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      Does Robert Menendez Have Enough Teflon to Survive Again?

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      Senator Menendez, who has defeated prosecutors and political challengers, faces his sternest test yet in his federal indictment in Manhattan.In a state long attuned to the drumbeat of political corruption — salacious charges, furious denials, explosive trials — Senator Robert Menendez has often registered as the quintessential New Jersey politician.He successfully avoided charges in one case, and after federal prosecutors indicted him in another, he got off after a mistrial in 2017. “To those who were digging my political grave,” Mr. Menendez warned then with characteristic bravado, “I know who you are and I won’t forget you.”Six years later, he is once again on the brink, battling for his political life after federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a jarring new indictment on Friday charging the powerful Democratic senator and his wife in a garish bribery scheme involving a foreign power, piles of cash and gold bars.A defiant Mr. Menendez, 69, immediately vowed to clear his name from what he cast as just more smears by vengeful prosecutors. A top adviser said that he would also continue running for re-election in 2024, when he is trying to secure a fourth full term.But as details of the case quickly spread through Trenton and Washington — including images of an allegedly ill-begotten Mercedes-Benz convertible and cash bribes hidden in closets — it was clear Mr. Menendez may be confronting the gravest political challenge in a career that started 49 years ago in the shadow of New York City.Calls for his resignation mounted from ethics groups, Republicans and even longtime Democratic allies who stood by him last time, including the governor, state party chairman and the leaders of the legislature. And party strategists and elected officials were already openly speculating that one or more of a group of ambitious, young Democrats representing the state in Congress could mount a primary campaign against him.“The alleged facts are so serious that they compromise the ability of Senator Menendez to effectively represent the people of our state,” said Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat. “Therefore, I am calling for his immediate resignation.”Representatives Frank Pallone and Bill Pascrell, two of the state’s longest serving Democrats who have served alongside Mr. Menendez for decades, joined them later. So did Representatives Mikie Sherrill and Andy Kim, two of the younger representatives considered possible primary challengers or replacements should the senator step down.For now, Mr. Menendez appeared to be on firmer footing among his colleagues in the Senate, including party leaders who could force his hand. They accepted his temporary resignation as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, but did not ask him to leave office.In a statement, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, called Mr. Menendez “a dedicated public servant” and said that his colleague had “a right to due process and a fair trial.”The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, right, urged against a rash judgment, saying Mr. Menendez had a “right to due process and a fair trial.”Erin Schaff/The New York TimesCalls for his ouster seemed to only embolden Mr. Menendez, who spent part of Friday afternoon trying to rally allies by phone. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he wrote in a fiery retort to Democrats who broke with him. “I am not going anywhere.”The electoral stakes were high, and not just for Mr. Menendez.Though he had yet to formally answer the charges in court, some party strategists were already gauging the possibility that Mr. Menendez could be scheduled to stand trial in the middle of the campaign — an unwelcome distraction for Democratic candidates across the nation.Republicans were already using the indictment to attack the party. “Democrats covered for Menendez the first time he got indicted for corruption,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the Senate Republican campaign committee. “It would be a shame if they did so again.”Democrats have not lost a Senate race in New Jersey since the 1970s. But allowing Mr. Menendez to stay in office could at the least force the party to spend heavily to defend the seat at a time when it already faces daunting odds of retaining a razor-thin majority.“I understand personal loyalty, and I understand the depths of friendships, but somebody needs to take a stand here,” said Robert Torricelli, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey. “This is not about him — it’s about holding the majority.”Mr. Torricelli speaks from experience. He retired rather than seek re-election in 2002 after his own ethics scandal ended without charges. He was also widely believed to be a target of Mr. Menendez’s ire after the former senator put his hand up to succeed Mr. Menendez had he been convicted in 2017.“In the history of the United States Congress, it is doubtful there has ever been a corruption allegation of this depth and seriousness,” Mr. Torricelli added. “The degree of the evidence. The gold bars and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash. It’s incomprehensible.”The details laid out in the 39-page indictment were nothing short of tawdry. Prosecutors said that Mr. Menendez had used his position to provide sensitive government information to Egypt, browbeat the Department of Agriculture and tamper with a criminal investigation. In exchange, associates rewarded him with the gold bullion, car and cash, along with home mortgage payments and other benefits, they said.Prosecutors referred to a text between an Egyptian general and an Egyptian American businessman in which Mr. Menendez was referred to as “our man.” At one point, prosecutors said, the senator searched in a web browser “how much is one kilo of gold worth.”Damien Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, laid out details of a 39-page indictment against Mr. Menendez.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesMr. Menendez is far from the first elected official in New Jersey to face serious criminal allegations. With a long tradition of one-party rule, a bare-knuckle political culture and an unusual patchwork of governmental fiefs, the state has been a hotbed for corruption that has felled city councilors, mayors, state legislators and members of Congress.The Washington Post tried to quantify the criminality in 2015 and found that New Jersey’s rate of crime per politician easily led any other state. Mr. Menendez already has a Democratic primary opponent, Kyle Jasey, a real estate lender and first-time candidate who called the indictment an “embarrassment for our state.” But political strategists and elected Democrats said Mr. Jasey may not have the lane to himself for long.New Jersey has a glut of ambitious Democratic members of Congress with outsize national profiles; it took barely minutes on Friday for the state’s political class to begin speculating about who might step forward.Among the most prominent were Ms. Sherrill, 51, and Josh Gottheimer, 48, moderates known for their fund-raising prowess who have proven they can win difficult suburban districts and were already said to be looking at statewide campaigns for governor in 2025, when Mr. Murphy cannot run because of term limits. Other names included Mr. Kim and Tom Malinowski, a two-term congressman who lost his seat last year.National Republicans cast their focus on Christine Serrano Glassner, the two-term mayor of a small community roughly 25 miles west of Newark, N.J., who announced this week she would run.Mr. Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, was elected to his first local office at age 20. At 28, he donned a bulletproof vest as he testified in a corruption trial against his former mentor. He won the mayoralty of Union City, before moving onto the State Assembly, the Senate, the House of Representatives and, in 2006, an appointment to the Senate.It was only a matter of months before he was in the sights of the U.S. attorney’s office of New Jersey. The senator was never charged, but the investigation became campaign fodder after the U.S. attorney, then Chris Christie, issued a subpoena to a community agency that paid rent to Mr. Menendez while getting lucrative federal grants.Almost a decade later, federal prosecutors went further, making Mr. Menendez the first sitting senator in a generation to face federal bribery charges in 2015. They accused him of exchanging political favors with a wealthy Florida eye surgeon for luxury vacations, expensive flights and campaign donations.A jury heard the case two years later and could not reach a verdict; the Justice Department later dropped the prosecution, but the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” him for accepting gifts while promoting the surgeon’s interests.Even so, Mr. Menendez handily won his party’s nomination and re-election in 2018.To longtime analysts of the state politics, though, Friday’s case crossed a new threshold.“Even by New Jersey standards, this one stands out — how graphic it is, how raw it is,” said Micah Rasmussen, a seasoned Democratic political hand who now leads Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.“There is a world of difference between not reporting a plane ride and having half a million in hundreds stashed around your house,” Mr. Rasmussen added. “By all rights, this should be the end of the line.”Tracey Tully More

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      Influx of Migrants Exposes Democrats’ Division on Immigration

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      Democratic voters far from the border say they want leaders to do more to address the growing number of migrants in their cities, but they don’t agree on what.In recent years, Alisa Pata, a lifelong Democrat living in Manhattan, has spent far more time worrying about Donald J. Trump than immigration. But now, as she reads about the influx of migrants coming to her city, that’s starting to change.“We have too many people coming in,” said Ms. Pata, 85, as her older sister unpacked a travel Scrabble board for a game in the park. “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”Sitting a few feet away, Daniela Garduño, 24, who also supported President Biden, had the opposite view. She cringed when she heard Eric Adams, the city’s Democratic mayor, say that the asylum seekers would “destroy New York City.” It reminded Ms. Garduño of the conservative politicians in her native Texas.She left the state for New York expecting more liberal politics, said Ms. Garduño, a paralegal. “And now it seems like there’s just so many echoes.”In some of the country’s most liberal cities, Democrats are wrestling with the complications of a dysfunctional immigration system and a set of problems that for many years has largely remained thousands of miles away. The new wave of migrants, some bused north by Republican governors, is exposing fissures in a party that was for the most part unified against the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration.Most strikingly, much of the debate over incoming migrants is happening not in swing states or battleground suburban counties, but in some of the most diverse — and deeply blue — corners of the country.In interviews with more than two dozen voters in the Democratic strongholds of New York, Boston and Chicago, most embraced the migrants, whom they saw as fleeing difficult and desperate circumstances. They largely praised the Biden administration’s decision to expand temporary protected status to 472,000 Venezuelans, allowing them to work legally in the United States for 18 months. Many said they believed that the new arrivals should be allowed to try to support themselves and saw plenty of available jobs to be filled.“The restaurant industry has been lacking cooks, bus people and dishwashers for years now — we were calling cooks unicorns because nobody could find them,” said David Bonomi, 47, a Democrat who owns a restaurant in Chicago’s Little Italy. “If there’s people who are here looking for a better life, looking for opportunity and willing to do those jobs, I’m absolutely for it.”But many expressed frustration with the Democratic leaders managing the new arrivals, and some worried that the Biden administration’s new order was only encouraging more people to come.“There are all kinds of empty dwellings in Chicago. Put them in there, and let them work,” said Charles Kelly, a retiree who was riding his bike in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood on Thursday. “People are lying on the sidewalks, and I’m like, why? People are begging for jobs and guess what, here’s your work force right here.”Recently arrived migrants in a makeshift shelter at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in August.Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune, via Getty ImagesBut at the same time, Mr. Kelly wondered if the border could be temporarily closed to give cities time to accommodate the migrants already here, a policy once proposed by Mr. Trump and one that would face major legal hurdles.