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      What Democrats Can Learn From Joe Biden and Poll Numbers

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      Well, this week has been an emotional roller coaster. On Sunday, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed President Biden behind Donald Trump in a bunch of battleground states, sending Democrats into a tizzy. Then on Tuesday, voters handed Democrats a string of election victories — the kind they have enjoyed in election after election since Trump was inaugurated in 2017.What’s going on here? Are the polls wrong? Are the Democrats strong but Biden weak? Let me offer a few thoughts:Americans increasingly use polls to vent, not to vote. During the 20th century, when Americans were in a better mood about the state of the country, presidents generally had high approval ratings and broad support during their time in office. Since 2003, the national mood has grown unbelievably sour, and since 2005, sitting presidents have had underwater approval ratings during about 77 percent of their terms.As the progressive political strategist Michael Podhorzer argues, a lot of this negativity is not a reflection on particular politicians. It is “indicative of broad and intense dissatisfaction with our governing institutions and political parties.” These days, when pollsters call people a year away from the election, they take the opportunity to lash out at whoever is in the White House. It’s their way of venting and saying they want change.This does not mean that, when it comes time to cast ballots and actually pick a president, their preferences will be the same. “Americans know the difference between answering a survey and casting a ballot, even if the polling industrial complex and pundits don’t,” Podhorzer writes. George W. Bush and Barack Obama had periods of low poll numbers but still won re-election when voters had to make an actual decision.Podhorzer notes that since 2017, there have been significant anti-MAGA majorities pretty much every time voters went to the voting booths. There’s a good chance that that anti-MAGA majority will still be there when voters go to the ballot box in 2024. After all, Trump’s favorability ratings haven’t gone up. They’re lower now than they were through most of his presidency — and are basically at the same low level as Biden’s.Biden doesn’t have to become magically popular; he just has to remind the tens of millions of Americans who voted against MAGA multiple times before why they need to vote against MAGA again, just as Democrats did in 2020, 2022 and, to some degree, 2023.The median voter rule still applies. The median voter rule says parties win when they stay close to the center of the electorate. It’s one of the most boring rules in all of politics, and sometimes people on the left and the right pretend they can ignore it, but they usually end up paying a price.The Democrats’ strong showing in elections across the country this week proves how powerful the median voter rule is, especially when it comes to the abortion issue. Abortion was not always a great issue for Democrats. But it became one because of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the subsequent Republican legislation to severely restrict abortion. This year, Democrats and their supporters effectively played to median voters, with, for example, an ad in Ohio in which a father who grew up in the church castigated the G.O.P. for not allowing abortion exceptions for rape and the health of the mother, and one in Kentucky in which a woman who was raped by her stepfather noted that she would have had to carry the baby to term under the extreme Republican laws.Dull but effective government can win, and circus politics is failing. The Trumpian G.O.P. has built its political strategy around culture war theatrics — be they anti-trans or anti-woke. That culture war strategy may get you hits on right-wing media, but it has flopped for Ron DeSantis, flopped for Vivek Ramaswamy, and it flopped Tuesday night on the ballot. Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, did so well in Kentucky in part because he stayed close to the practicalities, focusing on boring old governance issues like jobs, health care costs and investment in infrastructure. He also demonstrated a Christian faith that was the opposite of Christian nationalism. As he told E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post, “For me, faith is about uniting all people. It says all children are children of God. And if you’re truly living out your faith, you’re not playing into these anger and hatred games.”Remember that none of us know what the political climate will be like a year from now. Neither you nor I have any clue how some set of swing voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are going to see things in 12 months, or what events will intervene in the meantime. Nobody does.It’s better to ask the simple question: Do I think Joe Biden is doing a good job? I look around and conclude that he is. The economic trends are good for average Americans. The U.S. economy grew at a torrid 4.9 percent annualized rate in the third quarter of this year, by far the highest cumulative, inflation-adjusted growth in the Group of 7. The prime age employment rate is near record highs and inflation is down to 3.7 percent.Household debt is way down. The average family’s net worth increased by an inflation-adjusted 37 percent between 2019 and 2022. The gains were broadly felt: Income increased almost across the board, benefiting urban and rural people, homeowners and renters, white people and Black people.The mood is so glum, many voters don’t yet perceive these improvements, reeling as they are from the recent bout of inflation. Will they come to appreciate all the positive trends this time next year? I have no idea, and neither do you. It can take a long time for perceptions to catch up with economic realities. The only thing we can do is put our faith in the idea that good policy deserves our support.I spoke this week to Mitch Landrieu, who oversees Biden’s infrastructure initiative. It was like talking to someone from a saner epoch. He described hundreds of productive meetings he’s had over the past year with Republican and Democratic governors and mayors to get over 40,000 different projects off the ground — roads, clean water and all the rest. “It’s gone swimmingly well, it really has. This is not a conservative or liberal thing,” Landrieu said. And the scope is huge: nearly $400 billion has gone into investments. “When history renders its verdict, this will be comparable to Works Progress Administration, or the Eisenhower highway construction program or rural electrification,” Landrieu added.I’m not saying this election won’t be close. Democrats don’t like that Biden is so old, and he’s not getting younger. I’m just saying he has a path to victory. As the former Obama adviser David Axelrod has been saying, Biden has to make this a comparison election — him versus Trump. And I’d add that he has to make this a prosaic election. It’s not which of these two men do you dislike least, it’s which set of goods do you want to buy: low prescription drug prices or higher ones, some student debt forgiveness or none, abundant infrastructure jobs or few? If Biden can make this about concrete benefits to everyday Americans, I suspect he’ll be fine.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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      Are We Looking at George H.W. Biden?

