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      Why the Leaders of Turkey and Thailand Have an Interest in Elections

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      Turkey and Thailand held two huge elections this week, both with uncertain outcomes. Each shows some of the benefits that elections can hold for leaders who have amassed power with the tools of the state.Two important elections happened this week. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to win an outright victory so he now faces a runoff election that could be the most significant political challenge of his career. And in Thailand, ruled by military leaders who took power in a 2014 coup, voters overwhelmingly backed opposition parties, delivering a stinging rebuke to the military establishment. It remains to be seen how much power the junta will actually hand over.Both countries have me thinking about the type of government that is sometimes called a “competitive authoritarian” regime. Their leaders use the tools of state, such as purging foes from the bureaucracy and curtailing civil liberties, to consolidate their own power. But they regularly hold elections, and when they do, the votes are not shams. Voters can cast ballots with the expectation that they will be fairly counted, and that leaders will abide by the result.And yet the fact that those governments embrace elections can tell us something important about the nature of democratic backsliding, and perhaps something even more important about its opposite. Most people call it democratization, but I prefer to think of it, for the sake of verbal and conceptual symmetry, as democratic forwardsliding.Turkey has for years been sliding into a competitive authoritarian government, analysts say. Thailand isn’t one, at least not yet — its military leaders came to power in a coup, not an election — but its vote provides a useful point of comparison.After all, at first blush it’s a little odd that competitive authoritarian leaders hold real elections! In the usual story we tell about democracy, one of elections’ chief virtues is that they allow the public to check leaders’ power. Too much repression, the theory goes, will lead to a reckoning at the ballot box.That doesn’t seem like a prospect that would be popular with leaders who otherwise go to remarkable lengths to dismantle checks and balances. Competitive authoritarians often stack courts with friendly judges, undermine judicial review of their power, weaken legislative branches, jail journalists and try in various ways to stifle opponents.But that view misses out something else that elections can do: validate an authoritarian leader’s power by showing that the public supports the regime. And that validation, it turns out, is valuable enough to outweigh the risks inherent in elections — especially when the incumbent can take steps to manipulate the contest in his favor.In Turkey, Erdogan draws his claim to power, and his justification for his harsh and repressive treatment of the opposition, from public approval, said Turkuler Isiksel, a Columbia University political scientist. Like other populists, he claims to represent the interests of the people. Elections, which provide hard numbers on public support, are a powerful tool to support that claim.And conversely, rejecting election results can damage public support for the regime. Milan Svolik, a Yale political scientist who studies authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, pointed to the example of Istanbul’s 2019 mayoral elections, which were seen as an important test of the popularity of Erdogan’s A.K.P. party. When that contest was initially held, the opposition candidate won by a narrow margin, but the race was invalidated by the courts, leading to public outrage at the perceived refusal to honor the results. When it was re-run a few months later, the opposition candidate won by a landslide — suggesting that for a substantial minority of voters, the failure to respect the initial result was enough to make them abandon Erdogan’s party.“They decided, ‘I’m changing my vote,’” Svolik said. “That suggests a high cost to being perceived as not abiding by the results of an election.” And while such precise natural experiments are rare, Svolik has found similar results when he ran experiments in other countries using hypothetical scenarios of candidates engaging in similar behavior.Which brings me to Thailand. At present, its leaders do not derive their legitimacy from public support — their 2014 coup ousted the democratically elected government by force after an extended period of political unrest.“Thailand is a very divided country that has a conservative establishment that keeps trying to find a way to write a constitution that allows it to win, but can’t do it because it’s not that popular,” said Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell political scientist who studies authoritarianism and democratization with a focus on Southeast Asia. The current government has tried to hedge the results of last weekend’s election by granting Thailand’s military-appointed Senate one-third of the votes to select the prime minister, effectively reserving veto power over any government that doesn’t win a supermajority. But, as Svolik’s research shows, overriding the results of the election risks public backlash.So why hold elections at all?It’s impossible to be sure of the junta members’ true motivations — such personal decisions are, ultimately, unknowable. It may be that the junta members see the risk of losing power in an election as less damaging than what could happen if they held onto power without one.There are real costs to holding power by force, for leaders themselves and their countries. If public outrage has no outlet in elections, that increases the likelihood of mass protests, uprisings, and violence. For years, Thailand has been trapped in a cycle of “protests and putsches,” as my Times colleagues Sui-Lee Wee and Muktita Suhartono memorably described it — a loop that has only increased voters’ anger and support for opposition parties.Such cycles can be difficult to break. In Thailand, “they’re sort of in a coup trap, where the existence of a precedent for military intervention in politics makes people act as if that’s going to be possible, which makes it then possible,” Pepinsky said. “It’s a very bad equilibrium to be in.” Holding an election isn’t always a solution to that problem. Svolik pointed to the example of Myanmar, whose ruling junta cautiously handed over some power after semi-democratic elections in 2015 and 2020, but staged another coup in 2021. But it can still be a way to shift political disputes away from costly and damaging political violence. “Why don’t we just have a battle that’s called an election? It is much less costly,” Svolik said.That has benefits for the public as well as for leaders. Even though the legitimacy conferred by elections can help authoritarian leaders in the short term, Isiksel said, in the longer term it can aid democratization by strengthening democratic institutions, political parties, and the “civic habits” of voting and campaigning.Over time, those can build and reinforce on each other in ways that go beyond elections — a slow and incremental process of forwardsliding toward a more secure democracy.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