“It’s overwhelming the system,” he said. “They should be monitored closely. I don’t know exactly how to do that but the federal and state governments should be doing more.”The reality that Democrats like Mr. Kelly are grappling with is complex. After a drop this spring, unlawful crossings at the Southern border are rising sharply, and migrants cannot work legally while they wait to be processed through the clogged courts. While allowing some to work may ease the strain, critics note that it could also encourage more to come.For decades, attempts to pass systemic fixes through Congress have crumbled. A broad immigration overhaul is now considered a nonstarter given Republicans’ internal divisions.In New York, more than 113,300 migrants have arrived since the spring of 2022. Local officials have struggled to respond, and the city has estimated that it would spend about $5 billion this fiscal year to house and feed migrants. Last fall, Mr. Adams declared a state of emergency.Chicago has taken in 13,500 migrants and spent at least $250 million, while Washington has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris. In Massachusetts, the state’s shelter population rose 80 percent in the last year after the arrival of thousands of migrant families. Many of the asylum seekers who have arrived in recent months are Venezuelans fleeing the economic collapse of their home country.LaQuana Chambers, 41, saw a racial bias in the way some Democratic politicians were talking about the new arrivals and denounced what she viewed as efforts to pit the migrants against citizens.“When it was Ukrainian immigrants coming in, there wasn’t this much of an uproar,” said Ms. Chambers, who works for the city’s education department and lives in Brooklyn. “If you’re white and European, people will easily digest that, they’re OK with that. But if you’re brown — no.”The situation presents a potential political danger for Mr. Biden and his party. Nationally, Republicans have gained an edge with voters on immigration over the past year. Roughly four in ten Americans said they broadly agreed with Republicans on the issue in a June survey by Pew Research Center, about 10 points more than agreed with Democrats. That was a notable shift from a year earlier, when roughly equal shares of Americans said they agreed with each party.Polling on views about the recent wave of migrants has been largely limited to New York. A survey released this week by Siena College found that 51 percent of registered Democrats in New York considered the recent migrants to be a “major problem.” Only 14 percent, however, ranked it as the single most important issue for the governor and state legislature, far fewer than those who selected economic factors like cost of living and the availability of affordable housing.Advisers to Mr. Biden’s campaign argue that the president’s voters haven’t changed their position on immigration; they just want to see steps taken to help handle the influx of migrants. The advisers said they believed those concerns would be assuaged by steps like the decision to expand temporary protected status this week.Still, some Democratic politicians have responded by adopting talking points that sound almost like they were lifted from their Republican rivals, a sign that they fear a political backlash. They have activated the national guard, petitioned the White House for expedited work authorizations and pleaded with Mr. Biden to take a more aggressive approach.Mr. Adams, who has said the president has “failed” the city by not doing more, praised Mr. Biden’s move this week to expand temporary protected status but also pressed the White House to extend protections to migrants from other nations.Mayor Eric Adams staged a rally in August to call on federal officials to expedite work authorization for asylum seekers.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMost Democratic voters said the issue was not prompting them to reconsider their support for Mr. Biden, whom they still vastly prefer over Mr. Trump or any of his Republican primary opponents. But the political implications might be most visible among swing voters in crucial suburban battlegrounds, where voters in recent elections have punished Democratic candidates for what they perceive as the declining quality of life in cities.Robert Speicher, 60, a retired social worker on Long Island who worked with undocumented immigrant families, said his heart broke for the migrants.“They just want to work and stay in the shadow. This myth that they’re here to suck our system dry — they don’t want that,” said Mr. Speicher, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and skipped the election in 2020, after being disappointed by the former president.But he added that he believed Mr. Biden’s policies had failed to secure the border, escalating what he saw as a crisis.“Why are these 500,000 people getting to cut the line?” he said. In Watertown, Mass., a city outside of Boston, Josh Fiedler, 48, said that recent reports about cities struggling to deal with the new population of migrants made him think more about the border crisis that has animated Republicans for years.But it did not lead him to support Republican solutions. He said he would like to see an increase in foreign aid to Latin American countries to improve conditions.“I didn’t realize it was a problem until it happened,” said Mr. Fiedler, a quality assurance analyst and a Democrat. “The border states have complained for a long time. Something needs to be done.”Robert Chiarito in Chicago, Melissa Russell in Somerville, Mass., and More

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      Biden Sharpens Focus on Trump as He Tries to Re-Energize Democrats for 2024

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      Months before the first Republican primaries, the president is turning his attention to his old adversary as he tries to re-energize his party’s voters and donors.This spring, as the Republican presidential primary race was just beginning, the Democratic National Committee commissioned polling on how the leading Republicans — Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis — fared against President Biden in battleground states.But now, as Mr. Trump’s lead in the primary has grown and hardened, the party has dropped Mr. DeSantis from such hypothetical matchups. And the Biden campaign’s polling on Republican candidates is now directed squarely at Mr. Trump, according to officials familiar with the surveys.The sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.On Sunday, after Mr. Trump sought to muddy the waters on his position on abortion, the Biden operation and its surrogates pushed back with uncommon intensity. On Monday, Mr. Biden told donors at a New York fund-raiser that Mr. Trump was out to “destroy” American democracy, in some of his most forceful language so far about the implications of a second Trump term. And on Wednesday, as the president spoke to donors at a Manhattan hotel, he acknowledged in the most explicit way yet that he now expected to be running against “the same fella.”The mileposts all point to a general election that has, in many ways, already arrived.David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said engaging now with Mr. Trump would help Mr. Biden in “getting past this hand-wringing period” about whether the president is the strongest Democratic nominee.“The whole predicate of Biden’s campaign is that he would be running against Trump,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Their operative theory is, once this is focused on the race between Biden and Trump, that nervousness will fade away into a shared sense of mission. Their mission is in getting to that place quickly and ending this period of doubt.”Mr. Trump has undertaken a pivot of his own, skipping the Republican debates and seeking to position himself as the inevitable G.O.P. nominee, with allies urging the party to line up behind him even before any primary votes are cast.Mr. Biden, in his remarks to donors on Monday on Broadway, issued a blunt warning about his likely Republican opponent.“Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” the president said. “And I will always defend, protect and fight for our democracy. That’s why I’m running.”Mr. Biden is planning to follow up those off-camera remarks with what he has billed as a “major speech” about democracy. The White House said the speech, in the Phoenix area the day after the next Republican debate, would be about “honoring the legacy of Senator John McCain and the work we must do together to strengthen our democracy.”Instead of attending that debate, on Wednesday, Mr. Trump is making a trip to Michigan planned during the autoworker strike — aiming to appeal to the blue-collar workers who helped deliver him the White House in 2016. The Biden campaign has been building out a plan to counter him there, in addition to its planned response to the Republican debate.Mr. Trump has maintained dominance in the Republican primary, both in national polls and in Iowa and New Hampshire.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesMr. Biden is facing a moment of turbulence. His son Hunter was just indicted. The Republican-controlled House is moving toward impeachment. Polls show a lack of Democratic excitement for his re-election. And voters continue to dismiss rosy economic indicators and hold a more dour financial outlook, even as the president has tried to sell a success story under the banner of “Bidenomics.”The focus on democracy and Mr. Trump is not new for Mr. Biden. The opening images of his 2024 campaign kickoff video showed the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol, and he delivered two major addresses on the stakes for democracy before the 2022 midterm elections.Yet Mr. Biden, White House officials and his campaign have remained studiously silent on the biggest developments surrounding Mr. Trump this year: the 91 felony counts he faces in indictments in four jurisdictions. The president wants to avoid giving credence to the evidence-free idea that he is personally responsible for Mr. Trump’s legal travails.“Trump was his own worst enemy throughout the last year,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist. “While most of the punditry talked about how much the indictments helped with his base, it hurt with everyone else.”Ms. Greenberg said it was almost inevitable that Mr. Trump would energize Democratic voters if he won the Republican nomination again. “For better or worse, Trump has been the driver of the highest turnout we’ve seen in the last 100 years in the last three election cycles,” she said. “I fully believe Trump will be a driver of turnout in 2024 as well.”“Joe Biden is an unmitigated disaster and his policies have hurt Americans and made this country weaker,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump. “President Trump continues to dominate the primary because voters know he’s the only person who will beat Biden and take back the White House.”Mr. Biden also faces a key fund-raising deadline at the end of September. In his 2020 run, he struggled to raise money from small donors online — until he became the nominee against Mr. Trump, when he shattered fund-raising records.Mr. Biden’s fund-raising during the reporting period that ended in June showed that he was again slow to attract vigorous support from small donors online, though people familiar with the campaign’s fund-raising have said the numbers have been better during the current quarter.At the start of this year, Democrats close to the White House had hoped for a long and bloody Republican primary that would consume the party, leaving its eventual nominee undecided until deeper into 2024 and by then weakened.But as Mr. Trump has consolidated his lead — he has consistently drawn more than 50 percent support in national polling averages since late spring — Democrats are resigned to something of a political consolation prize: the chance to draw an early contrast with Mr. Trump.Some of Mr. Biden’s top aides and advisers have believed, despite ample polling earlier in the year that suggested the opposite, that Mr. Trump would be a tougher general-election opponent than Mr. DeSantis or any of the other Republican presidential candidates.This spring, months before the D.N.C.’s pollsters stopped testing matchups between Mr. Biden and Mr. DeSantis, the party’s polls showed the Florida governor faring better than Mr. Trump against the president in battleground states.Now, Democrats in the few states where the 2024 presidential election is likely to be decided have come to the same conclusion as Mr. Biden: It’s going to be Mr. Trump again.“I don’t see any of the other Republicans gaining any traction against Trump,” said Representative Dina Titus of Nevada, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “DeSantis has dropped even further in the polls and nobody else has moved much ahead.”Most of the advertisements Mr. Biden’s campaign has broadcast so far have been positive messages highlighting his record on foreign policy and the economy. But a spot about abortion rights that has run for three weeks shows Mr. Trump boasting that “I’m the one who got rid of Roe v. Wade” and saying, in a quickly recanted 2016 interview, that women should be punished for having abortions. The ad also shows Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina speaking about legislation to restrict abortion.Mr. Biden has spoken, off and on, about Mr. Trump for months. He has also used several right-wing figures, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, as stand-ins to paint the whole Republican Party as in thrall to Mr. Trump.In a Labor Day speech in Philadelphia that Mr. Biden’s aides described as framing the forthcoming general-election campaign, he made five references to “the last guy” and one to “my predecessor” but never mentioned Mr. Trump by name.The shift toward Mr. Trump was reflected in Mr. Biden’s remarks to donors this week. At his New York fund-raiser, Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump’s name four times in 12 minutes.“I don’t believe America is a dark, negative nation — a nation of carnage driven by anger, fear and revenge,” he said. “Donald Trump does.”Mr. Biden’s Instagram feed, meanwhile, offers a road map of the issues on which his campaign wants to draw a contrast with Mr. Trump in 2024: abortion, guns, infrastructure, jobs and prescription drug prices.“I think,” said Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, “that we are set for a rematch.” More

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      Discontent With Party Politics Reaches New Heights

