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      Biden to Set Stakes for 2024 Election in Pennsylvania Speech

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      President Biden is returning to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday to try to define the 2024 presidential election as an urgent and intensifying fight for American democracy.Mr. Biden is expected to use a location near the famous Revolutionary War encampment of Valley Forge and the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to cast preserving democracy as a foundational issue to the 2024 campaign, according to a senior Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the remarks.The address, which builds on previous speeches about safeguarding American institutions and combating political violence, represents a bet that many Americans remain shaken by the Jan. 6 attack and Donald J. Trump’s role in it.Leaning on a phrase used by America’s first president, George Washington, around the time he commanded troops at Valley Forge, Mr. Biden is expected to suggest that the 2024 election is a test of whether democracy is still a “sacred cause” in the nation, the aide said.Mr. Biden is fond of using sites of historical significance to underscore speeches that he and his team see as important moments. He traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia before the midterm elections and to Gettysburg, Pa., during the 2020 presidential campaign.His campaign views the events of Jan. 6 — when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent culmination of his election denialism — as critical to understanding how the 2024 campaign will unfold. His team notes that Mr. Trump and Republicans have tried to rewrite the history of that day but argues that images of the Capitol riot remain seared in the minds of voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Would Keeping Trump Off the Ballot Hurt or Help Democracy?

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      Some critics say the battles over the former president’s ballot status are turning him into a martyr and eroding faith in American elections.As the top elections official in Washington State, Steve Hobbs says he is troubled by the threat former President Donald J. Trump poses to democracy and fears the prospect of his return to power. But he also worries that recent decisions in Maine and Colorado to bar Mr. Trump from presidential primary ballots there could backfire, further eroding Americans’ fraying faith in U.S. elections.“Removing him from the ballot would, on its face value, seem very anti-democratic,” said Mr. Hobbs, a Democrat who is in his first term as secretary of state. Then he added a critical caveat: “But so is trying to overthrow your country.”Mr. Hobbs’s misgivings reflect deep divisions and unease among elected officials, democracy experts and voters over how to handle Mr. Trump’s campaign to reclaim the presidency four years after he went to extraordinary lengths in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While some, like Mr. Hobbs, think it best that voters settle the matter, others say that Mr. Trump’s efforts require accountability and should be legally disqualifying.Challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 32 states, though many of those challenges have gained little or no traction, and some have languished on court dockets for months.The decisions happening right now come amid a collapse of faith in the American electoral system, said Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor who specializes in election law and democracy.“We are walking in new constitutional snow here to try and figure out how to deal with these unprecedented developments,” he said.Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs at a debate in 2022.Ted S. Warren/Associated PressProfessor Persily and other legal experts said they expected the United States Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the decisions in Colorado and Maine to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot, perhaps sidestepping the question of whether Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection. Mr. Persily is hopeful that whatever ruling the court issues will bring clarity — and soon.“This is not a political and electoral system that can deal with ambiguity right now,” he said.Mr. Trump and his supporters have called the disqualifications in Maine and Colorado partisan ploys that robbed voters of their right to choose candidates. They accused Democrats of hypocrisy for trying to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot after campaigning in the past two elections as champions of democracy.After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump should be removed from the state’s primary ballot, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement: “Apparently democracy is when judges tell people they’re not allowed to vote for the candidate leading in the polls? This is disgraceful. The Supreme Court must take the case and end this assault on American voters.”Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and Mr. Trump’s most ardent critic in the Republican primary, warned that Maine’s decision would turn Mr. Trump into a “martyr.”But other prominent critics of Mr. Trump — many of them anti-Trump Republicans — said the threat he posed to democracy and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol now required an extraordinary intervention, whatever the electoral consequences.The challenges are based on a Reconstruction Era provision of the 14th Amendment that prohibits anyone who has engaged in rebellion or insurrection from holding federal or state office.Former President Donald Trump spoke at an event in Reno, Nevada, this month.