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      in Elections

      Two Theories for Beating Trump in the Primary

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      A successful campaign will probably need the traits of both Trumpism and an alternative to Trumpism.Ronald Reagan rode the issues of 1979, some similar to today’s, to the Oval Office. George Tames/The New York TimesThere are two basic theories for how Donald J. Trump might be defeated in a Republican primary. It’s possible that neither, both or some combination of the two can actually work in practice. But by considering them in depth, it becomes easier to think about and judge the various efforts to beat him — and why so many haven’t pulled it off.In our next article, we’ll consider whether and how Ron DeSantis fits into the picture — and why his campaign has struggled to meet the very real challenge of defeating a former president.Theory One: Trumpism Without TrumpThis type of candidacy assumes that Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism reoriented the Republican Party in irreversible and advantageous ways, but that his personal conduct has been a disaster for conservatives.In this view, his poor hires and lack of experience and focus prevented him from being an effective president. His coarse remarks, tweets, election denialism and ultimately Jan. 6 not only cost Republicans the White House and the Senate, but also the opportunity for a truly decisive victory — like the one Mr. DeSantis won in 2022 in Florida.According to this theory, these same personal weaknesses are his vulnerability in a Republican primary in 2024. A challenger to Mr. Trump, therefore, ought to hew as close as possible to him on the issues, while distinguishing himself or herself on electability, competence and character.If you imagine yourself in a hypothetical brainstorming session for the Trumpism Without Trump campaign, you can imagine the kinds of attacks that might add up to a critique of a hapless, weak president who wasn’t up to the job of making America great again. In this view, Mr. Trump presided over rising crime, a strengthening China, growing trade deficits, rising drug overdose deaths and a stronger Democratic Party. He talked a big game, but didn’t accomplish much. He failed to build a wall. He lost to sleepy Joe Biden. He’s old. The election was stolen from under his nose. He let the Deep State drag him down and did nothing to dismantle it. He let Dr. Fauci into our lives, and the vaccine into our bodies. He didn’t command the respect of the military and hired countless people he now considers disloyal. Not every one of these attacks is ready for prime time, but some combination could work, and you could undoubtedly come up with other examples.The logic of Trumpism Without Trump has merit, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Indeed, it suffers from an obvious and fundamental problem: It doesn’t work if Republicans still want Mr. Trump.There’s another, less obvious issue: It’s hard for this type of candidate to unite the various skeptical-of-Trump factions. After all, many of the most vocal opponents of Mr. Trump oppose both Trumpism and the man himself. This sets up routine clashes between a Trumpism Without Trump candidate and his or her likeliest own supporters. It could even lead many of those supporters to seek an explicitly anti-Trump candidate.Theory Two: An alternative to TrumpismThis theory is a little more complicated. It describes something that doesn’t yet exist. But the case for this theory picks up with the last critique of Trumpism Without Trump.An anti-Trump candidate will probably need to be something more than Trumpism Without Trump: A reinvigorated brand of conservatism would be needed to pull off the challenging task of unifying everyone from the Trumpist types to the supporters of Mitt Romney’s Reaganism to the Ted Cruz Tea Partiers.Needless to say, this would be challenging. To do it, a conservative would need to find a message that at once checks the boxes and wins the hearts of various factions — without alienating the rest. This is not easy, given the many disagreements between the different factions of the Republican Party. But something like this has happened before under circumstances that in some ways resemble today’s.Recall the conditions that brought about the last great renewal of conservatism, in the 1970s. The parallels to today are striking. In both 1979 and 2023, conservatives could say inflation and crime was high; the Kremlin had decided to invade a neighbor; and a new class of young, highly educated activists was at once driving some old-school liberals to the right and sparking a full-blown conservative reaction. In each case, it was 15 years after an epochal breakthrough for Black Americans (the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008).As with today, the right was fractured. The politicians who embodied the different wings of a possible Republican coalition — Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Gerald Ford — were every bit as ideologically diverse as Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump and Mr. Romney. But the events of the 1960s and 1970s created conditions that allowed these groups to come together around a reinvigorated conservatism that dominated the Republican Party for the next 30 years.The reaction against the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s was strong enough to bring some once-liberal intellectuals and the religious right together against the excesses of the counterculture. The backlash against the civil rights era, rising crime and the failings of the Great Society brought blue-collar, urban, white ethnic Reagan Democrats together with Sun Belt suburbanites. High inflation and a growing tax burden offered a way for neoliberal economics to align big business, working-class economic interests and white resentment.The conditions for a rejuvenated conservatism today aren’t nearly as favorable as they were in 1979. They don’t even seem as favorable as they were in 2021. But it’s not 2015 anymore, either. Many of the conditions that helped lead to Trumpian populism are gone. Fear of economic stagnation, high unemployment and low interest rates have been replaced by inflation and high interest rates. Globalization is unequivocally in retreat. The Forever Wars are gone, and Great Power politics is back. Meanwhile, the rise of a new “woke” left and lingering resentment over coronavirus restrictions have brought a new set of issues that didn’t exist a decade ago.If you look in the right corners of the internet, you can see these changes congealing into new kinds of conservatives. You can spot neo-neo-cons on Substack, where Obama-era liberals who insist they aren’t conservatives rail against “woke” and forge unusual alliances with longtime conservatives. There’s even a neo-neoliberalism of sorts, as a small corner of the right mulls deregulation to contain costs, and even progressives find themselves mulling “supply side” policies. Many of the people dabbling in these ideas were also skeptics of coronavirus restrictions, especially school closings. Rising concern about Russia and China needs no explanation.If you put all of these various strands together, you can imagine the outlines of a reinvigorated conservatism tied to the challenges of 2023, not 2015 or 1979. Compared with 2015, it would be distinguished by anti-woke cultural politics, a stronger approach to Russia or China, and deregulation aiming to tackle inflation and promote “freedom.” It also fulfills the most important element for the Alternative to Trumpism theory: Moderate elites and Obama-era Tea Partiers can find common ground on all of these issues or at least tolerate the other side.But like Trumpism Without Trump, this approach faces a fundamental problem: It’s not obvious whether these new issues are strong enough to hold the disparate elements of the anti-Trump coalition together through a primary campaign.Over the last year or so, new developments have tended to weaken the punch of the new issues. The pandemic is past, at least politically. “Wokeness” may be fading somewhat as an issue. Meanwhile, the old issues are making a comeback. Inflation is edging down, but the end of pandemic-era restrictions has renewed focus on the border. The end of Roe v. Wade has thrust abortion back to the center of American life. Nothing similar could be said in 1979, when older divisive fights over civil rights or Medicare had plainly given way to a new set of more acute challenges. Imagine how much harder it would have been for Ronald Reagan to balance winning the South and the rest of the country in the Republican primary if Brown v. Board had been overturned by conservative judges in 1978.There’s another reason the new issues might not be enough: They don’t always offer easy avenues for attack against Mr. Trump. There are a few obvious but fundamentally limited opportunities, like Russia and China. But after that, it gets tougher. Inflation could be a plausible path: The argument would go that Mr. Trump’s tariffs, push for lower interest rates, immigration restrictions, government spending, stimulus checks and big tax cuts all contributed to supply chain issues, labor shortages and excess demand. This would even allow for a natural comparison lumping him in with Mr. Biden. But this attack is complicated to pull off, and it doesn’t seem to be political gold.Importantly, it is hard to attack Mr. Trump on “woke,” which is probably still the single new issue with the most resonance across the Republican Party, even if it isn’t quite as salient as it was a year or two ago. The attack on woke does offer some opportunity for a contrast with Mr. Trump, by embracing American Greatness as an explicit critique of woke anti-Americanism and an implicit critique of dystopian MAGA-ism. Nikki Haley has taken this tack. But it is not at all obvious whether this sunnier brand has any resonance with conservative voters.Realistically, a successful campaign will need the traits of both Trumpism Without Trump and an Alternative to Trumpism. Alone, neither quite seems like enough. The strongest candidacy will benefit a bit from some aspects of the other. Done right, perhaps no one would be quite sure which category it falls into.Next, we’ll consider why Mr. DeSantis is a distinct candidate who comes close to pulling off both, but so far hasn’t done either — with poll numbers to show for it. More

