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      N.Y. Governor Poll Shows Hochul Leading James and Williams

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      A Marist College poll found that voters favored Gov. Kathy Hochul over potential primary rivals, including the state attorney general, Letitia James.When Kathy Hochul unexpectedly became governor of New York two months ago, she was immediately faced with two challenges: To learn to lead a state traversing a pandemic and simultaneously build a statewide campaign operation to run for a full term next year.Ms. Hochul immediately began courting donors and hiring campaign staff, as she faced the prospects of potentially running against Letitia James, the state attorney general, whose office led the sexual harassment investigation that ultimately led to the demise of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and to Ms. Hochul’s ascension.Ms. Hochul’s efforts appear to be paying off: A Marist College poll released on Tuesday found that Ms. Hochul would beat Ms. James and Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, if next year’s Democratic primary for governor were held today.The poll, the first significant survey to gauge New Yorkers on the 2022 Democratic race for governor, also found that Ms. Hochul would win the primary if Mr. Cuomo, the former three-term governor who resigned in disgrace in August, decided to run.In a hypothetical three-way primary, 44 percent of New York Democrats said they would vote for Ms. Hochul, 28 percent for Ms. James and 15 percent for Mr. Williams, while 13 percent said they were unsure.In a four-way race that included Mr. Cuomo, 36 percent of Democratic voters said they favored Ms. Hochul, while 24 percent said they would vote for Ms. James, 19 percent for Mr. Cuomo and 9 percent for Mr. Williams; 12 percent said they were unsure.The poll did not include other potential Democratic candidates who are thought to be considering a run for governor, including Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Representative Thomas Suozzi of Long Island.Ms. Hochul, who was elevated from lieutenant governor after Mr. Cuomo stepped down following allegations of sexual harassment, is so far the only Democrat to formally declare her candidacy. More

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      How Democrats Can Save Themselves

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      Normally the political party that loses an election goes through a period of soul-searching and vigorous internal debate, while the winning party embraces a smug certainty about its own inevitable multigenerational dominance. In 2021, though, the roles are reversed.The widespread belief that Donald Trump was, in some sense, the real winner of an election that he lost has succeeded in pre-empting a Republican debate about why the Democrats captured the White House last year. Meanwhile, the Democrats, despite their control of the Congress and the presidency, are increasingly the ones arguing as though they’re already in the wilderness.The Democrats’ angst strikes me as a healthy development for liberalism. One problem with the emergency thinking that Trump inspires in his opponents — and one reason to resist it — is that it occludes real understanding of the political conditions that put him in power, and that might do so again. This is what you saw happen to the Democrats after 2016: The sense of being lightning-struck sent the center-left wandering into a maze of conspiracies, a haunted wood where villains like Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg loomed larger than the swing voters they had lost and savior figures like Robert Mueller were supposed to unmake Trump’s power for them.Only the party’s left, its Bernie Sanders wing, fully developed a more normal theory of the 2016 defeat, trying to understand Obama-Trump voters in the context of globalization and deindustrialization as well as racism, fascism and Putinist dirty tricks. But this created a fundamental imbalance in the party’s conversation: With the Sanders faction trying to pull the party toward social democracy and the establishment acting as if its major challenges were Russian bots and nefarious Facebook memes, there was hardly anyone left to point out the ways that Democrats might be in danger of moving too far left — and the writers who did so were generally dismissed as dinosaurs.So it was up to Democratic voters to exert a rightward tug on their party — first by saving the party from the likely disaster of nominating the intelligentsia’s candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and ultimately by putting up a nominee, Joe Biden, whose long career as a moderate gave him some distance from the “Great Awokening” that swept liberal institutions in 2020.Now, though, with the increasing awareness that Bidenism is probably not a long-term strategy, we’re finally getting the fuller argument that should have broken out after 2016 — over what the Democrats can do, and whether they can do anything, to win over the working-class and rural voters alienated by the party’s increasingly rigorous progressive litmus tests.A key player in this argument is the pollster and analyst David Shor, whom my colleague Ezra Klein interviewed for a long essay last week, and who has emerged — after a temporary 2020 cancellation — as the leading spokesman for the pragmatic liberal critique of progressive zeal.This critique starts with a diagnosis: Democrats misread the meaning of Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, imagining that it proved that their multiracial coalition could win without downscale and rural white voters, when in fact Obama had beaten Mitt Romney precisely because of his relatively resilient support from those demographics, especially