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      When you played second fiddle to a revered, charismatic, transformative president who chose you as his running mate not because you dazzled him but because you dully rounded him out, not because he saw you as the party’s future but because you were a link to its past, can you ever shine as brightly as you deserve to?When you’ve been in government forever and almost everything about you smacks of tradition, can you beat back complaints that you’re out of touch and sweet-talk voters who are soured on the status quo?George H.W. Bush, running for a second term more than three decades ago, couldn’t.Joe Biden, running for a second term now, is about to find out.Among Democrats justly nervous about Biden’s poll numbers and rightly angry about the dearth of respect he gets, it has recently been popular — and consoling — to compare him to a different commander in chief, the one for whom he served as vice president, Barack Obama. At this point in Obama’s first term, surveys strongly suggested that he would lose his re-election effort.Voters in late 2011 shortchanged Obama on credit for steering the nation out of the 2008 housing bust and recession, just as voters in late 2023 are shortchanging Biden for steering the nation out of the pandemic. They didn’t wrestle seriously with whether Obama merited a renewal on his White House lease until much closer to Election Day, and they won’t give Biden an accurate report card any sooner, or so the thinking goes. It also holds that once Obama focused on his campaign, he was able to cast his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, as an unacceptable choice. When Biden buckles down, he’ll do the same to his likely Republican rival, Donald Trump. Heck, he already did it in 2020.I’d buy that forecast — I want nothing more than for it to be true — but for a few pesky details. Obama was 50 then. Biden is 80 now. Obama, our first Black president, still had the perfume of history around him. Biden has no such bouquet. And the Tea Party of Obama’s era may have been a precursor to our MAGA moment, but it was a firecracker beside this dynamite, as the wreckage at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, showed. We live, and quiver, in more explosive times.The Bush-Biden parallels come easier. George H.W. Biden has a plausibility that Barack Biden doesn’t.Admittedly, it’s not a tidy fit, for a range of reasons: The first President Bush immediately succeeded his boss, Ronald Reagan, so it was as if the same presidency went on and on, while there were four years between Obama and Biden, who represented not a continuation of the Obama administration but a merciful reprieve from the Trump interruption. “Poppy Bush” had a famously patrician aura, while “Scranton Joe” is a scruffier sort.Then there’s the biggest difference of all. Bush faced an idealistic Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, who presented a much younger, fresher face and whose liabilities didn’t include 91 felony charges tracing a contempt for democracy and appetite for insurrection. A vote for Clinton wasn’t a gesture of furious protest or expression of acrid contempt.Biden is staring at a nihilistic Republican opponent who raged through the West Wing once already and, to cleareyed voters, is an autocrat in waiting. A vote for Trump is like a civic suicide pact.Do the election results from Tuesday reflect an awareness of that? Democrats did very, very well: Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat in a deep-red state, secured a second term. Democrats won control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature. Ohioans rejected Republican calls for limits on abortion, enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution.“Democracy won and MAGA lost,” Biden said in a statement distributed by his re-election campaign. “It’s what we’ve always said. Voters vote. Polls don’t.”That’s indisputable. But there are nonetheless facets of Biden’s circumstances that prompt flashbacks to Bush during the 1992 race for the White House.The questions about whether Vice President Kamala Harris is a drag on Biden and should be replaced have nothing on the questions about whether Vice President Dan Quayle was a drag on Bush and had to go. Time magazine published a whole cover story on the dump-Dan movement, complete with a list of promising alternatives that included one Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary. And the dumping was seen as especially important because the president’s age made the possibility of the vice president’s ascent to the Oval Office seem very real. Sound familiar?Bush struggled to please a fractious Republican Party, its divisions clear in the primary challenge mounted by Pat Buchanan. Biden struggles to please a fractious Democratic Party, its divisions clear in the fact that 22 Democrats just joined House Republicans in voting to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, for her remarks about Israel.And those divisions matter more in the context of something else that Biden shares with Bush: “Biden is the first person elected president since George H.W. Bush without a political base,” Doug Sosnik, a political strategist who worked in the Clinton administration, told me. “Bush got elected basically as a Reagan third term, and Biden got elected as a vote against Trump.”By a “base,” Sosnik means a large core group of passionate supporters who see the candidate as more than just the best option available, who will stick with the candidate through thick and thin. Reagan and Obama had that. Trump has that, which is why the other Republican candidates for president can’t muscle him out of the frame.“A base is critical, because it becomes the foundation from which they’re able to persuade the remaining voters,” Sosnik added. “It’s critical because of the inevitable ebbs and flows when you’re in office — when things aren’t going well. It’s critical because it creates a higher floor for your support.”Bush hoped that his experience on the world stage and proven stewardship of tricky international relations — his elder statesman bona fides — might counteract voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy. There’s a similar wish in Biden’s camp, and it makes Bush’s experience in 1992 not just an interesting point of reference but also an instructive one, with an important lesson: Fail to project extreme attentiveness to Americans’ financial anxieties at your electoral peril. They want their pain felt.And it’s tough for a longtime Washington insider who lives in the bubble of the presidency to project that he’s sufficiently in touch. That required more intense and sustained effort than Bush managed in his day, and Biden will have to do better than “Bidenomics,” a nifty but nebulous portmanteau.Not that Trump is some exquisitely sensitive man of the people! He is, however, the challenger, and even with his own stint as president behind him, he represents change. Biden embodies continuity, which is often the harder sell, and an aged incumbent is a vulnerable creature. Bush learned as much. For all of our sakes, Biden should study that history.For the Love of SentencesA yak.Getty ImagesIn a recent essay about aging in The Washington Post, Anne Lamott fashioned one memorable sentence after another: “Getting older is almost like changing species, from cute middle-aged white-tailed deer to yak. We are both grass eaters, but that’s about the only similarity.” “Some weeks, it feels as though there is a sniper in the trees, picking off people we have loved for years. It breaks your heart, but as Carly Simon sang, there is more room in a broken heart. My heart is the roomiest it has ever been.” “In my experience, most of us age away from brain and ambition toward heart and soul, and we bathe in relief that things are not worse.” (Thanks to Melissa France of Flemington, N.J., and Steve Aldrich of Minneapolis, among others, for nominating passages from Lamott’s essay.)On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.” Had she just seen “Oppenheimer”? (Jo Radner, Lovell, Maine)In the unsigned Lexington column of The Economist (which I happen to know is written by my former Times boss and colleague James Bennet), there was this description of the G.O.P. in 2016, when Donald Trump was its presidential nominee, versus 2012, when Mitt Romney was: “The Republicans’ swing in four years to Mr. Trump from Mr. Romney seems neck-snapping even now; it was a kind of penance in reverse, a brawling, bankrupting bender in a strip club after a quiet morning in the pews.” Give me the pews. (Roger Tellefsen, Berwyn, Pa.)In Slate, Luke Winkie marveled at the athleticism of Cooper Flagg, a precocious 16-year-old who recently joined the Duke basketball team. I didn’t understand all of Winkie’s terms — I’m a perversely but proudly stubborn naïf when it comes to college basketball — but could appreciate the writing even so: “At 6-foot-8 and still growing, Flagg can protect the rim, he can drift out for threes, he possesses a silky handle, and he can absolutely yam on any of the puny teenagers who step in the lane on his way to the basket. Flagg’s highlight mixtapes are downright gratuitous — look at him reducing these poor kids into piles of gristle and bone! It should honestly come with a content warning.” (Matthew Dallett, Brooklin, Maine)In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” (Paul Shikany, the Bronx)In The Times, David Streitfeld summarized the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried: “It’s impossible to read the sad saga of Mr. Bankman-Fried without thinking he, and many of those around him, would have been better off if they had spent less time at math camp and more time in English class. Sometimes in books, the characters find their moral compass; in the best books, the reader does, too.” (Paula Huguenin, Collex, Switzerland, and Christine Thielman, Arlington, Mass.)Also in The Times, David French puzzled over the supposed religiousness of Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson, contrasting him with another Republican, Mike Pence: “One Christian man tells the truth, and it kills his career. Another Christian man helps lead one of the most comprehensively dishonest and dangerous political and