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      Two Schools of Polling Are Converging: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Decade

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      Should polling change or stay the same? It doesn’t seem a hard call.Old methods just aren’t enough anymore. Joshua Bright for The New York TimesIt’s been nearly a decade since I first attended the annual conference of pollsters, known as AAPOR.Back then, it was a very different place. It was dominated by traditional pollsters who knew change was inevitable but who appeared uncomfortable with the sacrifices required to accommodate new people, methods and ideas.At the time, that gathering reminded me of the Republican Party, which was then grappling with how to deal with demographic change and Hispanic voters in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election. There are obvious differences, but the AAPOR crowd’s talk about reaching out to new groups and ideas was animated by similar senses of threat that the Republicans were facing then — the concern posed by long-term trends, the status threat from newcomers, and the sense that traditional values would be threatened by accommodating new ideas.But if Donald J. Trump showed that Republicans didn’t have to support immigration reform to win, he most certainly showed pollsters they would have to innovate. A decade and two historically significant poor cycles later, AAPOR is a very different place. The old guard is still around, but presentation after presentation employs methods that would have been scorned a decade ago. This year’s Innovators Award went to someone who referred to AAPOR as an association of “Buggy-Whip Manufacturers” back in 2014, the year I first attended.The innovative turn in the polling community is very real, including in public political polling. Today, virtually no pollsters are using the methods they did a decade ago. The ABC/Post poll is perhaps the only major exception, with its live-interview, random-digit-dialing telephone surveys. But to this point, innovation and change hasn’t been enough to solve the problems facing the industry. It has been enough only to keep it afloat, if still struggling to keep its head above water.Heading into 2024, pollsters still don’t know if they can successfully reach Trump voters. They still struggle with rising costs. And they really did lose something they had a decade ago: the belief that a well-designed survey would yield a representative sample. Today, a well-designed survey isn’t enough: The most theoretically sound surveys tended to produce the worst results of 2020.To this point, innovation in polling has occurred on two parallel tracks: one to find new ways of sampling voters in an era of low response rates; another intended to improve unrepresentative samples through statistical adjustments. If there’s an underlying theory of the Times/Siena poll, it’s to try to get the best of both worlds: high-quality sampling with sophisticated statistical adjustment. There are surprisingly few public polls that can make a similar case: There’s bad sampling with fancy statistical modeling, and there’s some good sampling with simple demographic adjustment, but not much of both.Because of the pandemic, it has been a few years since I’ve attended AAPOR in person. But from my vantage point, this was the first time that these two parallel tracks looked as if they were getting closer to merging. They haven’t merged — the old guard remains reluctant to make some of the sacrifices needed to improve its methods of adjustment; costs will prevent the upstarts from matching the old guard’s expensive sampling. But they’re getting closer, as researchers on either track realize their own efforts are insufficient and dabble a bit more in the ideas of the other side.One early theme, for instance, was a recognition that even the most sophisticated survey designs still struggle to reach less engaged voters, who tend to be less educated and perhaps likelier to back Mr. Trump as well. This problem may never be perfectly addressed, and so it benefits from both the best of traditional and nontraditional methods.For our part, I promise we’ll have more on our Wisconsin experiment — which had parallel telephone and high-incentive mail surveys ahead of the 2022 election — in the weeks ahead. In the last week or so, we received the final data necessary to begin this analysis, and I’ve started to dig in over the last two days. It’s early in the analysis, but there’s some interesting stuff. Stay tuned. More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s ‘Stupid,’ ‘Stupid’ Town Hall

