officials say the president and Democrats have enacted policies, like the infrastructure bill and $2.2 billion in relief aimed at helping Black farmers, that directly benefit these communities. Part of the challenge, they say, is explaining that they could do more were it not for Republican opposition in Congress.“We want to point out the fact that the Republicans have stood in the way,” Quentin Fulks, Mr. Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager, told me in a phone interview. But, he said, “we have to do a better job of taking credit for the work we’ve been doing.”In rural Georgia, this disconnect is vast. Organizers, voters and others here say there has been little investment from national Democrats in the region. Mr. Fulks said that it’s early, and that the campaign was still hiring and planned to spend significant resources in the state. Nevertheless, as Mr. Biden campaigns for a second term, likely against a would-be autocrat, he is speaking about democracy in sweeping terms and lauding the strength of an economy whose fruits are far removed from the daily realities of Black Americans in rural Georgia.Whipping up fears over Mr. Trump and taking a victory lap on standard Democratic policies may not be enough to win back these voters. Instead, Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party will have to get serious about taking bolder measures to help a group of people who, descended from Americans once enslaved in the very same region, remain largely without access to financial capital, under constant threat of political disenfranchisement and, too often, in poverty.When the gentlemen at Major’s Barber & Beauty Shop in downtown Fort Valley learned a journalist from The New York Times was in town, one of them stepped out onto the mostly empty street and beckoned me in. Inside, one of the customers, a regular, welcomed me to what he described as “our country club.”“If it’s Trump, I’ll vote twice,” Major McKenzie, 72, joked. But across the room one barber, Shaun William, 38, carefully affixed a Louis Vuitton-themed cape around a client’s neck and shook his head. Mr. William was worried. Many of his clients, he said, couldn’t stand Mr. Trump. But in recent years under Mr. Biden, they had only seen their lives become harder with rising inflation.Major’s Barber & Beauty Shop in Fort Valley.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York Times“Bad as things were, people say they felt money was circulating with Trump in office, those stimulus checks,” he said. “Now there is no money circulating. Prices are up. The cost of food is up.”Throughout the region, opportunities for jobs are extremely limited. Many voters told me they are forced to make a choice: working menial jobs for local businesses owned by a handful of White Republican families, fast food or Wal-Mart. Given the grinding poverty around them, some voters here also said the recent headlines about the United States sending billions to Israel to bomb Gaza are hard to swallow.“I think he should stay out of other people’s business and focus more on problems here at home,” said Kameron White, a 33-year-old forklift operator. “We need help here. We need better education. More jobs. There’s drugs, there’s gang violence. There’s very few grocery stores. I want to see more change at home.”The state of Georgia stands to receive more than $9 billion under the infrastructure plan championed by Mr. Biden, money for roads, bridges, airports, public transit and cleaner water. But Black voters in Georgia, which has two Democratic senators but a Republican governor and legislature, say they have yet to see that money flow into their own communities. In Valdosta, not far from the Florida border, several residents told me they were angry the city was spending $1.8 million to build pickleball courts even as it keeps threadbare hours for a public swimming pool in a largely Black neighborhood throughout the sweltering South Georgia summer. Though Black residents make up a modest majority in Valdosta, the city’s mayor is a white right-wing talk-show host.The pool at the Mildred Hunter Community Center, in Valdosta, Ga., is open only on Saturdays during the weekends and for limited hours each weekday during the summer.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesVoter enthusiasm is critical in Georgia, where a spirited campaign of suppression and disenfranchisement driven by Republicans and conservative activists both local and national makes exercising the right to vote harder than in many places. In 2005, the state became among the first in the country to enact a measure requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote. In recent years, right-wing activists and Republican Party officials in the state have led an effort to remove voters from the rolls.In a quiet neighborhood of Valdosta near Barack Obama Boulevard, Erica Jordan, 29, greeted me on the porch of her aging white bungalow.She is behind on the rent, as she recently lost her job at Pizza Hut. Because of this, she lost her car, severely limiting her ability to work and be a parent in Valdosta, which has no regular citywide public transit system. Over the past year, the monthly rent on her small house went up by $100, to $750. In late August, floodwaters from Hurricane Idalia entered her home, damaging some of her belongings.Erica Jordan with her daughter.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesMs. Jordan is now working a telecommunications job from home, but she says she earns too much for food stamps and not enough to make ends meet or afford food at the one grocery store within walking distance. At the end of every month, Ms. Jordan says, she asks to babysit or do hair just to eke by.“I’m not complaining, but I pay the bills on my own. I’m a single mother. I need help,” she said.She plans to vote next year, but wonders aloud if it will ever bring the change she needs. “All my life, I been played,” she says. “Every year it gets harder. It makes me wonder why I vote.”It was these voters, some of the poorest in the country, who played a key role in denying Mr. Trump a second term and preserving American democracy. It’s in America’s best interest to make sure they have a reason — and a right — to keep showing up to vote.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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    How Much Is Biden’s Support of Israel Hurting Him With Young Voters?

