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    Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say

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    Extreme heat and flooding are accelerating the deterioration of bridges, engineers say, posting a quiet but growing threat.On a 95-degree day this summer, New York City’s Third Avenue Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Manhattan, got stuck in the open position for hours. As heat and flooding scorched and scoured the Midwest, a steel railroad bridge connecting Iowa with South Dakota collapsed under surging waters. In Lewiston, Maine, a bridge closed after the pavement buckled from fluctuating temperatures.America’s bridges, a quarter of which were built before 1960, were already in need of repair. But now, extreme heat and increased flooding linked to climate change are accelerating the disintegration of the nation’s bridges, engineers say, essentially causing them to age prematurely.The result is a quiet but growing threat to the safe movement of people and goods around the country, and another example of how climate change is reshaping daily life in ways Americans may not realize.“We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the effects of climate change on infrastructure. “These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.”Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.“It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” Dr. Chinowsky said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Not as Powerful as She Thinks She Is

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      In an interview last week, NewsNation’s Blake Burman asked Speaker Mike Johnson about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and before Burman could finish his question, Johnson responded with classic Southern scorn. “Bless her heart,” he said, and then he told Burman that Greene wasn’t proving to be a serious lawmaker and that he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her.Strangely enough, Johnson’s dismissal of Greene — on the eve of her potential effort to oust him from the office he won in October — spoke as loudly as his decision to put a vote for Ukraine aid on the floor in the first place. In spite of the Republican Party’s narrow majority in the House and the constant threat of a motion to vacate the chair, he will not let MAGA’s most extreme lawmaker run the place.To understand the significance of this moment, it’s necessary to understand the changing culture of the MAGAfied Republican Party. After eight years of Donald Trump’s dominance, we know the fate of any Republican politician who directly challenges him — the confrontation typically ends his or her political career in the most miserable way possible, with dissenters chased out of office amid a hail of threats and insults. Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are but a few of the many Republicans who dared to defy Trump and paid a high political price.But there’s an open question: Does the MAGA movement have the same control over the Republican Party when Trump isn’t directly in the fray? Can it use the same tactics to impose party discipline and end political careers? If the likes of Greene or Steve Bannon or Matt Gaetz or Charlie Kirk can wield the same power, then the transformation of the party will be complete. It won’t be simply in thrall to Trump; it will be in thrall to his imitators and heirs and perhaps lost to the reactionary right for a generation or more.I don’t want to overstate the case, but Johnson’s stand — together with the Democrats’ response — gives me hope. Consider the chain of events. On April 12, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago and received enough of a blessing from Trump to make it clear that Trump didn’t want him removed. Days before a vote on Ukraine aid that directly defied the MAGA movement, Trump said Johnson was doing a “very good job.”Days later, Johnson got aid to Ukraine passed with more Democratic votes than Republican — a violation of the so-called Hastert Rule, an informal practice that says the speaker shouldn’t bring a vote unless the measure is supported by a majority within his own party. Greene and the rest of MAGA exploded, especially when Democratic lawmakers waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor. Greene vowed to force a vote on her motion to end Johnson’s speakership. She filed the motion in March as a “warning” to Johnson, and now she’s following through — directly testing her ability to transform the House.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Vetoes Republican Measure to Block Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

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      Republicans and some Democrats tried to repeal a waiver issued by the Biden administration that allows federally funded E.V. chargers to be made from imported iron and steel.President Biden on Wednesday vetoed a Republican-led effort that could have thwarted the administration’s plans to invest $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle charging stations across the country.In issuing the veto, Mr. Biden argued that the congressional resolution would have hurt domestic manufacturing as well as the clean energy transition.“If enacted, this resolution would undermine the hundreds of millions of dollars that the private sector has already invested in domestic E.V. charging manufacturing, and chill further domestic investment in this critical market,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.The move comes amid a growing political divide over electric vehicles. The Biden administration is aggressively promoting them as an important part of the fight to slow global warming. The landmark climate law signed in 2022 by Mr. Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act, offers incentives to consumers to buy electric vehicles and to manufacturers to build them in the United States.Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden’s likely challenger in the 2024 election, have attacked electric vehicles as unreliable, inconvenient and ceding America’s auto manufacturing to China, which dominates the supply chain for electric vehicles.Republicans, with some Democrats, voted to repeal a waiver issued by the Biden administration that allows federally funded electric vehicle chargers to be made from imported iron and steel, as long as they are assembled in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      A Report Card for Bidenomics