across the industrial Midwest. And this misreading was particularly disastrous because these voters have outsize influence in Senate races and the Electoral College, so losing them — and then beginning to lose culturally conservative minority voters as well — has left the Democrats with a structural disadvantage that will cost them dearly across the next decade absent some kind of clear strategic adjustment.From this diagnosis comes the prescription, so-called popularism, glossed by Klein as follows: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”You will note that this banal-seeming wisdom is not an ideological litmus test: Where left-wing ideas are popular, Shor Thought would have Democrats talk about them more. But where they are unpopular, especially with the kind of voters who hold the key to contested Senate races, Democrats need a way to defuse them or hold them at a distance.Thus a “popularist” candidate might be a thoroughgoing centrist in some cases, and in others a candidate running the way Bernie Sanders did in 2016, stressing the most popular ideas in the social-democratic tool kit. But in both cases such candidates would do everything in their power not to be associated with ideas like, say, police abolition or the suspension of immigration enforcement. Instead they would imitate the way Obama himself, in his first term, tried to finesse issues like immigration and same-sex marriage, sometimes using objectively conservative rhetoric and never getting way out ahead of public opinion.Which is easier said than done. For one thing, the Democratic Party’s activists have a different scale of power in the world of 2021 than the world of 2011, and the hypothetical “popularist” politician can’t make their influence and expectations just go away. For another, as my colleague Nate Cohn points out, Obama in 2011 was trying to keep white working-class voters in the Democratic fold, while the popularist politician in 2022 or 2024 would be trying to win them back from the G.O.P. — a much harder thing to achieve just by soft-pedaling vexatious issues.At the very least a Democratic strategy along these lines would probably need to go further along two dimensions. First, it would need to overtly attack the new progressivism — not on every front but on certain points where the language and ideas of the progressive clerisy are particularly alienated from ordinary life.For instance, popularist Democrats would not merely avoid a term like “Latinx,” which is ubiquitous in official progressive discourse and alien to most U.S. Hispanics; they would need to attack and even mock its use. (Obviously this is somewhat easier for the ideal popularist candidate: an unwoke minority politician in the style of Eric Adams.)Likewise, a popularist candidate — ideally a female candidate — on the stump in a swing state might say something like: I want this to be a party for normal people, and normal people say mother, not “birthing person.”Instead of reducing the salience of progressive jargon, the goal would be to raise its salience in order to be seen to reject it — much as Donald Trump in 2016 brazenly rejected unpopular G.O.P. positions on entitlements that other Republican rivals were trying to merely soft-pedal.But then along with this rhetorical fire directed leftward, popularists would also need go further in addressing the actual policy concerns surrounding the issues they’re trying to defuse. Immigration is a major political problem for Democrats right now, for instance, not just because their activists have taken extreme positions on the issue, but because the border is a major policy problem: The effects of globalized travel and communication make it ever-easier for sudden migrant surges to overwhelm the system, and liberalism’s shift away from tough enforcement — or at least its professed desire to make that shift — creates extra incentives for those surges to happen under Democratic presidents.So in the long run — especially given climate change’s likely effect on mass migration — there is no way for Democrats to have a stable policy that’s pro-immigration under the law without first having a strategy to make the American border much more secure than it’s been under the Biden administration to date. How to do that humanely is a policy challenge, but if you really want to court voters for whom the issue matters, you have to take the challenge seriously — because the problem makes itself salient, and it isn’t going away.It’s worth nothing that even this combination — attack progressive excess, show Obama-Trump voters that you take their issues seriously — is still a somewhat defensive one. As Cohn notes, when Trump reoriented the Republican Party to win more working-class votes, he made a sweeping and dramatic — and yes, demagogic — case that he would be better than Hillary Clinton for their interests and their values. Democrats have specific ideas that poll well with these voters, but it’s not clear that even a sweeping “heartland revival” message could actually reverse the post-Trump shift.But even a strictly defensive strategy, one that just prevents more Hispanic voters from shifting to the Republicans and holds on to some of Biden’s modest Rust Belt gains, would buy crucial time for Democrats — time for a generational turnover that still favors them, and time to seize the opportunities that are always offered, in ways no data scientist can foretell, by unexpected events.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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      David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear

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      President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]That, at least, is what David Shor thinks. Shor started modeling elections in 2008, when he was a 16-year-old blogger, and he proved good at it. By 2012, he was deep inside President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, putting together the fabled “Golden Report,” which modeled the election daily. The forecast proved spookily accurate: It ultimately called the popular vote within one-tenth of a percentage point in every swing state but Ohio. Math-geek data analysts became a hot item for Democratic Party campaigns, and Shor was one of the field’s young stars, pioneering ways to survey huge numbers of Americans and experimentally test their reactions to messages and ads.But it was a tweet that changed his career. During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” Nonviolent protests, he noted, tended to help Democrats electorally. The numbers came from Omar Wasow, a political scientist who now teaches at Pomona College. But online activists responded with fury to Shor’s interjection of electoral strategy into a moment of grief and rage, and he was summarily fired by his employer, Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.A socially distanced arrangement for state delegates at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFreed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind, Shor was resurrected as the Democratic data guru who refused to soften an analysis the left often didn’t want to hear. He became ubiquitous on podcasts and Twitter, where Obama posts his analyses and pundits half-jokingly refer to themselves as being “Shor-pilled.” Politico reported that Shor has “an audience in the White House and is one of the most in-demand data analysts in the country,” calling his following “the cult of Shor.” Now he is a co-founder of and the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a progressive data science operation. “Obviously, in retrospect,” he told me, “it was positive for my career.”At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing.We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.”In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.Sit with that. Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate. You can see Shor’s work below. We’ve built a version of his model, in which you can change the assumptions and see how they affect Democrats’ projected Senate chances in 2022 and 2024. More

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      Can You Imagine Bill de Blasio as Governor? He Can.

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      A run for higher office by New York City’s mayor might be viewed skeptically across the state, but he says he wants to remain in public life.Mayor Bill de Blasio has begun to tell people privately that he plans to run for governor of New York next year, according to three people with direct knowledge of his conversations with fellow Democrats and donors.Mr. de Blasio, who has been a polarizing figure during his two terms in office, has also sounded out trusted former aides about their interest in working on a potential campaign, according to two people who are familiar with those contacts, and has made other overtures to labor leaders about a possible bid. His longtime pollster conducted a private survey to assess Mr. de Blasio’s appeal beyond New York City. And publicly, too, he has increasingly made it clear that he wants to remain in public life.“There’s a number of things I want to keep working on in this city, in this state,” Mr. de Blasio said last week, noting his interest in public health, early childhood education and combating income inequality. “That is going to be what I focus on when this mission is over. So, I want to serve. I’m going to figure out the right way to serve and the right time to serve.”Mr. de Blasio’s move toward a possible run for governor comes even as the city he now leads faces extraordinary challenges and an uncertain future, and should he enter what may be a crowded and well-financed field, he would face significant hurdles.His approval ratings in New York City have been low, according to the sparse polling that is publicly available, and he faces deep skepticism elsewhere in the state — an environment similar to the one he confronted, unsuccessfully, in his 2020 presidential bid. A run for governor would be contrary to the better judgment of even some people he considers allies, as well as that of many party leaders across the state.“Osama bin Laden is probably more popular in Suffolk County than Bill de Blasio,” said Rich Schaffer, the chairman of the county’s Democratic committee, who endorsed Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday. “De Blasio, I would say, would have zero support if not negative out here.”At a debate during New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary this year, the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they would accept Mr. de Blasio’s endorsement. Only one contender did so — a sign of the mayor’s standing in his own party.He could also face significant competition in the city, let alone the rest of the state. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who, like Mr. de Blasio, is from Brooklyn, is thought to be nearing a final decision concerning a possible campaign. Jumaane D. Williams, another Brooklyn Democrat and the city’s public advocate, has already begun exploring a potential run, and others in the party are also weighing whether to get into the race.Asked whether New York should have another white male governor — Ms. Hochul is the first woman to lead the state; Ms. James and Mr. Williams are Black, and Ms. James could be the first Black woman to govern any state in the country — Mr. de Blasio appeared to brush aside the question last week.“We need people of all backgrounds to be involved in government,” he said.His plans could change. Peter Ragone, the adviser who may be closest to Mr. de Blasio’s deliberations, insisted that the mayor had not made a determination.