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      Fearing a New Shellacking, Democrats Rush for Economic Message

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      Democratic candidates, facing what increasingly looks like a reckoning in two weeks, are struggling to find a closing message on the economy that acknowledges the deep uncertainty troubling the electorate while making the case that they, not the Republicans, hold the solutions.For some time, the party’s candidates and strategists have debated whether to hit inflation head on or to heed warnings that any shift toward an economic message would be ending the campaign on the strongest possible Republican ground. Since midsummer, when the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, Democrats had hoped that preserving the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion and castigating Republican extremism could get them past the worst inflation in 40 years.That is looking increasingly like wishful thinking.On Monday, Democrats unveiled new messages that appeared to switch tacks, incorporating achievements of the past two years with expressions of sympathy on the economy and dire warnings for what Republicans might bring.Former Representative Steve Israel, who headed the House Democrats’ campaign arm in a strong cycle of 2012 and weak one in 2014, said the dispute over how to address voters’ economic distress was essentially being resolved in favor of trying to accomplish a political feat that he said would be the trickiest he has ever seen: Democrats would continue to hammer Republicans on abortion and their ties to former President Donald J. Trump to boost turnout among their core supporters, while simultaneously trying to win over undecided voters whose biggest concerns are inflation and crime.“There was a narrative at one point that this was a Roe v. Wade election,” said Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, whose district, newly drawn to lean Republican, has made him one of the most endangered Democratic incumbents in the House. “I never thought it was going to be that simple.”On Friday, four veteran Democratic strategists published a piece in The American Prospect, the liberal magazine, that pleaded with Democrats to find a new message that acknowledges the pain of rising prices and answers voter concerns. To do that, they argued, candidates need to convey their legislative successes while setting up culprits other than themselves: Republicans who voted against popular measures like capping the price of insulin, and wealthy corporations that are jacking up prices and reaping more profits.Voters “want to know you understand what is going on in their lives,” the strategists wrote. “They want to know you are helping with their No. 1 problem and have a plan. They want to know the difference between Democrats and Republicans when they cast their votes.” The piece was written by Patrick Gaspard, president of the liberal Center for American Politics; Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake, veteran Democratic pollsters; and Mike Lux, a senior White House aide under President Bill Clinton.Ms. Lake, in an interview on Saturday, said Democratic strategists were “extremely concerned” that the wave of support the party saw over the summer was evaporating at the worst possible time. But she insisted there was time, with barely two weeks to go, to correct course.“A lot of candidates aren’t really clear about what the economic message is,” she said. “What we need to do is set up a more vivid contrast. People are getting more pessimistic about the economy.”To some Democrats, liberals and moderates alike, the reluctance of frontline candidates to talk up the party’s achievements has been maddening. Faiz Shakir, a longtime political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive mainstay from Vermont, called a campaign built around abortion and former President Donald J. Trump “political malpractice.”Representative Nancy Pelosi during a news conference on the Inflation Reduction Act.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesIn two years, the party has passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, a generous tax credit for parents that brought child poverty to historic lows, legislation that made good on the popular, longstanding promise to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, and the biggest investment in clean energy in history — all achievements that could be framed as helping people cope with rising prices.An ad launched on Monday by a Democratic super PAC in the Minnesota district of moderate Representative Angie Craig makes that point. And Mr. Sanders pressed it on Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying Republicans have said little about what they would do, and what they have said — like forcing cuts to entitlements like Medicare and Social Security and extending Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — would be unpopular, make the problem worse, or both.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.A G.O.P. Advantage: Republicans appear to be gaining an edge in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the mood of the electorate has shifted.Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is challenging J.D. Vance, has turned the state into perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground.Losing Faith in the System: As democracy erodes in Wisconsin, many of the state’s citizens feel powerless. But Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” Mr. Sanders said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.”But for the party in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, finding an effective message will be difficult, if not impossible. Republicans are evincing no fears of any Democratic shifts.