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesJ. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative federal appeals court judge, hailed Colorado and Maine’s decisions as “unassailable” interpretations of the Constitution. Officials in Maine and Colorado who disqualified Mr. Trump from the ballot have written that their decisions stemmed from following the language of the Constitution.But on a recent sunny Friday afternoon in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Deena Drewis, 37, a copy writer, and Aaron Baggaley, 43, a contractor, both of whom have consistently voted for Democrats, expressed a queasy ambivalence over such an extraordinary step.“I’m really just conflicted,” Mr. Baggaley said. “It’s hard to imagine he didn’t fully engage in insurrection. Everything points to it. But the other half of the country is in a position where they feel like it should be up to the electorate.”Officials in Democratic-controlled California have shown little appetite for following Colorado and Maine. California’s Democratic secretary of state, Shirley Weber, announced on Thursday that Mr. Trump would remain on the ballot, and Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed calls by other Democrats to remove him. “We defeat candidates at the polls,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “Everything else is a political distraction.”In interviews, some voters and experts said it was premature to disqualify Mr. Trump because he had not been criminally convicted of insurrection. They worried that red-state officials could use the tactic to knock Democratic candidates off future ballots, or that the disqualifications could further poison the country’s political divisions while giving Mr. Trump a new grievance to rail against.“Attempts to disqualify demagogues with deep popular support often backfire,” said Yascha Mounk, a professor and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has written about threats to democracies. “The only way to neutralize the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump is to beat them at the ballot box, as decisively as possible and as often as it takes.”Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, in January. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated PressThe decisions by Colorado’s highest court and Maine’s secretary of state barring Mr. Trump from state primary ballots are on hold for now and are likely to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.While most of the challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been proceeding in federal or state courts, Maine’s constitution required the voters seeking to disqualify Mr. Trump to file a petition with the secretary of state, putting the politically volatile and hugely consequential decision into the hands of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.Her counterparts in other states said that they had spent months discussing whether they could face a similar decision, and that they had been talking with other elections officials and their legal teams about the thickets of state laws governing each state’s elections.In Washington State, Mr. Hobbs said he did not believe he had the power as secretary of state to unilaterally remove Mr. Trump from the ballot. He was relieved, he said, because he did not think one person should have the power to decide who qualifies to run for president.The stakes for the nation were enormous, Mr. Hobbs said, because of the damage Mr. Trump had already done to faith in the nation’s elections.“It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. “This is going to be a long-term effort to try to regain trust among those who have lost it.”Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview this week that she supported decisions by Ms. Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot.Election workers and secretaries of state have increasingly become the targets of conspiracy theorists and violent threats since Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat; Ms. Griswold said she had received 64 death threats since the lawsuit seeking to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot was filed by six Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado.“All of us swear to uphold our state constitution and the U.S. Constitution,” Ms. Griswold said. “Making these decisions takes bravery and courage.”Her office announced this week that, because Mr. Trump’s case had been appealed, his name would be included on Colorado’s primary ballots unless the U.S. Supreme Court said otherwise or declined to take up his case.In Arizona, placing Mr. Trump on the ballot was a more cut-and-dry decision, said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state. He said that state law required him to list any candidate who had been certified in two other states.He called the blizzard of legal rulings, dissents and contradictory opinions swirling around Mr. Trump’s place on the ballot a “slow rolling civics lesson” that demonstrated the country’s democratic resilience.“I kind of celebrate the notion it’s complicated,” he said. “We’re having this conversation because that’s what democracy is about.”Mitch Smith More

