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      Is the Electoral College Becoming Fairer?

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      The Republican Party’s advantage is shrinking in the Electoral College. The Electoral College has been very kind to Republicans in the 21st century. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, and Donald Trump did the same in 2016.But over the past few years the Republican advantage in the Electoral College seems to have shrunk, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out in his newsletter. Republicans are no longer faring significantly better in the states likely to decide the presidential election — like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — than they are nationwide. Instead, a 2024 race between Biden and Trump looks extremely close, with a tiny lead for Biden both nationally and in the swing states.A Shrinking Electoral Advance More

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      State House Candidate in Virginia Condemns Leak of Sex Tapes

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      Susanna Gibson, a Democrat running in one of seven tossup House seats in the closely divided legislature, denounced the “illegal invasion of my privacy.”A Democratic candidate in a crucial race for the Virginia General Assembly denounced reports on Monday that she and her husband had performed live on a sexually explicit streaming site.Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running in her first election cycle, said in a statement that the leaks about the online activity were “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.”The Washington Post and The Associated Press reported on Monday that tapes of live-streamed sexual activity had been recorded from a pornographic site and archived on another site. The New York Times has not independently verified the content of the videos. The Democratic Party of Virginia did not respond to a request for comment.Ms. Gibson, 40, who appears on her campaign website in hospital scrubs as well as at home with her husband and two young children, is running for the House of Delegates in one of only a handful of competitive races that will determine control of the General Assembly. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, and Democrats narrowly control the State Senate, but both chambers are up for grabs in November.Ms. Gibson’s district, which is outside Richmond and primarily in Henrico County, is one of seven tossup seats in the 100-member House, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.Releasing damaging information about candidates of the opposing party into the heat of a campaign is an age-old political practice, but the sensational nature of the disclosure of sex tapes — reportedly featuring Ms. Gibson and her husband, a lawyer — is highly unusual. Ms. Gibson called the release of the tapes “the worst gutter politics.” The Post said it learned of the material from a “Republican operative” who denied a connection to Ms. Gibson’s opponent, David Owen, or to other political groups in Virginia.Daniel P. Watkins, a lawyer for Ms. Gibson, said it was unlawful in the state to record someone in a state of undress and distribute it to a third party without that person’s consent.“It’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material, and we’re working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice,” Mr. Watkins said.Ms. Gibson gave no indication she was considering dropping out of the race.“It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me,” she said in her statement. “My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has raised record sums for his party in an effort to take full control of the Legislature, which, if successful, would cap a remarkable swing from two years ago when Democrats fully controlled state government. More

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      Biden Campaign Aims to Calm Worries About His Age