“Democrats are out of time and out of solutions when it comes to fixing the rising costs they handed voters — now they’re going to pay the price at the ballot box,” said Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans.In the 2010 midterms, then-President Barack Obama barnstormed the country with a message that Republicans had driven the country’s economy into a ditch, and Democrats had pulled the car out. Then voters delivered what Mr. Obama himself called a “shellacking,” giving Republicans 63 total seats in the House and seven in the Senate, the largest shift since 1948.David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief political adviser, recalled telling the president-elect in 2008 that Democrats would face a reckoning in 2010 after two successive wave elections and the most dire financial crisis since the Depression. After Democrats passed a huge economic stimulus bill, other economic measures like legislation to help consumers trade in their “clunker” cars for more efficient models, and a landmark regulation of Wall Street, they could say they had made progress on the economy.“But people didn’t feel the car was out of the ditch yet,” Mr. Axelrod said, “and they were looking to the guy who was in there now.”The lesson of 2010 was not to avoid the subject but to acknowledge the pain and set up a choice. Two years later, with the economic shock of the financial crisis still lingering, the Obama campaign made fighting for the middle class the central message of a re-election bid against a Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, who was painted as the essence of the out-of-touch plutocrat.“It was never going to work to not talk about the economy,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s sort of like, ‘How was the play otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln?’”If voter anguish in 2022 is similar to 2010, the economic issues are different. Unemployment is at record lows in several states. The issue is more a shortage of workers than a shortage of jobs. Wage growth is robust. But inflation — which lends itself to an attendant fear of the future and pervasive sense of falling behind — is a particularly destabilizing force. It helped topple Liz Truss, the British prime minister, after only six chaotic weeks, and helped usher in an Italian government that descends from Mussolini’s fascism.Ms. Truss’s support collapsed after her conservative economic plan of tax cuts skewed to the rich sent financial markets in a tailspin. The British pound also sank to near record lows against the dollar, and economists warned of still worse inflation. Representative Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat from California, said Democrats needed to harness that experience to point out that Republican leaders have a similar economic plan if they take control of Congress.“The Republicans are running on an explicit promise of extending Trump’s tax cuts,” he said. “We have to frame the election as a choice on the economy.”Mr. Khanna was campaigning for Democrats in South Carolina on Saturday. He said the party’s candidates needed to answer the inflation question by hammering home the argument that Republican fiscal policies translate to tax cuts for the wealthy and sending jobs overseas.“We’ve got to do a better job having a clear economic message,” Mr. Khanna said. “I don’t think we can say, ‘Woe is me. Gas prices are going up.’”But Republicans, out of power, with no responsibility for much of the legislation of the Biden era, have a ready answer, which they have used with success: All those “achievements” created the inflation problem, by stoking consumer demand at a time when supply could not keep up. The U.S. economy was not prepared for a rapid shift from fossil fuels, their argument goes, so Democratic efforts to address climate change sent gas prices soaring. And Democratic promises for still more government assistance will only keep prices rising.Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican in an unexpectedly competitive re-election fight, has taken to quoting the Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist Milton Friedman on inflation repeatedly: “Consumers don’t produce it. Producers don’t produce it. The trade unions don’t produce it. Foreign sheikhs don’t produce it. Oil imports don’t produce it. What produces it is too much government spending.”That may be oversimplified in today’s strange economy. Some price increases were triggered by supply chains snarled by the pandemic that created pent-up consumer demand after periods of confinement and shuttered factories and shipping industries that were slow to return to peak production. Tight energy supplies and ensuing gas price increases are far more attributable to the war in Ukraine than any domestic energy legislation. Inflation is a global problem that is worse in Europe and Britain than in the United States.A gas station in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.Aimee Dilger/ReutersBut most economists do believe some Democratic bills — especially the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — exacerbated the problem. The $1,400 checks that most American households received in 2021 have been forgotten. Their contribution to an overheated consumer economy has not.The latest Republican attack ads hit inflation and economic uncertainty hard and lay the blame on Democratic malfeasance, not the complexities of international commerce and conflict.“Democrats spent two years completely ignoring the country’s single-most pressing issue because they have nothing to say. They know their policies made inflation worse and they own this economic tsunami,” said Dan Conston, head of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful super PAC aligned with the House Republican leadership.Mr. Axelrod said the Democrats’ secret weapon could be their opponents. For all the campaign ads harping on economic issues, many Republican candidates are using extreme language to spotlight more contentious issues: national abortion legislation, denying the validity of the 2020 election, and impeaching President Biden. Given some of the loudest voices in the G.O.P. seem uninterested in economic struggles, voters may not see the opposition party as a credible alternative.But, Ms. Lake said, the Democrats need to make that case.“There’s time; there’s money,” she said. “We’re going to be spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising in the next two weeks, and there’s vulnerability on the Republican side, but only if we articulate the contrast.” More