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      Americans tend to agree on what is wrong with the political system, and majorities of voters from both parties are unhappy with the quality of the candidates. But there also seems to be little appetite for third-party candidates.Close to one year away from the 2024 presidential election, most Americans say they are discontent with their candidate choices, and 28 percent of Americans say they do not like either political party, quadruple the share that said the same thing 30 years ago.But the question remains whether voters will hold their noses and vote for a candidate they dislike or sit out this election.Americans are less satisfied than they were even five years ago with the quality of candidates running for office, according to a new study by Pew Research Center that attempts to understand the breadth and depth of political dissatisfaction in the country. Just 26 percent of Americans said candidates for office had been good in the last several years, with no split between Republicans and Democrats. That’s down from 47 percent in 2018 and 34 percent in 2021, when voters who aligned with the party in power were more likely to be satisfied.When it comes to the quality of candidates running for the presidency, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they are not satisfied, but majorities of voters from both parties are unhappy.“The two-party system just doesn’t work — there aren’t only two types of people,” said Madison Lane, a mother of two and political independent from Jacksonville, Fla. “I believe in global warming, gay rights and trans rights. I can’t really vote Republican and believe in those things. But at the same time, Democrats are just fueled by big corporations and money. So I feel like I’m left with no good candidates to choose from.”As more ideologically extreme voters decide primary elections, parties are also pushed to the extremes, which leaves a vast majority of the people in the middle feeling alienated, said Professor Ian Shapiro, a political science professor at Yale University and author of “Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself.”“I expect this number who feel alienated by the parties to continue to grow,” he said.Across the partisan spectrum, Americans tend to agree on what is wrong with the political system, citing political fighting, polarization, money in politics and lobbying influence. And when asked specifically to list any strengths of the political system, more than half of Americans either skipped the question entirely or said the system had no strengths. Respondents who did not list a strength tended to be younger and less educated.In an era where many delight in hate watching television shows, engagement in politics may be a part of the problem. Highly politically engaged Americans are more likely than those who are more tuned out to say they always or often feel exhausted and angry when they think about politics.Discontent with political options is not new, and nearly every presidential election features a quest to float a moderate, if often quixotic, alternative to the major parties. According to the Pew study, sizable shares of Americans say they wish there were more political parties from which to choose, and this sentiment is stronger among Democrats than Republicans.But only about a quarter of Americans actually think having more political parties would solve the nation’s problems. And most Republicans and Democrats think their own party governs in an honest and ethical way and is respectful and tolerant of different types of people.“Politicians are not focusing on the priorities of the public,” Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, said. “They’re primarily focused on niche issues.” Even so, he said, “most Americans will hold their nose and pick from the available two parties.”Despite the rhetoric from many Republican elected officials focused on questioning the integrity of elections and vote counting, Americans — including sizable shares of Republicans — still see voting as the single best way to change the country for the better.Even so, only a quarter of Americans think who the president is makes a big difference in their lives. More

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      The Idea That Biden Should Just Give Up Political Power Is Preposterous

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      It was clear from an early point that barring some unforeseen circumstance, the 2024 presidential election would be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — the first contest with two presidents on the ballot since 1912’s four-way matchup between William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, the upstart Woodrow Wilson and the long-shot socialist Eugene V. Debs.Most Americans, according to several polls conducted this year, say they do not want this. Most Americans, a recent CBS News survey reports, think a Trump-Biden rematch — which would not be the first presidential rematch in American history — is evidence of a broken political system. But most Americans who plan to vote are nonetheless resigned to casting a ballot for either Biden or Trump next November.This palpable sense of exhaustion is perhaps the reason so many political observers have taken to speculating about a future in which Biden, at least, doesn’t run.David Ignatius wrote last week in The Washington Post that if Biden and Kamala Harris “campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.” Likewise, Eliot Cohen wrote this summer in The Atlantic that Biden “has no business running for president at age 80.”I find this drumbeat, which has been ongoing since at least 2022 (“Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024,” Mark Leibovich wrote last summer, also in The Atlantic. “He is too old”), to be incredibly strange, to say the least. The basic premise of a voluntary one-term presidency rests on a fundamental misconception of the role of re-election in presidential politics and presidential governance.Re-election — or rather the act of running for re-election — isn’t an unexpected treat or something ancillary to the position. It is one of the ways presidents seek to preserve their influence, whether or not they ultimately win another term of office.