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      ‘Couples Therapy,’ but for Politics

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      Growing political polarization is a problem that keeps me up at night. Not because I think it’s bad to have strong opinions, but because of what social scientists call affective polarization: polarization beyond political disagreement, when “ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.” At its worst, affective polarization can lead to hate and dehumanization.When my colleague Thomas Edsall wrote about affective polarization earlier this year, he quoted Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, who said that part of what’s behind today’s intense partisan divide is that “Politicians, instead of focusing on the large list of issues where there is broad agreement in the American public, endlessly re-litigate social divides like gay rights and abortion to mobilize a base they fear will stay home if they focus on the mundane details of pragmatic governance.”I see this play out when I hear activists suggest that you can’t talk to them about climate change if you don’t agree with their stance on the Israel-Hamas war, or when I see politicians tying approval of military appointments to abortion access. The attitude seems to be: You have to agree with me about everything or you’re my enemy and we can’t work together on anything. It leads to a whole lot of nothing.Because I cover family policy, the lack of movement on areas of “pragmatic governance” where there is “broad agreement” drives me bonkers. A prime example is federal paid leave, which is popular among voters across the spectrum, yet remains in legislative purgatory, and has for decades. Though there’s a bipartisan working group in Congress on the issue, we’re still a long way from any change, leaving us out of step with most wealthy nations and creating a lot of stress and economic hardship for people just trying to make ends meet while also caring for children or sick family members.But there’s a group of people of all ideological backgrounds — social conservatives, progressive activists, budget wonks and lots of people in between — that’s been convening over the past year, and that gives me a bit of hope for family policy’s future. It also offers a road map for people who disagree vehemently on issues to have productive conversations and find points of connection. If nothing else, the group’s participants agree that too many American families are struggling, that families should be more of a political priority and that something needs to be done to help them.The convocation has the somewhat jargony name Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, and its members let me sit in on one of their guided discussions with the understanding that I would follow the Chatham House Rule — I can report on what was said during the session but not reveal “the identity nor the affiliation” of any speaker.The group consists of around 30 people and it has met monthly since April. It is directed by Abby McCloskey, who runs a research and consulting firm and was a policy adviser for Jeb Bush’s and Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaigns and Howard Schultz’s exploratory 2020 presidential run. The collaborative is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. With permission, after the meeting I reached out to some of the individuals involved to see if they’d be comfortable talking in general terms about their experiences in the group.During the initial meetings, the members came up with set of family policy principles they could mostly agree on. The discussion I observed involved them delivering feedback on a draft of a report outlining those principles. At first, I feared this was going to be an absolutely mind-numbing way to spend three hours of my life and that I would have to gently pinch myself to stay awake while listening to a discussion of the budgetary implications of the earned-income tax credit.Instead, the conversation was spicy while still being respectful, and full of fundamental disagreements that did not seem completely papered over simply for the sake of congeniality. McCloskey described it to me more than once as feeling like “couples therapy,” and it did.For example, a few people objected to wording in the report about center-based child care that they felt put a thumb on the scale against stay-at-home parents. Others disagreed with that objection, and there was an impassioned back-and-forth about it. Ultimately, the moderator stepped in, restated everyone’s point of view in a neutral way and advised that everyone needn’t agree on every detail to move forward.I give a lot of credit to that moderator, the aptly named David Fairman, who is a senior mediator at the Consensus Building Institute, for the structure and tone of the discussion. When we spoke on the phone afterward, he explained that C.B.I. is one of “roughly a dozen” similar organizations that help conduct mediation on public issues. His job is to help find common ground among people with different backgrounds and belief systems.There are three main things Fairman does to facilitate these discussions. The first is to build relationships among participants, so that “they discover that there’s more to them than the battle of tweets that they’ve had or the countering publications or testimony and the identities that they carry with their businesses, with their advocacy groups or whoever.” That kind of humanizing is done partly through guided conversations in breakout groups, and some of it is done more organically through events like in-person cocktail hours.The second is by getting people to “listen openly” during discussions, which means calming down their “rebuttal minds, the hamster wheel that is almost always turning as we listen to someone with whom we disagree, coming up with the counterarguments,” Fairman explained. Instead, he urges people to ask “clarifying questions, not rhetorical questions, not debating questions.” And he gave this example: “What do you mean by saying that ‘you really feel strongly that the child tax credit should remain universal’? Is it that the most important thing about it is that it’s for everyone? Or is it that you are worried that the political support for it will not be there if it is not universal, or is it something else? I just want to know.”The third, and I would argue the most difficult component, is trying to get beyond people’s stated positions to their underlying interests, values and principles, to create space “to explore new ways of thinking about the options,” Fairman said. He referred to a disagreement over how generous a child care tax credit or other allowance could be. The group was at an impasse. While they couldn’t agree on the appropriate size of the credit, a new idea emerged: that more flexibility for parents to choose how to spend the credit “over the life cycle of their child would be a win, even if it doesn’t address the question of the absolute amount of funding.”I also interviewed several members of the group about their experiences. My takeaway was that overall, people were happy to be in conversation with one another, to meet basically agreeable people with totally different ways of framing the problems at hand and to think hard about their own biases. “I think the level of candor was surprising,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I think everybody committed to coming in with a willingness to critique their own side where necessary and to say frankly where their red lines were.”But the process was certainly not a cure-all. Many said that they wished they had even more time to work through the document they were creating. Some felt that some fundamental concerns — particularly with regard to race and immigration — weren’t aired thoroughly enough before moving on to the particulars of policymaking. More than one person expressed frustration that systemic racism was not more explicitly addressed and that barriers to accessing currently available benefits weren’t fully interrogated.While all the participants thought they would have a document at the end of the process that they would be willing to put their names to, some wondered if it would wind up being so watered down that it wouldn’t have “truly moved the needle,” as Lina Guzman, the chief strategy officer at Child Trends, put it, to get more people fired up about these issues.Even if they come up with something that isn’t earth-shattering, every person I spoke to felt that the process was worthwhile because of the relationships they built. “I think that having created the space to do this is valuable in and of itself, even if what we come out with falls short of what some people might have hoped,” said Katharine Stevens, the founder and chief executive of the Center on Child and Family Policy.We don’t know what unexpected alliances and priorities might arise in national politics in the coming years. But because these professionals have spent a lot of hours together talking about their deepest values, giving and getting clarity about their beliefs, they may find unexpected sources of support for specific ideas that aren’t yet mainstream.I came out of observing the discussion mostly wishing that we could all have mediators like Fairman at our holiday tables. We can’t simply wish away the profound disagreements many of us have. But I’ll certainly be trying to ask more clarifying questions of people I don’t agree with. Quieting my rebuttal mind, as a professional opinion haver, will be a rough one, but I’m going to do my best, and I’m going to try to maintain as much good faith as I can muster. We’ll need it in 2024. More