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      Murkowski Says She Will Rank Peltola First on Her Ballot in Alaska

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      ANCHORAGE — Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a centrist Republican facing a tough re-election campaign, plans on ranking Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, first on her ballot this November, crossing party lines to back the incumbent in her race to serve a full term in the House.Sitting in a quiet backstage corner behind exhibitions and vendors at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention this weekend, Ms. Murkowski confirmed to The New York Times on Saturday her support for Ms. Peltola, who earlier this year overcame a chaotic field of four dozen candidates to finish the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term after he died in March.Ms. Murkowski declined to say whether or how she would rank Ms. Peltola’s challengers: Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor and vice-presidential candidate, or Nicholas Begich III, a conservative member of an Alaskan liberal dynasty, both registered Republican candidates, or Chris Bye, a libertarian. Under Alaska’s new ranked-choice system, voters can rank their preferred candidates, which are counted until at least one candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote.Ms. Murkowski brushed off the significance of her comment, describing it as “Lisa being honest” and adding that she was primarily focused on her own race, where she is fending off Kelly Tshibaka, a right-wing challenger endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump and the state’s Republican Party. Ms. Murkowski has also retained broad support from Alaska Native voters in the state, and they proved crucial to her write-in campaign in 2010. (Ms. Peltola told The Washington Post she also planned on voting for Ms. Murkowski, and they posed together for a photo at the convention.)“Alaskans are going to go through the same process that I am, which is evaluating people, looking at their values and whether they represent them, and they will make that determination going forward,” Ms. Murkowski said.But the comment underscored the broad coalition Ms. Peltola is assembling in her bid to remain the sole representative for the state’s 734,000 people, after being sworn in last month as the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. At the convention, Ms. Peltola was feted with raucous cheers and emotional prayer songs and tributes, as attendees rang cowbells and waved cutouts of her face at the very mention of her name.“We are in Mary’s house, and I know this,” Ms. Palin proclaimed at a candidate forum at the convention. “Doggone it, I never have anything, like, to gripe about — I just wish she’d convert on over to the other party.”Ms. Palin, while quick to lavish Ms. Peltola, her longtime friend, with praise, made no mention of Mr. Begich, who also appeared and who siphoned away some conservative voters in the primary. More

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      Fetterman’s Debate Challenges: Selling Policies and Proving He’s Fit to Serve

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      WASHINGTON — When John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, faces his Republican opponent in a high-stakes debate on Tuesday night, he will face twin challenges: making the case for his policies while convincing voters he is healthy enough to serve.The debate, the first and only in a race that could determine whether Democrats keep control of the Senate, will look different than any other. Two 70-inch monitors above the heads of the moderators — scrolling the text of their questions, as well as transcribing the answers, attacks and ripostes of the Republican, Dr. Mehmet Oz — will be visible to TV watchers whenever a camera pans to the moderators.Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, needs the accommodations because the stroke he had in May left him with an auditory processing disorder, a condition that affects the brain’s ability to filter and interpret sounds, his primary care doctor said last week. He uses closed captioning to follow conversations. Sometimes his speech is halting. Sometimes he stumbles over his words. But he has “no work restrictions,” the doctor said.Democrats say this makes him seem relatable. Disability rights activists say Mr. Fetterman has been a victim of prejudice from Republicans and reporters who focus more on his health than the issues. But Mr. Fetterman — who also has a heart condition that his cardiologist says was exacerbated by his failure to seek care and take medicine — was cagey about answering health questions in the early months of his campaign, which has left him open to bipartisan criticism about a lack of transparency.