legal efforts in American history, and he gets the speaker’s gavel.” (Phil Ryburn, Seattle)Also from that column: “This is precisely indicative of the political ruthlessness that’s overtaken evangelical Republicans. They are inflexible about policy positions even when the Bible is silent or vague. They are flexible about morality even when the Bible is clear.” (Joel Parkes, Altadena, Calif., and Michelle Cheatham, Calgary, Alberta, among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Writing, Watching and DoingJoe Raedle/Getty ImagesIn advance of the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, I talked with the polling analyst Nate Silver and Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason, about the 2024 election. You can read our online political round table here.Chris Christie’s composure amid the jeers when he appeared at the Florida Freedom Summit on Saturday was neither any surprise nor any great credit to him: He has spent enough time in public life and dished out enough that he should be able to take it. But the accuracy and bluntness with which he called the puerile hecklers on their behavior and told them precisely how they were degrading themselves and the country were beautiful to behold: a firm spanking of the noblest order. Please watch.I’m excited to welcome my Times colleague Wesley Morris, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, to Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy on Monday, Nov. 20. That evening, I’ll interview him at an event open to the public, so if you’ll be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, please consider popping by. Here are the details.On a Personal NoteDamon Winter/The New York TimesThe day after his election as the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson gave his first extended interview — on Fox News, of course — and said this: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”Those remarks drew enormous scrutiny, including from my Times colleague David French, who cited them in his excellent column — mentioned above — about the fickleness and hollowness of many Republicans’ professed religiousness.But while most commentators focused on the glimmers of Christian nationalism in Johnson’s words, I’m struck as well by their hints of simple-mindedness. Where’s the independence of thought in outsourcing all your judgments to a single source? Where’s the openness to evolving knowledge, to fresh perspectives, to different ones?I say that not to be besmirch Christianity or religion: I know and greatly respect many Christians and many other people who use the Bible, the Torah, the Quran or some other sacred text as a trove of inspiration, a store of wisdom, a repository of counsel. Their relationships with religion allow for broad interpretation and plenty of disagreement. They recognize the need for that.And maybe Johnson was speaking of the Bible in such a vein. But he didn’t say “guide.” He said “worldview.” His tone, his record and much else about him suggest an uncritical obeisance, and he’s emblematic of many current Republicans’ reductive and oppressive piety.He’s also emblematic of something broader, something by no means limited to certain strains of religiousness, something with secular examples aplenty: the temptation to quiet the jangle and resolve the complications of our maddening world by latching onto one answer, lining up behind one leader, taking the oath of one tribe and then reveling in its smug and censorious rightness.That’s undoubtedly a clarifying decision and a comfort. But it can be hell on a democracy. More

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      The Joe Biden Re-election Dilemma

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      Joe Biden should be far and away the favorite to win re-election in 2024.The American economy continues to gather strength. He has a solid string of policy victories. And his main Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is lost in a jungle of legal troubles.The Democratic Party continues to score electoral victories as voters coalesce on the issue of abortion rights, as we saw in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky on Tuesday night. But it is not clear at this point whether Biden’s fate is linked to down-ballot candidates or issues.In Ohio, where abortion access and marijuana legalization won, and in Pennsylvania, where a Democratic State Supreme Court justice won, Trump appears to hold an edge in several polls. Biden is polling ahead in Virginia, where Democrats flipped control of the House of Delegates and maintained control of the Senate, but it’s also a state where Democrats have won the last several presidential elections.And while abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats, it’s not clear yet if it will be on the ballot next November in any swing states — Arizona is one where it might be — or if Biden will effectively capitalize on the issue.Taken together, this is why Biden’s continued struggles in the polls are so worrisome. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday found Biden trailing Trump in five of six swing states. We’re a year out from Election Day, but Biden’s relative weakness compared to Trump’s position is still shocking.The poll would be easier to dismiss if it were the only one showing Biden’s weakness against Trump, but it’s not. Recent polls from CBS News and ABC News/Ipsos also reveal troubling signs for Biden.David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, posted on social media on Sunday that if Biden continues to run, he will surely be the Democratic nominee in 2024. But, Axelrod said: “What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?” because “the stakes of miscalculation here are too dramatic to ignore.”Some understandably thought that Axelrod was suggesting that Biden drop out of the race, but Axelrod himself insisted that was not what he was saying.I don’t view Axelrod’s comments as controversial. They’re not a dig at Biden for his performance. It is ridiculous to ask people to ignore the erosion of Biden’s support among demographic groups that he must secure to win re-election.The risk of a Biden loss is real, and no amount of political ego or posturing can disguise that.According to the Times/Siena poll, Biden is losing ground among younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters.At The Times’s Nate Cohn put it, “Long-festering vulnerabilities on his age, economic stewardship, and appeal to young, Black and Hispanic voters have grown severe enough to imperil his re-election chances.”The economic piece is a conundrum. The economy is improving, but many people don’t see it or feel it, and they blame Biden. There is a clear disconnect in the data. And it is possible that people are also injecting a more general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country into their feelings about the economy. Either way, this may be fixable.The age issue, which I view as largely a manufactured one, is one that has calcified. Unlike feelings about the economy, which change as conditions shift, Biden is only getting older.What is his campaign going to do? Put him in more jeans and rolled-up dress shirts? Have him jog up to the mic at rallies? Make sure that he appears tanned and rested? Every scenario designed to signal youth and virility has the downside potential of looking ridiculous.I still remember the cringe-worthy moment in 2019 when an Iowa voter raised questions about Biden’s age, and Biden responded by challenging the man to a push-up contest. No more of that, I beg you.Biden is an elderly man, yes. And he will look and behave in ways that demonstrate that. But he seems to me to be handling his job well now and capable of continuing. The irony is that Trump is also elderly, but the immaturity in his defiance, anger and petulance can read as young.Lastly, the minority outreach question is also more complicated than it might appear. I sense a growing dissatisfaction with Biden, particularly among young minorities, and the war in Gaza is only making it worse. The passions are so high now that I think this tension will remain even after the war ends.Also, both parties and all demographics have segments that are less engaged and informed, but those groups are also open to drift, even if in the end they would be voting against their own interests.Recently, the rising rapper Sexyy Red said in an interview that “the hood” started to love Trump once he started “getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money” in the form of stimulus checks.Never mind that Trump and Republicans opposed those stimulus checks and Democrats pushed them — that “free money” is still associated in the minds of many with Trump.This just underscores how Biden has trouble on both ends of the engagement spectrum among some young voters: Some of the highly engaged ones criticize him for the U.S.’s actions in the war in Gaza, and some of those less engaged mythologize his predecessor.It is possible that more and better outreach and engagement could change some of these realities, but make no mistake: We are in a very risky situation where the one person likely standing between Trump — and Trump’s destructive impulses — and the White House is a president who is limping into a re-election bid.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      A Good Night for Democrats. A Bad Poll for Biden.

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe election results on Tuesday made it clear that voters support Democratic policies and state politicians — but new polling shows they don’t love the president.On this week’s episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts share their takeaways from the voting, and what it all means for 2024. Also, your calls about your presidential fantasy matchups.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:“October 2023 Times/Siena Poll of the 2024 Battlegrounds”“The Woke Burnout is Real — and Politics is Catching Up”Thoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud, Efim Shapiro, Pat McCusker and Isaac Jones. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

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      Love Can Win Trump the Nomination. It Will Take Hate to Win Back the White House.