“The simple fact is that he hasn’t made any final decisions at all about what he’s doing next,” Mr. Ragone said. “The mayor believes in public service because he can do things like push universal pre-K and 3-K. That’s why millions of New Yorkers have voted for him in the past 12 years, to the dismay of political insiders.”Many New York Democrats are incredulous that Mr. de Blasio would run and, simultaneously, believe that he may do so, pointing to his failed presidential bid as proof that he has an appetite for challenging campaigns and a steadfast belief in his own political potential.Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive and unsuccessful candidate for governor in 2018, said that many of his fellow Republicans, as well as independent voters around the state, blamed Mr. de Blasio for the “rise in crime and the deterioration of the economic and social strength of New York City.”Even so, Mr. Molinaro, who said he gets along well with Mr. de Blasio, warned that it would be unwise to discount the mayor’s political prowess.“I would not underestimate his ability to develop a coalition within his party,” Mr. Molinaro said. “He’s very skilled at that.”Mr. de Blasio’s allies, too, note that in his mayoral runs, he assembled a diverse coalition in the nation’s largest city, with strong support from Black voters, although that dynamic is hardly guaranteed to transfer to a potentially crowded field in a statewide race.The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, said that he had spoken with Mr. de Blasio about a potential run recently but that the mayor had not indicated whether he had reached a final decision.“He has some standing in the progressive community, he has some standing in communities of color,” Mr. Sharpton said. “He should not be taken lightly.”Other veterans of New York politics were less interested in discussing the mayor’s future prospects.“I very seldom pass, but I don’t want to get involved in anything that would be negative,” said Charles B. Rangel, the former congressman from Harlem, after laughing when asked for his thoughts on a potential run by Mr. de Blasio. “And I cannot think of anything positive.” More

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      Democrats Lost the Most in Midwestern ‘Factory Towns’, Report Says

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      The party’s struggles in communities that saw declines in manufacturing and union jobs, and health care, could more than offset its gains in metropolitan areas.WASHINGTON — The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month.The party’s worsening performance in the region’s midsize communities — often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich. — poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns.Nationally and in the Midwest, Democratic gains in large metropolitan areas have offset their losses in rural areas. And while the party’s struggles in the industrial Midwest have been well-chronicled, the 82-page report explicitly links Democratic decline in the region that elected Donald J. Trump in 2016 to the sort of deindustrialization that has weakened liberal parties around the world.“We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don’t address those losses,” wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled “Factory Towns.”Mr. Martin wrote the report in conjunction with Mike Lux and David Wilhelm, fellow Democratic strategists who, like him, also have roots in the region and worked together on President Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign.For all the arresting data, vivid graphs and deepening red maps presented, Mr. Martin offers little guidance on how to reverse the trends. He does, however, offer a warning, one that Midwestern Democrats have been issuing since Mr. Trump’s victory five years ago.“If things continue to get worse for us in small and midsize, working-class counties, we can give up any hope of winning the battleground states of the industrial heartland,” writes Mr. Martin.Surveying ten states — the Great Lakes region as well as Missouri and Iowa — Mr. Martin laid out a set of stark figures.Comparing Barack Obama’s re-election to President Biden’s election last year, he notes that Democrats gained about 1.55 million votes in the big cities and suburbs of the region surveyed. In the same period, they lost about 557,000 votes in heavily rural counties.But in midsize and small counties, Democrats lost over 2.63 million votes between the two elections. Dubbing these communities “factory towns,” Mr. Martin separates them by midsize counties anchored around cities with a population of 35,000 or more and smaller counties that lean on manufacturing but do not have such sizable cities.Taken together, the changes illustrate the degree to which Mr. Obama relied upon the votes of working-class white voters to propel his re-election — and how much Mr. Biden leaned on suburbanites to offset his losses in working-class communities that had once been a pillar of the Democratic coalition.What alarms Mr. Martin, and many Democratic officials, is whether the party can sustain those gains in metropolitan areas. It’s uncertain, as he puts it, “if moderate suburban Republicans will continue to vote for Democrats when Trump is not on the ballot.”Democratic gains up and down the ballot in fast-growing Sun Belt states like Arizona and Georgia garnered significant attention last year. Yet Mr. Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency and Democrats couldn’t have flipped the Senate without victories in 2020 across the Great Lakes region.However, those wins proved more difficult than many pre-election polls concluded because of the G.O.P.’s continued strength in manufacturing communities. And, the report noted, these communities made up a significant portion of the region’s vote share. In Wisconsin, midsize and small manufacturing counties make up 58 percent of the statewide vote. In Michigan, half of the voting population is in these communities.This is where the decline in manufacturing has been most damaging to Democrats. The ten states included in the survey have lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs since the beginning of this century.In the small to midsize “factory town” counties in those states, where support for the Republican presidential nominee grew between 2012 and 2020, the losses were acute: More than 70 percent suffered declines in manufacturing jobs.The elimination of those jobs also led to declines in health care, according to data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.In the counties that suffered manufacturing losses and health care declines, Republicans surged between 2012 and 2020. Nearly half of the party’s gains in these states came in communities where there were both manufacturing cuts and worsening health care.Republicans also prospered in communities hit hard by the decline in manufacturing that were predominantly white. With fewer well-paying industry jobs, the power of local unions declined as well, silencing what was always the beating heart of Democratic political organizing in these areas. In 154 such counties, Democrats suffered a net loss of over 613,000 votes between the elections in 2016 and 2020.Perhaps most striking was the decline in union membership across the region.Nine of the 10 states included in the survey have accounted for 93 percent of the loss of union members nationwide in the last two decades. And just in the last 10 years, these states have lost 10 percent of their union membership — an average that is three times greater than nationally. More

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      The Once and Future Threat of Trump

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      Last fall, before the November election, Barton Gellman wrote an essay for The Atlantic sketching out a series of worst-case scenarios for the voting and its aftermath. It was essentially a blueprint for how Donald Trump could either force the country into a constitutional crisis or hold onto power under the most dubious of legal auspices, with the help of pliant Republican officials and potentially backed by military force.Shortly afterward I wrote a column responding, in part, to Gellman’s essay, making a counterargument that Trump wasn’t capable of pulling off the complex maneuvers that would be required for the darker scenarios to come to pass. Whatever Trump’s authoritarian inclinations or desires, I predicted, “any attempt to cling to power illegitimately will be a theater of the absurd.”That column was titled “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” Ever since Jan. 6, it’s been held up as an example of fatal naïveté or click-happy contrarianism, whereas Gellman’s article is regularly cited as a case of prophecy fulfilled. In alarmed commentary on Trumpism like Robert Kagan’s epic recent essay in The Washington Post, the assumption is that to have doubted the scale of the Trumpian peril in 2020 renders one incapable of recognizing the even greater peril of today. In a paragraph that links to my fatefully titled column, Kagan laments the fatal lure of Pollyannaism: “The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one.”One odd thing about the underlying argument here is that in certain ways it’s just a matter of emphasis. I don’t think we have “nothing to worry about” from Trump in 2024 and I didn’t argue that he wouldn’t try (emphasis on try) to overturn the election in 2020. I agree with Kagan that the success of Trump’s stolen election narrative may help him win the Republican nomination once again, and I agree with him, as well, that it would be foolish not to worry about some kind of chaos, extending to crisis or paralysis in Capitol Hill, should a Trump-Biden rematch turn out to be close.But emphasis matters a great deal. The Kagan thesis is that the Trump threat is existential, that Trump’s movement is ever more equivalent to 1930s fascism and that only some sort of popular front between Democrats and Romney Republicans can save the Republic from the worst. My thesis is that Trump is an adventurer of few consistent principles rather than a Hitler, that we’ve seen enough from watching him in power to understand his weaknesses and incapacities, and that his threat to constitutional norms is one of many percolating dangers in the United States today, not a singular danger that should organize all other political choices and suspend all other disagreements.To draw a parallel from the not-too-distant past, Kagan regards Trump the way he once regarded Saddam Hussein, whose regime he depicted as such a grave and unique threat that it made sense to organize American foreign policy around its removal. Whereas an alternative possibility is that just as Hussein’s threat to the American-led world order was real but ultimately overstated by supporters of the Iraq War, so, too, Trump is a dangerous man, both a species and agent of American degradation, who nevertheless doesn’t fit in Kagan’s absolutist 1930s categories.History may eventually reveal that Kagan, so wrong about the Iraq war, is now correct about the Trump wars. In that case, in some future of sectional breakdown or near-dictatorship, my own threat-deflating Trump-era punditry will deserve to be judged as harshly as Kagan’s Bush-era threat inflation.But that judgment is far from settled. Let’s consider those autumn of 2020 essays I started with. In hindsight, Gellman’s essay got Trump’s intentions absolutely right: He was right