“He handled the issue badly at first because he was evasive for months, and that’s changed,” said Shanin Specter, a politically active Philadelphia lawyer (and the son of former Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania), who said he is not supporting either candidate. “He should be more worried about the electorate’s concerns about his evasion than about his capacity.”The race pits Mr. Fetterman, a tall, tattooed figure who favors hoodies and shorts and casts himself as a working man, against Dr. Oz, a former TV celebrity — and newcomer to Pennsylvania residency — who was scolded by senators in 2014 for using his TV show to promote foods and dietary supplements that falsely promised weight loss. Dr. Oz has been endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, who has said his long television run was proof of his political viability.The general election contest has tightened in recent days, as once-skeptical Republican voters fall in line with Dr. Oz. Polls show Mr. Fetterman’s solid lead has nearly vanished this month.Dr. Mehmet Oz’s campaign spent months taunting and openly mocking Mr. Fetterman as mentally unfit to hold office.Laurence Kesterson/Associated PressThe Oz campaign spent months taunting and openly mocking Mr. Fetterman as mentally unfit to hold office. But now, amid a social media backlash from some voters as well as disability rights activists, Dr. Oz and his allies are shifting course. They have insisted the debate will be about policies, not health.“I don’t think that viewers are tuning into this debate to learn about John Fetterman’s health status,” said Barney Keller, a senior strategist for Dr. Oz. “I think they’ll tune into the debate to learn about the contrast between the candidates on the issues.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.A G.O.P. Advantage: Republicans appear to be gaining an edge in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the mood of the electorate has shifted.Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is challenging J.D. Vance, has turned the state into perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground.Losing Faith in the System: As democracy erodes in Wisconsin, many of the state’s citizens feel powerless. But Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.Mr. Fetterman has long sought to turn the Oz campaign’s attacks on his health to his advantage. “Recovering from a stroke in public isn’t easy,” he recently wrote on Twitter. “But in January, I’m going to be much better — and Dr. Oz will still be a fraud.”Still, Democrats worry that any off-key moment by Mr. Fetterman could go viral and affect the outcome of the race.“We are prepared for Oz’s allies and right-wing media to circulate malicious viral videos after the debate that try to paint John in a negative light because of awkward pauses, missing some words, and mushing other words together,” Rebecca Katz, Mr. Fetterman’s senior communications adviser, and Brendan McPhillips, his campaign manager, wrote in a memo on Monday.Although Mr. Fetterman has sat for one-on-one interviews with news outlets using closed captioning, the debate will move much faster — with cross-talk and interruptions — and it is unclear how the technology that Mr. Fetterman relies on will keep up, and how he will respond.His auditory processing issues mean that he typically avoids situations when voices and noise come from multiple directions. He has held no free-for-all meetings with voters or a gaggle of reporters..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Ahead of the debate, the Fetterman campaign sought to lower expectations. “John is five months post-stroke and Oz has spent the last two decades literally in a TV studio; if there’s a home-field advantage, it’s definitely his,’’ said Ms. Katz, who is overseeing his debate preparations.In an earlier debate during the Democratic primary race that predated Mr. Fetterman’s stroke, he was considered the least verbally dexterous of the three candidates, though he went on to win the nomination easily.“Please remember that John did not get where he is by winning debates, or being a polished speaker,” Ms. Katz said. “He got here because he connects with Pennsylvanians.”Mr. Fetterman, who had a stroke days before the Democratic primary in May, later had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted to address atrial fibrillation — an irregular heart rhythm — which was the underlying cause of the stroke. In June, the campaign released a statement from Mr. Fetterman’s cardiologist, Dr. Ramesh R. Chandra, that said the candidate also has cardiomyopathy, a weakened heart muscle.In a letter released last week, Mr. Fetterman’s primary care doctor, Dr. Clifford Chen, said he is “recovering well” from his stroke. He is continuing to get speech therapy, which experts say is standard treatment for an auditory processing disorder. Experts also say such disorders often improve with time, and do not render a person unable to hold public office.Research shows that people who have had strokes improve more rapidly in the beginning, said Dr. Clinton Wright, director of the division of clinical research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. But Mr. Wright said the data show that patients can continue to improve a year after the stroke.“This is a teachable moment,” said Jean Hall, director of the Institute for Health and Disability Policy Studies at the University of Kansas. “My question would be, What if his stroke had resulted in him being deaf and he needed a sign language interpreter?”Medical experts say that is an apt comparison, though auditory processing disorders have nothing to do with hearing. Rather, people with such disorders have a hard time processing small sound differences in words, because their brains don’t hear sounds in the usual way. Closed captioning makes conversations easier to follow.