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      Voters’ negative perceptions about the economy are weighing on President Biden’s poll numbers. Here’s what his economic policies have, and haven’t, accomplished.President Biden is finding it hard to sell Americans on his economic track record.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesWhere the economy is working (and where it isn’t) With a year to go before Election Day, polls increasingly show that American voters believe next year will be a rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump — with the former president in the lead in key battleground states despite his legal troubles (more on that below).Biden’s troubles stem in large part from negative perceptions about the economy, even as several indications show that it is performing strongly. Here’s a deeper look at what “Bidenomics” has, and hasn’t, accomplished.On the positive side: jobs. Since Biden took office, employers have created 14 million jobs, and the unemployment rate has been hovering around a 50-year-low for months.The president has also been talking up signature economic accomplishments like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which he argues have helped rebuild rural America and invigorated the economy. “Bidenomics is just another way of saying the American dream,” he said in a speech. It’s not a stretch. The economy grew last quarter at nearly 5 percent, belying a global slowdown.On the negative side: inflation. Wages have been growing slowly, but they’ve been offset by rising prices, Biden’s Achilles’ heel. Republicans have blamed the White House’s economic policies for soaring consumer prices, which hit a 40-year high in the summer of 2022.Many economists say global factors are probably more to blame. But the perception of Biden’s culpability here is hurting him.A partial win: the markets. Investors tend to give high marks to presidents whose tenures coincide with strong investment returns. The S&P 500 has gained nearly 15 percent since Biden’s inauguration, weathering much of the slump set off by the Fed’s historic rates-tightening policy. (The bond market has gone in the opposite direction.)That’s decent, but pales in comparison with the Trump years, when the benchmark index climbed more than 65 percent.Biden has been touring the country — on Monday, he was in Delaware to promote federal money flowing to Amtrak, the rail operator — to refocus the public’s perceptions of his economic achievements. Meanwhile, questions swirl over whether Biden can eventually overtake Trump.A reminder: The DealBook Summit is on Nov. 29. Among the guests are Bob Iger of Disney; Lina Khan of the F.T.C.; and David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery. You can apply to attend here.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Uber’s latest earnings miss expectations. The ride-hailing giant said on Tuesday that it had earned 10 cents per share in the third quarter, below the 12 cents that analysts had forecast. But the company argued that its business showed strong growth in its core mobility division.OpenAI seeks to build on its runaway success. The Microsoft-backed A.I. start-up said that its chatbot, ChatGPT, now had over 100 million weekly active users, giving it a formidable lead in the race to capture artificial intelligence customers. The company also introduced an online store that will let users build customized chatbots.Striking Hollywood actors push back on studios’ latest contract offer. The SAG-AFTRA union said that the “last, best and final” bid still fell short on key issues like the use of A.I., making it unclear when its nearly four-month strike will end. In other labor news, Starbucks will raise the average salary of hourly workers by at least 3 percent.Trump puts his legal liabilities on displayDonald Trump may be handily leading the 2024 election polls. But his appearance in court on Monday, testifying in a civil fraud lawsuit filed by New York State, appeared to do him no favors in efforts to hold onto his business empire.It was a reminder that, while he’s riding high in the presidential race, the former president still faces a thicket of legal battles that could cost him financially and, perhaps, politically.Here are some notable moments from Trump’s testimony:Trump conceded that he had played a role in valuing his company’s properties, an issue at the heart of the case. (New York prosecutors argue that Trump illicitly inflated his net worth to defraud banks and insurers.) Of the company’s financial statements, he said, “I would look at them, I would see them, and I would maybe on occasion have some suggestions.”But Trump also sought to underplay the importance of those statements, saying they were so riddled with disclaimers that they were “worthless.” He promised, unprompted, that some of his bankers would testify in his defense.Trump also assailed the presiding judge, Arthur Engoron, for having decided before the trial that fraud was committed. Engoron appeared exasperated, telling the former president to answer questions and stop delivering speeches.The testimony was a reminder of his political baggage, which was also an undercurrent of the endorsement of Ron DeSantis on Monday by Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s popular governor. Reynolds, whose state’s caucuses could be crucial in bolstering a Trump rival, said that the U.S. needed a president “who puts this country first and not himself” — a thinly veiled rebuke of Trump.His legal issues don’t appear to have dented his popularity. He has contended that he is being politically persecuted — “People like you go around and try to demean me and try to hurt me,” he told a state lawyer on Monday — an argument that some of his supporters have embraced.In a sign of his enduring political strength, the betting site PredictIt puts Trump’s odds of winning the nomination on Monday at more than four times that of his nearest competitor in its market, Nikki Haley.Dina Powell McCormick, in 2017, when she was a deputy national security adviser during the Trump presidency.Al Drago for The New York TimesExxon Mobil taps a Wall Street and D.C. power player Dina Powell McCormick, a former Goldman Sachs executive and onetime Trump administration official, is joining the board of Exxon Mobil effective Jan. 1. Her appointment comes as energy groups have embarked on a series of big deals on the back of soaring oil prices and bumper profits.Powell McCormick has long been one of the most senior women on Wall Street. Before joining BDT & MSD partners, an investment and advisory firm, earlier this year, she spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs. Powell McCormick led the Wall Street giant’s global sovereign business and sustainability, and she was a member of its management committee, among other roles.Powell McCormick has also been a Washington power player. She has spent more than a dozen years working in government. From 2017 to 2018, she was a deputy national security adviser to Trump and played a significant role on Middle East policy, including efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. (Her husband, David McCormick, is a former C.E.O. of the hedge fund Bridgewater and was a Treasury Department official under Hank Paulson. He is running for Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican.)Powell McCormick’s appointment even won backing from Mike Bloomberg, who is spending billions to fight climate change — a sign of how wide-ranging her political and business relationships are.