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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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      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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      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

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      Did Fox News Just Pay for the Privilege of Continued Corruption?

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      In many legal settlements, both sides declare victory. The settlements themselves are often confidential, or are for amounts so far below the plaintiff’s original demand that a defendant can argue, with a straight face, that he settled essentially to make the case go away. Rather than deal with the risk of a rogue jury, defendants can settle for a reasonable sum and then often, in exchange for the cash, gain the silence of the plaintiff. The public, to the extent it cares, is left to argue over what “victory” truly meant.Not so with Dominion’s settlement against Fox. The moment the amount of the settlement emerged — $787,500,000 — I knew that Dominion had won and Fox had lost, and it wasn’t even close. The reason was clear to anyone who’d followed the case carefully: Damages, not guilt, were the weakest part of Dominion’s case. It had asked for $1.6 billion in damages, based in part on a theory outlined in the complaint that Fox’s “viral disinformation campaign” had “destroyed the enterprise value of a business that was worth potentially more than $1 billion.”To call that claim speculative is an understatement. According to a 2020 report in Forbes, Dominion had been paid $118.3 million for its election services between 2017 and 2019. I’ve litigated lost profit/lost enterprise value cases, and I know how difficult it is to prove estimated future financial fortunes.In other words, it was going to be straightforward to prove that Fox employees lied and deliberately platformed lies. It was going to be much harder to prove the kind of damages that Dominion claimed. Then, in the settlement, Fox paid Dominion a sum larger than Dominion could reasonably presume a jury would require. Why?This brings us to the difference between justice and accountability. The legal system can achieve justice when an aggrieved party is made whole. And make no mistake, Dominion received justice. It was more than made whole for Fox’s lies, and its quest for even more justice continues. Its lawsuits against OAN, Newsmax, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell are still pending.But accountability is different. Accountability occurs when the people responsible for misconduct — and not merely their corporate bank accounts — experience proportionate consequences for their actions. One of the #MeToo movement’s greatest achievements was exposing to the world the degree to which corporations essentially paid for the privilege of continued corruption. They’d write checks to the survivors of abuse (granting them justice) without taking action against the abusers (enabling them to avoid accountability).This is not a critique of the plaintiffs at all. They need justice, and they don’t have the power to impose accountability. They can’t mandate that corporations apologize or terminate employees without the agreement of the corporation. The system itself can generally only give them money. Do we want to ask people who’ve been harmed by misconduct to delay or risk their own quest for justice for the sake of using the settlement process to mandate apologies or terminations that the courts don’t have the power to compel?The end result, however, is a system whereby wealthy institutions can essentially build in their corruption as a cost of doing business. In 2021, for example, my wife and I published a report detailing years of sexual abuse at one of the largest and most prominent Christian summer camps in America, Kanakuk Kamp. The pattern there was clear: pay survivors, get them to sign confidential settlements, and continue on with the same leaders who had abjectly failed to protect the kids in their care.The Fox settlement reeks of justice without accountability. Not only is Fox not publicly apologizing for its misconduct, it has released deceptive descriptions of the settlement and the court’s findings. Its initial statement said in part: “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”That is not what the settlement reflects. The settlement reflects Fox’s abandonment of even the most minimal journalistic standards.Fox’s “news” story about the settlement was perhaps even worse. The headline stated that “Fox News Media, Dominion Voting Systems reach agreement over defamation lawsuit,” but it didn’t state the amount of the settlement and instead mainly focused on the judge’s compliments of Fox’s legal team. No, really:Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who was overseeing the defamation lawsuit, praised both parties for their handling of the case.