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      With low approval ratings and shaky public performances, the president and his team are planning an ad blitz and trying to reassure voters about his age.With stubbornly subterranean approval numbers, President Biden is taking early steps to shore up his re-election candidacy with a multipronged strategy that includes a costly advertising campaign and leveraging the powers of the bully pulpit.During his recent trip to India and Vietnam, Mr. Biden’s aides aggressively pushed back on suggestions that he has lost a step, highlighting his busy schedule as a sign of his vigor. Back home, his campaign broadcast a television ad depicting a previous overseas trip — a secret journey to Ukraine in February that the White House has trumpeted as a triumph of daring and a foreign policy tour de force.That ad comes three weeks into a $25 million battleground state campaign to promote Mr. Biden’s economic record to a public that remains skeptical of the so-called Bidenomics pitch he began making this summer.Such an ad blitz is notably early for an incumbent, in the face of concerns that Mr. Biden is struggling to maintain support among young, Black and Latino voters — key parts of the coalition that lifted him to office in 2020. While Mr. Biden’s TV ads do not frontally address a central concern raised by Democratic voters — his age — they showcase his vitality and stamina.The Ukraine ad features footage of Mr. Biden striding confidently alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky during a surprise visit to Kyiv to support the war effort. “In the middle of a war zone, Joe Biden showed the world what America is made of,” a narrator says. It ends bluntly, “Biden. President.”Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement: “As Republicans fight each other in their divisive primary, we are building a campaign that is working to break through in a fragmented media environment, and speaking to the general-election audience in the battleground states that will decide next year’s election.”Democratic strategists say that many of the worries are overblown and that Mr. Biden has plenty of time to improve his numbers. Last week, Jim Messina, the campaign manager of President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, who has become a leading voice of the don’t-panic-about-Biden chorus, circulated a 24-page presentation suggesting that the political environment was good for Democrats and calling for “bedwetters” in their ranks to relax.“Polling 15 months out is notoriously ridiculous,” Mr. Messina said in an interview. “If you were just playing poker, you would rather have Joe Biden’s cards than Donald Trump’s.”But Mr. Biden gave his Republican critics some fresh ammunition to question his physical and mental competence at a news conference in Vietnam, telling reporters at one point he was ready to go to bed. He also made a meandering and culturally awkward reference to John Wayne, who last acted in a film in 1976, nearly a half-century ago.Mr. Biden is operating in a bit of a political vacuum, as Republicans go through their primary process. Once a challenger emerges, party strategists say, Democrats will see Mr. Biden as the stronger choice and rally behind the president.Joe Trippi, a Democrat who has worked on presidential campaigns over five election cycles, said all incumbent presidents over the past decade were nearly tied with their rivals in September of the year before the election.“I’ve seen this movie over and over and over,” he said. “Every sitting president has been sitting exactly in the same place — in a dead heat.”The $25 million the campaign is spending on new ads amounts to a small fraction of what is expected to be the total cost of Mr. Biden’s campaign. In 2020, he made history by raising $1 billion for his run. This time, Mr. Biden’s initial fund-raising has been slower, impeded in part by an across-the-board decline in online contributions and the absence of liberal outrage about Mr. Trump’s presidency.Still, Mr. Biden is jumping into the political fray far earlier than his predecessors did. President Barack Obama did not begin running re-election TV ads until after Thanksgiving in 2011. His first spot was a straight-to-camera invitation to supporters to “let me know you’re in,” rather than an effort to reassure supporters about his record in office.While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings were, like Mr. Biden’s, quite low, he did not face widespread doubts within his party about whether he should seek re-election.In a different era of politics and television, the 2004 George W. Bush re-election campaign did not begin advertising until March of the election year — after John Kerry had effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination.Mr. Biden’s campaign says it began advertising earlier than in previous cycles because it is harder to reach broad audiences in an era of cord-cutting. TV networks are not inclined to carry prime-time presidential speeches about policy developments that are often months old, and Mr. Biden is an unsteady performer in front of a microphone. Advertisements can both be seen by a target audience and prompt coverage about them in the news media, and are one of the luxuries of being the incumbent.“Trump could easily define a narrative that kind of rewrites his own history as well as Biden’s history, and that needs to be countered,” said Teddy Goff, the digital director for Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign.Even Mr. Biden’s public in-person events don’t always show the president in the most favorable light. He often speaks softly or holds a microphone too far from his mouth, making it difficult for the audience to follow what he is saying — and making images of fired-up supporters tougher to come by.“It was tough to hear,” Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau, Wis., said after seeing Mr. Biden speak in Milwaukee last month. “The acoustics were bad. Having a rally in a factory is tough.”Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, aggressively pushed back on social media after a headline said Mr. Biden was running “a bunker campaign.” “Presidents shall never sleep,” he wrote in one sarcastic post.Unlike the 2020 race, which was largely conducted remotely because of the pandemic, Mr. Biden’s 2024 effort will have to look more like a traditional campaign, with speeches and events that might make the president show his age.The latest chatter about Mr. Biden’s political standing followed a poll from CNN that was full of grim numbers for the president. The findings suggested that Democratic and independent voters had concerns about Mr. Biden himself, not his legislative record. Two-thirds of Democrats surveyed said they would prefer that the party nominate someone else as president. And 63 percent of Democrats said their biggest concern about Mr. Biden’s candidacy was his age, mental acuity or health.Just 4 percent of Democrats polled by CNN said their biggest concern about Mr. Biden was his handling of the economy — the subject that has been the focus of most of the campaign’s advertising so far.Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks to strengthen the party’s bench by recruiting Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said that expanding the Democratic argument beyond Mr. Biden to convey the broader stakes of the election for issues like abortion rights and climate change would be crucial.“He really has to make the campaign beyond just Joe Biden,” she says. “If it’s bigger than him, it will energize younger voters and voters of color and women.” More

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      Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?

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      Joe Biden is an unpopular president, and without some recovery, he could easily lose to Donald Trump in 2024.By itself, this is no great wonder: His two predecessors were also unpopular at this stage of their presidencies, also endangered in their re-election bids.But with Trump and Barack Obama, there were reasonably simple explanations. For Obama, it was the unemployment rate, 9.1 percent in September 2011, and the bruising battles over Obamacare. For Trump, it was the fact that he had never been popular, making bad approval ratings his presidency’s natural default.For Biden, though, there was a normal honeymoon, months of reasonably high approval ratings that ended only with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And since then, it’s been hard to distill a singular explanation for what’s kept his numbers lousy.The economy is better than in Obama’s first term, inflation is ebbing, and the feared recession hasn’t materialized. The woke wars and Covid battles that disadvantaged Democrats are no longer central, and the post-Roe culture wars seem like friendlier terrain. Biden’s foreign policy team has defended Ukraine without (so far) a dangerous escalation with the Russians, and Biden has even delivered legislative bipartisanship, co-opting Trumpian promises about industrial policy along the way.This has created mystification among Democratic partisans as to why all this isn’t enough to give the president a decent polling lead. I don’t share that mystification. But I do think there’s real uncertainty about which of the forces dragging on Biden’s approval ratings matter most.Start with the theory that Biden’s troubles are mostly still about inflation — that people just hate rising prices and he isn’t credited with avoiding a recession because wage increases have been eaten up by inflation until recently.If this is the master issue, then the White House doesn’t have many options beyond patience. The administration’s original inflationary sin, the overspending in the American Rescue Plan Act, isn’t going to be repeated, and apart from the possibility of an armistice in Ukraine relieving some pressure on gas prices, there aren’t a lot of policy levers to pull. The hope has to be that inflation continues to drift down, real wages rise consistently and in November 2024, Biden gets the economic credit he isn’t getting now.But maybe it’s not just the economy. Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters, continuing a Trump-era trend. This raises the possibility that there’s a social-issues undertow for Democrats, in which even when wokeness isn’t front and center, the fact that the party’s activist core is so far left gradually pushes culturally conservative African Americans and Hispanics toward the G.O.P. — much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960s and the 2000s.Bill Clinton temporarily arrested that rightward drift by deliberately picking public fights with factions to his left. But this has not been Biden’s strategy. He’s moved somewhat rightward on issues like immigration, in which progressivism’s policy vision hit the rocks. But he doesn’t make a big deal about his differences with his progressive flank. I don’t expect that to change — but it might be costing him in ways somewhat invisible to liberals at the moment.Or maybe the big problem is just simmering anxiety about Biden’s age. Maybe his poll numbers dipped first in the Afghanistan crisis because it showcased the public absenteeism that often characterizes his presidency. Maybe some voters now just assume that a vote for Biden is a vote for the hapless Kamala Harris. Maybe there’s just a vigor premium in presidential campaigns that gives Trump an advantage.In which case a different leader with the same policies might be more popular. Lacking any way to elevate such a leader, however, all Democrats can do is ask Biden to show more public vigor, with all the risks that may entail.But this is at least a strategy, of sorts. The hardest problem for the incumbent to address may be the pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans, especially younger Americans, which has been worsened by Covid but seems rooted in deeper social trends.I don’t see any obvious way for Biden to address this issue through normal presidential positioning. I would not recommend updating Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech with the therapy-speak of contemporary progressivism. I also don’t think the president is suited to be a crusader against digital derangement or a herald of religious revival.Biden got elected, in part, by casting himself as a transitional figure, a bridge to a more youthful and optimistic future. Now he needs some general belief in that brighter future to help carry him to re-election.But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself.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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      Gavin Newsom Promotes Biden and Himself in a Delicate Dance