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      A few weeks ago, I was talking to a local pastor here in Tennessee, and he started the conversation by asking a question I hear all the time: “Can anybody beat Trump?” He was desperate for someone else, anyone else, to claim the Republican nomination. He ticked through the names — DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Pence (he was still in the race then) — and they were all better. Why can’t they gain traction? “It’s not a binary choice anymore,” he said. “It’s not Trump or Biden.”“But,” he quickly added, “if it is Trump or Biden, then I’m voting Trump. It’s just who I am.”It’s just who I am. I thought of that conversation when I saw last weekend’s headlines. Donald Trump is now leading President Biden in five swing states, and if the race goes the way the poll suggests, Trump could win the presidency with more than 300 electoral votes. At the same time, we know from previous Times/Siena College polling that the hard-core MAGA base is 37 percent of the Republican Party. Another 37 percent can be persuaded to oppose Trump, while 25 percent are completely opposed to his nomination.How is it possible that a person whose true base is only 37 percent of his party, who faces four separate criminal indictments and who already lost once to Biden might sit in the electoral driver’s seat?I’ve written quite a bit on the enduring bond between Trump and his base. There’s the strange combination of rage and joy that marks the MAGA community. They’re somehow both furious about the direction of the country and having the time of their lives supporting Trump. There’s also the power of prophecy. Millions of Christians are influenced by claims that Trump is divinely ordained to save the United States. But the MAGA millions aren’t enough to put him back in the White House.To understand his general election prospects, we have to go beyond Trump’s MAGA core. He needs millions more votes — including from my pastor friend, a man who’s desperate to see Trump leave American politics.Trump’s viability in the Republican Party depends on the loyalty of his base, but his viability in the general election depends on a dark combination of negative partisanship and civic ignorance. “Negative partisanship” is the term political scientists use to describe partisan loyalty that exists not because a voter loves his party or its ideas but because he loathes the opposing party and the people in it. And why do voters loathe the opposition so darn much? That’s where civic ignorance plays its diabolical role. Partisan Americans are wrong about each other in a particularly dangerous way: Each side thinks the other is more extreme than it really is.This hostility is what permits Trump to convert his primary plurality into a potential electoral majority. This hostility both predated Trump and powered his election. In previous American political generations, nominating a person perceived to be an extremist or a crank was the kiss of electoral death. You wouldn’t merely expect to lose. You would expect to lose in a landslide.When Republicans nominated far-right Barry Goldwater in 1964, for example, he won six states and lost the popular vote by 23 points. Eight years later, when Democrats nominated far-left George McGovern, they won one state and also lost the popular vote by 23 points. There was enough partisan mobility in the electorate to decisively reject two different candidates, from opposing edges of the political spectrum.But now? It is unthinkable for many millions of partisans — or even for those independents who lean right or left and maybe secretly don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re truly partisan — to either vote third party or cross the aisle and vote for a candidate of the opposing party. They simply hate the other side too much. The result is that virtually any Republican or Democratic nominee begins the race with both a high floor and a low ceiling and no one has much margin for error. Every nominee is going to be fragile, and every national presidential race is going to be close. The margin in the last two races has been agonizingly slim. A few thousand votes cast differently in key swing states, and Hillary Clinton wins, or Joe Biden loses.To understand the power of negative partisanship, it’s important to understand the sheer scale of the mutual partisan hatred. Dating back to June 2014 — a full year before Trump came down that escalator — the Pew Research Center reported an extraordinary increase in polarization. Between 1994 and 2014, the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who expressed “very unfavorable” views of their opponents more than doubled, to 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans. Overall, 82 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats had either unfavorable or very unfavorable views of their political opponents.During the Trump era, this mutual contempt and loathing only grew. A June 2019 report by More in Common found that 86 percent of Republicans believed Democrats were brainwashed, 84 percent believed Democrats were hateful and 71 percent believed Democrats were racist. Democrats also expressed withering disgust for Republicans: 88 percent believed Republicans were brainwashed, 87 percent believed Republicans were hateful and 89 percent believed Republicans were racist.There is an interesting additional wrinkle to the More in Common report. Yes, it found that the two sides hated each other, but it also discovered that both sides were wrong about their political opponents. Both Democrats and Republicans believed their opponents were more politically extreme than they really were. The findings are startling: “Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents … hold views they consider ‘extreme’ ” than is actually the case.The media compounds the problem. More in Common found that consuming news media (with the exception of broadcast news on ABC, NBC and CBS) actually increased the perception gap. As a practical matter, this means that parties are almost always defined by their ideological extremes and each party uses the existence of those extremes to generate fear and increase turnout. Even if a party does try to moderate to appeal to the middle, partisan media still highlights the radicals that remain, and the perception gap persists. The fear persists.We can start to see why Trump is viable beyond his base. When you ask right-leaning voters to abandon Trump, you’re asking them to empower a political party they view as brainwashed, hateful and racist. You’re asking them to empower a political party they view as extreme. That’s the source of Trump’s strength in a general election. He’s surfing on top of a huge wave of fear and animosity, a wave he did not create but one that he’s making bigger through his malignant, destructive influence.That’s not to say that we face a political stalemate. After all, we’ve seen MAGA candidates perform poorly in multiple swing state elections, but many of those elections — even against plainly incompetent or corrupt candidates — have been extraordinarily close. Trump’s loss in 2020 was extraordinarily close. In a narrowly divided country, it becomes difficult for one party to deliver the kind of decisive blows that Republicans suffered in 1964 or Democrats suffered in 1972.When the Trump Republican Party is forced to take three steps back, it often consoles itself with two steps forward. It lost the House in 2018, but it gained seats in the Senate. It lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, but it gained seats in the House. It lost ground in the Senate in 2022, but it did (barely) win back control of the House. There weren’t many bright spots for Republicans in the 2023 elections, either, but there weren’t many races, and MAGA will still believe that Biden is weak even if other Democrats have proved stronger than expected.Already Trump and his allies are blaming electoral setbacks on the Republican establishment. The radio host Mark Levin claimed that the Republican nominee for governor in Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, lost to the Democrat, Andy Beshear, because Cameron is a “Mitch McConnell protégé.” Trump echoed the same theme, declaring on Truth Social that Cameron “couldn’t alleviate the stench of Mitch McConnell.” MAGA’s solution to electoral setbacks is always the same: more MAGA.There are two potential paths past this Republican dynamic. One is slow, difficult and dangerous. That’s the path of the Democratic Party defeating Trump and other MAGA candidates, race by race, year by year, with the full knowledge that the margin of victory can be razor thin and that there’s always the risk of a close loss that brings catastrophic consequences for our Republic. One negative news cycle — like Anthony Weiner’s laptop surfacing in the closing days of the 2016 election — can be the difference between victory and defeat.The other path — the better path — requires the Republican Party to reform itself, to reject Trump now. A two-party nation needs two healthy parties. Any republic that depends on one party defeating the other to preserve democracy and the rule of law is a republic that teeters on the edge of destruction. A Nikki Haley nomination, for example, might make Biden’s defeat more likely, but farsighted Democrats should welcome a potential return to normalcy in the Republican Party. It would mean that politics will perhaps return to a world of manageable differences, rather than a series of existential threats to democracy itself.As of now, however, internal Republican reform is a pipe dream. Ron DeSantis is falling, and while Haley is rising, she hasn’t even hit 10 percent support in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump leads by a staggering spread of 43.7 points. Perhaps a criminal conviction could reverse Trump’s primary momentum, but after watching Trump’s Republican approval rating survive every single scandal of his presidency and political career, the idea that anything will shake his Republican support is far more of a hope than an expectation.Until that unlikely moment, we’re stuck with the current dynamic. Love for Trump fuels his support in the Republican primary contest. Hatred of Democrats makes him viable in the general election. American animosity gave Trump the White House once, and as long as that animosity remains, it threatens to give him the White House once again. More

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      Election 2023: How Abortion Lifted Democrats, and More Key Takeaways