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      Given all the attention to President Biden’s cognitive fitness for a second presidential term, it seems fair, even mandatory, to assess Donald Trump’s performance at a televised town hall in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday night through the same lens:How clear was his thinking? How sturdy his tether to reality? How appropriate his demeanor?On a scale of 1 to Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’d give him an 11.He was asked to respond to a Manhattan jury’s verdict the previous day that he had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.He said that Carroll once had a cat named Vagina.He was asked about his failure to deliver on his signature promise to voters in 2016 — that he’d build a wall stretching across the southwestern border of the United States.“I did finish the wall,” he said, just a few beats before adding that Biden could have easily and quickly completed the stretch that still hasn’t been built if he’d cared to. The statements contradicted each other. They made no sense. They were his entire performance in a nutshell.He was asked about his role in the Jan. 6 violence and whether he had regrets.He reminisced mistily about addressing the rally before the riot — “It was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to,” he boasted — and about how they were there “with love in their hearts.” The problem, he said, was “Crazy Nancy,” meaning Pelosi, whose fault all of this really was.It’s never Trump’s — not on this score, not on any other, not when a jury rules against him, not when voters pick someone else to be in the White House, not when he’s indicted, not when he’s impeached, not when he’s impeached a second time, not when he’s caught hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, not when he’s caught on tape.He was grilled about such a tape, the one after Election Day 2020 that has him ordering the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, which Biden narrowly won, to overturn that result by finding him more votes.“I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Trump insisted, incorrectly. “I said, ‘You owe me votes.’” Whew! I’m glad that’s cleared up.In response to question after question, on issue after issue, Trump denied incontrovertible facts, insisted on alternative ones, spoke of America as a country swirling down the toilet, spoke of himself as the only politician who could save it, framed his presidency as one that outshone all the others, projected his own flaws and mistakes on his critics and opponents, expressed contempt for them and claimed persecution.He was, in other words, a font of lies keeping true to himself, ever the peacock, always cuckoo. The evening made utterly clear — just in case there was a scintilla of doubt — that his latest, third bid for the White House won’t be any kind of reset, just a full-on rehash. And that was inevitable, because someone like Trump doesn’t change. His self-infatuation precludes any possibility of that.The town hall, hosted by CNN and moderated heroically by the anchor Kaitlan Collins, played like a kind of Mad Libs of hundreds of Trump’s public appearances and interviews since he jumped into the presidential fray back in 2015. Some of the proper nouns were different. Some of the dates had changed. Almost everything else was the same.Instead of complaining about the insufficient financial contributions of NATO’s member countries, he complained about the insufficient financial contributions of European nations to Ukraine’s war effort. His descriptions of the evil, dangerous hordes poised to stream into the United States from Mexico right now sounded like a remix of his descriptions, on the day he announced his first presidential campaign nearly eight years ago, of the evil, dangerous hordes supposedly streaming in then.In an ugly echo of the 2016 presidential debate when he called Hillary Clinton “nasty,” he called Collins “nasty.” The “very stable genius,” as he once pronounced himself, has a very static vocabulary.And he has no acquaintance with a thesaurus, dignity or maturity. “Stupid,” “stupid,” “stupid” — he kept using that word, I guess because it’s so presidential. He applied it to anyone who doesn’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen and rigged. He applied it to everything about the Biden administration and Democrats in Washington.“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people — by very stupid people,” he said. He never ascended to an altitude of eloquence above that.A word about CNN: Its decision to give Trump this platform was widely attacked, but the network was correct to recognize that he is a relevant, potent political force who cannot be ignored and must be thoroughly vetted. Collins was clearly and rightly encouraged to challenge every false claim that he made, and she did precisely that, demonstrating great knowledge and preternatural poise.But where CNN went wrong was in the audience it assembled, a generally adoring crowd who laughed heartily at Trump’s jokes, clapped lustily at his insults and thrilled to his every puerile flourish. When several of them had their turns at the microphone, their questions were air kisses, which is why Collins had to keep stepping in to slap Trump around with her own. The contrast — her righteous firmness, their star-struck flaccidity — was disorienting and repellent. Between now and November 2024, we’re in for a stranger and scarier ride than in any other presidential election in my lifetime, and there’s no telling how it will end.That was the moral of the much-discussed poll by The Washington Post and ABC News that was released last weekend. It not only gave Trump a six-point lead over Biden in a hypothetical matchup but also showed that voters deem Trump, 76, more physically and mentally fit for the presidency than Biden, 80.I’ll grant Trump his vigor. During the town hall, he spoke emphatically and energetically.But vigor isn’t competence, and that brings me back to the start. I myself have observed that Biden often doesn’t seem as clear and focused as he did in the past, but next to a man who insouciantly brags that he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours, as Trump did on Wednesday night?Next to a man who also reprised his claims of some godlike power to declassify documents by simply staring at them and thinking unclassified thoughts?Next to a man who sires his own reality, comes to believe in that fantasy while it’s still in diapers, considers himself omnipotent, fancies himself omniscient and replaces genuine reflection with disingenuous navel gazing?That was Trump at the town hall. That was Trump for his four years in office. That would be Trump if he gets back to the White House. And it’s no display of superior cognition. Just a reminder of the madness that this country can’t seem to put behind it.For the Love of SentencesPool photo by Stefan RousseauIn the prelude to last weekend’s coronation of King Charles III, Helen Lewis visited and considered royals less fussed over. “One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts,” she observed. “It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.” She has to pass through a gate “guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term ‘faithful retainer’ might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.” (Thanks to Lizzy Menges of Garden City, N.Y., for drawing my attention to Lewis’s excellent article.)Rachel Tashjian in The Washington Post weighed in on the ostentation of Charles’s coronation: “The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility.” (Ann Kolasa Zastrow, Evanston, Ill., and Merrio Morton, Lancaster, S.C., among many others)And from Tom Holland in The Guardian: “Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures.” (Dot McFalls, Charlottesville, Va.)In The New Yorker, J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” reflected on the impossibility of walking entirely in this particular man’s shoes: “I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience.” (Sara Klemmer, Charlotte, N.C., and Susan Kochan, Brooklyn, among others)In The Times, Ligaya Mishan celebrated the infinite textures of food: “What of the coy half-surrender that the Italians venerate in pasta as ‘al dente’ and the Taiwanese in noodles and boba as ‘Q’ (or ‘QQ,’ if the food in question is exceptionally springy); the restive yolk threatening to slither off a six-minute egg; the seraphic weight of a chiffon cake; the heavy melt of fat off a slab of pork belly, slowly liquefying itself? What of goo, foam, dust, air? What of the worlds that lie between slime and velvet, collapse and refusal, succulence and desiccation?” (Judy Cress, El Cerrito, Calif.)Also in The Times, Robert Draper profiled William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director: “His ascent is an unlikely turn for a tall, discreet figure with wary eyes, ashen hair and a trim mustache, a sort you could easily imagine in a John le Carré novel whispering into a dignitary’s ear at an embassy party that the city is falling to the rebels and a boat will be waiting in the harbor at midnight.” (Jefferson M. Gray, Baltimore, and Ed Lyon, Cincinnati)And Michael Levenson reported on the odd dumping of hundreds of pounds of pasta alongside a creek in Old Bridge, N.J. “When photos of the discarded pasta were shared on a Reddit discussion about all things New Jersey, it became fertile ground for puns and dad jokes,” he wrote. “Someone commented: ‘We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary.’” Town workers cleaned up and disposed of the pasta in under an hour. “It was not clear if a large fork had been used.” (Pat Reneman, Kettle Falls, Wash., and Margaret Koziel, Cambridge, Mass., among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m ReadingA red-eyed tree frog in the Costa Rican rainforest.Getty ImagesI was a few months late to The New Yorker article “Is Artificial Light Poisoning the Planet?” by Adam Gopnik, but I’m glad I didn’t miss it altogether. It springboards off the book “The Darkness Manifesto” by the Swedish ecologist Johan Eklof, and it’s a fascinating glance at one of the less discussed ways in which human activity and advancement have badly harmed the fauna around us. It’s also a mini-tutorial on the evolution of animal vision, and it’s rich with artful prose. (Harry Gerecke, Vashon, Wash.)If you, like me, are a dog lover, but you, unlike me, missed Sarah Lyall’s delightful profile in The Times of the fluffy canine cloud that is Striker, you should remedy that right away.There’s a reason the world seems so much scarier now than at many points in the recent past: It is! Or at least the perils come in newly diverse forms. That’s one of the takeaways from a new book, “Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons and New Threats,” co-written by my former Times colleague Thom Shanker, who now runs the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University, and Andrew Hoehn of the RAND Corporation. It was published Tuesday, and it’s a sobering, intelligent analysis from two experts who know whereof they write.On a Personal NoteLiz Holmes, left, as she looks today, many years after she went by Elizabeth Holmes, right.Philip Cheung for The New York Times; Lisa Lake, via Getty ImagesMany of my friends were abuzz last weekend about Amy Chozick’s profile in The Times of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced and convicted founder of the fraudulent biotech start-up Theranos. The incarnation of herself that Holmes presented to Chozick — loving spouse, nurturing mother, known to her husband and friends as Liz — was a far cry from the Silicon Valley sorceress who spoke so affectedly, rose so astronomically and fell so spectacularly, and my friends puzzled over the same question Chozick did: How much of Liz was real?I’m betting quite a bit, and that’s not because I’m credulously accepting that she has traveled some profound moral arc, from a thicket of want to a clearing of altruism and authenticity. I don’t believe in personality transplants any more than I do in head transplants, and life isn’t tidy that way. But just as I suspect that Elizabeth lives on in Liz, I suspect that Liz was always lurking in Elizabeth. Life is messy that way.We love to assign people types, fold them into taxonomies, put them in discrete categories. You’re an introvert, but your partner is an extrovert. He’s codependent, but she has commitment issues. Many of us are all of the above. Most of us indeed contain multitudes, even if — for a short period or forever — we manage to wear and show the world just one face, which reflects the circumstances in which we find ourselves as much as it does some unalloyed and immutable truth.Elizabeth or Liz? It’s not a binary, and the more relevant and answerable question is whether Elizabeth-cum-Liz acted badly, hurt people needlessly and should pay a price. I believe so, as did a jury and a judge: She has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for her reckless and ruinous fictions, be they consistent with her priorities now or not.On the far side of her incarceration, she won’t be a different person. But she’ll surely be a reassembled, reapportioned one, with parts more or less prominent than in phases of her life when they got less tending or when they had less use. More