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      The California governor has made himself the most visible Democrat-in-waiting. Still, he says that it’s time Democrats “buck up” and get behind President Biden.Over the past four months, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, has traveled to six Republican-led states. He has goaded Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican presidential candidate from Florida, to debate on Fox News. He has assembled a small staff of political advisers and created a political action committee to distribute $10 million to Democratic causes and candidates.And this week, he raised $40,000 for a long-shot candidate for the United States Senate in Tennessee, one of the red states he has criticized his own party for neglecting.By all appearances, Mr. Newsom is a man with an eye on the White House, building a national network of supporters and accumulating the kind of good will among donors, party operatives and voters that could prove critical should he decide to move beyond Sacramento. Mr. Newsom said in an interview that he was not running for president, and that the time has come for Democrats to rally around President Biden.“The train has left the station,” Mr. Newsom said. “We’re all in. Stop talking. He’s not going anywhere. It’s time for all of us to get on the train and buck up.”But it may be difficult for Mr. Newsom to quiet speculation about his own future. He has spent months positioning himself as one of his party’s leading voices during a time of deep Democratic worry and lingering unease about the political strengths of Mr. Biden, who is 80, and his vice president, Kamala Harris.A CNN poll released on Thursday found that 73 percent of all respondents were “seriously concerned” that the president’s age might affect his mental and physical competence. Some 67 percent of Democrats said the party should nominate someone else.Mr. Newsom has, by his account, sought to reassure the White House in both public and private that he is no threat to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign. And in turn, Mr. Biden’s team has appeared to pull him closer. The governor will be a top Democratic surrogate defending Mr. Biden when Republican candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library later this month.This dance — of raising one’s profile without undercutting the president — is the challenge for a class of Democrats-in-waiting, which also includes Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. But Mr. Newsom, a 55-year-old telegenic, popular-in-his-own-state leader, has made himself the most visible in this group, and he may serve as a reminder of Mr. Biden’s shortcoming as he seeks re-election.Mr. Newsom has raised $3.5 million for Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden among them.Doug Mills/The New York Times“He’s got to be careful about it,” Joel Benenson, a pollster who advised Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, said of Mr. Newsom’s effort to raise his profile. “You don’t want to be too cute by half. If you are going to run, do it. If not, go out there and make the connections and talk to Democrats, learn about these states. The worst mistake would be the way to do it and seem sly about doing it.”Mr. Newsom presents his travel to Republican states as an attempt to build up the Democratic Party in places he argues it has neglected. And while defending Mr. Biden, particularly on questions about his age and fitness, he also engages in a debate over cultural issues — transgender rights and gun control, to name two — that Democrats have sometimes avoided.Mr. Newsom spent nearly an hour with Sean Hannity on Fox News in June to make the case for Mr. Biden and to defend his own record in California. “You have to give Gavin Newsom a lot of credit,” Mr. Hannity said in an interview. “He knew it wasn’t going to be an easy interview.”Mr. Newsom recently turned up at a Boise, Idaho, bookstore to denounce “the insane book bans happening across the country. ” He has picked arguments with Republican governors like Mr. DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, on abortion, gun control and trans rights.“He is taking the fight to the Republicans,” said Jared DeLoof, the executive director of the Democratic Party in Idaho, where Mr. Newsom appeared in July. “Too often Democrats shy away from things like critical race theory or transgender rights or some of these issues that Republican like to pop off about. The governor showed he was really effective on this issues — we can take them on, and we can win.”On his tour of Republican states, Mr. Newsom has engaged in the kind of cultural issues — transgender rights and gun control, to name two — that Democrats have at times avoided.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesMr. Newsom said his activities were done with the consultation and approval of the White House, an assertion confirmed by White House aides.“I am sensitive to that,” he said, noting that he has made a point of not visiting states that are at the center of the presidential battleground. “I am trying not to play into the presidential frame.”(Mr. Newsom, however, did suggest that his still-unscheduled debate with Mr. DeSantis take place in, among other states, Nevada and Georgia, both of which are likely to be in play in 2024.)A spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, T.J. Ducklo, said in a statement Friday that Mr. Newsom had “forcefully and effectively makes the president’s case publicly and is an enormous asset to our fund-raising and organizing operations.”There are other potential sources of friction as Mr. Newsom’s profile rises. Mr. Newsom and Ms. Harris are both ambitious Democrats from the same state who are of similar ages — she is 58 — and have, over the years, had to navigate around each other as they traveled down the same political roads. Ms. Harris would almost certainly be a rival in a Democratic presidential primary in 2028.Mr. Newsom said he and Ms. Harris speak regularly and rejected the suggestion that his success comes at her expense. “This is a true story — I shouldn’t even share it. There were a couple of unknown numbers on my voice mail the other day, and it was Kamala checking in,” he said. “I am really proud of her, and I don’t say that to be patronizing.”Ms. Harris’s aides said she had most recently called the governor to ask how California was faring after it was struck by Hurricane Hilary and an earthquake.Mr. Newsom, who is barred from seeking a third term as governor, has assembled a skeleton structure of campaign aides, in effect a campaign-in-waiting.He has raised $3.5 million for Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden among them. He is also distributing money from his political action committee, Campaign for Democracy, further enhancing his standing with Democrats candidates and political operatives around the country. “If he ever ran for national office, he has a record to run on,” said Sean Clegg, one of Mr. Newsom’s top advisers.Still, should Mr. Newsom seek to expand his political ambitions, he faces some serious obstacles.Mr. Newsom has rejected the notion that his rising profile was undercutting Vice President Kamala Harris, about whom Democrats have expressed doubt.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Newsom won a second term as governor in 2022 with nearly 60 percent of the vote. But he is a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state and has never had to face a tough Republican opponent.Mr. Newsom has become the face of a state with a long history of innovation and prosperity, but that state also brings with it some of his party’s biggest challenges: homelessness, a housing crisis and what may be the end the kind of growth that has defined the California dream. California has always been a political and cultural outlier and has, more than ever, become a rallying point of the right on issues like crime.Jessica Millan Patterson, the leader of the California Republican Party, said Mr. Newsom could prove an appealing national candidate, but that he would not play well with swing voters in many states.“It’s a really difficult sale,” she said. “I don’t think most of the country is looking at California and saying, ‘That’s what we should be doing.”The last California governor elected president was Ronald Reagan, a Republican; but by the time of that election, in 1980, he had been out of office for five years.Jerry Brown, a former California governor who ran for the White House and lost three times, said that none of the hurdles Mr. Newsom faced were insurmountable. “The most important thing is the candidate and the times,” Mr. Brown said. “If the candidate fits the time, I don’t think the geography and the cultural differences matter as much.”Mr. Newsom acknowledged all the hurdles. “It’s the surround-sound nature of the anger machine that is 24/7, wall-to-wall anti-California,” he said. “People’s entire careers are built on tearing this state down.”But Mr. Newsom argued — while insisting he was engaging in a hypothetical discussion, since he is not running for president — that being governor of a state like California would make someone particularly qualified to run the nation.Not that it matters, by the governor’s telling. Mr. Newsom said becoming president was “never on my list” and that he was not one of those Democrats who grew up with a photograph of John F. Kennedy on his wall, as he put it, drawing an unstated comparison to Bill Clinton and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who ran for president in 2020 and may well run again in 2028.“Look, in 2028, 99.9999 percent of people will not remember a damn thing about what we did in this election,” he said. “They will all fall in love with whomever it is — and there will be 30 of them on the stage. No one is naïve about that.”Michael D. Shear More