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      The political potency of abortion rights proved more powerful than the drag of President Biden’s approval ratings in Tuesday’s off-year elections, as Ohioans enshrined a right to abortion in their state’s constitution, and Democrats took control of both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly while holding on to Kentucky’s governorship.The night’s results showed the durability of Democrats’ political momentum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022. It may also, at least temporarily, stem the latest round of Democratic fretting from a series of polls demonstrating Mr. Biden’s political weakness.After a strong midterm showing last year, a blowout victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April and a series of special election wins, Democrats head into Mr. Biden’s re-election contest with the wind at their backs. The question for the party is how they can translate that momentum to Mr. Biden, who remains unpopular while others running on his agenda have prevailed.Here are key takeaways from Tuesday:There’s nothing like abortion to aid Democrats.Democratic officials have been saying for months that the fight for abortion rights has become the issue that best motivates Democrats to vote, and is also the issue that persuades the most Republicans to vote for Democrats.On Tuesday, they found new evidence to bolster their case in victories by Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who criticized his opponent’s defense of the state’s near-total ban; legislative candidates in Virginia who opposed the 15-week abortion ban proposed by the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin; and, above all, the Ohio referendum establishing a right to abortion access. A Pennsylvania Supreme Court candidate who ran on abortion rights, Daniel McCaffery, also won, giving Democrats a 5-2 majority.Where Trump Counties in Ohio Voted to Support Abortion RightsOhio’s referendum drew support from both liberal and conservative areas of the state, and polled well ahead of President Biden’s results three years ago.Abortion is now so powerful as a Democratic issue that Everytown, the gun control organization founded and funded by Michael Bloomberg, used its TV ads in Virginia to promote abortion rights before it discussed gun violence.The anti-abortion Democrat who ran for governor of Mississippi, Brandon Presley, underperformed expectations.It’s a sign that no matter how weak Mr. Biden’s standing is, the political environment and the issues terrain are still strong for Democrats running on abortion access and against Republicans who defend bans.The last six Kentucky governor’s elections have been won by the same party that won the presidential election the following year. The president may not be able to do what Mr. Beshear managed — talking up Biden policies without ever mentioning the president’s name — but he now has examples of what a winning road map could look like for 2024.In Virginia, a Republican rising star faces an eclipse.Governor Youngkin had hoped a strong night for his party would greatly raise his stature as the Republican who turned an increasingly blue state back to red. That would at the very least include him in the conversation for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, if not 2024.Democratic victories in the Virginia legislature undercut Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s agenda, which was focused on abortion.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesBut Mr. Youngkin’s pledge to enact what he called a moderate abortion law — a ban on abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of an endangered mother — gave Democrats an effective counter as he sought full control of state government.The Democratic argument won the day, at least in part. The party seized the majority in the House of Delegates, kept control of the State Senate and definitely spoiled Mr. Youngkin’s night. The results offered nervous national Democrats still more evidence of abortion’s power as a motivator for their voters while upending the term-limited Mr. Youngkin’s plans for his final two years in office, and possibly beyond.A Democrat can win in deep-red Kentucky, if his name is Andy Beshear.Being the most popular governor in the country turns out to be a good thing if you want to get re-elected.Mr. Beshear spent his first term and his re-election campaign hyperfocused on local issues like teacher salaries, new road projects, guiding the state through the pandemic and natural disasters and, since last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, opposing his state’s total ban on abortion.Gov. Andy Beshear focused on local issues in Kentucky, and avoided mentioning President Biden by name.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesThat made him politically bulletproof when his Republican challenger, Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, sought to nationalize the campaign and juice G.O.P. turnout by tying Mr. Beshear to Mr. Biden and attacking him on crime and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. (Mr. Beshear vetoed new restrictions aimed at transgender young people, though G.O.P. lawmakers voted to override him.)It’s not as if Republican voters stayed home; all the other Republicans running for statewide office won with at least 57 percent of the vote. Mr. Beshear just got enough of them to back him for governor. A Democrat who can win Republican voters without making compromises on issues important to liberal voters is someone the rest of the party will want to emulate in red states and districts across the country.Attacks on transgender rights didn’t work.As abortion access has become the top issue motivating Democrats, and with same-sex marriage broadly accepted in America, Republicans casting about for an issue to motivate social conservatives landed on restricting rights for transgender people. On Tuesday, that didn’t work.In Kentucky, Mr. Cameron and his Republican allies spent more than $5 million on television ads attacking L.G.B.T.Q. rights and Mr. Beshear for his defense of them, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising. Gov. Tate Reeves in Mississippi spent $1.2 million on anti-L.G.B.T.Q. ads, while Republicans running for legislative seats in Virginia spent $527,000 worth of TV time on the issue.Daniel Cameron and his Republican allies spent more than $5 million on television ads attacking L.G.B.T.Q. rights — a strategy that did not pay off in Tuesday’s election.Michael Swensen/Getty ImagesIndeed, in Virginia, Danica Roem, a member of the House of Delegates, will become the South’s first transgender state senator after defeating a former Fairfax County police detective who supported barring transgender athletes from competing in high school sports.In Ohio, voters back both abortion and weed.Ohioans once again showed the popularity of abortion rights, even in reliably Republican states, when they easily approved a constitutional amendment establishing the right to an abortion.The vote in Ohio could be a harbinger for the coming presidential election season, when proponents and opponents of abortion rights are trying to put the issue before voters in the critical battleground states of Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania.Abortion rights groups entered Tuesday on a winning streak with such ballot measures since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. And ultimately, Ohio voters did as voters before them had done — electing to preserve the right to an abortion in their state.Voters at a high school in Columbus, Ohio. Ohioans legalized recreational marijuana.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAnd with a margin that was almost identical to the abortion vote, Ohioans also legalized recreational marijuana use. That will make Ohio the 24th state to do so.Where abortion wasn’t an issue, a Republican won easily.Mississippi’s governor’s race was the exception to this off-year election’s rule on abortion: The incumbent governor, Mr. Reeves, and his Democratic challenger, Mr. Presley, ran as staunch opponents of abortion rights.And in that race, the Democrat lost.Mr. Presley hoped to make the Mississippi race close by tying the incumbent to a public corruption scandal that saw the misspending of $94 million in federal funds intended for Mississippi’s poor on projects like a college volleyball facility pushed by the retired superstar quarterback Brett Favre. He also pressed for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to save Mississippi’s collapsing rural hospitals.Gov. Tate Reeves won his re-election campaign easily Tuesday night in Mississippi.Emily Kask for The New York TimesBut in Mississippi, Mr. Reeves had three advantages that proved impenetrable: incumbency, the “R” next to his name on the ballot, and the endorsement of Mr. Trump, who won the state in 2020 by nearly 17 percentage points.In Kentucky races beneath the marquee governor’s contest, Democrats also did not run on abortion, and they, like Mr. Presley, lost.Rhode Island sends a Biden aide to the House.Rhode Island is hardly a swing state, but still, the heavily Democratic enclave’s election of Gabe Amo to one of its two House seats most likely brought a smile to Mr. Biden’s face. Mr. Amo was a deputy director of the White House office of intergovernmental affairs and as such, becomes the first Biden White House aide to rise to Congress.The son of African immigrants, Mr. Amo will also be the first Black representative from the Ocean State.Gabe Amo became the first Black person to represent Rhode Island in the U.S. Congress, according to The Associated Press.Kris Craig/Providence Journal, via Associated PressWhite House officials said the president congratulated his former aide on his victory. The special election fills the seat vacated by David Cicilline, a Democrat who left the seat to run a nonprofit. More

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      The War Between Israel and Hamas Is Splintering the Democratic Coalition