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      in Elections

      An Outlier Poll on Trump vs. Biden That Still Informs

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      A seven-point Trump lead in an ABC/Post survey is an aberration but points to some Biden weaknesses.Is Donald Trump really leading President Biden?Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThere’s usually a simple rule of thumb for thinking about outlying poll results: Toss it in the average, and don’t think too hard about it. After all, outlying poll results are inevitable, simply by chance. When they occur, it shouldn’t be any surprise.But sometimes, that guidance gets a little hard to follow. The most recent ABC/Washington Post poll is proving to be one of those cases.In a startling finding, the poll found Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis each leading President Biden by seven percentage points, with Mr. Biden trailing among young people and struggling badly among nonwhite voters. After a few days of relentless media conversation, even I’ve been forced to abandon the usual rule of thumb.Make no mistake: This survey is an outlier. The Post article reporting the result acknowledged as much. But of all the cases over the last few years when an outlier has dominated the political discourse, this may be one of the more useful ones. For one, it may not be quite as much as an outlier as you might assume. Even if it is, it may nonetheless help readers internalize something that might have been hard to believe without such a stark survey result: Mr. Trump is quite competitive at the outset of the race.To the extent the usual rule of thumb would mean dismissing the poll result and returning to an assumption that Mr. Trump can’t win, the usual guidance might be counterproductive.Before I go on, I should acknowledge that I do have a few gripes with this survey. It reported the results among all adults, not registered or likely voters. The question about the presidential matchup explicitly offered respondents the option to say they’re still undecided, which could tend to disadvantage the candidate with less enthusiastic support. For good measure, the matchup was buried 16th in the questionnaire, following other questions about the debt ceiling, abortion, the presidential primary, the allegations against Mr. Trump and so on.But my various gripes probably don’t “explain” Mr. Trump’s strength. The poll actually did report a result among registered voters and still found Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis ahead by six. And just a few months ago, an entirely different ABC/Post survey asked about the presidential matchup among registered voters in the typical way, without offering undecided as an option. What did they find? Mr. Trump still led by three points among registered voters. Similarly, they found him leading by two last September.Interestingly, the January and September surveys showed all of the same peculiar results by subgroup — Mr. Trump’s lead among young voters (18 to 39), and the staggering Democratic weakness among nonwhite voters. And while this was not included in the most recent poll, Mr. Trump led among voters making less than $50,000 per year, historically a Democratic voting group. No other high-quality survey has consistently shown Mr. Biden performing so poorly, especially among young voters.All of this means that the ABC/Post poll isn’t quite like the usual outlier. This consistent pattern requires more than just statistical noise and random sampling. Something else is at play, whether that’s something about the ABC/Post methodology, the underlying bias in telephone response patterns nowadays, or some combination of the above. It should be noted that the ABC/Post poll is nearly the last of the traditional, live-interview, random-digit-dialing telephone surveys that dominated public polling for much of the last half-century. So it’s easy to understand why it could produce different results, even if it’s not obvious why it produces them.But if no other survey has matched the ABC/Post poll, it would probably be wrong to say that it’s entirely alone in showing a weak Biden. Yes, it’s alone in showing Mr. Trump ahead by seven (counting leaners). But even the last Times/Siena poll, in October, showed Mr. Trump ahead by one point among registered voters. So far this year, the average of all polls has shown an essentially tied race.And virtually all of the polling shows an admittedly more muted version of the same basic demographic story, especially among nonwhite voters. Even excluding ABC/Post polling altogether (in clear violation of the “toss it in the average” rule), Mr. Biden still has a mere 49-37 lead over Mr. Trump among Hispanic voters and just a 70-18 lead among Black voters. In each case, Mr. Biden is far behind usual Democratic benchmarks, and it comes on the heels of a midterm election featuring unusually low Black turnout.If the lesson from the ABC/Post poll is that Mr. Biden is vulnerable and weak among usually reliable Democratic constituencies, then perhaps the takeaway from an outlying poll isn’t necessarily a misleading one. More