“Dina has been a close partner for years through her role as global head of sustainability at Goldman Sachs,” Bloomberg said, “and we have teamed up to create new partnerships that invest in market-driven ways to create clean energy and advance climate transition goals.”Energy giants are on a deal spree. Exxon reported quarterly profits of $9.1 billion last month, as oil prices have surged and demand has skyrocketed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In October, Exxon agreed to acquire the shale oil specialist Pioneer Natural Resources for around $60 billion and Chevron struck a $53 billion deal to buy Hess. Exxon’s board had been in the spotlight over the energy transition. Engine No. 1, an activist investor, won three seats after targeting the company over its governance and environmental track record. But two years later, the firm changed course, saying that Exxon had made big changes. Exxon, however, has resisted calls to pour more money into renewable energy, arguing that its money is better on low-carbon investments.Tracing WeWork’s rise and spectacular fallWeWork finally filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, after years of struggling with crushing debt and the coronavirus pandemic’s emptying out of office spaces — and that’s even after it had abandoned the runaway growth it pursued under its co-founder, Adam Neumann.The company that sought Chapter 11 is a shell of the real estate juggernaut that first sought to go public at a $47 billion valuation. (Its stock is down 98 percent this year.) Here’s how the business once lauded by the Japanese tech investor SoftBank as a revolution went astray.WeWork has been on its heels since it scrapped its I.P.O. plans in 2019. The company had been riding high, buoyed by Neumann’s promises that the start-up — whose business involved leasing out office space for co-working — would “elevate the world’s consciousness.” But then:Prospective investors blanched at the company’s steep losses, lax corporate governance and the controversies that dogged Neumann. (Activities on private jets were among them.) And the S.E.C. criticized the company’s disclosure involving mismatches between long-term financial obligations and its short-term assets. Neumann stepped down after WeWork shelved its I.P.O., and SoftBank provided it with a multibillion-dollar lifeline.Under a new C.E.O., Sandeep Mathrani, WeWork confronted the devastating effect of pandemic lockdowns and the rise of remote working. The company went public — via a blank-check vehicle — in 2021, while it started closing locations and renegotiating leases.Mathrani left in May, reportedly after clashing with SoftBank. His replacement, David Tolley, has kept trying to right the ship, but WeWork warned in August that there was “substantial doubt” about its future. Last month, it said it would miss interest payments on its debt.WeWork’s filing raises questions about the fate of commercial real estate. The company noted on Monday that it had reached agreements with about 92 percent of creditors holding secured debt. Its restructuring involves reducing its real estate portfolio.The company is one of the largest corporate tenants in New York and London, and any move to shed more of its leases would hurt commercial landlords that are themselves struggling to pay their debts.THE SPEED READ DealsResearch analysts at some of the banks that took Birkenstock public wrote in their initial reports on the sandal maker that its I.P.O. was valued too high. (Bloomberg)“Warring Billionaires, a Rogue Employee, a Divorce: One Hedge Fund’s Tale of Woe” (NYT)PolicyIntel is reportedly the leading candidate to land billions of dollars in federal funding to build secure plants to make chips for use by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. (WSJ)A man who posed as a billionaire rabbi and made a $290 million takeover bid for the retailer Lord & Taylor was sentenced to more than eight years in prison. (Bloomberg)Best of the restDisney hired Hugh Johnston, the longtime finance chief at PepsiCo, as its new C.F.O. (CNBC)The founder of the dating app Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd, is stepping down as C.E.O. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Union Victories May Lift Biden, as U.A.W. Targets Tesla and Others

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      President Biden’s support for autoworkers helped them make big wage gains, and labor organizers are looking to bring about similar gains elsewhere as carmakers transition to electric vehicles.The United Automobile Workers’ big wins with Detroit’s Big Three automakers could also prove to be a significant political victory for President Biden, who openly sided with striking workers to pressure the companies, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, to produce generous concessions.But the U.A.W.’s turn now toward nonunionized automakers like Tesla, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes will test whether Mr. Biden’s support, as well as measures that he signed into law, will produce the expansion of organized labor that he has long promised.For unionized autoworkers, many of them in the swing state of Michigan, the tentative contracts, which are awaiting rank-and-file ratification, would bring substantial wage gains, “another piece of good economic news,” Mr. Biden said on Monday. The tentative contracts would lift the top U.A.W. wage to more than $40 per hour over four and a half years, from $32 an hour. Stellantis, maker of Chryslers, Jeeps and Ram trucks, agreed to reopen its assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., near the border of Wisconsin, another crucial swing state.“The impact of Biden’s public support can’t be overstated,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the umbrella A.F.L.-C.I.O., which includes the autoworkers’ union. “There’s a lot of upside here for Biden. The contracts set a new standard for the industry that clearly show the benefit of collective bargaining.”Beyond that, G.M. agreed to bring its electric vehicle battery joint venture, Ultium, under the national contract, a boon for Ultium workers but also a pressure point for unions as they seek to organize battery plants sprouting up around the country. Such plants are using generous subsidies from Mr. Biden’s signature legislative achievements — especially the climate change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act — as the administration pushes to speed the country’s transition to electric vehicles.“This historic contract is a testament to the power of unions and collective bargaining to build strong middle-class jobs while helping our most iconic American companies thrive,” Mr. Biden said Monday evening.Jason Walsh, the executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which has brought together labor and environmental groups to marshal support for the clean energy transition, said the contracts, if ratified by U.A.W. workers, would be a watershed moment for the economy — and possibly the planet.