“Among the many hats the president wears, none is more important to his long-term success than that of party leader,” the political scientist James W. Davis writes in a 1992 book on presidential leadership. “Unless he is skilled in the management of party affairs, especially in dealing with members of the coequal legislative branch, the president will not be able to achieve that esteemed place in history reserved for all of our great presidents.”The reason, Davis explains, is that the institutional separation of the executive and the legislature along with the fragmented nature of political authority in the American system — presidents and lawmakers of the same party, even lawmakers within the same state, do not share the same constituencies — result in large and imposing barriers to presidential ambition. But, Davis writes, “while the president faces numerous constraints in our Madisonian system of checks and balances, he nevertheless can, if he has the inclination and leadership drive, use his party ties to lead the nation to new heights.”Crucial to achieving this is the possibility of future power, which is to say, the prospect of re-election. The promise of a second term, and thus another four years to achieve their political and ideological goals, is a critical incentive that binds lawmakers to the president in the present. This is especially true given the recent trend toward the nationalization of congressional elections, in which public esteem for the incumbent — or lack thereof — shapes the fate of the entire party.Or, as the presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter observed in a 1957 letter addressing a House committee hearing on the potential repeal of what were then recently enacted presidential term limits, “Everything in our history tells us that a president who does not or cannot seek re-election loses much of his grip in his last couple of years.” In other words, no president wants to be a lame duck.Rossiter, it should be said, opposed the 22nd Amendment — which wrote presidential term limits into the Constitution in 1951 — as a nakedly partisan prohibition “based on the sharp anger of the moment rather than the studied wisdom of a generation.” It was, in his view, an “undisguised insult to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”There was a notion during the 2020 presidential race that Biden would be a one-term caretaker. “Biden should do the honorable thing and commit to standing aside after the completion of a successful first term,” a CNN op-ed declared. Some of Biden’s advisers even floated the idea that he would essentially step aside after winning election. “According to four people who regularly talk to Biden,” Politico’s Ryan Lizza wrote in 2019, “all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for re-election in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.”Even Biden himself said that he viewed himself as a “transition candidate.” Perhaps that was true in the months after he won the nomination. For reasons that should now be obvious, however, it was a fantasy. There is no faster way to political and policy irrelevance than for a president to tell the nation he plans to step aside. Biden could be an effective, successful president or he could be a one-term, transitional figure. He cannot not be both. A president who doesn’t intend to run for re-election is essentially a president who can be safely ignored as a nonentity. No one who wanted to achieve something with the office would make that pledge.Let’s also be honest about the individual in question: the kind of person, like Joe Biden, who plans and plots for a lifetime to become president is going to want to serve as long as the law, and the voting public, will allow.Absent an extraordinary turn of events, Biden will be on the ballot next year. He wants it, much of the institutional Democratic Party wants it, and there’s no appetite among the men and women who might want to be the next Democratic president to try to take it away from him. Democrats are committed to Biden and there’s no other option, for them, but to see that choice to its conclusion.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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      Where Has All the Left-Wing Money Gone?

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      As we stumble toward another existential election, panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging. “Donations to progressive organizations are way down in 2023 across the board,” said a recent memo from Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter Project, an organization founded in 2016 that channels funds to community organizers, mostly in swing states, who engage and galvanize voters. He added, “Groups need money to make sure we have a good outcome next November. But. People. Are. Not. Donating.”As both big and small donors pull back, there have been layoffs across the progressive ecosystem, from behemoths like the Sierra Club to insurgent outfits like Justice Democrats, the group that first recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge the Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018. According to a July analysis by Middle Seat, a Democratic strategy and consulting firm, in the first half of this year, grass-roots donations to Democratic House and Senate campaigns were down almost 50 percent compared to the same point in 2021. Wimsatt, who had to lay off 15 people from a 55-person staff in June, told me, “I haven’t experienced a situation like this before when there’s been such a sense of scarcity.”This isn’t just about political operatives losing their jobs: It means that organizations that should be building up their turnout operations for next year are instead having to downsize. And it speaks to a mood of liberal apathy and disenchantment that Democrats can’t afford ahead of another grueling election. “To the degree that there isn’t enough organic enthusiasm, we have to generate it,” Wimsatt said. That’s hard to do when you’re broke.It was probably inevitable that left-leaning fund-raising would fall once the immediate crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency ended. Activism, like electoral politics, is often thermostatic: There’s more energy on the right when Democrats are in power, and more on the left during Republican administrations. After a pandemic, an insurrection, and innumerable climate disasters and mass shootings, people are burned out and maybe even, as Ana Marie Cox argues in the New Republic, traumatized, a state that can lead to hypervigilance but also avoidance. And, of course, there’s inflation, a big part of the reason that charitable giving is down overall.Yet if liberal lassitude is understandable, it’s also alarming, because we’re going to have to fend off Trump once again. And even if some of the pullback is cyclical, some seems to be rooted in a more enduring malaise. “There was a huge amount of additional grass- roots funding in the Trump era, because people were so scared,” said Max Berger, the co-founder of progressive groups such as If Not Now and the Momentum Training Institute. “And I feel like we’re at the end of the wave of what people are willing to do out of sheer terror. So now, if we’re going to keep that level of momentum, we need something more positive.”One small, characteristic piece of this problem — and perhaps the easiest part to solve — involves the way Democrats use email. If you’re on any progressive mailing lists, you surely know what I’m talking about: the endless appeals, sometimes in bold all caps, warning of imminent Democratic implosion. (Recent subject lines in my inbox include, “We can kiss our Senate majority goodbye” and “This is not looking good.”)In the short term, these emails are effective, which is why campaigns use them. Over time, they encourage a mix of cynicism and helplessness — precisely the feelings leading too many people to withdraw from political involvement. “We and others in the field have argued that, long term, it’s disastrous, because you don’t build a trusting base,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party when I asked him about these hair-on-fire missives.But this is just a symptom of a bigger problem, which is that, right now, progressive politics are necessarily organized around preventing imminent catastrophe rather than offering up a vision of a transformed world. Joe Biden has an impressive legislative record, but because of the counter-majoritarian roadblocks in our system, the case for his re-election is largely about staving off disaster rather than the promise of new accomplishments. “It’s really hard to get people to give money when you do not have a coherent theory of change,” said Berger.Where there is a prospect of real change, progressives are still getting mobilized. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, “there was a resurgence of both activist energy and donor energy,” said Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a network of progressive donors channeling money to pro-democracy grass-roots groups. “And those things are often correlated.” As she pointed out, Janet Protasiewicz raised “more money than God” in her race for a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. In Ohio, organizers fought off a sneaky statewide ballot measure meant to kneecap a campaign to protect reproductive rights. (Planned Parenthood has recently laid people off, but the organization insists this was because of restructuring rather than a fund-raising shortfall.)As the prospect of Trump redux moves from looming horror to daily emergency, Gavito expects people to throw themselves into politics once again. “I have faith in the anti-MAGA coalition, that we will not go back,” she said. I hope she’s right, and democratic forces can rouse themselves one more time. It’s a depressing paradox: We need politics that are about more than just the miserable business of stopping Trump, but unless Trump is stopped, we’re not going to get them.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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      The Run-Up Podcast: Share Your Questions About the 2024 Election

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      As primary season gets underway, “The Run-Up” podcast will begin answering listener questions in a new, recurring segment.Is the Republican primary just a race for second place? How old is too old to be president? Is it really going to be Biden vs. Trump … again?If you’re paying any attention to politics these days, you might have some questions. On “The Run-Up,” the politics podcast I host, I want to help answer them.In our first two seasons, we tried to examine a lot of big political questions and answers — such as the perceived inevitability of former President Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee, even as he faces criminal charges, and the way the Democratic Party has consolidated support around President Biden, over the concerns of voters.Starting in mid-October, we’ll be back every week — here to serve as your election companion through Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024.I’ve traveled around the country a lot as a reporter since Mr. Trump was elected and one thing I’ve learned is that in this political era the normal rules don’t apply. And while you can’t really answer the question of “who will win?” you can do a lot before election night. Specifically, you can explore the factors that will determine the result, and make the stakes of the race clear for voters to understand. That’s what I’ll do this season on “The Run-Up” — along with my colleagues at The New York Times.So what do you want to know about this election season? We want to know. You can either fill out the form below, or send a recording of your question(s) via email: therunup@nytimes.comWe will not publish or share your contact information outside of the Times newsroom. Nor will we publish any part of your submission without talking with you first. If we’re interested in featuring your question and voice on the podcast, we may contact you to learn more and to record your question. More

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      September Is the Cruelest Month? It Is if You’re Joe Biden.

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      Gail Collins: Bret, September is one of my favorite months, and I’ve always kinda wished Congress would stay out on vacation longer. They tend to be a leaky cloud on the horizon.Let’s start with — oh God, the impeachment inquiry. You’re in charge of the Republicans, no matter how you feel about Donald Trump. Give me your take.Bret Stephens: Gail, if this impeachment inquiry were any more premature, it would be a teenage boy.Gail: I’m stealing that line.Bret: I say that as someone who thinks that Hunter Biden’s business dealings — with his family’s alleged shell companies and his shady foreign partners and curiously high-priced artwork — stink to heaven. I also think we in the press need to dig deeper and harder into what his father knew about what his son was up to, whether Joe knowingly lent his name to the enterprise, and who, if anyone, in the wider Biden family benefited from Hunter’s activities. And it’s no excuse to say the Trumps did worse. Innocence isn’t established by arguing that the other guy is a bigger crook.But, as our colleague David French astutely pointed out last week, “Where is the blue dress?” Every modern impeachment inquiry, from Richard Nixon and the missing 18½ minutes of tape to Bill Clinton and his, er, DNA sample, to Trump’s phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky and then the Jan. 6 riot, started from smoking-gun evidence of wrongdoing. What we have here, at most, is secondhand smoke.Gail: Thirdhand, maybe. Hunter Biden broke the law when he filled out a false gun-purchase form, denying he had a drug use problem. That’s bad. He should be punished, but it certainly doesn’t have to be by doing time in the slammer.Bret: Agree. It would probably be enough to sentence Hunter to watch 100 hours of Josh Hawley questioning Senate witnesses. But that might vanquish his hard-earned sobriety.Gail: When you try to connect Hunter’s stupid misdeeds to his father, to argue it’s a reason to throw the duly elected president of the United States out of office — it’s like me demanding new antismoking laws in Manhattan because a guy in Canton, Ohio, is puffing on a cigar downtown.But we’re pretty much in concert on this, I think. Next what-about-the-Republicans inquiry: the budget. Is Kevin McCarthy leading — or not-leading — us into a government shutdown?Bret: I love the way McCarthy keeps getting kicked around by the ultra-MAGAites: It’s the most poetic bit of justice since Mr. Bumble, the sadist, married Mrs. Corney, the