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      The Devolution of Ron DeSantis

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      After a promising start, he has become bogged down in issues that have divided and hurt Republicans in the past.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has fallen sharply in the polls.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAt the beginning of the year, Ron DeSantis looked as if he might be the answer to all of the Republican Party’s problems.For the first time in decades, a conservative politician rose to national prominence on issues that unified the party’s populist base with its beleaguered establishment — and without triggering a Resistance from Florida Democrats. He seemed to offer Republicans a path beyond the divisions and defeats of the last 15 years.Mr. DeSantis does not seem like the answer anymore. His poll numbers are cratering. His strength as a general election candidate is being questioned. This is partly because he’s fallen flat on the national stage, but it’s also because he’s slowly devolved into an older kind of Republican — the kind without answers to the party’s problems.He’s been bogged down in the very issues that divided and hurt Republicans in the past, like abortion, entitlements, Russia and the conduct of Donald J. Trump. Against Mr. Trump and without Democrats as a foil, his instinct to take the most conservative stance has pushed him far to the right. He’s devolved into another Ted Cruz.Mr. DeSantis will probably never be an entertainer like Mr. Trump, an orator like Ronald Reagan, or someone to get a beer with like George W. Bush. But to compete for the nomination, he will at least need to be who he appeared to be a few months ago: a new kind of conservative, who can appeal to the establishment and the base by focusing on the new set of issues that got him here: the fight for “freedom” and against “woke.”Mr. DeSantis’s varying campaigns against everything from coronavirus restrictions to gender studies curriculums weren’t extraordinarily popular, at least not in terms of national polling, but it was a type of political gold nonetheless. It let him channel the passions of the Republican base and get on Fox News without offending bourgeoise conservative sensibilities on race, immigration and gender. In fact, many elite conservatives disliked “woke” and coronavirus restrictions just like the rank-and-file. Even some Democrats sympathized with his positions. As a result, he won re-election in Florida in a landslide. Democratic turnout was abysmal.This combination of base and elite appeal made him a natural candidate to lead an anti-Trump coalition. In the last presidential primary, in 2016, Mr. Trump held the center of the Republican electorate and left his opposition split on either side. To his right, there was Mr. Cruz and the orthodox conservatives. To his left, there was Marco Rubio, John Kasich and the relatively moderate, business-friendly establishment. None of these factional figures stood a chance of unifying those two disparate groups, but for a fleeting moment after the midterms last year, Mr. DeSantis seemed to assemble all of the various not-necessarily-Trump factions under his banner.Since then, Mr. DeSantis’s coalition has unraveled. His superficial struggles on the campaign trail might be evident to most, but what is more easily overlooked is an overarching struggle to balance the competing needs of an ideologically diverse coalition in a Republican primary.His challenge has two halves. First, his instinct to move to the right has been more fraught in a Republican primary than it was when “woke” liberals were his foil. After all, there’s plenty of room to line up to the right of “woke” without alienating anyone on the right. Trying to be to the right of Mr. Trump, on the other hand, involves greater risk regarding both the general electorate and his relatively moderate supporters.Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. DeSantis actually fares best among moderate voters in Republican primary polling. This probably says more about which Republicans are most skeptical about Mr. Trump than it does about Mr. DeSantis, but it nonetheless means that his conservative instincts routinely put him at odds with his own base.In some cases, the tension between Mr. DeSantis and his base is unavoidable — and his moderate supporters will sometimes lose. A politician can’t always please every constituency. Abortion, for instance, poses a legitimate problem for Mr. DeSantis — and every Republican nowadays.But Mr. DeSantis has not always seemed cognizant of the delicate balancing act ahead of him and has committed errors as a result. His relatively soft position on Russia regarding Ukraine, for instance, overlooked that the elite, hawkish, neoconservative right not only cares deeply about containing Russia but would also inevitably be part of any successful anti-Trump coalition. Mr. DeSantis doesn’t need to be a neocon to hold this support against Mr. Trump, but it does seem he needs to support defending Ukraine.The second half is that the fights for “freedom” and against “woke” have not been a glue that’s held his fractious coalition together. So far this year, he’s struggled to make the race about these issues at all. Instead, abortion, entitlements, Russia and Mr. Trump have dominated the conversation.Of all the things that have happened to Mr. DeSantis so far this year, this might be the most troubling and telling. Tactical mistakes can be fixed, but if fighting for “freedom” and against “woke” isn’t a powerful, organizing theme, then he’s not especially different from any other Republican.This might not be entirely Mr. DeSantis’s fault. The coronavirus pandemic is over — at least for political purposes. The peak of “woke” might have come and gone as well: The arc of new left culture fights seems to have bent into a reactionary phase in which debate centers as much or more on proposed Republican restrictions on books, drag shows and A.P. history curriculums as on the latest controversy about the excesses of the left. Mr. DeSantis’s renewal of a year-old fight against Disney — the exact origins of which I suspect would stump even many regular readers of this newsletter — is a telling indicator that his campaign against “woke” is struggling for oxygen.At the same time as Mr. DeSantis’s new issues have faded, the old issues have come roaring back. The Supreme Court and Vladimir Putin made sure of it. So did Mr. Trump, who attacked Mr. DeSantis for old statements on cutting entitlements. And while all of these issues make Mr. DeSantis vulnerable in various ways, there are few opportunities to attack Mr. Trump as too woke.The devolution of Mr. DeSantis, in other words, is partly due to forces beyond his control. But if “freedom” or “woke” is not enough, he will probably need a new set of issues to unite open-to-anyone-but-Trump voters. More

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      Will the Economy Make or Break Biden in 2024?