“The legislative intent behind the industrial policy in the Inflation Reduction Act was an implicit deal: We as a nation are going to invest in the sectors of the economy that are important to the country and the planet in the long run, but in return we want the companies that receive those benefits to maximize returns to workers, communities and the environment,” Mr. Walsh said. To that end, the contract settlement is “huge,” he added. “It highlights the lie peddled by Donald Trump and at times the Big Three that the E.V. transition means lower-quality jobs in a nonunion work force.”The U.A.W. actions took on strikingly political meaning. In May, the autoworkers’ union opted to withhold an endorsement of Mr. Biden’s re-election, openly expressing “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president was pushing through legislation and regulation.Last month, Mr. Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, castigated striking workers, saying “they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.”Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, visited a nonunion parts plant in Michigan to rail against electric vehicles and to demand that Shawn Fain, the new and aggressive U.A.W. president, endorse him for another term in the White House.Mr. Fain said he would never do that, and supporters of the president pointed to provisions in federal laws championed by Mr. Biden that may have helped secure the deals. Subsidies for electric vehicle production will go only to domestic manufacturing plants, meaning Detroit management could not credibly threaten to move new auto plants overseas in search of cheaper labor.But union officials did not say on Monday what their intentions were for a presidential endorsement. Mr. Fain did make clear over the weekend that he was not resting on his laurels with the gains achieved with its escalating wave of strikes against the Big Three. The union plans to target Tesla, the nonunion automaker that dominates the domestic electric vehicle market, as well as foreign automakers with factories in the Southeast, where unions have struggled to gain a foothold. Some of the biggest new plants are under construction in Georgia, a critical swing state for 2024, including a Hyundai electric vehicle plant that will be the state’s biggest economic development project ever.Organizers will be able to lean on provisions of the three big laws that Mr. Biden signed — a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change — to push their case.Tucked into all of those laws were measures to give unions the power to effectively tell employers that accept rich federal tax incentives this: You must pay union-scale wages and use union apprenticeship and training programs, so you might as well hire union workers.How electric vehicle and battery makers respond to the U.A.W.’s next push will go a long way toward determining whether Mr. Biden can make good on his promise that his effort to curtail climate change and wean the nation off fossil fuels will indeed produce “good union jobs.” More

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      Biden Is Trying to Co-opt Trump’s Biggest Strength

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      Joe Biden just offered a window into what a Biden-Trump rematch might look like. Well, part of it, at least.The wildness of Donald Trump’s political style often obscures — at least to his critics — the more banal dimensions of his appeal. The strongest of Trump’s arguments, and the one Biden has the most to fear from in 2024, is economic. In 2016, Trump ran as a businessman savant who would wield his mastery of the deal in service of the American people. “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” Trump said. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.”Trump said that elites had sold you out. They traded your job to China. They let your bridges and roads and buildings crumble. They respected the work they did — work that happens behind a computer screen, work that needs fancy degrees, work that happens in offices rather than factories and cities rather than towns — and dismissed the work you did. They got rich and you got nothing. Exit polls found that Trump won large majorities among those who thought the economy was “fair” or “poor.”Trump did not, during his presidency, turn that critique into an agenda. There were islands of action — trade policy foremost among them — but the order of the day was incoherence. Infrastructure weeks came and went. Tax cuts were tilted toward the rich. There was no strategy to restore America’s manufacturing prowess or rebuild bargaining power for workers without college degrees.But Trump had the good fortune to take office during an economic boom. And he kept that boom going. He worked with congressional Republicans to tax less and spend more, budget deficits be damned. He appointed Jay Powell to the Federal Reserve, and Powell kept money cheap and the labor market hot. Unemployment, in February 2020, was 3.5 percent. Wages were rising and inflation was low.Then Covid hit, and Trump worked with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to flood the economy with trillions of dollars in support payments. Joblessness spiked, but workers overall didn’t suffer. This is Trump’s deepest well of strength in a 2024 rematch. Only about a third of voters approve of the job Biden has done on the economy. Polls show Trump is the more trusted economic manager, by far.On Wednesday, in Chicago, Biden previewed the counterargument he’ll make in a much-hyped speech defining “Bidenomics.” Biden’s case is this: What Trump only promised, I delivered.Biden set his economic policies in contrast to “40 years of trickle-down.” Trickle-down economics usually describes the theory that tax cuts at the top will lead to prosperity at the bottom. Biden is using it to describe a more expansive economic order — what sometimes gets called “neoliberalism.” Trickle-down, in his telling, was the philosophy that “it didn’t matter where you made things.” It “meant slashing public investment” and looking the other way as “three-quarters of U.S. industries grew more concentrated.” Forty years, as alert readers will note, encompasses not just the administrations of Donald Trump and George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but Bill Clinton and, yes, Barack Obama.This is a point worth dwelling on. The Biden administration is thickly populated with veterans of the Obama and Clinton White Houses. But it doesn’t see itself in comfortable continuity with those legacies. It sees itself, in key ways, as a break with them.Back in May, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser (and a key aide, before that, to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), made this explicit during a speech to the Brookings Institution. Sullivan slammed the belief that “the type of growth did