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      J.D. Vance’s Strange Turn to 1876

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      The most favorable gloss you could give to Donald Trump’s effort to “Stop the Steal” is that it was an attempt to deal with real discrepancies in the 2020 presidential race as well as to satisfy those voters angry about the conduct of the election.This, in fact, was the argument made by Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio in a recent interview with my colleague Ross Douthat. Vance defended the conduct of the former president and his allies, and condemned the political class for its attempt to “try to take this very legitimate grievance over our most fundamental democratic act as a people, and completely suppress concerns about it.”Vance briefly analogized Trump’s attempt to contest the election to that of the disputed election of 1876, describing the latter as an example of what should have been done in 2020. “Here’s what this would’ve looked like if you really wanted to do this. You would’ve actually tried to go to the states that had problems; you would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876. And then you have to actually prosecute that case; you have to make an argument to the American people.”Let’s look at what happened in 1876. In that race, the Democrat, Gov. Samuel Tilden of New York, won a majority of the national popular vote but fell one vote short of a majority in the Electoral College. The Republican, Rutherford Hayes, was well behind in both. The trouble was 20 electoral votes in four states: Florida, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina. In the three Southern states, where the elections were marred by fraud, violence and anti-Black intimidation, officials from both parties certified rival slates of electors.Hayes believed, probably correctly, that had there been “a fair election in the South, our electoral vote would reach two hundred and that we should have a large popular majority.” As the historian Michael Fitzgibbon Holt noted in “By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876,” “Had blacks been allowed to vote freely, Hayes easily would have carried all three states in dispute, Mississippi, and perhaps Alabama as well.”In the weeks following the election, Democrats and Republicans in those states would fight fierce legal battles on behalf of their respective candidates. In South Carolina, where an election for governor was in dispute as well, Democrats threatened to seize the statehouse by force. The predominantly Black Republican majority in the state legislature tried to certify the Republican candidate as the winner, and Democrats went as far as convening a separate legislature, where they crowned their candidate, Wade Hampton III, the victor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will It Matter? Searching for Clues in the Polls About a Trump Conviction.

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      He may not lose support at all, but recent backing from young and nonwhite voters might be likelier to fade.After the verdict in New York.Mike Segar/ReutersFor almost a decade, Donald J. Trump has done, said and survived things that would have doomed any other politician.He even saw his support increase after four sets of criminal indictments last year — including the charges for falsifying business records that he was ultimately found guilty of Thursday.The polls cannot tell us how voters will respond to the unprecedented verdict. Most voters weren’t even paying close attention to the trial, and asking voters about hypotheticals is always fraught. With his track record of political resilience, there’s surely little reason to expect his loyal MAGA base to suddenly collapse after a guilty verdict — or even imprisonment. It’s possible he won’t lose any support at all.But in a close election in a closely divided country, any losses could be pivotal. While Mr. Trump has survived many controversies, he has also suffered a political penalty for his conduct. He did lose re-election, after all. And this cycle, there is one reason to wonder whether Mr. Trump might now be more vulnerable: He depends on the support of many young and nonwhite voters who haven’t voted for him in the past, and who might not prove as loyal as those who have stood by his side from the start.In the last six months, many pollsters have asked voters to consider the hypothetical scenario where Mr. Trump was convicted at trial. It’s important to emphasize that these poll results shouldn’t be interpreted as simulations of how voters will behave after a real-world conviction. The questions don’t replicate how voters will react to the full context and facts of the case, or to statements of support from Republicans, or to the coverage on Fox News. Instead, they put a hypothetical conviction right in the face of the respondent.Nonetheless, the results do show that a meaningful number of Mr. Trump’s supporters are understandably uncomfortable with the idea of supporting a felon. This is a line that Mr. Trump hasn’t crossed before, and a sliver of his supporters were even willing to tell a pollster they would vote for President Biden if Mr. Trump were found guilty.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Alito Is Holding Trump to a Different Standard

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      I mentioned it in passing in my Friday column, but I was struck — disturbed, really — by one specific point made by Justice Samuel Alito during Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v. United States.Alito began innocuously enough: “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully if that candidate is the incumbent.”“Of course,” answered Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing the case for the Department of Justice.“Now,” Alito continued, “if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”The implication of Alito’s question is that presidential immunity for all official acts may be a necessary concession to the possibility of a politically motivated investigation and prosecution: Presidents need to be above the law to raise the odds that they follow the law and leave office without incident.If this sounds backward, that’s because it is.There have been, in the nearly 236 years since Americans ratified the Constitution, 45 presidents. Of those, 10 sought but did not win re-election. In every case but one, the defeated incumbents left office without incident. There was no fear that they would try to overturn the results or subvert the process, nor was there any fear that their successors would turn the power of the state against them. Thomas Jefferson did not try to jail John Adams after the close-fought 1800 election; he assured the American people that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists.” Jimmy Carter did not sic the F.B.I. on Gerald Ford in the wake of his narrow victory; he thanked him for “all he has done to heal our land.”By Alito’s lights, this should not have been possible. Why would a president leave if he could be prosecuted as a private citizen? The answer is that the other nine people who lost had a commitment to American democracy that transcended their narrow, personal or partisan interests.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ozempic and Wegovy Have Health Benefits Beyond Weight Loss