that Trump would never concede, right that Trump would reach for every lever to keep himself in power, right that Trump would try to litigate against late-counted votes and mail-in ballots, right that Trump would pressure state legislatures to overrule their voters, right that Trump’s final attention would be fixed on the vote count before Congress.If you compare all those Trumpian intentions with what actually transpired, though, what you see again and again is his inability to get other people and other institutions to cooperate.In one of Gellman’s imagined scenarios, teams of efficient and well-prepared Republican lawyers fan out across the country, turning challenges to vote counts into “a culminating phase of legal combat.” In reality, a variety of conservative lawyers delivered laughable arguments to skeptical judges and were ultimately swatted down by some of the same jurists — up to and including the Supreme Court — that Trump himself had appointed to the bench.In another Gellman scenario, Trump sends in “Federal Personnel in battle dress” to shut down voting and seize uncounted ballots. In reality, the military leadership hated Trump and reportedly spent the transition period planning for how to resist orders that he never gave.Further on in his scenarios, Gellman suggested that if Trump asked “state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly,” this pressure could be extremely difficult for the legislators to resist. In reality, Trump did make the ask, and every state government dismissed it: No statehouse leader proposed setting aside the popular vote, no state legislature put such a measure on the floor, no Republican governor threatened to block certification.Finally, Gellman warned that if the counting itself was disputed, “the Trump team would take the position” that Vice President Mike Pence “has the unilateral power to announce his own re-election, and a second term for Trump.” We know now that John Eastman, a Trump legal adviser, ultimately made an even wilder argument on the president’s behalf — that Pence could declare count was disputed even without competing slates of electors from the states and try to hand Trump re-election. But the White House’s close Senate allies reportedly dismissed this as a fantasy, and in the end so did Pence himself.At almost every level, then, what Gellman’s essay anticipated, Trump tried to do. But at every level he was rebuffed, often embarrassingly, and by the end his plotting consisted of listening to charlatans and cranks proposing last-ditch ideas, including Eastman’s memo, that would have failed just as dramatically as Rudy Giuliani’s lawsuits did.Which was, basically, what my own “no coup” essay predicted: not that Trump would necessarily meekly accept defeat, but that he lacked any of the powers — over the military, over Silicon Valley (“more likely to censor him than to support him in a constitutional crisis,” I wrote, and so it was), over the Supreme Court, over G.O.P. politicians who supported him in other ways — required to bend or shatter law and custom and keep him in the White House.Instead, once he went down the road of denying his own defeat, Trump was serially abandoned by almost all the major figures who were supposedly his cat’s paws or lackeys, from Bill Barr to Brett Kavanaugh to Brian Kemp to Senators Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee and Pence. All that he had left, in the end, were Sidney Powell’s fantasy lawsuits, Eastman’s fantasy memo and the mob.I did, however, underestimate the mob. “America’s streets belong to the anti-Trump left,” I wrote, which was true for much of 2020 but not on Jan. 6, 2021. And that underestimation was part of a larger one: I didn’t quite grasp until after the election how fully Trump’s voter-fraud paranoia had intertwined with deeper conservative anxieties about liberal power, creating a narrative that couldn’t keep Trump in power but could keep him powerful in the G.O.P. — as the exiled king, unjustly deposed, whom the right audit might yet restore to power.That Trump-in-exile drama is continuing, and it’s entirely reasonable to worry about how it might influence a contested 2024 election. The political payoff for being the Republican who “fights” for Trump in that scenario — meaning the secretary of state who refuses to certify a clear Democratic outcome, or the state politician who pushes for some kind of legislative intervention — may be higher in three years than it was last winter. There could also be new pressures on the creaking machinery of the Electoral Count Act should Republicans control the House of Representatives.But as I’ve argued before, you have to balance that increased danger against the reality that Trump in 2024 will have none of the presidential powers, legal and practical, that he enjoyed in 2020 but failed to use effectively in any shape or form. And you have to fold those conspicuous failures, including the constant gap between Gellman’s dire scenarios and Trump’s flailing in pursuit of them, into your analysis as well. You can’t assess Trump’s potential to overturn an election from outside the Oval Office unless you acknowledge his inability to effectively employ the powers of that office when he had them.This is what’s missing in the Kagan style of alarmism. “As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise,” he writes of Trump, “their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.” That arguably describes the political world of 2015 and 2016, but the story of Trump’s presidency was the exact opposite: not confused paralysis in opposition to an effective authoritarian, but hysterical opposition of every sort swirling around a chief executive who couldn’t get even his own party to pass a serious infrastructure bill or his own military to bend to his wishes on