“Auditory processing has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence or the ideas in their head or their thoughts,” said Dr. Peter Turkeltaub, a neurologist and director of the Cognitive Recovery Lab at Georgetown University Medical Center. “It’s just the input and output: Can you connect those ideas to the words you are hearing, and then can you take the ideas and connect them to your own words?”People with disabilities have long held public office. Franklin D. Roosevelt used a wheelchair, although he tried to hide it from the public. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Representative Jim Langevin of Rhode Island also use wheelchairs.But visible physical limitations are easier to explain to voters, said Lisa Iezzoni, a professor at Harvard Medical School who researches health disparities on people with disabilities. Because voters can’t clearly see Mr. Fetterman’s disability, however, he must fight “this perception that his mind was altered in some way.”In Mr. Fetterman’s first live television interview since his stroke, which was broadcast on Oct. 11 by NBC News, the reporter Dasha Burns told viewers that before the formal interview, Mr. Fetterman seemed not to follow her attempts at small talk without his monitor.“Quite frankly, it really infuriated me,” said Judy Heumann, a longtime leader in the disability rights movement, who helped pass the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990 and later served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “Voters should be looking at what he’s doing and what he’s saying, and not whether he uses a communications device.”Over the weekend, Dr. Oz steered the conversation away from Mr. Fetterman’s health toward his policies. “I just want him to show up on Tuesday so we can talk to Pennsylvania about our policies, and let them see how extreme his positions have been,” he told Fox News.The Fetterman campaign believes that Dr. Oz and his allies in the right-wing news media went too far in calling attention for months to Mr. Fetterman’s sometimes halting speech and fumbling for words. They say it might work to Mr. Fetterman’s advantage, by lowering expectations for his performance.“Even if he stumbles on a few words here and there, I don’t think it’s a big deal to voters,” said Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist. “There’s a lot more opportunity than risk for John Fetterman in this debate.”Dr. Iezzoni, the Harvard professor, said the debate would be a referendum on voters as well. The World Health Organization, she said, has described having a disability as a “universal human experience.” Seeing Mr. Fetterman use closed captioning — and answer questions in a halting, not necessarily fluent way — will test the public’s tolerance for differences, she said.“It will be interesting to know whether the public has empathy for human frailty, which we all experience in some way or another,” she said. “Will they be willing to look past it or do they demand perfection?”Katie Glueck More

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      Frustrated With Polling? Pollsters Are, Too

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      Mr. Bui is the deputy graphics director for Opinion. From 2015 to 2022, he was a graphics editor for the Upshot. Pollsters are holding their breath. Their time-tested method of randomly dialing up people isn’t working like it used to. Voter turnout in the last two national elections was a blowout compared to years past. […] More

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      This Wasn’t the Vibe Shift Democrats Had in Mind

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      Gail Collins: Bret, as you know, I always try to avoid discussing foreign affairs — never been my specialty — but I do want to ask you about the British, um, situation.Bret Stephens: You mean the country that seems to have switched places with Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, politically speaking, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s Argentina, economically speaking, and Groucho Marx’s Freedonia, comically speaking? Go on.Gail: The Tory prime minister, Liz Truss, set a record for failure before she slunk out of office last week. She came into 10 Downing Street promising to cut taxes on the rich, and she did, and she … nose-dived.Any message there for the rest of us?Bret: When Margaret Thatcher was pressed on whether she would switch course on her free-market policies, she famously said, “The lady’s not for turning.” She went on to be one of the longest-serving prime ministers in British history. Truss turned against her own policies almost immediately and wound up being turned out of office almost immediately.So the first lesson is that if you announce a policy, have the guts to stick to it or face political destruction.Gail: Well, in this case I think we’d have seen political destruction either way. The tax cut idea was disastrous.Bret: I’d say it was the execution, not the idea: Tax cuts usually stimulate a sluggish economy. The second lesson is that Britain’s economic mess isn’t the result of a month and a half of Truss but 12 years of big-government Toryism under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Britain just isn’t an attractive country to live or invest in anymore, particularly after it made the foolish decision to leave the European Union.Bottom line: Have the courage of your convictions and the wit to defend them. Your take?Gail: That cutting taxes on the rich isn’t the magic answer to economic problems. I believe in a lot of what you’d call big government, but sooner or later, you’ve gotta pay for stuff.Bret: Gail Collins, fiscal conservative …Gail: Speaking of debt, President Biden’s plan to start his program of canceling student loans to poor and middle-class borrowers is facing a slew of Republican court challenges.I’m rooting for him to win the fight — a matter on which I believe we disagree.Bret: Totally against loan forgiveness. We’ve increased the national debt from $20 trillion to $31 trillion in barely five years and now higher interest rates are going to make it more expensive to service that debt. And we are supposed to write off $400 billion in college loans — including to couples making up to $250,000 — without even giving Congress an opportunity to weigh in? It’s bad policy and worse politics.Gail: Let me quickly point out that many of the folks who are spending their lives paying off big student loans signed up for the deal when they were little more than kids, some not ready for the programs they were recruited into, and some who were assured that their major in medieval history would lead to high-income jobs that would make it easy to pay off the debt. The system did not work.Bret: I probably shouldn’t say this, but anyone who thought, at any age, that a degree in medieval history would lead to a life of riches needs stupidity forgiveness, not loan forgiveness.I guess we’ll find out soon enough if the courts even allow the plan to go through, though I did find it interesting that Amy Coney Barrett effectively sided with the administration on this issue. Nice to see a Trump nominee show some independence.Gail: Agreed. Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting to ask you about the Senate races. The whole world is watching! Or at least the politically obsessed part of America. Anything grabbing your interest?Bret: The most interesting Senate race is in Ohio. I really don’t see Tim Ryan beating J.D. Vance, but the fact that he’s even competitive in a state Trump won in 2020 by eight points suggests he’s found a formula for how Democrats win back white, working-class votes from the Republicans. Mainly that means running as far away as possible from Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the progressive wing of his party.How about you?Gail: Since Cincinnati is my hometown, I’ve been watching Ohio pretty intently. I think Ryan has a chance — he’s in a pretty red state, but one that’s elected Democrats before. Including the state’s other senator, Sherrod Brown, who’s considered liberal.Bret: True. And just by outperforming expectations Ryan is forcing Republicans to pour a ton of money in the race just to hold the seat.Gail: Plus Ryan is running against a truly terrible candidate. Vance seems to have an unending supply of mini-scandals about his financial dealings.Bret: I thought Vance did fine in the debate last week. What bothers me about him aren’t his financial dealings. It’s the crass opportunism it took for him to flip almost overnight from Never Trumper to MAGA Republican. And the fact that he represents the isolationist wing of the conservative movement. Hard to overstate how dangerous that is in the face of the new axis of evil in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing.Gail: Also interested in New Hampshire, where the Democratic incumbent, Maggie Hassan, seemed doomed in a Republican-leaning year, given that she won her last election by only about 1,000 votes.But her opponent, the retired general Don Bolduc, has been another awful candidate — all over the map, trying to be a right-wing stalwart in the primaries and now metamorphosing into a moderate who wants to raise Social Security taxes on the wealthy.Who would you vote for there?Bret: Hassan, no question. She’s a good senator, willing to work across the aisle. I would have supported the Republican governor, Chris Sununu, if he’d decided to run, but apparently the sanity gene runs too strongly in his family so he stayed out of the race. And Bolduc isn’t just an election denier or even an election-denier denier — in that he retracted his denialism after he won the primary. It’s that he subsequently denied that he denied being a denier. Which means he should be denied the election.Gail: Bret, either you are the most fair-minded commentator in the country or this is yet another marker for how far the Republican Party has sunk. Even its defenders can’t defend many of this year’s candidates.I’m inclined to say both are true, by the way.Bret: Thanks! Can we switch to some of the races for governor? In New York the Republican candidate, Lee Zeldin, seems to be zooming up in the polls.Gail: Aauugh. If this was a New York Republican like your old fave George Pataki, I’d be unshocked — Gov. Kathy Hochul hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. But Zeldin is terrible! If you want to get a really good feel for this contest, read our editorial board’s very powerful Hochul endorsement.Bret: Zeldin is doing well because New Yorkers are doing badly. We have the highest overall tax burden in the country if you count income, property, sales and excise taxes, but we are very far from having the best school districts, the best infrastructure or the safest streets. The only area in which we lead the country is in losing people to other states. And one-party rule is bad for governance. There are things I don’t like about Zeldin, starting with his proximity to Donald Trump, but I’ll vote for him next month.Gail: Looking elsewhere — how about Arizona? The race pits Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, against Kari Lake, a Republican TV personality. I certainly think Hobbs would make the better governor. But if Lake wins I could see her turning into a possible vice-presidential candidate on a Trump ticket.Bret: Our news-side colleague Jack Healy wrote a devastating report about Hobbs, whose personal strengths apparently don’t include campaigning. She refuses to debate her opponent on the grounds that Lake is an election denier, which seems to me like an especially good reason to debate. My bet is that the governorship stays in Republican hands — and that it might push Blake Masters to victory in his Senate race against