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      Pelosi, Defying Predictions, Says She Will Seek Re-election in 2024

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      Since she stepped down from leadership last year, many observers expected Representative Nancy Pelosi of California to head toward retirement. But she has kept people guessing about her future.Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who served for decades as the Democratic Party’s House leader and was the first woman to become speaker, announced on Friday that she would seek re-election in 2024, ending months of speculation about her political future.“In light of the values of San Francisco, which we’ve always been proud to promote, I’ve made the decision to seek re-election,” Ms. Pelosi said on Friday at an event in her hometown focused on organized labor.Since she stepped down from leadership last year after Democrats lost the House majority, many observers expected that Ms. Pelosi, who at 83 is the seventh-oldest member of the chamber, was headed for retirement. Some had been surprised to see her stay in Congress at all, a rare move for a former speaker, and speculated that she would not finish her term.But colleagues said she has relished her lower profile as a rank-and-file member with emeritus status. In that new role, Ms. Pelosi offers advice on an as-needed basis to her party’s new leadership team, often sits in the back rows of the House floor gabbing with her closest friends and focuses her attention on San Francisco while quietly remaining a fund-raising powerhouse for Democrats.“I’m emancipated now!” an ebullient Ms. Pelosi said in a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times.Even after Ms. Pelosi made clear she would stay on after giving up her leadership post, some Democrats assumed that she would leave Congress early, potentially clearing the way for her daughter Christine Pelosi, a party activist and a Democratic National Committee executive committee member, to run for her seat.Ms. Pelosi’s decision to carry on with her 36-year career in the House comes at a moment of renewed scrutiny on the advanced age and health status of the country’s leading public servants — including President Biden, 80, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, 81, the longtime Republican leader — and questions about whether they have overstayed their time in power. Ms. Pelosi managed to somewhat insulate herself from those critiques when she decided last year to step down from leadership, essentially giving herself a demotion.Senator Dianne Feinstein, another California Democrat who at 90 is the oldest member of Congress, plans to retire after her term ends next year. But she is facing calls to step down sooner amid a precipitous health decline that has raised questions about her ability to do her job. Ms. Pelosi recently attributed those calls to sexism.A major factor in Ms. Pelosi’s decision to not only finish her term but to seek another, according to people close to her, was the health of her husband, Paul Pelosi, who was brutally beaten with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco last year by an assailant who later said he had been targeting the speaker. With Mr. Pelosi on a solid path to recovery, allies said, Ms. Pelosi did not feel it was necessary to step away from a job she loved.“Nancy Pelosi has always been untraditional,” said Stacy Kerr, who for a decade served as a senior aide to Ms. Pelosi. “She’s done things her own way her whole career, driven by the needs of her district and the country. We shouldn’t expect that she won’t continue to be a trailblazer now.”Still, Ms. Pelosi, famous for keeping her own counsel, had not shared her plans with anyone. People close to her said on Friday that she had ultimately decided to run again because she also viewed it as an urgent priority to re-elect Mr. Biden and help Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, become the next House speaker.Ms. Pelosi is still her party’s most prolific fund-raiser in Congress, a political skill that could be determinative in helping Democrats win back the House majority next year.The National Republican Congressional Committee quickly tried to frame her decision to stay on as a sign of Mr. Jeffries’s weakness.“The babysitter agreed to stay late!” the group’s press secretary, Will Reinert, said in a statement, noting that House Democrats still relied on Ms. Pelosi as the main engine of their fund-raising machine.In an online post, Ms. Pelosi characterized her decision to run again as one driven by local and global concerns.“Now, more than ever, our city needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our recovery,” Ms. Pelosi said in announcing her plans. “Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there, with liberty and justice for all.” More

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      Manchin Mulls His Political Future, Keeping Washington Guessing