Afghanistan or the Middle East.Again and again, from the first shocking days after his election to the early days of the pandemic, Trump was handed opportunities that a true strongman — from a 1930s dictator to contemporary figures like Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin — would have seized and used. Again and again he let those opportunities slide. Again and again his most dramatic actions tended to (temporarily) strengthen his opponents — from the firing of James Comey down to the events of Jan. 6 itself. Again and again his most alarmist critics have accurately analyzed his ruthless amorality but then overestimated his capacity to impose his will on subordinates and allies, let alone the country as a whole.That Trump is resilient nobody disputes. That his flailing incompetence can push him to unusual extremities and create unusual constitutional risks is clear as well. That he could actually beat Joe Biden (or Kamala Harris) fairly in 2024 and become president again is a possibility that cannot be discounted.But to look at all his failures to consolidate and use power and see each one as just a prelude to a more effective coup next time is to assume a direction and a destiny that isn’t yet in evidence. And it’s to hold tightly to certain familiar 20th-century categories, certain preconceptions about How Republics Fall, rather than to acknowledge the sheer shambolic strangeness, the bizarro virtual-reality atmospherics, with which our own decadence has come upon us — with Trump and through Trump but through many other forces, too.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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      Eric Adams Runs His First General Election TV Ad

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      The Democratic nominee for New York City mayor used the 30-second ad to tell his personal story, stressing his commitment to affordable housing.With a month left until Election Day, Eric Adams is finally starting to use some of his sizable campaign war chest, releasing his first post-primary television ad on Tuesday in the general election for mayor of New York City.The ad focuses on his working-class roots and his mother, Dorothy Adams, who died in March — a departure from his ads during the Democratic primary, which focused on policing.“My mom cleaned houses and worked three jobs to give us a better life in a city that too often fails families like ours,” Mr. Adams says in the ad, as a Black woman is shown cleaning a home and embracing her children at the end of the day.Mr. Adams then appears onscreen with a smile and says that the city must invest in early childhood education and affordable housing: “That’s how we really make a difference.”The ad marks the beginning of the final stretch of the mayor’s race, which pits Mr. Adams against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, on Nov. 2. Mr. Adams, 61, the Brooklyn borough president, is widely expected to win and has been promoting himself and his centrist platform as the future of the Democratic Party.He won a contentious Democratic primary by focusing on public safety and his background as a police officer. Now he is trying to highlight other priorities like reducing the cost of child care for children under 3.Mr. Adams wants to offer “universal child care” for families that cannot afford it by reducing the costs that centers pay for space with tax breaks and other incentives. He also wants to rezone wealthy neighborhoods to build more affordable housing and to convert empty hotels outside Manhattan to supportive housing.Mr. Sliwa, 67, has focused his ads on the message that he is compassionate toward homeless people — as well as his small army of rescue cats — and that he would offer a departure from Mayor Bill de Blasio. He has also criticized Mr. Adams for spending his summer meeting with the city’s elite and traveling outside the city to court donors.“The choice is somebody up in the suites like an Eric Adams — a professional politician — or somebody down in the streets and subways — that’s Curtis Sliwa,” he says in one ad. “I’ve got the touch with the common man and common woman.”Mr. Sliwa’s ad shows Mr. Adams standing next to Mr. de Blasio, who has supported Mr. Adams during the race.But Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly seven to one in New York City, and Mr. Sliwa has struggled to gain attention, let alone momentum. Mr. Adams also has a major fund-raising advantage: He has more than $7.5 million on hand; Mr. Sliwa has about $1.2 million.Mr. Adams’s new ad was produced by Ralston Lapp Guinn, a media firm that worked with him during the primary. The team has made ads for other Democrats like President Barack Obama and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.The ad mentions Mr. Adams’s signature issue — public safety — noting that “we all have a right to a safe and secure future”Mr. Adams, who would be New York City’s second Black mayor, has often spoken about his mother on the campaign trail and of growing up poor with five siblings. Ms. Adams died earlier this year — something Mr. Adams revealed in an emotional moment during the primary.In recent interviews, Mr. Adams has said that it was two months into the Democratic primary when he decided to focus on his personal narrative.He said in a recent podcast with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that he decided to share a “series of vignettes” about his life, including being beaten by the police, having a learning disability and working as a dishwasher, and he believed that his authenticity won over voters.“Each time I stood in front of a group of people and gave them another peek into who I am, they said to themselves, ‘He’s one of us,’” he said. More