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      A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

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      As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.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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      Barring Trump From the Ballot Would Be a Mistake

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      When Donald Trump appeals the Colorado decision disqualifying him from the ballot in that state’s Republican primary, the Supreme Court should overturn the ruling unanimously.Like many of my fellow liberals, I would love to live in a country where Americans had never elected Mr. Trump — let alone sided with him by the millions in his claims that he won an election he lost, and that he did nothing wrong afterward. But nobody lives in that America. For all the power the institution has arrogated, the Supreme Court cannot bring that fantasy into being. To bar Mr. Trump from the ballot now would be the wrong way to show him to the exits of the political system, after all these years of strife.Some aspects of American election law are perfectly clear — like the rule that prohibits candidates from becoming president before they turn 35 — but many others are invitations to judges to resolve uncertainty as they see fit, based in part on their own politics. Take Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which blocks insurrectionists from running for office, a provision originally aimed at former Confederates in the wake of the Civil War. There may well be some instances in which the very survival of a democratic regime is at stake if noxious candidates or parties are not banned, as in West Germany after World War II. But in this case, what Section 3 requires is far from straightforward. Keeping Mr. Trump off the ballot could put democracy at more risk rather than less.Part of the danger lies in the fact that what actually happened on Jan. 6 — and especially Mr. Trump’s exact role beyond months of election denial and entreaties to government officials to side with him — is still too broadly contested. The Colorado court deferred to a lower court on the facts, but it was a bench trial, meaning that no jury ever assessed what happened, and that many Americans still believe Mr. Trump did nothing wrong. A Supreme Court that affirms the Colorado ruling would have to succeed in constructing a consensual narrative where others — including armies of journalists, the Jan. 6 commission and recent indictments — have failed.The Supreme Court has been asked to weigh in on the fate of presidencies before, and its finer moments in this regard have been when it was a force for stability and reflected the will and interests of voters. Almost 50 years ago, the court faced a choice to end a presidency as it deliberated on Richard Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors. But by the time the Supreme Court acted in 1974, a special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, had already won indictments of Nixon’s henchmen and named the president himself before a grand jury as an unindicted co-conspirator. Public opinion was with Jaworski; the American people agreed that the tapes Nixon was trying to shield from prosecutors were material evidence, and elites in both political parties had reached the same conclusion. In deciding against Nixon, the Supreme Court was only reaffirming the political consensus.As the constitutional law professor Josh Chafetz has observed, even United States v. Nixon was suffused with a rhetoric of judicial aggrandizement. But if the Supreme Court were to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot, seconding the Colorado court on each legal nicety, when so many people still disagree on the facts, it would have disastrous consequences.For one thing, it would strengthen the hand of a Supreme Court that liberals have rightly complained grabs too much power too routinely. Joe Biden came into office calling for a re-examination of whether the Supreme Court needs reform, and there would be considerable irony if he were re-elected after that very body was seen by millions to pre-empt a democratic choice.Worse, it is not obvious how many would accept a Supreme Court decision that erased Mr. Trump’s name from every ballot in the land. Liberals with bad memories of Bush v. Gore, which threw an election to one candidate rather than counting votes, have often regretted accepting that ruling as supinely as they did. And rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place. The purpose of Section 3 was to stabilize the country after a civil war, not to cause another one.As it unfolds, the effort to disqualify Mr. Trump could make him more popular than ever. As harsh experience since 2016 has taught, legalistic maneuvers haven’t hurt him in the polls. And Democrats do nothing to increase their popularity by setting out to “save democracy” when it looks — if their legal basis for proceeding is too flimsy — as if they are afraid of practicing it. That the approval ratings of the Democratic standard-bearer, Mr. Biden, have cratered as prosecutions of Mr. Trump and now this Colorado ruling have accumulated indicates that trying again is a mistake, both of principle and of strategy.Perhaps the worst outcome of all would be for the Supreme Court to split on ideological lines, as it did in Bush v. Gore, hardly its finest hour. Justices have fretted about the damage to their “legitimacy” when their decisions look like political choices. They often are, as so many recent cases have revealed, but when the stakes are this high, the best political choice for the justices is to avoid final judgment on contested matters of fact and law and to let the people decide.In the Nixon era, the justices were shrewd enough to stand together in delivering their decision: It was handed down 8-0, with one recusal. In our moment, the Supreme Court must do the same.This will require considerable diplomacy from Chief Justice John Roberts, and it will define his stewardship as profoundly as cases such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which his effort to herd his colleagues into consensus failed. In this situation, unlike that one, it will require him to convince his liberal colleagues who might otherwise dissent. For their part, they ought to be able to anticipate the high and unpredictable costs of presuming that judges can save a nation on the brink of breakdown.The truth is that this country has to be allowed to save itself. The Supreme Court must act, but only to place the burden on Mr. Trump’s political opponents to make their case in the political arena. Not just to criticize him for his turpitude, but to argue that their own policies benefit the disaffected voters who side with a charlatan again and again.Samuel Moyn teaches law and history at Yale.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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      Don’t Give In to Political Despair. Trump Is Too Great a Threat.