not matter.” That had led, he said, to administrations that let Wall Street thrive while “essential sectors, like semiconductors and infrastructure, atrophied.” He dismissed the “assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently.”And he tendered a modest mea culpa for his own party. “Frankly, our domestic economic policies also failed to fully account for the consequences of our international economic policies,” he said. In letting globalization and automation hollow out domestic manufacturing, Democrats had been part of a Washington consensus that “had frayed the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests.”Biden’s speech in Chicago tried to show he was a Democrat who had learned these lessons. First, there was his emphasis on place. “I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to say where they grew up and stay where they grew up,” he said. “That’s Bidenomics.” Later, he said it again. “I believe that every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job no matter where they are — in the heartland, in small towns, in every part of this country — to raise their kids on a good paycheck and keep their roots where they grew up.”I talked to Jared Bernstein, the chairman of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, about the thinking here. “One of the pretty bereft assumptions of traditional economics is that you don’t need to worry about place because, as long as there are good jobs somewhere, people will go there and get them,” Bernstein told me. “It doesn’t really work that way.” One reason it doesn’t work that way is housing costs. “The idea that you can relocate from rural America, where housing is cheap, to expensive-housing America, even with the pay differentials, is a bit of a fantasy,” he said.Biden’s answer is built around the investments being made by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. You don’t install wind and solar farms in Manhattan and San Francisco. You don’t even necessarily do it in blue states, much to the chagrin of Democratic governors. Biden pointed to Weirton, W.Va., “where a steel mill closed in the beginning of the century” and, because of him, an iron-air battery plant is “being built on the same exact site, bringing back 750 good-paying jobs, bringing back a sense of pride and hope for the future.” The Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research firm, estimates that Biden’s red states will get $623 billion in clean energy investments by 2030, compared with $354 billion for blue states.All these factories and battery plants and electric-vehicle charging stations and auto manufacturing facilities give Biden his strongest line against Trump. After comparing the infrastructure weeks Trump never delivered and “the infrastructure decade” he did, Biden noted: “Construction of manufacturing facilities here on U.S. soil grew only 2 percent on my predecessor’s watch in four years. Two percent. On my watch, it’s grown nearly 100 percent in two years.”Biden made a point of saying that in the economy he’s building, “we don’t need everyone to have a four-year degree. It’s great if you can get one; we’re trying to make it easier for you to get one. But you don’t need it to get a good-paying job anymore.”Bernstein didn’t pull his punch on this one. “I’ve been part of Democratic administrations where, basically, the solution to labor market woes was to go to college. The president has seen through that.” Biden, he continued, “realizes something everybody should know. About two-thirds of the work force isn’t college-educated. And there’s no version of Bidenomics that leaves two-thirds of the labor force out.”But here, Biden’s policy argument was a little thinner. He talked up his support for unions and apprenticeship programs, but he named more proposals to help people go to college than to help them get good jobs without a degree.The best thing Biden has done for less-educated workers is preside over a tight labor market. Unemployment has been below 4 percent since February 2022, and workers who are often on the margin are making gains. The Black-white employment gap has nearly closed, and wage gains have been particularly strong for workers without a college education. But the Biden administration’s pride in those numbers only underscores the real problem it faces: Americans felt good about the economy under Trump. They don’t feel good about it under Biden.The reason is simple: Real wages have been falling because inflation has been rising. Biden’s long-term investments, his efforts to rebuild American manufacturing and create millions of news jobs decarbonizing the American economy, will take time to pay off. People have to live in the economy now, not a decade from now.The good news — for both Biden and America — is that real wages have risen over the past few months. Inflation is down by more than half since its peak. Forecasters who were confidently predicting a recession in 2023 are now hedging. Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, thinks we’ll escape the downturn altogether. Whether the good economic news continues may well decide the 2024 election. Biden has co-opted the best of Trump’s ideas and pursued them with a diligence and focus that Trump never did. But that won’t mean much if voters still find themselves yearning for Trump’s economy.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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      Republicans’ Problem in Attacking Biden: They Helped Pass His Economic Bills

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      No doubt they will take swings at him anyway. But it may be more difficult to land punches given that plenty of them voted for the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing bills.President Biden isn’t the only one doing a full summer embrace of federal spending on infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing — so are some of the Republicans aiming to remove him from office next year.The White House has labeled the president’s new economic campaign Bidenomics, a portmanteau that until now has been a pejorative used by Republicans and conservative news outlets primarily to underscore inflation.But in a speech on Wednesday in Chicago about the economy, Mr. Biden latched on, with a renewed focus on the two most significant bipartisan legislative accomplishments of his term, the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act. He hopes these measures will help brand him as the cross-aisle deal maker he sold to voters in 2020, appeal to political moderates who formed a core of his winning electoral coalition and impress upon tuned-out voters what he has done in office.One significant benefit for Mr. Biden: Republicans helped pass those bills.While G.O.P. presidential candidates and the Republican National Committee continue to paint Mr. Biden’s economic stewardship as a rolling disaster, Republican senators who helped shape the legislation say they anticipated that those accomplishments would accrue to Mr. Biden’s political advantage — as well as to their own.Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who helped write the enormous bill aimed at revitalizing the domestic semiconductor industry, said the work on a law that he called “off-the-charts popular” had started with Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, during President Donald J. Trump’s administration.“The Biden administration deserves credit for advancing the proposal and, irrespective of the timing of its origin, helping it become law,” Mr. Young said.“The Biden administration deserves credit for advancing the proposal and, irrespective of the timing of its origin, helping it become law,” Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, said of the CHIPS and Science Act.Al Drago for The New York TimesSenator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, more grudgingly acknowledged the president’s role in securing a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that had eluded the past two administrations.“When senators from different parties come together to work on solutions to our nation’s problems and then the president jumps in front of the parade, it does not mean he’s the grand marshal,” Mr. Cassidy said.Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill won votes from 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican House members. Sixteen Senate Republicans and 24 Republicans in the House voted for the semiconductor legislation.It will be difficult for Republicans to land criticism when they themselves are taking credit for the same achievements. The White House on Wednesday highlighted praise for the Biden administration’s broadband spending from Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Gus Bilirakis of Florida, Republicans who both voted against the infrastructure legislation that funded it, along with Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.But perhaps no Republican acclaim for the infrastructure legislation brought Mr. Biden more joy than a tweet from Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama that said it was “great to see Alabama receive crucial funds.”“To no one’s surprise, it’s bringing along some converts,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday of his bipartisan legislation. “There’s a guy named Tuberville from Alabama, a senator from Alabama, who announced that he strongly opposed the legislation. Now he’s hailing its passage.” Mr. Biden then dryly drew the sign of the cross on his chest.Steven Stafford, a spokesman for Mr. Tuberville, said that Mr. Biden and his allies had “twisted” the senator’s words. “Now that the bill is law of the land, the people of Alabama deserve their fair share,” he said.And even as Mr. Biden on Monday played up the $42 billion of broadband spending in the infrastructure law, another Republican senator who did vote for it, Susan Collins of Maine, was trumpeting the $272 million from it that is going to her state.Of course, the White House’s celebration of Republican plaudits for legislation Mr. Biden signed will matter little unless the president can persuade voters that these achievements are improving their material well-being.Mr. Biden’s defenders have long maintained that the economic policies he is highlighting in the Bidenomics rebrand are very popular with voters. The problem, these allies say, is that few people connect them with Mr. Biden.And Wednesday’s speech came at a moment when Mr. Biden’s approval ratings on the economy are in dangerous territory.“When senators from different parties come together to work on solutions to our nation’s problems and then the president jumps in front of the parade, it does not mean he’s the grand marshal,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAn Associated Press/NORC poll released Wednesday found that just 34 percent of adults approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy. Among Democrats, only 60 percent — and a mere 47 percent of those 45 years old or younger — approved of his economic stewardship.The millstone is inflation, which has tempered sharply from its peak last year but remains above the norm. Whether inflation is at 9 percent or 4 percent, prices remain high, which may be why the president speaks less about the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan, which passed early in his tenure and has been blamed even by the Federal Reserve for part of the surge of inflation. It is also why Republicans continue to mock what they call the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022 on strictly Democratic votes.“It makes sense for him to emphasize the bipartisan bills that passed that should have economic impact as opposed to the totally partisan bills that drove inflation,” said former Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who voted for both the infrastructure and semiconductor bills before his retirement early this year.Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, made clear that his party intended to lump all of the achievements being promoted by Mr. Biden into the inflationary maw, including the infrastructure and semiconductor legislation.“Both of those bills caused inflation, which is Biden’s biggest albatross in the upcoming election,” he said, “so I don’t think they did him any favors,” referring to Republicans who helped pass the measures.In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said that the pandemic relief plan had driven unemployment down from above 6 percent to below 4 percent. He suggested that his economic leadership would achieve an even broader goal he placed at the center of his 2020 campaign: restoring the soul of America.“It’s going to help lessen the division in this country by bringing us back together,” Mr. Biden said. “It makes it awful hard to demagogue something when it’s working.”The Republicans aiming to unseat Mr. Biden weren’t buying the economic kumbaya. The Trump campaign on Wednesday said “Bidenomics has created the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in a Fox News appearance, said Mr. Biden’s policies mean “everybody pays more for basic staples of life.”Republicans are loath to concede that the passage of two major bills makes Mr. Biden a bipartisan statesman. Those bills are “not only not emblematic, it’s the exception,” said Josh Holmes, a longtime political adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who voted for the infrastructure bill.In truth, more bills than those passed with bipartisan support in the last Congress. Mr. Biden enters the 2024 election cycle as the beneficiary of an extraordinary bout of productivity that included a modest gun control law, a legal codification of same-sex marriage, and a revamping of procedures for counting Electoral College votes after Mr. Trump tried to hijack that obscure process.Senators from both parties put aside their tendency to push for only the legislation they want or pocket the issue for the next election.“We can’t get in a place in the country where you don’t vote for something you believe needs to pass because you think it might help the other side,” Mr. Blunt said.Democrats point to the circumstances that Mr. Biden inherited in 2021 — the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the election results.“There was a sizable group of Senate Republicans who looked the death of democracy in the eye on Jan. 6 and decided to try to show people that democracy could still work,” said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut.But Mr. Murphy also credited the legislative skills of Mr. Biden, honed over 36 years in the Senate.“A lot of my progressive friends were angry he wasn’t punching Republicans in the mouth so much,” Mr. Murphy said, “but he kept the door open for Republicans to work with us on infrastructure, guns and industrial policy.”Cecilia Kang More