    Donald Trump leads him among those 18 to 29, a new poll shows.Palestine supporters in Washington on Sunday.Tasos Katopodis/Getty ImagesAs recently as this summer, a poll with Donald J. Trump leading among young voters would have been eye-popping.Now, it’s increasingly familiar — and our new New York Times/Siena College national survey released Tuesday morning is no exception.For the first time, Mr. Trump leads President Biden among young voters in a Times/Siena national survey, 49 percent to 43 percent. It’s enough to give him a narrow 46-44 lead among registered voters overall.Usually, it’s not worth dwelling too much on a subsample from a single poll, but this basic story about young voters is present in nearly every major survey at this point. Our own battleground state surveys in the fall showed something similar, with Mr. Biden ahead by a single point among those 18 to 29. Either figure is a big shift from Mr. Biden’s 21-point lead in our final poll before the midterms or his 10-point lead in our last national poll in July.And there’s a plausible explanation for the shift in recent months: Israel.As my colleagues Jonathan Weisman, Ruth Igielnik and Alyce McFadden report, young voters in the survey took an extraordinarily negative view of Israel’s recent conduct: They overwhelming say Israel isn’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, and think Israel should stop its military campaign, even if it means Hamas isn’t eliminated.You might think that the young voters with these progressive or even left-wing views would be among the most likely to stick with Mr. Biden. At least for now, that’s not the case. The young Biden ’20 voters with anti-Israel views are the likeliest to report switching to Mr. Trump.Overall, Mr. Trump is winning 21 percent of young Biden ’20 voters who sympathize more with Palestinians than Israel, while winning 12 percent of other young Biden ’20 voters. In an even more striking sign of defections among his own supporters, Mr. Biden holds just a 64-24 lead among the young Biden ’20 voters who say Israel is intentionally killing civilians, compared with an 84-8 lead among the Biden ’20 voters who don’t think Israel is intentionally killing civilians.It’s possible that the kinds of young voters opposed to Israel already opposed Mr. Biden back before the war. That can’t be ruled out. But it’s still evidence that opposition to the war itself is probably contributing to Mr. Biden’s unusual weakness among young voters.Here are a few other findings from the poll:Biden ahead among likely voters?Even though he trails among registered voters, Mr. Biden actually leads Mr. Trump in our first measure of the 2024 likely electorate, 47 percent to 45 percent.If you’re a close reader of this newsletter, this might not come completely out of nowhere. Our polls have consistently shown Mr. Biden doing better among highly regular and engaged voters — especially those who voted in the last midterm election. In those polls, the most heavily Republican voters have been those who voted in 2020, but not 2022. It helps explain why Democrats keep doing so well in low-turnout special elections even though they struggle in polls of registered voters or adults.But in this particular poll, the split isn’t just between midterm and non-midterm voters. It’s between people who voted in the 2020 general election and those who didn’t. Mr. Biden leads by six points among voters who participated in the 2020 election, while Mr. Trump holds an overwhelming 22-point lead among those who did not vote in 2020. In our estimation, needless to say, 2020 nonvoters are less likely to vote in 2024, and that’s why we show Mr. Biden ahead among likely voters.It’s an intriguing pattern, but there’s good reason for caution here.For one: Our previous polling hasn’t shown anything this extreme, including our battleground polling conducted eight weeks ago. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but our sample of 2020 nonvoters includes only 296 respondents — a sample that’s too small for any serious conclusions.For another: The people who voted in 2020 reported backing Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by 10 points in the 2020 election, 51 percent to 41 percent. In reality, Mr. Biden won by 4.5 points.Now, there’s a good reason respondents might have been less likely to report backing Mr. Trump in our poll: We concluded the substantive portion of the survey with a series of questions about Mr. Trump’s coming legal battles, including whether he committed crimes, whether he’ll be convicted, whether he should go to jail and so on. Then, at the