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      The Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Gaza are creating a fissure between Democratic constituencies crucial to President Biden’s campaign for a second term in the White House.The Nov. 2 Quinnipiac University Poll found that half of all voters approved of the way Israel is responding to the Oct. 7 attacks, while 35 percent disapproved. Among all voters, however, one key subgroup dissented — 18-to-34-years-olds — a constituency that provided Biden with enough votes in 2020 to put him over the top. These young voters faulted Israel’s response to the attacks, 52-32 percent.Exit poll data from 2020 shows that Donald Trump beat Biden by small margins among the 60 percent of the electorate that was 45 or older, that Biden won 52-46 among the 23 percent of voters aged 30 to 44 and that the one bloc decisively in favor of Biden was voters aged 18 to 29, who made up 17 percent of the electorate and backed the Democratic nominee 60-36.Perhaps equally significant, in March 2023, more than six months before Hamas’s attack on Israel, Gallup found that “sympathy toward the Palestinians among U.S. adults is at a new high of 31 percent, while the proportion not favoring either side is at a new low of 15 percent. The 54 percent of Americans sympathizing more with the Israelis is similar to last year’s 55 percent, but it is the lowest since 2005.”This shift in American public opinion toward Palestinians provides crucial insight into what my Times colleagues Jennifer Medina and Lisa Lerer wrote on Oct. 20:Progressive Jews who have spent years supporting racial equity, gay and transgender rights, abortion rights and other causes on the American left — including opposing Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank — are suddenly feeling abandoned by those who they long thought of as allies. This wartime shift represents a fundamental break within a liberal coalition that has long powered the Democratic Party.There is, Medina and Lerer add:a politically engaged swath of American Jewry who are reaching a breaking point. They have long sought an end to the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, supported a two-state solution and protested the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.But in the Hamas attacks, many saw an existential threat, evoking memories of the Holocaust and generations of antisemitism, and provoking anxiety about whether they could face attacks in the United States. And they were taken aback to discover that many of their ideological allies not only failed to perceive the same threats but also saw them as oppressors deserving of blame.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my question on the domestic political consequences of the violence in the Middle East:For Democrats, the Gaza war exacerbates pre-existing coalitional tensions along age, racial, religious, and ideological lines. The pro-Hamas faction is younger, nonwhite, Muslim and secular, and more progressive. The pro-Israel faction is older, whiter, Jewish and Christian, and more centrist.Biden cannot afford to lose even thin slices of the Democratic electorate, Cain argued: “As the Siena/NYT poll indicates, small swings in turnout of the Democratic base can doom Biden. This is what happened to Hillary behind the blue curtain in 2016.”“The longer and bloodier the war,” Cain added, “the harder it will be for the Democratic coalition.”I asked Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “Do you see the conflict hurting Biden’s prospects or helping them?” He replied by email: “Right now, there is no question it is dividing the Democratic base and hurting Biden’s approval.” But, Ornstein quickly added, “the election is a year away, and, more important, all will be shaped by the outcome of the conflict.”Biden’s support of Israel has produced exceptional, if not unprecedented, dissent among party loyalists and government employees.On Nov. 3, Liz Skalka, Daniel Marans and Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported on the HuffPost website that more than 50 staff members of the Democratic National Committee had signed a letter calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.“As strategic partners to the administration … we feel it is the D.N.C.’s moral obligation to urge President Biden to publicly call for a cease-fire,” they wrote. “With the number of civilian deaths growing rapidly each day, we must be clear: the Israeli government’s unrelenting military bombardment and blockading of vital supplies entering Gaza must end.”Along similar lines, a Nov. 1 Foreign Policy article by Robbie Gramer disclosed that there was a “storm of dissent brewing in the State Department.”A group of State Department employees opposed to administration policies is gathering signatures for a “dissent cable,” Gramer wrote, a formal procedure created by the State Department “to allow its users the opportunity to bring dissenting or alternative views on substantive foreign policy issues.”Gramer reported that “many U.S. diplomats were privately angered, shocked and despondent by what they perceived as a de facto blank check from Washington for Israel to launch a massive military operation in Gaza at an immense humanitarian cost for the besieged Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”In a separate Nov. 3 Foreign Policy article, “More U.S. Officials Are Anonymously Calling for a Gaza Cease-Fire,” Amy Mackinnon and Gramer wrote:Hundreds of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) officials have reportedly signed a letter calling on the Biden administration to push for “an immediate cease-fire and cessation of hostilities” in the Israel-Hamas war, according to a copy of the petition obtained by Foreign Policy.On Nov. 3, 56 Democratic members of the House and two senators wrote to Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, demanding that the administration “make clear that Israel must conduct military operations within the scope of international law and minimize civilian harm.”“We must continue to hold ourselves and our closest allies to the highest standards of conduct,” the authors of the letter went on to say,even at times of great tragedy and violence. While we firmly believe in Israel’s right to defend itself, we are gravely concerned by Israel’s military operation and conduct that fails to limit harm to noncombatants and vulnerable populations. Nearly 9,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 3,600 children. Abiding by international law is not only morally imperative, but also legally required per international humanitarian law, and strategically important to prevent regional escalation and to preserve global support for Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack.One underlying reason the Israel versus Hamas conflict — including both the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent Israeli counterattack on Gaza — is particularly problematic for Democrats is that psychological research shows that liberals are more inclined to feel empathy than conservatives.In a May 2018 paper, “Are Liberals and Conservatives Equally Motivated to Feel Empathy Toward Others?” Yossi Hasson, Maya Tamir, Kea S. Brahms, J. Christopher Cohrs and Eran Halperin reported that “on average and across samples, liberals wanted to feel more empathy and experienced more empathy than conservatives did.”Their conclusion found support in a paper that was published in May, “Ideological Values Are Parametrically Associated With Empathy Neural Response to Vicarious Suffering,” by Niloufar Zebarjadi, Eliyahu Adler, Annika Kluge, Mikko Sams and Jonathan Levy of Aalto University in Finland. The five authors used neuroimaging “to reveal an asymmetry in the neural empathy response as a function of political ideology.”The research by Zebarjadi and her four colleagues “revealed a typical rhythmic alpha-band ‘empathy response’ in the temporal-parietal junction. This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group” of those studied.Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as the director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance from 2013-17, gave voice to this empathy in an interview with Politico about the Israel/Hamas conflict:What the rest of the world sees is that when civilian apartment buildings are bombed by Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. government forcefully condemns this as illegitimate. And when they see similar tactics being used by the I.D.F. in Gaza, they see lock-step support from the U.S. government. This dramatically undermines the credibility of international humanitarian law.The fundamental foundation of international law is that certain things are wrong full stop because it happens to humans. That’s why it makes the attacks by Hamas wrong — deeply horrific and a grave violation of international humanitarian law. And that’s why it makes war crimes in response wrong.One of the striking findings in polling conducted in the aftermath of Oct. 7 is how much more supportive young voters are of Hamas and how much less supportive they are of Israel.The Oct. 19 Harvard-Harris poll asked 2,116 registered voters: “In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?”By 84 to 16 percent, voters chose Israel, with everyone 25 or older backing the Jewish state by three to one or better. The one exception was voters 18 to 25, with 52 percent saying they sided with Israel and 48 percent with Hamas.Asked “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians in Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?” an overwhelming majority of registered voters surveyed, 76 percent, said it could not be justified; 24 percent said it could be.Among the youngest voters, however, 51 percent of those 18 to 24 said the killing “can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians” and 49 percent said it cannot be. Voters 25 to 34 were split, 48 percent saying the killing of Israelis can be justified, 52 saying it cannot.In researching their March 2022 article, “The Young American Left and Attitudes About Israel,” Laura Royden and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Harvard and Tufts, “surveyed 3,500 U.S. adults, including oversampling of 2,500 adults aged 18-30” to explore why “young people and the ideological far left have developed distinctly negative views toward Israel.”