“I have been on the bench since 2010. … I think this is the best lawyering I’ve had, ever,” Davis said, adding, “I would be proud to be your judge in the future.”No mention, of course, that less than a week before, the same judge rebuked Fox’s lawyers, said he was concerned about “misrepresentations to the court” and lamented, “What do I do with attorneys that aren’t straightforward with me?” And then the Fox story ends with this howler of a paragraph:Then-President Donald Trump and his allies fiercely challenged Joe Biden’s victory in the weeks following the election. Some of them, including members of his legal team, made false and unsubstantiated claims against Dominion Voting Systems and are the subject of separate defamation lawsuits.Note the deflection of responsibility. It was Trump’s legal team that made “false and unsubstantiated claims.” That’s unquestionably true, but those same lawyers were enthusiastically put on the air by Fox for the purpose of spreading their “false and unsubstantiated claims.” And as the court’s summary judgment ruling made clear, Fox employees also made what they knew to be false and unsubstantiated claims.The end result is that Fox has paid an immense price for its lies, but it recognizes that its true vulnerability isn’t in its bank account but in its audience. It can absorb huge financial losses so long as those losses are fleeting. It cannot prosper if it loses its audience. Shielding its audience from the truth is easily worth almost $800 million to a company that made $1.2 billion in net income last year and is sitting on $4 billion in cash reserves.In the meantime, many of the viewers who keep the company so very profitable won’t know anything meaningful about the Dominion settlement or Fox’s lies — because Fox won’t tell them. I can think of any number of friends, relatives and neighbors who regularly consume conservative media and know nothing about the case. They know nothing about Fox’s falsehoods. Their ignorance is of incalculable worth to Fox.While this newsletter is admittedly rather bleak even in the face of Fox’s decisive court defeat, the story is far from over. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox is pending in New York State court in Manhattan, and the larger right-wing media world is facing a series of reckonings in cases across the country. My friends at Protect Democracy have filed cases against Project Veritas, Gateway Pundit, Rudy Giuliani, Dinesh D’Souza and several additional defendants related to some of the most grotesque lies in the entire Stop the Steal effort.There is a chance that great weight of legal judgments will lead to legal accountability. Justice can be so punishing that even the most amoral institutions have to respond as a matter of self-preservation. But true accountability remains elusive.Indeed, the Dominion lawsuit is perfectly representative of a vital lesson we’ve learned during the Trump era. The law can stave off disaster, but only moral norms truly preserve the republic. The law (and law enforcement) blocked Trump’s attempted coup. Legal processes are underway to hold Trump responsible for his alleged criminal misdeeds. Court cases are likely to compensate multiple victims of defamation for their profound losses. Yet still our public square is overrun with ignorance and outright lies. A Machiavellian spirit stalks the land.But the legal system does give our nation a chance to come to its senses. In the words of the old Fox show “The X-Files,” “The truth is out there.” Not only did Dominion receive justice, but its litigation gave the public the gift of truth. Now it’s incumbent on our nation to receive that truth and react accordingly. Fox News has tried to purchase the privilege of continued corruption, but even its vast bank account can’t protect it from the public — but only if that public possesses a trace of curiosity and preserves a moral core. More

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      Is a 6-Week Abortion Ban a Disaster for DeSantis? Two Theories.