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      Now that President Biden has announced his intention to run for a second term, economists and politicos are assessing whether his candidacy will be helped or hurt by the performance of the economy. If there’s a recession, will it be over and mostly forgotten by Election Day?Oxford Economics did an initial run of its election forecasting model, which takes economic factors into account, and found that Biden is in line to get around 55 percent of the popular vote, without any assumption about his opponent, according to a research briefing on Wednesday. Paul Krugman, my Opinion colleague, wrote Thursday that “the idea that the economy is going to pose a huge problem for Democrats next year isn’t backed by the available data.”The truth is, though, that we really don’t know who will win the 2024 election, or even what role the economy will play in it. As somebody who writes about economics, I’d love to say that the state of the economy leading up to Nov. 5, 2024, will matter a lot. But that does not seem to be the case, according to people I spoke with this week. One possible reason is that voters have become more polarized and set in their preferences, and thus less swayed by the ups and downs of the economy.For example, let’s say former President Donald Trump captures the Republican nomination. Most Biden supporters wouldn’t vote for him no matter how bad the economy got in 2024 — just as most Trump supporters won’t vote for Biden no matter how good the economy gets under the incumbent. James Carville’s admonition in 1992 that it’s “the economy, stupid” doesn’t hold up in this era of hyperpartisanship.In 1978 a pioneering article by the Yale economist Ray Fair, “The Effect of Economic Events on Votes for President,” made the case that “economic events as measured by the change in real economic activity in the year of the election do appear to have an important effect on votes for president.” In January, the model predicted, using his economic projections as inputs, that Biden, if renominated, would get 50.07 percent of the two-party presidential vote next year, with no assumption about the Republican opponent.Fair’s model, which he has tweaked over the years, correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every election from 1980 through 2008 except for 1992, when it incorrectly predicted Bill Clinton would get only 43 percent of the two-party popular vote against George H.W. Bush. It hasn’t done well lately, though: It predicted the Democrat would get less than half the popular vote in the two-candidate matchup in 2012, when President Barack Obama won a second term; in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost to Trump in the Electoral College; and in 2020, when Biden beat Trump.I asked Fair if it was fair to say that polarization of voters has weakened the predictive value of economic indicators. He acknowledged that Trump, an especially polarizing figure, had underperformed in both 2016 and 2020 given economic conditions that the Fair model considered favorable to him. (And he said it could happen again if Trump is the G.O.P. candidate next year.) But he said he’s not convinced that his economic model has lost its predictive power. “Personally, I think there’s still a pretty big middle group” of voters who are influenced by economic factors, he said.A good example of why it’s dangerous to over-rely on economic models is what happened in the spring of 2020, when Covid hit. Based on historical patterns, several of the best-known models (though not Fair’s) put a heavy weight on how the economy performs in the second quarter of an election year, namely April through June. Because of the Covid shutdown, the gross domestic product fell at an annual rate of 29.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Going by that one data point, the election should have been a disaster for the incumbent, Trump. But voters understood that Trump couldn’t be blamed for Covid. What’s more, the economy grew at an annual rate of 35.3 percent in the following quarter as it rebounded from the shutdown. In the end, Trump did worse than Fair’s model had predicted, but way better than predicted by models that heavily weighted second-quarter economic growth.Another problem with some economics-based forecasting models such as Fair’s is that they predict the popular vote, rather than the one that really matters, the Electoral College vote, which depends on state-by-state results. Fair is sticking to forecasting the popular vote because he thinks it’s of academic interest. Some other forecasters have switched to predicting the Electoral College result, but it’s much trickier. The outcome of the election comes down to a handful of swing states, and within those few states, to the behavior of a small minority of voters whose minds aren’t made up. “The Electoral College throws a monkey wrench into the business,” Alan Abramowitz, an emeritus professor of political science at Emory University, told me.One thing that puzzles me is why it’s even worthwhile to plug economic factors into an election forecast. If the relevance of the economy is that it affects voters’ feelings about the candidates, why not just cut to the chase and focus on the voters’ feelings? (Nate Cohn, my colleague on the news side, pointed out this week in another subscriber-only newsletter that the polls are showing a tight contest, with Biden slightly ahead of Trump and slightly behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in hypothetical matchups.)I asked Charles Tien, a political science professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and Hunter College, why he and others put economic indicators into their models. “When you add in the economy, it improves the results,” he said. But he acknowledged that it’s not obvious why that’s the case. When I asked Fair the same question by email, he wrote, “My empirical results are quite strong that the economy has mattered over time.” I wonder if it’s because economic indicators signal something about voters’ situations that they don’t fully express in surveys, which in any case have become less reliable as response rates have declined.Peter Enns, a political scientist at Cornell who ran the Cornell-based Roper Center for Public Opinion Research until last year, told me he thinks it’s too soon for predictions about the 2024 race. First, because there are too many unknowns, such as the field of candidates and the business cycle. Second, because at this stage voters should be focusing on who should win, not who will win. OK, that’s fair. No more horse-race prognosticating from me. For now.The Readers WriteWhat your newsletter about innovation misses is the input by experimentation. Our five senses are permanently providing us with personal experience that facilitates new creative thoughts. Only when chatbots are equipped with sensors can they become independent thinkers.Heinrich MullerRancho Palos Verdes, Calif.As for fertility, maybe all you men should think a little. Maybe women do not want to be saddled all through their adult years with raising your kids! Or maybe if men did a little more of the work, women wouldn’t mind so much.Marilynn MillerChicago areaTo test peer effects on fertility, why not hire actors to wheel baby carriages around one area and not around a demographically matched area nearby? Joking, of course.David AuerbachDurham, N.C.With the large run-up in housing prices that you mentioned, selling a home and buying a new one may involve a huge increase in property tax payments. This may be a significant disincentive to selling in addition to higher mortgage rates.Randy K. VogelLaguna Hills, Calif.Quote of the Day“I used to say to our audiences: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!’”— Upton Sinclair, “I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked” (1935) More