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      Lovely Warren, Troubled Rochester Mayor, to Resign in Plea Deal

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      Ms. Warren will leave office early as part of a plea deal on campaign finance violations. The deal also resolves gun charges against her.Lovely Warren, the embattled Democratic mayor of Rochester, N.Y., agreed to resign on Monday as part of a plea deal on several state criminal charges, capping a swift and staggering fall for a politician once considered a rising star in the state Democratic Party.The plea deal, in Monroe County court, resolves two separate state cases against Ms. Warren: one arising from campaign finance violations and another that included gun and child-endangerment charges that Ms. Warren and her estranged husband faced.Ms. Warren’s resignation is effective Dec. 1, just a month before she would have left office, having lost a June primary for a third term to Malik Evans, a city councilman.Last October, Ms. Warren was indicted by a grand jury in Monroe County on two campaign finance charges related to her 2017 re-election campaign, involving her official campaign fund and a political action committee.Those charges came just a month after Ms. Warren’s administration had been engulfed in a scandal involving accusations of a cover-up in the death in March 2020 of Daniel Prude, a Black man, after the Rochester police pinned him to the ground and put a hood over his head while taking him into custody.In July, Ms. Warren and her husband, Timothy Granison, were indicted on gun and child-endangerment charges, after police found weapons in a May raid of the home they shared, despite being estranged. Both pleaded not guilty.Mr. Granison had previously been charged in state and federal court as part of what prosecutors called a drug-trafficking ring. His charges weren’t resolved by Ms. Warren’s plea, his lawyer said Monday.In a news conference after her husband’s May arrest, Ms. Warren said she was the victim of a conspiracy, engineered in part by the county prosecutor, to discredit her on the eve of the Democratic primary. “People will try anything to break me,” she said.Ms. Warren’s resignation adds to a period of turmoil in Rochester, a city of some 200,000 people on the shores of Lake Ontario that suffered a steep toll from the coronavirus and was shaken by the fallout from the death of Mr. Prude, including heated demonstrations and the firing of the city’s police chief.A lawyer and onetime president of the City Council, Ms. Warren was the city’s first female mayor and the youngest in the modern era. She was first elected in 2013 after scoring a stunning upset against a Democratic incumbent, Thomas S. Richards, in both a September primary and a general election two months later. (Mr. Richards ran on two third-party lines.)She was also the city’s second Black mayor and spoke passionately in her 2014 inaugural address about the city’s future, devoting her speech to promises to her young daughter.“I know this isn’t going to be easy,” she said. “But I’m going to fight for changes and outcomes with the fierceness of a parent defending their child. Because I am defending you, and all of Rochester’s children.”She was handily re-elected in 2017, but the criminal charges against her arose from allegations raised at the time by her challengers about evasion of donor limits. Those complaints led to an investigation by the state Board of Elections.Ms. Warren’s trial on the campaign finance charges was set to begin on Monday. Carrie Cohen, her lawyer, said that the mayor’s plea — to a misdemeanor, rather than the initial felony charges she had faced — was in line with her previous admission that payments to her political action committee “were not categorized correctly.”“There never was any allegation of theft of any campaign or other funds by the mayor, or anybody else involved in the campaign,” said Ms. Cohen, adding that the plea resolved all the pending state criminal charges without admission of any fraud or dishonesty.Calli Marianetti, a spokeswoman for Sandra Doorley, the Monroe County district attorney, said that as part of a plea deal with Ms. Warren, the gun and child endangerment charges would no longer be pursued.In a statement, Ms. Doorley said that the resolution of the charges facing Ms. Warren — and those facing two fellow defendants, her campaign treasurer and Rochester’s finance director — was “fair and just based on the nature of their crimes.”“This is an important step in our larger efforts in promoting ethical elections in our state,” said Ms. Doorley, a Republican.It was the Daniel Prude case that came to define much of Ms. Warren’s second term. In March 2020, Mr. Prude, visiting Rochester from Chicago, ran out of his brother’s home in an agitated state. After his brother called 911, police responded and handcuffed Mr. Prude. When he began spitting, they covered his head with a hood and later pinned him on the ground, face down.Mr. Prude stopped breathing and was resuscitated, but died a week later at a hospital. An internal investigation by police quickly cleared the officers involved, despite a medical examiner’s finding that Mr. Prude’s death was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.”Months later, the public release of a video of the encounter sparked outrage in the wake of a national reckoning over police brutality. Ms. Warren soon announced the firing of the police chief and suspension of other city officials, but questions about her response — and allegations of a cover-up — continued to dog her.Mr. Evans, the Democratic nominee and Ms. Warren’s presumptive successor, said Monday that he expected to continue to work with the administration until Ms. Warren stepped down.“We have to stay focused on making sure the city of Rochester continues to move forward,” Mr. Evans said. More