very end of the survey, we asked them how they voted in 2020.It’s possible these questions about Mr. Trump’s legal problems made his supporters less likely to admit supporting him in the 2020 election. Indeed, registered Republicans with a record of voting in 2020 were three times as likely as Democrats to refuse to tell us whom they supported in the last presidential election. But it’s also possible that our sample really does just contain too many Biden ’20 voters with respect to nonvoters, yielding a lopsided shift in his direction among likely voters.The underlying data still looks mostly normal.Every time I see what looks like a crazy result — such as Mr. Trump leading among young voters or a nearly 30-point gap between 2020 voters and nonvoters — I think that I’m going to peer deeper into the data and see the signs that something is off.I haven’t seen it yet.In fact, this survey has a more Democratic sample of young people by party registration than in the past, but a much more Trump-friendly result.A similar story holds for the 2020 nonvoters. They may back Mr. Trump by a wide margin, but 27 percent are registered as Democrats compared with 17 percent as Republicans. Mr. Trump nonetheless leads among them because Mr. Biden has only a 49-34 lead among registered Democrats who didn’t turn out in the 2020 election. He has an 83-8 lead among registered Democrats who did vote.A mere 49-34 lead for Mr. Biden among Democratic nonvoters sounds pretty far-fetched, but it’s at least easy to imagine why these kinds of Democrats might be less likely to support Mr. Biden. If you’re a Democrat who didn’t vote in 2020, you probably aren’t as vigorously and passionately opposed to Mr. Trump as those who did show up. Nonvoters also tend to be young, nonwhite, less educated and have low incomes — all groups Mr. Biden has struggled with. They also tend to be less partisan and less ideological, and therefore may be less loyal to the party.But for now, it’s just one relatively small data point. And curiously, it’s a data point we might never get a chance to validate. Nonvoters don’t vote, after all. In all likelihood, people with a robust track record of voting will play an outsize role in the election, and at least in this poll, that’s good news for Mr. Biden. More

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    Poll Finds Wide Disapproval of Biden on Gaza, and Little Room to Shift Gears

    Voters broadly disapprove of the way President Biden is handling the bloody strife between Israelis and Palestinians, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found, with younger Americans far more critical than older voters of both Israel’s conduct and of the administration’s response to the war in Gaza.Voters are also sending decidedly mixed signals about the direction U.S. policy-making should take as the war in Gaza grinds into its third month, with Israelis still reeling from the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, thousands of Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the Biden administration trying to pressure Israel to scale back its military campaign. Nearly as many Americans want Israel to continue its military campaign as want it to stop now to avoid further civilian casualties.That split appears to leave the president with few politically palatable options.The findings of the Times/Siena poll hold portents not only for Mr. Biden as he enters the 2024 re-election year but also for long-term relations between the Jewish state and its most powerful benefactor, the United States.The fractured views on the conflict among traditionally Democratic voter groups show the continued difficulty Mr. Biden faces of holding together the coalition he built in 2020 — a challenge that is likely to persist even as economic indicators grow more positive and legal troubles swirl around his expected opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.Overall, registered voters say they favor Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden in next year’s presidential election by two percentage points, 46 percent to 44 percent. The president’s job approval rating has slid to 37 percent, down two points from July.But there is considerable uncertainty over whether disaffected voters will even vote. While it is still early, the race is flipped among the likely electorate, with Mr. Biden leading by two percentage points.Economic concerns remain paramount, with 34 percent of registered voters listing economic- or inflation-related concerns as the top issue facing the country. That’s down from 45 percent in October 2022, but still high. More