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      Last year was called the year of Ozempic, though it was also a year of Ozempic backlash and Ozempic shortages, which could persist for years. Even so, we appear very far from a peak for GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, which are powered by a molecule called semaglutide, and Mounjaro, which uses its cousin tirzepatide. It seems possible to imagine a future in which almost everyone is taking some variety of GLP-1 drug, and with a pretty good reason to do so.Probably, you have heard about the game-changing impact of such drugs on obesity, a condition that affects 40 percent of Americans and increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and hundreds of other comorbidities. Patients on Ozempic and Wegovy can lose 15 to 20 percent or more of their weight in a little over a year, and if they stay on the drugs, the weight tends to stay off. That may not sound like a monumental effect, but consider that on average, an obese 210-pound man who loses 20 percent of his body mass generally passes quickly through the overweight stage all the way to a normal weight.If anything, though, we’ve probably talked too much about cosmetic weight loss and Hollywood vanity — and certainly made too many comparisons to fen-phen, Botox and Viagra. The GLP-1 drugs have been shown to cut risk of heart attacks, strokes and death from coronary disease by 20 percent among overweight and obese patients, presumably through the salubrious effect of weight loss, though the researchers can’t yet say for sure. Semaglutide has been shown to eliminate or reduce the need for insulin among those with recent-onset Type 1 diabetes. In a clinical trial of people with Type 2 diabetes and moderate to severe kidney disease, the drug reduced the risk of kidney disease progression and cut the death rate from cardiovascular and kidney-related causes by 24 percent — such a clear result that the trial was ended early. Semaglutide has reduced fatty liver deposits in patients with H.I.V. and nonalcoholic steatotic liver disease. It has normalized the menstrual cycles of those with polycystic ovary syndrome. (It has also, somewhat mysteriously, seemed to produce a wave of unintended pregnancies among women taking birth control, at least if TikTok videos are to be trusted.)Studies have shown promise in treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s with GLP-1 drugs, perhaps by regulating insulin levels and reducing inflammation, and the drugs may yet prove useful in treating many other conditions made worse by chronic inflammation. Some studies have found large decreases in the risk of depression and anxiety; others found smaller but still positive effects. There are potential applications for schizophrenia and neurological dysfunction, thanks to the role that insulinlike hormones like GLP-1 play in the development of the central nervous system and the way semaglutide reshapes the brain’s chemical reward system. It seems to bend the curve on alcoholism and drug addiction and curb other addictive behaviors, as well — compulsive shopping and sex addiction, gambling and nail biting, smoking and skin picking. A compulsive nation has stumbled into what looks like a treatment for compulsion and one that happens to protect against some of the country’s biggest killers and curb some of its most pervasive pathologies and inner demons.Americans love to dream of miracle drugs, but hardly anything ever seems to fill the bill. True, semaglutide has arrived with real questions trailing like bunting: Much of the weight loss is from lean muscle mass, which isn’t ideal, and there are reasons to worry over the possibility of thyroid problems, loss of bone density and sarcopenia, a weakness disorder associated with aging. There are potentially other serious long-term side effects, though millions of Americans have been taking Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes for years without serious issues. (Some of them do report more familiar side effects, like nausea.) The GLP-1 drugs aren’t a permanent fix in a single shot — whether the thing being addressed is body mass index or cardiac risk or the progression of Alzheimer’s — but a permanent disease-management program. They also haven’t exactly cured cancer, although more than a dozen cancers are linked to obesity, and in at least one case, colorectal cancer, there is reason to believe GLP-1 drugs may directly cut the chances of developing the disease.All that means that semaglutide isn’t exactly a cure-all, in the vernacular sense. But it seems to be about as close as we’ve gotten, even in a time of racing biomedical progress, to that old science-fiction proposition — one pill for almost everything and almost everyone forever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Kellyanne Conway Has Some Weak Advice for Her Party