“In June 2021,” they write, “immediately following armed conflict in Israel and Palestine, liberal Democrats were three times more likely than conservative Republicans to say that the U.S.A. was too supportive of Israel. Three in five Republicans, but only one in five Democrats, agreed in May 2021 that it was very important for the U.S.A. to help protect Israel.”Among Democrats aged 18-35, however, they found that “respondents were three times more likely to say the U.S.A. should lean more toward Palestinians than Israel.”Digging deeper, Royden and Hersh found a clear ideological and age pattern:On both ideological extremes, more young adults than older adults hold an unfavorable view of Israel. Moderate young adult favorable attitudes toward Israel (58 percent) is indistinguishable from moderate older adults (at 62 percent). The difference is largest on the far left, where Israel favorability is 27 percentage points less among younger very liberal adults (at 33 percent) for young adults compared with older adults (at 60 percent). Young very conservative adults are supportive of Israel (66 percent), but substantially less so than older very conservative adults (82 percent). Clearly, the most left-leaning young adults have the lowest rating of Israel.If many young people are disaffected with the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict between Hamas and Israel, their discontent pales in comparison with that of Muslim and Arab Americans.The Arab American Institute commissioned John Zogby Strategies to conduct a survey of 500 Arab Americans between Oct. 23 and Oct. 27. For Biden, the results were striking: “Support for President Biden in the upcoming election has plummeted among Arab Americans voters, dropping from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent, a 42-point decrease.”Two-thirds of Arab Americans “have a negative view of President Biden’s response to the current violence in Palestine and Israel,” according to the poll. “A strong majority of Arab Americans believe the U.S. should call for a cease-fire on the current violence.”In terms of partisan identification, Zogby wrote in his summary, the surveymarks the first time in our 26 years of polling Arab American voters in which a majority did not claim to prefer the Democratic Party. In 2008 and 2016, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one. In this poll, 32 percent of Arab Americans identified as Republican as opposed to just 23 percent who identified as Democrats.In 2020, Biden carried Michigan by 154,181 votes. Arab Americans played a significant role in his victory there.Farah Pandith, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out in an email that until recently, Muslim Americans had become a core Biden constituency:In 2020, American Muslims were involved in fund-raising and volunteering in the Biden campaign. They were mobilizing themselves to get Muslims out to vote, to educate and to — importantly — be publicly seen doing so. With so much hardship in the years post 9/11 and accusations that American Muslims could not be loyal Americans and practicing Muslims, this dedicated effort is compelling. These generations not only wanted to debunk that false narrative, but they wanted to see their candidate win — believing that Biden would understand their lived experience in America in a post 9/11 world and govern accordingly.Now, Pandith wrote, “it is clear that the hard-won trust and warm relationship Biden enjoyed with the vast number of American Muslims has been diminished. For many, their confidence in and loyalty to Biden has seemed to evaporate.”I asked a political operative closely tied to the Biden campaign — who insisted on anonymity in order to speak forthrightly — about the ramifications of the struggle between Israel and Hamas:There are open wounds and we are far from the war’s end. And there are hostages still out there. And Americans both tire and get bored with foreign conflicts after the messy part is done. But I do know one thing: Trump was the president of the Muslim ban and he called for a Muslim ban 2.0, so I don’t think a lot of Arab Americans are going his way. I think there is time for Biden to get them back. Not all of them.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argued by email that concern over Biden’s problems in dealing with the Mideast conflict may be overblown:Americans traditionally do not hold consistent or well-informed opinions on foreign policy. The further a foreign conflict or global issue is removed from people’s day to day lives, the less they are going to hold any meaningful opinion about it or use it to guide their political preferences.In addition, Wronski continued, “the role of negative partisanship may outweigh Muslim Americans’ criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy.” Some voters may defect to a third-party candidate or abstain from voting, but “a potential second Trump term can be more threatening to Muslim Americans domestically, given Trump’s record and rhetoric toward minority and marginalized groups, than Biden’s foreign policy agenda.”I asked Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, for his perspective. He replied to my query by email:My sense right now from our data is that Biden is in a very complicated political situation. Jewish voters, while only 2 percent of the electorate, provided key support (and voted about 70 percent for Biden) in pivotal states, where every group counts. Biden did even better among Muslim voters, winning 90 percent of the vote. Muslims are only about one-half of one percent of the electorate. Both groups are small shares of the overall vote, but they both vote Democratic. Biden risks alienating one Democratic group or the other if this is not handled right.Above all though, the situation in the Middle East is terrible. It is a human tragedy. Every president in modern history has tried to find a resolution to the Israel-Palestine question. Biden now faces the task of containing this conflict so that it does not escalate into a broader Middle East war. There’s not much upside here, politically or morally, just avoiding potentially terrible outcomes.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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      ‘He’s 80 Years Old, and That Colors Every Impression Voters Have’: Three Writers Dish on Biden and the G.O.P. Debate

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      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason magazine, and Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, to discuss their expectations for the third Republican debate on Wednesday night. They also dug into and sorted through a blizzard of political news — particularly the new New York Times/Siena battleground-state polling with dreadful news for President Biden that has Democrats freaked out (again).Frank Bruni: Thank you both for joining me. While we’ll pivot in short order to the debate, I can’t shake that poll, whose scariness ranks somewhere between “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Exorcist.” I know my own head is spinning. I mean: Donald Trump ahead of President Biden in five of six crucial battleground states?How loud an alarm is this? Should Biden at this late stage consider not pursuing re-election? Would that likely help or hurt the Democrats in winning the White House? And if not Biden, who would give the party the best chance? Nate, let’s start with you.Nate Silver: Thanks for having me, Frank! It’s nice to be back in the (digital) pages of The Times! I think whether Democrats would be better off if Biden dropped out is very much an open question — which is kind of a remarkable thing to be saying at this late stage. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to trying to figure out why Biden doesn’t get more credit on the economy, for instance. And the answer might just be that he’s 80 years old, and that colors every impression voters have of him.Katherine Mangu-Ward: The voters in these polls just seem to be screaming, ‘He’s too old, and I feel poor!’ The most shocking finding was that only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent. Two percent! Less than 1 percent of voters under 30 said the economy was excellent. In Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, exactly zero polled respondents under 30 said the economy was excellent.Bruni: Nate, I take your point about “open question” — I have no crystal ball, and my God, I’ve never so badly wanted one, because the Democrats getting this right and blocking Trump is, well, incalculably vital to this democracy’s future. But if you were the party’s chief adviser and you had to make the call: Yes to Biden or no to Biden and an invitation to someone else?Silver: Well, I’m the probabilities guy — so I’ll usually avoid answering a question definitively unless you force me to. Really, the best option would have been if Biden decided in March he wouldn’t run, and then you could have a vigorous primary. If you actually invested me with all this power, I’d want access to private information. I’d like to do some polling. I’d want to canvas people like Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock about how prepared they are. I’d like to know how energetic Biden is from day to day.Bruni: And you, Katherine? Biden thumbs-up or thumbs-down? And if thumbs-down, tell me your favorite alternative.Mangu-Ward: If we’re picking up magical artifacts, a time machine would be more useful than a crystal ball. And you’d need to go back before the selection of Kamala Harris as vice president. A viable vice president would have been a moderate threat to Biden, but a weak one is a major threat to the party. If we’re scrounging around for an alternative, I don’t completely hate Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.Bruni: I’d settle at this point for a Magic 8 Ball. And Katherine, “don’t completely hate” in 2023 politics equals “want to marry and live with forever” in the politics of decades past. We’re a cynical lot!In any case, Nate mentioned age. How do you two explain that the same poll we’ve been talking about revealed that while 62 percent of Americans feel that Biden, 80, doesn’t have the mental sharpness to be effective, only 44 percent feel that way about Trump, 77. Only 39 percent said that Trump is too old to be president, while 71 percent said that Biden is. Do those numbers make any sense at all to you?Silver: There are at least three things going on here. First, the three-and-a-half-year difference between Trump and Biden is not nothing. It’s certainly something you start to notice if you have older friends, parents, relatives entering their late 70s or early 80s. Second, Biden’s manner of speaking and presentation just reads as being more old-fashioned than Trump’s, and that perception is reinforced by media coverage. Third, I wonder if younger voters feel like Biden’s a bit of a forced choice — there wasn’t really a competitive primary — so “old” serves as a euphemism for “stale.”Mangu-Ward: Because this election cycle has been largely bereft of serious policy debate, I also think age is one thing people can grab on to to justify their unease about a Biden second term.Bruni: I wrote a few months back about this: Trump is so deliberately and flamboyantly outrageous — such a purposeful cyclone of noise and distraction — that the normal metrics don’t apply to him. He transcends mundane realities like age. He’s Trump! He’s a horror-movie villain, a Saturday-morning cartoon, a parade float. Those things don’t have ages (or four indictments encompassing 91 counts).Silver: I like that theory. There’s a sense in which some voters feel like they’re in on the joke with Trump. Although I also don’t think that voters have quite shifted into general-election mode, and maybe the media hasn’t, either. Trump as candidate is a