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      As Biden Runs Again, the Map, Issues and Incumbency Favor Democrats

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      Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe their country is on a “wrong track.” The incumbent president will be 81 on Election Day 2024. More than half of the voters in his own party don’t want him to run for re-election.Yet as President Biden embarks on his campaign for a second term, Democratic officials firmly believe he is beginning his bid on Tuesday from ground that is far more solid than his personal standing indicates. Democratic unity has stifled even the hint of an intraparty insurgency. The issues dominating the nation’s politics have largely worked in the Democrats’ favor. And a battleground that has narrowed to only a handful of states means, at least for now, that the 2024 campaign will be waged on favorable Democratic terrain.“I’m always going to be worried because we’re a very divided country, and presidential races are going to be close, no matter who is in it,” said Anne Caprara, who helped lead Hillary Clinton’s super PAC in 2016 and is now chief of staff to Illinois’s Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. “But for the first time in my career, I think Republicans have painted themselves into a terrible position. They’re losing and they can’t seem to see that.”Without doubt, Mr. Biden’s personal liabilities are tugging at the Democrats’ well-worn worry strings. Despite low unemployment, a remarkably resilient economy and an enviable record of legislative accomplishments in his first two years, the octogenarian president has never quite won over the nation, or even voters in his party. A new NBC News poll has Mr. Biden losing to a generic Republican presidential candidate, 47 percent to 41 percent.“President Biden is in remarkably weak shape for an incumbent running for re-election,” said Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster who co-directs the NBC News poll.Republicans plan to play on those uncertainties, harping on Mr. Biden’s age and frailty and painting him as the weakest incumbent president to run for re-election since Jimmy Carter tried 44 years ago. The campaign of former President Donald J. Trump is already looking past the coming Republican nomination fight to contrast what it sees as the strength of personality of an aggressive challenger against a vulnerable incumbent.“This is a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, adding, “If they think that is their greatest strength, they are going to have a long, miserable year.”But the political fundamentals look significantly better than Mr. Biden’s personal approval.By avoiding a serious primary challenge, Mr. Biden will not be spending the next year fighting with members of his own party on difficult issues like immigration, crime, gender and abortion in ways that might turn off swing voters. Instead, he can bide his time attending ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings for roads and bridges, semiconductor plants, electric vehicle manufacturers and solar energy projects that stem from his three biggest legislative achievements — the infrastructure bill, the “chips and science” law and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its huge tax incentives for clean energy.President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, attending a ceremony at the White House on Monday, the day before he formally declared his candidacy for a second term. Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe mere presence of Mr. Trump in the Republican primary race is helping the Democrats make the 2024 campaign a choice between the two parties, not a referendum on the incumbent, a far more difficult challenge for the party in power, said Jim Messina, who managed the last successful presidential re-election campaign, Barack Obama’s in 2012. Early polls, both in key states like Wisconsin and nationally, have Mr. Biden holding onto a slim lead over Mr. Trump, but even with or behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.The Republicans’ narrow control of the House has also given Mr. Biden a foil in the months before a Republican presidential nominee emerges, just as the Republican Congress helped Mr. Obama.And then there is the map.The 2022 midterms should have been a disaster for a president with low approval ratings. Instead, in two critical states — Pennsylvania and Michigan — the Democratic Party greatly strengthened its hand and its electoral infrastructure, with victories in the governors’ races in both states, the Pennsylvania House flipping to the Democrats and the Michigan Legislature falling to complete Democratic control for the first time in nearly 40 years.At the outset of the 2024 campaign, two-thirds of the Upper Midwestern “Blue Wall” that Mr. Trump shattered in 2016 and Mr. Biden rebuilt in 2020 appear to favor the Democrats.As partisanship intensifies in Democratic and Republican states, battlegrounds like Florida, Ohio and Iowa have moved firmly toward Republicans, but other battlegrounds like Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire look reliably Democratic.That has elevated just a handful of states as potentially decisive next year: Wisconsin, the third brick in the “Blue Wall”; Georgia, once reliably Republican; Arizona; and Pennsylvania, especially if the political winds shift in the Republicans’ favor. If Mr. Biden can lock down Pennsylvania, he would need to win only one of the other big battlegrounds — Wisconsin, Georgia or Arizona — to get the necessary Electoral College votes in 2024. Even if he lost Nevada, he would still win as long as he secures New Hampshire and doesn’t split the Electoral College votes of Maine.Wisconsin had a split decision in 2022, with the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, winning re-election while the Republican senator, Ron Johnson, also prevailed. But this month, an expensive, hard-fought State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin went to the Democratic-backed candidate by 11 percentage points, a remarkable margin.Democrats won the governorship in