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      It is beyond obvious at this point that abortion is the Achilles’ heel of the Republican Party. The prospect of a national abortion ban almost certainly helped Democrats stave off a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, and assisted them the following year in both statewide and state legislative races in Virginia and Kentucky. The prospect of abortion bans has also pushed voters in states such as Ohio and Michigan to approve sweeping affirmations of reproductive freedom in their respective state constitutions. And abortion looms over the 2024 race, as well; Democrats will spend countless millions to tell Americans that a vote for Trump, or any Republican on the ballot, is a vote for a national abortion ban.Republican strategists are well aware that abortion is an albatross around the party’s neck. Their advice? Find new language.“If it took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade, it’s going to take more than 50 minutes, 50 hours or 50 weeks to explain to people what that means, and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean, and to move hearts and minds,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to Donald Trump, at Politico’s Health Care Summit on Wednesday. During the conversation, she advised Republican candidates to focus on “concession” and “consensus” and to turn the conversation toward exceptions. She also urged Republicans to avoid ballot initiatives on abortion, for fear that they could mobilize voters against them.I have no doubt that Republicans will take this advice; they are desperate to neutralize the issue. But the Republican abortion problem isn’t an issue of language, it’s an issue of material reality. The reason voters are turned off by the Republican position on abortion has less to do with language and more to do with the actual consequences of putting tight restrictions on reproductive rights. Countless Americans have direct experience with difficult and complicated pregnancies; countless Americans have direct experience with abortion care; and countless Americans are rightfully horrified by the stories of injury and cruelty coming out of anti-abortion states.No amount of rhetorical moderation on abortion will diminish the impact of stories like that of K Monica Kelly, who had to travel from Tennessee to Florida to end a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, thanks to Tennessee’s strict post-Dobbs abortion ban. Nor will it obscure the extent to which the most conservative Republicans are gunning for other reproductive health services, from hormonal birth control to in vitro fertilization.It is too much to say that Republicans cannot save themselves from the political consequences of their assault on abortion rights, but if they do, it won’t be because they find another way to try to put lipstick on a pig.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      ‘Fix the Damn Roads’: How Democrats in Purple and Red States Win

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      When Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.In less than two weeks, the road reopened.Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024 could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the far right is chipping away at a postwar taboo

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      The traction gained by ultranationalist parties over the past decade may be a sign that an important consensus is breaking down.This week I’ve been pinging back and forth between two books that at first seem to have little in common. “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” by Tony Judt, and “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America,” by John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck.“Postwar” is a work of popular history about Europe in the decades between World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. Its tone is narrative: It reads as if someone sat down next to Judt and asked how Europe worked, and he began an out-loud answer that didn’t stop for 960 pages. Although Judt clearly relied on a vast body of primary and secondary sources to write it, most of that stays behind the curtain of his own confident pronouncements about what happened and why.“Identity Crisis” is quite different. Rather than expounding a confident narrative, it shows its work with near-obsessive precision, packing paragraphs with data and statistical analysis, and then pausing every few pages to pull it all together into an eloquent chart.There is a whole chapter on how Trump took advantage of existing weaknesses within the Republican Party, for example, accompanied by data on endorsements showing how the party elite failed to coalesce behind any mainstream candidate. Of course, one of the reasons “Identity Crisis” can adopt this approach is because it’s focused narrowly on one election rather than a decades-long sweep of history.Why did I find myself reading two such different books? Sometimes my reading choices can seem disjointed and scattered, as if I had been trying on different lenses for the world and discarding them in turn after they failed to give me the perspective I was looking for.And yet, when I look back over my notes, I see how these two specific books are part of my stumble toward answering a question that I have been thinking about since 2016: What was it that suddenly seemed to change, first with Donald Trump’s triumph in the Republican primary, then through the success of the Brexit referendum in Britain, Trump’s win in the 2016 general election and the subsequent electoral victories of far-right populist parties and politicians in Europe, South America and the United States?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Lost DeSantis Moment

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      For months, he routinely led Donald Trump in head-to-head polls and gave a possible glimpse at a post-Trump Republican future.Ron DeSantis after winning re-election as Florida governor in 2022. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesRon DeSantis began the 2024 campaign as a formidable candidate, with early poll numbers that rivaled or even exceeded the likes of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.In the end, that early strength meant only that he had more room to fall.There are countless reasons Mr. DeSantis fell apart and ultimately ended his campaign Sunday — including that his opponent proved once again to be a juggernaut. Perhaps Mr. DeSantis might have won the nomination in most other years, if he hadn’t been going against a former president.But rather than dwell on his losing campaign, it’s worth returning to his apparent strength at the outset — that brief moment when Mr. DeSantis, or at least the idea of Mr. DeSantis, routinely led Mr. Trump in high-quality head-to-head polls.In the eight years since Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination, this was the only moment when Republican voters appeared willing to go a different direction. Mr. DeSantis didn’t capitalize on the moment, but nonetheless it’s the only glimpse we’ve had into the post-Trump Republican Party. We saw something that might bring it about, and we saw what it might look like.What brought it about: the midtermsOver the last eight years, Mr. Trump has said and done countless things that might have doomed any other politician. He’s been impeached twice. He encouraged what turned into the Jan. 6 riot. He’s been charged with multiple federal crimes. None of it really made any difference in his support.That is, until November 2022. The disappointing Republican showing in the midterms damaged Mr. Trump in the polls, and Mr. DeSantis surged to take a clear lead in head-to-head polls that lasted for months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More