bigger sadist, in “Oliver Twist.”Gail: Yipee! A Dickens reference to Kevin McCarthy. Not as if we had great expectations for his speakership.Bret: Touché. My guess is that we’ll avoid a shutdown with a continuing resolution that funds the government past the end of the month. And I’m sure we’ll find a way to fund the Defense Department, too. The longer-term question is how McCarthy can manage a Republican circus in which Donald Trump is the ringmaster, Matt Gaetz cracks the whip, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is in charge of the clowns.And speaking of cracking the whip: Your thoughts on the autoworkers’ strike?Gail: You know, I’ve been out on strike a few times — mostly it worked out and got everybody to a decent settlement. Although once, long ago, it did cause the publisher of a small paper I was working on to just pull the plug.Bret: Uh oh.Gail: I’m generally on the union side in these things. Organized labor has been a key to the growth of a solid middle- and working-class America. But the U.A.W.’s lack of support for President Biden’s effort to move us to electric cars has definitely cooled me.Bret: Won’t surprise you that it’s the part of the strike I find most interesting: It shows the growing gap between the Democrats’ environmental commitments and the interests of working-class voters.Gail: Presuming you’re hanging with management?Bret: Er, yep.I don’t blame workers for wanting hefty raises: Inflation has really eaten away at purchasing power. But the U.A.W. wants to more than double the Big Three’s labor costs, to about $150 an hour from around $65 now, which is unsustainable against nonunionized competitors like Toyota, where it’s closer to $55. The union also wants to go back to the same kind of defined-benefit pension plan that practically bankrupted the Big Three a generation ago.I’m wondering about the politics of this, too. The administration is standing with the unions, though I’m not sure a long strike helps them as opposed to, say, Trump.Gail: I’m sure there’s a big gap between the ideal contract goals they espouse in public and their real-life targets. But the bottom line is that when profits are raising management pay spectacularly, workers also deserve an unusually nice, substantial raise.If there’s a long strike, which I doubt there will be, we’ll come back to it — this really is one of our most fundamental differences. But in the meantime: Mitt Romney. He’s retiring. What are your thoughts?Bret: You and I both have guilty consciences for being so hard on the guy back when he was running for president.Now, I think of him as the last good Republican. He was right about the threat posed by Russia back in 2012, when so many Democrats mocked him for it. He was the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial and one of only seven Republicans who voted for conviction in the second impeachment.Gail: Mitt Romney was a good governor in Massachusetts, where he proved a cost-conscious Republican could still build a much-needed state health care program. He’s been a fine senator who proved it’s possible for a Republican to have backbone in the age of Trump.Those were the arenas he was meant to star in. Sadly, as a presidential candidate, he was terrible. Suddenly retro: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” And very, very boring. It predates your arrival at The Times, but you may remember that I made a thing out of mentioning, every time I wrote about Romney, that he once drove to Canada with the family dog on the roof of the car.Bret: May remember, Gail?Gail: It was just a game I’d worked up to rebel against the deep, deep dullness of his candidacy. Still getting pictures of dogs on car roofs from readers after all these years.But that shouldn’t be his political legacy. Mitt, I apologize.Bret: Me too, Mitt. And in choosing to retire from politics when he’s still fit in order to make way for the next generation, Romney’s showing that he’s right about life — in the sense that it’s good to bow out with grace.Gail: Bet I know what’s coming next.Bret: Wish I could say the same thing about Joe Biden. Which reminds me to ask your thoughts about David Ignatius’s column in The Washington Post that everyone in the chattering classes is talking about, particularly this line: “If he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.”Gail: You and I both bemoaned Biden’s decision to run again. We wanted him to announce his planned retirement early so all the other Democratic options — many attractive possibilities from Congress and state government — could get out there and introduce themselves to the country.Didn’t happen. And Biden, alas, isn’t going to listen to critics unless he suffers some unexpected medical issue.Bret: That “unexpected medical issue” is the palpable sense of feebleness in Biden’s public performances. Not a good look for a guy who wants to spend five more years in the world’s most important job.Gail: But I’m not sure Biden’s age gives the race to Trump. And as I’ve pointed out a billion times, Trump will be 78 if he runs against Biden, and in way worse physical shape. Although he has now started to brag about his long-life genes.Bret: His awful dad lived to 93. I’ll assume his mom was a saint, and she died at 88.Gail: As to Kamala Harris, she’s certainly been improving during her vice presidency. I’d be happy to see her run as a candidate for president — up against a bunch of other smart, super-achieving Democrats.Bret: I suspect a lot of people would feel a lot better about voting for Biden next year if they had rock-solid confidence in his veep. Like Harris or not, her unfavorable ratings among voters is close to 56 percent, which makes her a huge drag on an already vulnerable ticket. I know a lot of Democrats feel Biden needs a minority woman as a running mate, so why not swap her out for someone like Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Hispanic governor of New Mexico, or Mellody Hobson, the superstar businesswoman, or Val Demings, the former congresswoman from Florida? I also think Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, would also be a great veep choice, even if she isn’t a minority woman, because she’s just incredibly talented. Remember that F.D.R. tossed out Henry Wallace for Harry Truman in 1944. That’s the historical analogy Biden ought to be thinking of now.Gail: Does sound very attractive. But Bret, you know that sort of thing isn’t done anymore. You don’t dump your loyal, hard-working vice president. Who also happens to be of Jamaican and Indian descent. Swapping for another minority woman just seems … tacky.If Biden bowed out, it’d be perfectly reasonable for all those other good candidates to jump in. But as things stand they are, sigh, as they are.Bret: I’ll grant you the tacky part. But I can think of something a lot worse: Donald Trump back in the White House. When those are the stakes, being tacky seems a small price to pay for national self-preservation.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