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      An Early, Early Look at Biden’s 2024 Prospects

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      Almost every recent poll shows a highly competitive presidential race.In 2024 polling, President Biden narrowly leads Donald J. Trump and trails Ron DeSantis.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesWith Donald J. Trump indicted, Ron DeSantis faltering in the polls and Democrats still basking in their strong midterm showing, some might feel that President Biden’s re-election is all but a done deal.But as Mr. Biden announced his re-election bid Tuesday, it’s worth noting something about the early 2024 polling: The race looks close.Almost every recent survey shows a highly competitive presidential race. On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by 1.4 percentage points so far this year. Mr. DeSantis even leads Mr. Biden, by less than a point.Now, to be clear: I don’t think you should put a lot of stock in general election polls quite yet. But no one should be terribly confident about the outcome of a general election at this early stage either. If there were any case for early confidence, it ought to be reflected in the early polls. If Mr. Trump is doomed, why isn’t he getting trounced in the polls?At the very least, Mr. Biden seems to have his work cut out for him. His job approval and favorability ratings remain stuck in the low 40s. This makes him quite a bit weaker than in 2020, when polls showed that voters generally had a favorable view of him. Or put differently: While the 2020 election was decided by voters who liked Mr. Biden and didn’t like Mr. Trump, today it seems the 2024 election could be decided by voters who dislike both candidates.Why is Mr. Biden faring so poorly? The causes of his weak ratings have been up for debate since they tanked in August 2021. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus, a stalled legislative agenda and the beginnings of inflation were all seen as possible theories. Today, all of those explanations seem to be in retreat — the story line of support for Ukraine against Russia has supplanted Afghanistan; the trend line on inflation shows some promise; Covid deaths are at their lowest point in three years — but Mr. Biden remains unpopular.At this stage, three basic possibilities remain. One is that the overall political environment remains unfavorable, presumably because of persistent inflation and partisan polarization. If so, any president in these straits would have low approval ratings and struggle until voters felt their economic fortunes were improving.Another possibility is that Mr. Biden’s early stumbles did unusual and lasting damage to perceptions of his leadership competence, probably related to his age (80). If this is true, he may not find it easy to restore the nation’s confidence as long as he doesn’t look the part.The final possibility is that the conditions may be in place for Mr. Biden’s ratings to rebound. It would not be the first time: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and even Mr. Trump (before coronavirus) saw their approval ratings increase from the low 40s in the two years before re-election. In this scenario, Mr. Biden’s ratings would increase as a crucial segment of voters judged him against the alternatives, rather than in isolation. His re-election campaign would offer a more forceful and energetic defense of his performance, perhaps against the backdrop of low unemployment and fading inflation.Historically, the third possibility seems more likely. Mr. Biden’s age shouldn’t be understated as a legitimate factor, but he won despite his age last time, and incumbent presidents usually win re-election. The large number of voters who dislike Mr. Trump and once liked Mr. Biden create upside. The direction of the economy will be a crucial variable, of course, but at least for now the combination of low unemployment and slowly fading inflation would seem to provide enough ammunition for Mr. Biden to make his case. Still, his ratings are low enough today that they could improve markedly without securing his re-election.Three kinds of voters appear to loom large as Mr. Biden tries to reassemble the coalition that brought him to the White House in 2020: young voters, nonwhite voters and perhaps low-income voters as well. In the most recent surveys, Mr. Biden is badly underperforming among these groups. Overall, he could be running at least a net 10 points behind what he earned in 2020 among each of these groups, helping to explain why the early general election polls show a close race.Mr. Biden has shown weakness among all of these groups at various times before, so it is not necessarily surprising that he’s struggling among them again with his approval rating in the low 40s. Still, they crystallize the various challenges ahead of his campaign: his age, the economy, and voters who won’t be won over on issues like abortion or democratic principles. In his announcement video on Tuesday, Mr. Biden devoted almost all of his attention to rights, freedom, democracy and abortion. He’ll probably need a way to speak to people who are animated by more material, economic concerns than abstract liberal values.A final wild card is the Electoral College. Even if Mr. Biden does win the national vote by a modest margin, Mr. Trump could assemble a winning coalition in the battleground states that decide the presidency, as he did in 2016.In 2020, Mr. Biden won the national vote by 4.4 percentage points, but barely squeaked out wins by less than one percentage point in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. To win, he needed one of the three.At the moment, there’s a case the Electoral College will be less favorable to Mr. Trump, relative to the national vote, than it was in 2020. In the midterm elections, the gap between the popular vote for U.S. House and a hypothetical Electoral College result based on the House vote essentially evaporated, down from nearly four points in 2020. It’s possible this was simply a product of unusually poor Republican nominees at the top of the ticket in many of the most competitive states, but there are plausible reasons it might also reflect underlying electoral trends.The renewed importance of abortion, for instance, might help Democrats most in relatively white, secular areas, which would tend to help them more in the Northern battlegrounds than elsewhere. “Democracy” may also play well as an issue in the battlegrounds, as these are the very states where the stop-the-steal movement threatened to overturn the results of the last election. Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s relative weakness among nonwhite voters, who are disproportionately concentrated in noncompetitive states, might do more to hurt his tallies in states like California or Illinois than Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.Given the idiosyncratic and localized nature of last year’s midterm results, it would be a mistake to be confident that the Republican Electoral College advantage is coming to an end. If that edge persists, the modest Biden lead in national polls today wouldn’t be enough for him to secure re-election. More