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      Shortly after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I spoke to a friend in Istanbul about my boundless horror, and while I can’t remember the exact words she said in response, they amounted to “Welcome to my world.” I told her about all the protests breaking out, and she gently warned me not to get my hopes up. She’d also demonstrated against Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she said, but eventually those protests had died out, and ours would too.Over the next four years, I was often relieved that her prediction hadn’t come true. The Resistance, as the broad alliance of anti-Trump Americans came to be known, never flagged. An obvious reason for its endurance is that Americans enjoy robust civil rights protections that the opponents of ruling regimes in many other countries do not. Despite my friend’s generous empathy, there was in fact no real comparison between our situations; while Trump demonized journalists, Erdogan imprisoned them. In the absence of serious state repression, Trump’s critics rarely had to hide their sentiments, making it easier to maintain hope that they, and not their freakish madman of a president, represented this country’s future.I fear that in a second Trump administration it will be much harder to keep the faith. The first Trump presidency seemed like a grotesque accident, a civic disaster that befell us because we were too blithely arrogant to see it coming. Trump redux, however, is something we’re lurching toward with eyes wide open. If he wins again, it won’t be a shock, and no one will be able to claim, as so many did before, that this is not who we are.Right now, general election polls are blaring like sirens: A recent survey from Bloomberg News/Morning Consult has Trump leading in all seven swing states. He has made no secret of how he intends to govern: He wants to round up undocumented immigrants by the millions and imprison them in a network of new detention camps while they await deportation. He will, he’s said, free many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists — he calls them “hostages” — and use the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies. As The Washington Post reported, his associates have drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act as soon as he takes power so that he can deploy the military against protesters.The ex-president’s rhetoric is increasingly Hitlerian; he’s repeatedly said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country, language that echoes “Mein Kampf.” This month, he approvingly quoted Vladimir Putin about the “rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” and he has said he wants to be a dictator on the first day of a second presidency. He should be taken seriously, even if we’ve all grown too numb to maintain the appropriate level of alarm.Faced with this onrushing nightmare, anti-Trump forces seem stunned and dejected. As progressives turn on Joe Biden over the war in Gaza, people too young to remember Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaign in 2000, which helped give us the George W. Bush presidency and thus the Iraq war, are threatening to vote for third-party or independent candidates like Jill Stein and Cornel West. Meanwhile, the flood of money that kept the Resistance flush through the Trump years has slowed to a trickle. In November, the liberal behemoth MoveOn became the latest progressive group to face layoffs, a sign, The New York Times reported, “of a slowdown in donations from small donors to left-leaning causes and candidates.”I was alarmed by something the painter Adam Pendleton said in a roundup of trendsetters’ 2024 predictions published by T, The Times’s style magazine. “We’ll turn toward abstraction,” he said. “I predict that Donald Trump is going to win the election and, when people seek some sort of relief valve or means to move forward, I don’t think they’re going to do that by looking at a bunch of figurative paintings.” I have nothing against abstract art, but I was disturbed both by his resignation and by the idea that a new Trump term might be met not with relentless pushback but with aesthetic escapism.Before we can fight authoritarianism, we have to fight fatalism. My great hope for 2024 is that anti-Trump Americans can transcend exhaustion, burnout and self-protective pessimism to mobilize once again for the latest most important election of our lifetimes. It’s perfectly understandable that many people galvanized by abhorrence of Trump would step back once his immediate threat to the Republic receded. The obsession with politics that took over the country during his administration was neither sustainable nor healthy. But if you don’t want an even uglier and more despairing replay of those years, the time to act is now.One place to start is with donations to grass-roots organizations working on voter turnout, which are desperately underfunded. (The Movement Voter Project has a clickable map with links to such groups all over the country.) You can also get involved with the campaigns to put referendums protecting abortion rights on the ballot in states like Arizona and Florida, efforts that could both undo cruel abortion bans and drive voter turnout.It’s going to be especially important next year to give people reasons to vote beyond the presidential election. I didn’t want Biden to run again and wish there had been a competitive Democratic primary, but it’s too late for a serious challenge now. Faced with an unenthusiastic electorate, Democrats will need down-ballot candidates who can motivate people to go the polls. Few are doing more to bring exciting new candidates into the political process than Run for Something, which recruits and trains young progressives to run for office.“As we look to our strategy for ’24, we want to make sure especially that we’re prioritizing resources for local candidates whose races can have an impact at the top of the ticket,” said Amanda Litman, Run for Something’s co-founder. Young voters, she said, “are not particularly psyched about Joe Biden right now. But thanks to years of education and each of these special elections, they deeply understand the need to show up locally.”Here’s hoping she’s right. Next year is going to be hard. It’s up to all of us whether it’s going to be disastrous.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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      The Secret to Trump’s Success Isn’t Authoritarianism

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      If the presidential election were held today, Donald Trump could very well win it. Polling from several organizations shows him gaining ground on Joe Biden, winning five of six swing states and drawing the support of about 20 percent of Black and roughly 40 percent of Hispanic voters in those states.For some liberal observers, Mr. Trump’s resilience confirms that many Americans aren’t wedded to democracy and are tempted by extreme ideologies. Hillary Clinton has described Mr. Trump as a “threat” to democracy, and Mr. Biden has called him “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”In a different spirit, some on the right also take Mr. Trump’s success as a sign that Americans are open to more radical forms of politics. After Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin crowed that the American people had “started the revolution” against political liberalism itself. Richard Spencer declared himself and his fellow white nationalists “the new Trumpian vanguard.”But both sides consistently misread Mr. Trump’s success. He isn’t edging ahead of Mr. Biden in swing states because Americans are eager to submit to authoritarianism, and he isn’t attracting the backing of significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters because they support white supremacy. His success is not a sign that America is prepared to embrace the ideas of the extreme right. Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Defeating Trump Is Just a Start