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      The West Virginia Democrat could run for re-election to the Senate, make a third-party presidential bid or simply retire from politics. To his party’s consternation, he’s not ready to say which.Senator Joe Manchin III, the conservative West Virginia Democrat, was attending an event in his home state last month when he made a joke that quickly touched off the latest round of feverish speculation about his political future.“I will also endorse Jim for basketball coach,” Mr. Manchin said, suggesting that the popular Republican governor, Jim Justice, who has announced he will seek Mr. Manchin’s Senate seat next year, should instead be hired by West Virginia University to pursue his lifelong passion on the court.The comment seemed to suggest that Mr. Manchin, who has flirted with bolting his party and running for president as an independent, had not given up on defending his Senate seat.But as the last pivotal Democratic senator who has not yet said whether he will seek re-election, Mr. Manchin still has Washington and his party guessing about his plans.Behind closed doors, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been relentlessly encouraging him to run, regarding Mr. Manchin — perhaps the only Democrat with a chance to win a statewide contest in deeply conservative West Virginia — as key to preserving his party’s tenuous control of the Senate. Democrats across the country have been praying that he will seek re-election rather than pursuing a presidential bid through the centrist political group No Labels, which could draw votes from President Biden and help elect a Republican.For a man who routinely seeks the spotlight when faced with politically consequential decisions, this is among the most closely watched dilemmas Mr. Manchin has confronted.“I don’t have a clue what he’s going to do, and I don’t think he knows what he’s going to do,” said Phil Smith, the longtime chief lobbyist for the United Mine Workers of America and a close ally of Mr. Manchin’s.In a brief interview in the basement of the Senate this week, Mr. Manchin said he would make a decision about his future by the end of the year. If he intends to run for re-election, he must inform the state by January.“The bottom line is, I’ve been in West Virginia for a long time and moving in the right direction,” he said. “Our approval rating’s up quite substantially in a very, very, very red state. So I feel very good about all those things.”He added, “We’ve got plenty of time.”Still, decisions will have to be made before the political terrain becomes completely clear. The most important of his considerations is which Republican he would face. To win the nomination, Mr. Justice, a wealthy Democrat turned Republican, would have to defeat Representative Alex X. Mooney, a more reliable ally of former President Donald J. Trump’s.A poll last week for the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce encapsulated Mr. Manchin’s conundrum. The senator and the governor are both popular in the state, with 56 percent of voters approving of the job Mr. Justice has done and 51 percent approving of Mr. Manchin’s performance, numbers above even Mr. Trump’s 49 percent approval rating.Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a wealthy Democrat turned Republican, is very popular in the state.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWhile the poll showed Mr. Justice beating Mr. Manchin handily in a hypothetical Senate contest, 51 percent to 38 percent, the poll also found that Mr. Manchin would narrowly lead Mr. Mooney, 45 percent to 41 percent.(Mr. Manchin’s allies point out that his approval rating increased by 9 percentage points since 2021 in the poll, while Mr. Justice declined by 5 points.)The conservative political action committee Club for Growth has said it will back Mr. Mooney in the primary. Joe Kildea, a spokesman for the group, said its political arm had raised about $14 million and would spend “whatever it takes.” That could bloody Mr. Justice, but money alone may not be enough for Mr. Mooney, who trails the governor among West Virginia Republican voters, 58 percent to 26 percent.“We beat big-government, establishment RINOs all the time,” said David McIntosh, the president of Club for Growth, referring to the conservative slur “Republicans in name only.”It is also unclear whether Mr. Trump will seek to get involved in the primary, set for May 14. In 2022, he endorsed Mr. Mooney in a House Republican primary against Representative David B. McKinley, and Mr. Mooney won easily. This time around, Mr. Trump is extremely unhappy with Club for Growth, which has funded an advertising campaign in Iowa imploring Republicans to back a different presidential candidate. Then again, he also likes to counter Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, who backs Mr. Justice.Mr. Manchin’s allies claim that none of that is weighing particularly heavily on the senator these days.“I know it’s shocking in D.C., but Joe Manchin isn’t focused on partisan politics this year,” said Jonathan Kott, his former senior adviser in the Senate. “He will sit down with his family at the end of the year and figure out how he can best serve the people of West Virginia and the country.”Yet the timeline set by No Labels for a possible independent presidential run has complicated Mr. Manchin’s calculations. So far, the group has qualified for a spot on the presidential ballot in only 11 states and is hustling to make the ballot in many more. And though No Labels leaders still insist they will only start a “unity” ticket for the White House if the major party nominees do not move to the political center, the group has set a date in April for a convention in Dallas to choose its candidates.That means Mr. Manchin would be choosing between the Senate run and a White House bid before he knew whether No Labels would select him.His third option might be simply to retire at 76. His alma mater, West Virginia University, is in deep trouble, slashing its budget, laying off faculty and even eliminating its foreign language program. Its president, E. Gordon Gee, turns 80 in February, and a chance to lead the university out of crisis would be tempting for the senator, Mr. Manchin’s allies said.Students protesting the budget cuts that led to the elimination of foreign language programs at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va., last month.Leah Willingham/Associated PressOne official with close ties to the senator pointed to the decision of one of his former chiefs of staff, Larry Puccio, to sign on with Mr. Justice as an indication that Mr. Manchin will retire.Adding to the intrigue, the senator’s daughter Heather Manchin has started a nonprofit organization, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that is trying to raise more than $100 million to promote centrist policies. Those familiar with the organization, which is currently independent from Mr. Manchin, said it could serve as a landing pad for the senator if he retires from politics. The group could also conduct market research on policies and messaging that would prove useful to his presidential aspirations should he run, though Ms. Manchin denied that had anything to do with it.“This movement is not about starting a third party or rallying behind any one individual,” she said. The No Labels flirtation has perplexed some of Mr. Manchin’s allies and some political observers. Senate aides say Mr. Manchin is seriously considering it, but others suggest that he is simply using the prospect of a third-party presidential run to keep his name in the news, pressure Mr. Biden to address his policy priorities as he carries out the Inflation Reduction Act and raise money for whatever he decides to do next.A possible rival for the No Labels ticket has already emerged in Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican and the former governor of Maryland.Mr. Hogan, appearing on CBS’s “Face The Nation” on Sunday, implied that the name at the top of the No Labels ticket would have to be a Republican to ensure that the independent campaign would take at least as many votes from the current Republican front-runner, Mr. Trump, as from Mr. Biden. Democrats, he said, should relax.Mr. Manchin’s possible candidacy “is really what set them off in a panic,” Mr. Hogan said.It was at an event in Beckley, W.Va., for former Representative Nick Rahall, one of the last Democrats to represent the state in Congress, that Mr. Manchin made the quip about West Virginia University hiring Mr. Justice to coach basketball, after Mr. Gee had suggested it.The event was a dedication of Mr. Rahall’s archives, and the crowd was full of former Democrats, including Mr. Justice. Mr. Manchin was the last of his kind.Still, Mr. Rahall left confident in the senator’s survival.“Joe Manchin has said if he enters the race, he will win, and I believe him when he says that,” Mr. Rahall said. “Now, he hasn’t said which race he’ll enter.” More