Arizona in 2022. And while they lost the governor’s race decisively in Georgia, they eked out the Senate contest between the incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and the Republican, Herschel Walker.Those recent electoral successes point to the other major factor that appears to be playing in the Democrats’ favor: the issues. The erosion of abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has continued to dominate electoral outcomes in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And abortion is not fading, in large part because the socially conservative core of the Republican electorate keeps driving red states and conservative judges forward on abortion restrictions.The tragic drumbeat of mass shootings has kept gun control high on the political agenda as well, an issue that Democrats believe will help them with suburban voters in key swing states and will trap Republicans between a base of voters who want no compromise on gun rights and a broader electorate that increasingly favors restrictions.Republicans have issues that could favor them, too. Crime helped deliver House seats in New York and California, which secured the narrow House majority for the G.O.P. And transgender politics might help Republicans with some swing voters. A poll for National Public Radio last summer found that 63 percent of Americans opposed allowing transgender women and girls to compete on teams that align with their gender identity, while broader support for L.G.B.T. rights has only gained ground.But a hotly contested primary is likely to drag the eventual nominee to the right, even on issues that could otherwise favor his party. Mr. DeSantis, widely seen as Mr. Trump’s most serious challenger, signed a ban on abortion in his state after six weeks, a threshold before many women know they are pregnant.And at some point, Republicans’ drive against transgender people and their fixation on social issues may appear to be bullying — or simply far afield from real issues in the lives of swing voters, said Ms. Caprara, the chief of staff for the Illinois governor.“There’s this toxic soup between abortion, guns, gay rights, library books, African American history,” she said. “It just comes across to people as, ‘Who are these people?’”The biggest issue, however, may be the storm cloud on the horizon that may or may not burst — the economy. In 2020, Mr. Biden became one of the few presidential candidates in modern history to have triumphed over the candidate who was more trusted on the economy in polls.Since then, the surge of job creation from the trough of the coronavirus pandemic has shattered monthly employment records, while unemployment rates — especially for workers of color — are at or near their lowest levels ever. Inflation, which peaked near 10 percent, is now at about 5 percent.Yet Mr. Biden continues to get low marks on his economic stewardship, and those marks could deteriorate as the Federal Reserve continues to tamp down inflation with higher interest rates, warned Mr. Messina, the former Obama campaign manager. A new poll for CNBC found that 53 percent of Americans expect the economy will get worse, compared with 34 percent when Mr. Biden took office.“Today, I’d rather be Joe Biden,” Mr. Messina said. “But I wish I knew where the economy is going to be, because that’s the one thing hanging out there that nobody can control.” More

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      Fight Over Warnock’s Senate Record Comes Down to Electric Vehicles

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      Hyundai’s huge new plant outside Savannah could be a model for bipartisanship and a central achievement for Raphael Warnock, whose biggest efforts otherwise fell short. But Republicans aren’t giving him credit.The groundbreaking ceremony in October for the Hyundai electric vehicle plant under construction outside Savannah should have been a moment for bipartisan bonhomie, with the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and a Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, both shoveling dirt to begin the largest economic development project in the state’s history.Instead, in this hyperpartisan moment in a bright-purple state, that triumph has been tarnished by a multipronged and acrimonious debate. Should state economic incentives or federal climate legislation get the credit? Did federal electric-vehicle tax breaks help or hurt the project? Above all, how should the brief Senate record of Mr. Warnock play in voters’ calculations ahead of his runoff election on Tuesday against Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee?Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, has only two short years of experience in elective office. Democrats say he has much to show for it: not a lot of flash, they concede, but the hard work and demonstrated skill of a legislative professional.His accomplishments are mainly modest but meaningful: science funding for historically Black colleges and universities, new access to grants for Georgia transit authorities, funding to replace aging highway-rail intersections, and new programs to improve maternal health care.His biggest achievement may have been his relentless push for a $35-a-month out-of-pocket cap on insulin costs, which survived for Medicare recipients in the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Biden in August, but was blocked by Republicans for those with private health insurance.There is no doubt that where Mr. Warnock swung hardest, he missed: He dearly wanted to expand health insurance access for the working poor in Georgia and other Republican-led states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Tax credits for low-income workers to buy private policies made it through the House under Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better bill but died in the Senate.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, with Mr. Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia last year. Senate Democrats say Mr. Warnock is needed as a key 51st vote for the party in the chamber.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Warnock was also the torch bearer for voting rights legislation that fell to a filibuster in the Senate. Promoted by Democratic leaders as the passionate heir to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who once preached from the same Ebenezer pulpit, Mr. Warnock was given ample floor time to make his case in the loftiest of terms, and his vulnerable position in the 2022 election was supposed to add urgency to his appeals.But he could not persuade two Democratic colleagues, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to reshape filibuster rules to let expanded access to the polls pass with a simple majority.One of Mr. Warnock’s earliest campaign ads this year featured him allowing: “A magician? I’m not. So in just a year in the Senate, did I think I could fix Washington? Of course not.”What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More