very different ball of wax than Trump as president, and that’s what Democrats will spend the next year reminding voters about.Bruni: Katherine, let’s say Biden stays in the race. Certainly looks that way. Can you envision a scenario in which Democrats grow so doubtful, so uncomfortable, that he’s seriously challenged for the nomination and maybe doesn’t get it? If so, sketch that for me.Mangu-Ward: As a libertarian (but not a Libertarian), I’m always cautiously interested in third-party challenges, and that seems more likely to me than a direct challenge for the Democratic nomination. After each election cycle, there’s a moment when pundits decide whether to blame a Green or a Libertarian or an independent for the fact that their pick lost, but an appealing outsider peeling off support from Biden or Trump seems more likely to be a real consideration this time around. We have a lot of noisy characters who don’t fit neatly into partisan boxes on the loose at the moment.Bruni: Veterans of Obama’s 2012 campaign are arguing that Obama was in a similar position to Biden a year out from the election in 2011. Nate, do they have a point? Or do their assurances ring hollow because Biden is not Obama, isn’t as beloved by the base, is indeed old, has been stuck in a low-approval rut for months now going back to 2021, or some combination of those?Silver: Certainly, it’s generally true that polling a year in advance of the election is not very predictive. But Biden’s situation is worse than Obama’s. His approval ratings are notably worse. The Electoral College has shifted against Democrats since 2012 (although it’s now not a given). And there’s the age thing. Remember, a majority of Democrats did not even want Biden to run again. I think the Democratic communications and strategy people have been shrugging off that data more than they maybe should.Mangu-Ward: Biden is definitely not Obama, and it’s definitely not 2012. The concerns about Biden’s age are valid. Though they would apply to Trump just as much in a sane world.Bruni: You’re both so admirably — or is that eerily? — calm. I need to get your diet, exercise or pharmaceutical regimen. Am I nuts to worry/believe that Trump’s return to the presidency isn’t just an unideal election outcome but a historically cataclysmic one? How much does that prospect scare you two?Mangu-Ward: That’s my secret, Frank. I’m always angry. Like the Hulk. I think the current offerings for president are deeply unappealing, to say the least. But that’s nothing new for someone who prefers to maximize freedom and minimize the role of the state in Americans’ personal and economic lives. I am concerned about the peaceful transfer of power, and Trump has shown that he and his supporters are more of a threat to that.Silver: On that, one thing I feel better about is that the reforms that Congress made to the Electoral Count Act made a repeat of Jan. 6 less likely. There’s also perhaps less chance of another Electoral College-popular vote split. If Trump wins the popular vote by three points and there’s no other funny business, I’m not sure what to say exactly other than that in a democracy, you often have to live with outcomes that you yourself would not have chosen.Bruni: Biden, theoretically, isn’t the only bar to Trump’s long red tie dangling over the Resolute Desk anew. I mean — again, theoretically — one of the candidates in this third Republican debate could be the nominee. Yes? Or is it time to admit that, barring a truly extraordinary development, the Republican primary is over?Silver: Prediction markets say there’s a roughly 75 percent chance that Trump is the nominee. That frankly seems too low — no candidate has been this dominant at this stage of the race before. I suppose there’s a path where Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley does relatively well in Iowa, the other drops out, and then — actually, I’m still not sure there’s a path. Maybe Trump’s legal trouble begins to catch up to him? As much as the early states tend to produce surprises, I think if you put all the numbers into a model, it would put the chances at closer to 90 percent than 75.Mangu-Ward: The Times/Siena poll is bad news for Biden, but it’s even worse news for the folks on the G.O.P. debate stage, because it suggests that they simply needn’t bother. Trump is doing just fine holding his own against Biden, so there’s no need to change horses midrace. Unless your horse goes to jail, I guess.The debate will be a primo demonstration of Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”Bruni: If one of the five people on the debate stage were somehow to overtake Trump, who would that be? Has Nikki Haley supplanted Ron DeSantis as the fallback?Silver: The one thing DeSantis originally had going for him was a perception of being more electable. But he’s pretty much squandered that by being an unappealing candidate along many dimensions. And Haley largely performed better than Trump in that new Times/Siena poll. Still, I’m not sure how many Republicans are going to be willing to oust Trump on the basis of a New York Times poll. And it’s not an easy argument to make to Republican voters when Biden looks vulnerable against anyone right now.Mangu-Ward: I appreciated Haley’s early debate appearances, where she put a lot of emphasis on the shared responsibility for budgetary malfeasance between the Democrats and Trump. But now she’s giving me 2012 Mitt Romney flashbacks. She’s a sane and competent Republican who has realized the best way to keep her primary campaign viable is to go hard on immigration restrictionism. She was never an open borders gal, but she did usually offer some warm fuzzies about our nation of immigrants followed by a “get in line.”Bruni: ​​Trump has said he doesn’t want a running mate from any of the people on the debate stage. Do you see anyone — like Haley in particular — who could force his or her way into at least serious consideration? And could possibly help him get elected?Mangu-Ward: The Harris debacle certainly offers lessons for Trump, but I’m not sure whether he’s in the mood to learn them.Silver: The conventional political science view is that V.P. choices do not matter very much unless they seem manifestly unqualified. But they probably ought to matter more for candidates as old as Biden and Trump. I do think Haley would represent some softening of Trump’s image and might appeal to Republicans who worry about a second term being a total clown show. Who would actually staff the cabinet in a second Trump administration, with Trump’s tendency to be disloyal and the legal jeopardy he puts everybody in his orbit in, is one of those things that keeps me up at night.Bruni: Nate, your cabinet question haunts me, too. The quality of Trump’s aides deteriorated steadily across his four years in the White House. And anyone who came near him paid for it in legal fees and the contagion of madness to which they were exposed. So who does serve him if he’s back? Do Ivanka and Jared make peace with him — power again!Silver: I don’t think I have anything reassuring to say on this front! I do think, I guess, that Trump has some incentive to assure voters that he wouldn’t go too crazy in a second term — in 2016, voters actually saw Trump as being more moderate than Clinton.Mangu-Ward: A second-term president will always have a different kind of cabinet than a first-termer, and a Trump-Biden matchup would mean a second-termer no matter who wins. But either way the cabinet will likely be lower quality and more focused on risk mitigation, which isn’t ideal.Bruni: So is there any reason to watch this debate other than, when the subjects of the Middle East in particular and foreign policy in general come up, to see Haley come at the yapping human jitterbug known as Vivek Ramaswamy like a can of Raid?Silver: TV ratings for the second debate were quite low. But I suspect the main audience here isn’t rank-and-file voters so much as what remains of the anti-Trump Republican establishment. If Haley can convince that crowd that she’s more viable than DeSantis, and more electable than Trump, that could make some difference.Mangu-Ward: Historically, debates have been my favorite part of the campaign season, because I’m in it for the policy. But G.O.P. primary voters have been pretty clear that policy is not a priority. I suppose I’ll also tune in to see Chris Christie scold the audience. This week’s spectacle of him telling a booing crowd “Your anger against the truth is reprehensible” was pretty wild.Bruni: OK, lightning round — fast and dirty. Or clean. But definitely fast. Will Trump ever serve a day in prison?Silver: I’d say no, although prediction markets put the odds at above 50 percent!Bruni: You and your prediction markets, Nate! You could have given me your own hunch. Or wish. My wish is a 10-year sentence. At least. My hunch is zip. Hulk?Mangu-Ward: He will probably serve time. He will certainly exhaust every avenue available to him before doing so. In general, the fact that there are many opportunities for appeal is a good thing about our justice system.Bruni: Which 2024 Senate race do you find most interesting?Silver: Undoubtedly Texas, just because it’s one of the only chances Democrats have to pick up a G.O.P. seat. Ted Cruz won fairly narrowly last time, and Colin Allred is probably a better candidate than Beto O’Rourke.Mangu-Ward: Peter Meijer just joined the Senate Republican primary race in Michigan. I appreciated his performance in the House — he’s quite libertarian and was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.Bruni: America’s medium-term future — are you bullish, bearish or, I don’t know, horse-ish?Silver: Everyone is so bearish now, you can almost seem like a bull by default just by pointing out that liberal democracy usually gets its act together in the long run. But the younger generation of voters takes a different attitude on a lot of issues, such as free speech, which has begun to worry me a bit.Mangu-Ward: Bullish, always. Politics ruins everything it touches, but not everything is politics.Bruni: Finally, should Democrats be brutally victory-minded and just swap out Joe and Kamala for Taylor and Travis?Mangu-Ward: I just said politics ruins everything it touches! Must you take Taylor from us, too?Bruni: Fair point, Hulk. You have me there.Silver: It would be a very popular ticket! Taylor Swift will turn 35 only a month before Inauguration Day in 2024, I’d note.Bruni: You both have my thanks. Great chatting with you.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and author of the forthcoming book “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.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. 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