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      The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.But there is another angle you can take on the Republican use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.At the same time, it is hard not to miss the degree to which attempts to nullify popular referendums or redistrict opponents into irrelevance can also work to inculcate a sense of hopelessness in those who might otherwise seek political change. Yes, it is true that many people will push back when faced with a sustained challenge to their right to participate in political life or exercise other fundamental rights. But many people will resign themselves to the new status quo, persuading themselves that nothing has fundamentally changed or concluding that it is not worth the time or effort involved to pick up the fight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      America’s Thirst for Authoritarianism

      by

      Around the world, authoritarianism is ascendant and democracy is in decline.A 2022 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that “over the past six years, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy” and that nearly half of the 173 countries assessed were “experiencing declines” in at least one metric of democracy.The United States wasn’t impervious to this trend. The report found that America was “moderately backsliding” on its democracy.But I fear that we’re now on the precipice of fully turning away from democracy and toward a full embrace of authoritarianism. The country seems thirsty for it; many Americans appear to be inviting it.Confidence in many of our major institutions — including schools, big business, the news media — is at or near its lowest point in the past half-century, in part because of the Donald Trump-led right-wing project to depress it. Indeed, according to a July Gallup report, Republicans’ confidence in 10 of the 16 institutions measured was lower than Democrats’. Three institutions in which Republicans’ confidence exceeded Democrats’ were the Supreme Court, organized religion and the police.And as people lose faith in these institutions — many being central to maintaining the social contract that democracies offer — they can lose faith in democracy itself. People then lose their fear of a candidate like Trump — who tried to overturn the previous presidential election and recently said that if he’s elected next time, he won’t be a dictator, “except for Day 1” — when they believe democracy is already broken.In fact, some welcome the prospect of breaking it completely and starting anew with something different, possibly a version of our political system from a time when it was less democratic — before we expanded the pool of participants.In Tim Alberta’s new book, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory,” he explains that many evangelical Christians have developed, in the words of the rightist Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, an “under siege” mentality that has allowed them to embrace Trump, whose decadent curriculum vitae runs counter to many of their stated values. It allows them to employ Trump as muscle in their battle against a changing America.This kind of thinking gives license — or turns a blind eye — to Trump’s authoritarian impulses.And while these authoritarian inklings may be more visible on the political right, they can also sneak in on the left.You could also argue that President Biden, whose approval numbers are languishing, is being punished by some because he isn’t an authoritarian and therefore isn’t able to govern by fiat: Many of his initiatives — voter protections, police reform, student loan forgiveness — were blocked by conservatives. Could he have fought harder in some of these cases? I believe so. But in the end, legislation is the province of Congress; presidents are bound by constitutional constraints.Trump surely appeals to those who want a president who’ll simply bulldoze through that bureaucracy, or at least expresses contempt for it and is willing to threaten it.Furthermore, Trump’s chances will probably be helped by the portion of the electorate misjudging the very utility of voting. There are still too many citizens who think of a vote, particularly for president, as something to throw to a person they like rather than being cast for the candidate and party more likely to advance the policies they need.And there are too many who think that a vote should be withheld from a more preferable candidate as punishment for not delivering every single thing on their wish lists — that choosing not to vote at all is a sensible act of political protest rather than a relinquishing of control to others. Abstinence doesn’t empower; it neuters.If you want a democracy to thrive, the idea that voting is a choice is itself an illusion. Voting is about survival, and survival isn’t a choice. It’s an imperative. It’s an instinct.It’s a tool one uses for self-advancement and self-preservation. It’s an instrument you use to decrease chances of harm and increase chances of betterment. It is naïve to use it solely to cosign an individual’s character; not to say that character doesn’t count — it does — but rather that its primacy is a fallacy.Voting isn’t just an expression of your worldview but also a manifestation of your insistence on safety and security.And to top it off, as Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California told me over the weekend, the Obama coalition that Biden will rely on in 2024 is “under a lot of stress” with the issue of the Israel-Hamas war, and that coalition can be mended by “a foreign policy that is rooted in the recognition of human rights,” which includes “taking seriously the calls for a neutral cease-fire and the end to violence.”On Tuesday, Biden warned that Israel risks losing international support because of “indiscriminate bombing,” but he has yet to endorse a cease-fire.With Republicans beaconing authoritarianism, and without an intact Obama coalition to thwart it, our democracy hangs by a thread.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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