the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly.Gail: It was a great piece, which did note that Lake refuses to answer any questions from the state’s major newspaper.Bret: Bigger picture, Gail, I suspect it’s going to be a pretty good November for Republicans, despite all of the lousy candidates they’ve put forward. Do you see this as just part of a natural cycle in which the incumbent party usually does badly in midterms? Or would you put some blame on the way Biden has handled the presidency so far?Gail: In a world full of war, energy shortages, health crises and political polarization, our president is doing a decent job of keeping things calm. Wish he had a more electric personality, but we’ve certainly learned there are worse things than a chief executive who isn’t great on camera.It is true that the incumbent party usually does poorly during the midterms. Fortunately, the Republicans under Trump have nominated so many terrible candidates that there’s a chance the results won’t be quite as dire for Biden’s side.What do you think? And more important, which side are you rooting for?Bret: I’m rooting for Biden to succeed because we can’t allow Trump to come back, Vladimir Putin to win or the country to come even more unglued and unhinged than it already is.Of course my way of rooting for success is to scold Biden nonstop whenever I think he’s screwing up. It’s a formula my mom has been using with me for nearly 49 years. She’s confident that in a few years more, she might even succeed.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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      Zeldin Agrees to Debate Hochul This Week in N.Y. Governor’s Race

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      ALBANY, N.Y. — Closing the chapter on a lengthy and bitter exchange, the Republican candidate for governor, Representative Lee Zeldin, has agreed to debate Gov. Kathy Hochul this week.The debate — the only one before the general election on Nov. 8 — will be held at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and hosted by Spectrum News NY1.That even one debate would be held has been a matter of some contention. Mr. Zeldin had previously challenged Ms. Hochul to a series of debates, but she agreed to this single one.Mr. Zeldin refused to accept the date in protest, noting that because it came so late, many voters would already have received and filled out absentee ballots. But Ms. Hochul held firm, and on Sunday, Mr. Zeldin agreed to appear.When asked on Sunday on Channel 7’s “Up Close” about her refusal to agree to additional dates, Ms. Hochul noted that a single debate was not unusual for New York governor’s races.“I also want to point out, I’m still running the state of New York government. I don’t have time to stand on a street corner screaming into the wind,” Ms. Hochul said.Previous governors have also played hardball with debate scheduling — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was notoriously reluctant to debate challengers. But unlike previous incumbents Ms. Hochul has not yet been elected to the office of governor, having ascended from the lieutenant governorship only after Mr. Cuomo resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment.Mr. Zeldin has repeatedly accused Ms. Hochul of avoiding the debates to avoid answering questions about her record, a line of attack he reprised in his statement Sunday. Even so, he said, did not intend to “let her off the hook.”Jerrel Harvey, a spokesman for the Hochul campaign, welcomed the news that Mr. Zeldin would debate, saying: “Governor Hochul looks forward to highlighting her strong record of delivering results and exposing Lee Zeldin’s dangerous lies.”The debate will be held at Pace University in Manhattan and will be available to New York viewers on Spectrum news channels and will be moderated by Susan Arbetter and Errol Lewis. More

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      Pelosi and Sanders Press Democrats’ Case, and More News From the Sunday Talk Shows

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      Democratic Party leaders turned toward inflation and the economy after a summer focus on abortion. Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican, said the G.O.P. would seek spending cuts.With less than three weeks to go before Election Day and polls showing Republicans gaining ground, Democrats dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to make their case for control of Congress. They focused on inflation and wages, a notable shift after months in which they leaned on abortion rights.Widespread anger at the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled Democrats through the summer, lifting them in special House races and raising their hopes of defying the historical pattern of midterm elections, in which the party in power usually loses seats. But polls suggest voters are prioritizing other issues.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emphasized Social Security and Medicare on Sunday, pointing to Republicans’ calls for spending cuts, while adding that they still considered abortion an important issue that would motivate many voters.“The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security — health blackmail — to lifting the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have said they would like to review Medicare and Social Security every five years. They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.”Mr. Sanders, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” rejected the argument that Democrats were to blame for inflation, noting that the inflation rate was also very high in Britain and the European Union. He argued that Republicans had put forward no workable plans to combat it.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.” More