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      in Elections

      Behold the Free Speech Chutzpah of the Republican Party

      by

      A solid majority of Republicans continues to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election — evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Virtually all Democrats believe that Trump did, in fact, lose the 2020 election and that Biden won fair and square.Now in an extraordinary display of chutzpah, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, and fellow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have accused Democrats of violating the First Amendment rights of election deniers.In a June 26, 2023, interim staff report, Jordan and his colleagues charged that the Biden administration “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor” those who claimed that Trump won in 2020.The report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded With Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” makes the argument thatThe First Amendment recognizes that no person or entity has a monopoly on the truth, and that the “truth” of today can quickly become the “misinformation” of tomorrow. Labeling speech “misinformation” or “disinformation” does not strip it of its First Amendment protection. As such, under the Constitution, the federal government is strictly prohibited from censoring Americans’ political speech.These civil libertarian claims of unconstitutional suppression of speech come from the same Republican Party that is leading the charge to censor the teaching of what it calls “divisive concepts” about race; the same party that expelled two Democratic members of the Tennessee state legislature who loudly called for more gun control after a school shooting; the same party that threatens to impeach a liberal judge in North Carolina for speaking out about racial bias; the same party that has aided and abetted book banning in red states across the country.In other words, it is Republicans who have become the driving force in deploying censorship to silence the opposition, simultaneously claiming that their own First Amendment rights are threatened by Democrats.One of the most egregious examples of Republican censorship is taking place in North Carolina, where a state judicial commission has initiated an investigation of Anita Earls, a Black State Supreme Court justice, because she publicly called for increased diversity in the court system.A June 2 Law360 piece examined the racial and gender composition of the North Carolina judiciary and found “that out of 22 appellate jurists — seven state Supreme Court justices and 15 Court of Appeals judges — 64 percent are male and 86 percent are white.”The article then quoted Earls: “It has been shown by social scientists that diverse decision-making bodies do a better job. … I really feel like everyone’s voice needs to be heard, and if you don’t have a diverse judicial system, perspectives and views are not being heard, you’re not making decisions that are in the interests of the entire society. And I feel like that’s wrong.”On Aug. 15, the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission notified Earls that it was opening an investigation “based on an interview you since gave to the media in which you appear to allege that your Supreme Court colleagues are acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias in some of their decision-making.”Earls’s interview, the notification letter continued, “potentially violates Canon 2A of the Code of Judicial Conduct which requires a judge to conduct herself ‘at all times in a manner which promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.’”On Aug. 29, Earls filed suit in federal court charging that there is “an ongoing campaign on the part of the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission to stifle” her First Amendment free-speech rights “and expose her to punishment that ranges from a letter of caution that becomes part of a permanent file available to any entity conducting a background check to removal from the bench.”At the center of Republican efforts to censor ideological adversaries is an extensive drive to regulate what is taught in public schools and colleges.In an Education Week article published last year, “Here’s the Long List of Topics Republicans Want Banned From the Classroom,” Sarah Schwartz and Eesha Pendharkar provided a laundry list of Republican state laws regulating education:Since January 2021, 14 states have passed into law what’s popularly referred to as “anti-critical race theory” legislation. These laws and orders, combined with local actions to restrict certain types of instruction, now impact more than one out of every three children in the country, according to a recent study from UCLA.Schwartz and Pendharkar also noted that “many of these new bills propose withholding funding from school districts that don’t comply with these regulations. Some, though, would allow parents to sue individual educators who provide banned material to students, potentially collecting thousands of dollars.”What’s more, “Most prohibited teaching a list of ‘divisive concepts,’ which originally appeared in an executive order signed by then-President Donald Trump in fall 2020.”The Trump order, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” included prohibitions on the following “divisive concepts”:That an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; that any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or that meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.The censorship effort has been quite successful.In a February 2022 article, “New Critical Race Theory Laws Have Teachers Scared, Confused and Self-censoring,” The Washington Post reported that “in 13 states, new laws or directives govern how race can be taught in schools, in some cases creating reporting systems for complaints. The result, teachers and principals say, is a climate of fear around how to comply with rules they often do not understand.”Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard who is a professor of economics there, argued in an email that issues of free speech are not easily resolved.The problem, Summers wrote, “comes from both sides. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to limit what he regards as critical race theory is deplorable as are efforts on Ivy League campuses to discredit and devalue those with unfashionable beliefs about diversity or the role of genes or things military.”But, Summers continued,It’s sometimes a bit harder than the good guys make out. What about cultures of intolerance where those who, for example, believe in genetic determinism are shunned, and graduate students all exhibit their academic freedom rights to not be the teaching fellows of faculty with those beliefs. Does ideological diversity mean philosophy departments need to treat Ayn Rand with dignity or biology departments need to hear out creationism?“What about professional schools where professional ethics are part of what is being instilled?” Summers asked:Could a law school consider hiring a lawyer who, while in government, defended coercive interrogation practices? Under what circumstances should one accept, perhaps insist on university leaders criticizing speech? I have been fond of saying academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism but when should leaders speak out? Was I right to condemn calls for divesting in Israel as antisemitic in effect, if not intent? When should speech be attacked?There is, at this moment, a nascent mobilization on many campuses of organizations determined to defend free speech rights, to reject the sanctioning of professors and students, and to ensure the safety of controversial speakers.Graduates of 22 colleges and universities have formed branches of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance “to support free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.”At Harvard, 133 members of the faculty have joined the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, dedicated to upholding the free speech guidelines adopted by the university in 1990:Free speech is uniquely important to the university because we are a community committed to reason and rational discourse. Free interchange of ideas is vital for our primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning.Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at the school and a founder of the group, wrote in an email that achieving this goal is much tougher than generally believed:To understand the recent assaults on free speech, we need to flip the question: Not why diverse opinions are being suppressed, but why they are tolerated. Freedom of speech is an exotic, counterintuitive concept. What’s intuitive is that the people who disagree with me are spreading dangerous falsehoods and must be stifled for the greater good. The realization that everyone feels this way, that all humans are fallible, that however confident I am in my beliefs, I may be wrong, and that the only way we can collectively approach the truth is to allow opinions to be expressed and then evaluate them, requires feats of abstraction and self-control.The example I cited at the beginning of this column — the charge that the Biden administration “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor” the claims of election deniers — has proved to be a case study of a successful Republican tactic on several fronts.Republicans claimed the moral high ground as the victims of censorship, throwing their adversaries on the defensive and quieting their opponents.On June 6, The Washington Post reported, in “These Academics Studied Falsehoods Spread by Trump. Now the G.O.P. Wants Answers,” thatThe pressure has forced some researchers to change their approach or step back, even as disinformation is rising ahead of the 2024 election. As artificial intelligence makes deception easier and platforms relax their rules on political hoaxes, industry veterans say they fear that young scholars will avoid studying disinformation.One of the underlying issues in the free speech debate is the unequal distribution of power. Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, raised a question in reply to my email: “I wonder if the century-long standard for why we defend free speech — that we need a fairly absolute marketplace of ideas to allow all ideas to be heard (with a few exceptions), deliberated upon, and that the truth will ultimately win out — is a bit dated in this modern era of social media, algorithms and most importantly profound corporate power.”While there has always been a corporate skew to speech, Frymer argued,in the modern era, technology enables such an overwhelming drowning out of different ideas. How long are we hanging on to the protection of a hypothetical — that someone will find the truth on the 40th page of a Google search or a podcast with no corporate backing? How long do we defend a hypothetical when the reality is so strongly skewed toward the suppression of the meaningful exercise of free speech?Frymer contended thatWe do seem to need regulation of speech, in some form, more than ever. I’m not convinced we can’t find a way to do it that would enable our society to be more just and informed. The stakes — the fragility of democracy, the increasing hatred and violence on the basis of demographic categories, and the health of our planet — are extremely high to defend a single idea with no compromise.Frymer suggested that ultimatelyWe can’t consider free speech without at least some understanding of power. We can’t assume in all contexts that the truth will ever come out; unregulated speech does not mean free speech.From a different vantage point, Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email that the censorship/free speech debate has run amok:It certainly has gone haywire. The way I understand it is that freedom of speech has not been a principled commitment, but has been used instrumentally to attain other political ends. The very folks who were so active in demanding freedom of speech in universities have turned around and imposed unconscionable censorship on schools and libraries. The very folks who have demanded a freedom of speech for minority groups have sought to suppress offensive and racist speech.The framing in the current debate over free speech and the First Amendment, Post contends, is dangerously off-kilter. He sent me an article he wrote that will be published shortly by the scholarly journal Daedalus, “The Unfortunate Consequences of a Misguided Free Speech Principle.” In it, he notes that the issues are not just more complex than generally recognized, but in fact distorted by false assumptions.Post makes the case that there is “a widespread tendency to conceptualize the problem as one of free speech. We imagine that the crisis would be resolved if only we could speak more freely.” In fact, he writes, “the difficulty we face is not one of free speech, but of politics. Our capacity to speak has been disrupted because our politics has become diseased.”He specifically faults a widely read March 2022 Times editorial, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” that warnedAmericans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.Post observes thatNo such right exists in any well-ordered society. If I walk into a room shouting outrageous slurs, I should expect to be shamed and shunned. Only a demoralized community would passively accept irresponsibly hurtful speech.People constantly “balance self-restraint against the need for candor.”Arguments that the protection of free speech is crucial to the preservation of democracy, Post maintains, “encourage us to forget that the fundamental point of public discourse is the political legitimation of the state. Our public discourse is successful when it produces a healthy public opinion capable of making state power answerable to politics.”In Post’s view, polarization “is not a simple question of speech. It is the corrosive dissolution of the political commitments by which Americans have forged themselves into a single nation. If we conceptualize public discourse as a social practice, we can see that its failures stem from this fundamental problem.”In this context, Post concludes,Politics is possible only when diverse persons agree to be bound by a common fate. Lacking that fundamental commitment, politics can easily slide into an existential struggle for survival that is the equivalent of war. We can too easily come to imagine our opponents as enemies, whose victory would mean the collapse of the nation.In such circumstances, Post continues,Political debate can no longer produce a healthy and legitimate democratic will. However inclusive we may make our public discourse, however tolerant of the infinite realms of potential diversity we may become, the social practice of public discourse will fail to achieve its purpose so long as we no longer experience ourselves as tied to a common destiny.“We cannot now speak to each other because something has already gone violently wrong with our political community,” Post writes. “The underlying issue is not our speech, but our politics. So long as we insist on allegiance to a mythical free speech principle that exists immaculately distinct from the concrete social practices, we shall look for solutions in all the wrong places.”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