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      There were plenty of midterm elections where Republicans didn’t seem to pay a price over new abortion restrictions.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Will the abortion issue define him?Eze Amos for The New York TimesAfter the liberal triumph in this month’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race, you probably don’t need much convincing that abortion rights can be a big political winner for Democrats.But after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law last week banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, it is worth considering another set of races: the elections where Republicans didn’t seem to pay a stiff political price for new abortion restrictions.Surprisingly, Republicans tended to fare just as well in the midterms in the states where abortion was recently banned as they did in the states where abortion remained legal.This is a little perplexing. There isn’t a definitive explanation, but I’ll offer two basic theories. Depending on your preferred answer, Mr. DeSantis’s anti-abortion stance may be an electoral death wish — or abortion simply may not be quite as helpful to Democrats as it seems based on the highest-profile elections, like the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race.Oddly enough, Wisconsin offers a stark example of how abortion may not always help Democrats. Abortion was banned there after the Dobbs decision, but in the midterms Republican candidates for U.S. House still won more votes than Democrats in a state Joe Biden carried in 2020. The Republican senator Ron Johnson won re-election as well. The Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won re-election by three percentage points — a fine performance, but not a Democratic romp.It’s worth noting the unusual circumstances of Wisconsin’s abortion ban. The law banning abortion was originally enacted in 1849 — not by today’s Republicans — and went info effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned, giving the G.O.P. some maneuvering room. The Republican state Legislature argued for adding exceptions; Mr. Johnson pushed for an abortion referendum. Perhaps Republicans in the state just weren’t seen as responsible for the ban.But Wisconsin isn’t alone. A similar story played out in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and Georgia. In some of these states, Republican governors enacted bans or other major restrictions that went into effect after the Dobbs decision. In others, Republican bans were blocked by the courts. But in all of them, Republicans nonetheless posted average to above-average midterm results.In fact, there was only one state — West Virginia — where abortion was banned and where Democrats posted well above-average results in House races. Overall, Republican House candidates outran Donald J. Trump by a typical or above average amount (six points or more) in 10 of the 13 states where abortion was banned after Roe.What makes sense of this pattern? Of the two basic possibilities, one would augur well for Democrats; the other would bode better for Mr. DeSantis.Theory No. 1: It’s about demographics.Abortion is relatively unpopular in states where today’s Republicans successfully banned abortion, like Texas or Georgia. These states tend to be relatively religious states in the South. There aren’t many of the secular, white, college-educated liberal Democrats who could bring about a “Roevember” backlash.There seems to be a lot to this theory. Not only does it explain many of the cases in question, but it also fits a broader pattern from last November: Democratic strength in the House vote was somewhat correlated with support for abortion (though big Democratic failures in New York and California stand out as obvious exceptions).But this theory doesn’t quite explain everything. In particular, it doesn’t work outside the South, including in places like Ohio or Wisconsin, where we know the right to abortion is popular. That’s where it’s important to notice my qualifier: where today’s Republicans successfully banned abortion. If demographics are the predominant explanation, then the Republican resilience in the North must be because voters simply didn’t hold them responsible for banning abortion. Democrats could hope Republicans will pay a greater political cost when they unequivocally restrict abortion, like what Mr. DeSantis is doing now in Florida.Theory No. 2: When abortion is the most important issue.This is what I’ll call the salience theory: It takes a special set of circumstances for Democrats to make abortion the most important issue to voters, like a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who promises to represent the decisive vote to legalize abortion when an abortion case is pending before the court, or a Michigan referendum that explicitly decides the future of abortion in a state.As with the demographics theory, the salience theory is also consistent with polling and the general story of the 2022 midterms. Only a sliver of voters said abortion was the most important issue, not because abortion rights wasn’t important to them but because there were lots of other genuinely important issues at stake — the economy and inflation, crime, guns, democracy, immigration, and so on. With so many other issues, it makes sense that abortion plays only a marginal role in vote choice unless a distinct set of circumstances focuses the electorate on abortion alone.The salience theory also fits one of the patterns of the election: the highly localized results. There were states where Democrats excelled, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, even as they struggled in California or New York. Where Democrats did well, they had the fodder to focus voters on one of their best issues, like attacking stop-the-steal candidates. Where they struggled, Republicans managed to focus the electorate on an issue like crime (democracy or abortion seemed less important).It’s worth emphasizing that the salience theory doesn’t mean that abortion as an issue didn’t help Democrats in 2022. If Roe hadn’t been overturned, abortion would have been less salient everywhere and perhaps Democrats would have fared a bit worse across the board. But it would mean that Republican support for an abortion ban is not, on its own, sufficient to make abortion the predominant issue and bring stiff political costs to conservatives.While this theory offers better news for Mr. DeSantis, it would nonetheless contain a lesson for Democrats: It seems they would be wise to find creative ways to keep the electorate focused on abortion. State referendums might be one option, much as Republicans put same-sex marriage on the ballot in 2004. A campaign to pass federal abortion legislation might be another path as well. More