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      Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

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      I just finished reading Tim Alberta’s masterly new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s a powerful and emotionally resonant account of the transformation in evangelical politics that has brought us to the current moment: A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.One of the troubling aspects of the Trump era for me, as a churchgoing evangelical, has been watching the evolution of his support among white evangelicals. During the 2016 primaries, I took some solace in the fact that Trump’s support seemed to decline the more a voter went to church. According to the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study, he received majority support from white evangelicals who seldom or never attended church, but he received barely over a third of the votes of white evangelicals who attended weekly.As we headed into the general election, a self-justifying narrative emerged. Countless churchgoing evangelicals told friends and neighbors that Trump had been their last choice among Republicans but that they had to vote for him against Hillary Clinton as the only pro-life option remaining.Soon enough, however, the churchgoing dynamic flipped. I noticed the change among people I knew before I saw it in the data. After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.Then the data started to confirm my observations. In 2018, Paul Djupe, a Denison University professor, and Ryan Burge, a statistician and associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, reported that Republican approval for Trump was positively correlated with church attendance: The more often people went to church, the more likely they were to strongly approve of Trump. By 2020, white evangelicals who attended church monthly or more were more likely to support Trump than evangelical voters who attended rarely or not at all.I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”Alberta captures this rage well in his book. He tells a gut-wrenching anecdote about receiving a nasty note in 2019 at the funeral of his father, a pastor. After Alberta spoke at the service, he was handed the note from a member of the congregation condemning him as part of an “evil plot” to “undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States” and demanding that he seek absolution by investigating the “deep state.” This would be a strange message to direct at a journalist under any circumstance. But to do so at his father’s funeral is grotesque.Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity. It’s the sense of shared purpose and community that makes any form of fundamentalism truly potent. There is an undeniable allure to the idea that you’re joining a community that has achieved an understanding of life’s mysteries or discovered a path to resolving injustice. As angry as fundamentalists may feel, at the same time, there is true joy among comrades in the foxhole — at least as long as they remain comrades.I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.When you recognize the psychology of fundamentalism, fundamentalist Christian enthusiasm for Trump makes considerably more sense. His fundamentalist supporters are certain that he is fulfilling a divine purpose. They are ferocious in their response to opponents, especially those Christians they believe to be weak or squishes. And they experience great joy in their motivated, activist solidarity.But the keys to fundamentalist success are also the source of its ultimate failure. Certainty, ferocity and solidarity can combine to create powerful social and political movements. They can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity.We’ve seen this phenomenon in both secular and religious spaces across the political spectrum. A small number of extremely confident and aggressive people can turn an organization upside down. Political activists who possess fundamentalist intensity can push through resistance — at least until their inherent intolerance creates sufficient backlash to trigger real opposition.That’s how fundamentalism fails. Certainty, which gives so much purpose, ultimately struggles in the face of complex realities. Ferocity, which allows fundamentalists to bully and intimidate opponents, also limits the ability to win converts. And solidarity, which creates community, can become stifling, as it encourages conformity and punishes those who raise good-faith questions.Why do so many fundamentalists love Trump? Because in his certainty, ferocity and demands of loyalty, he’s a far more culturally familiar figure than a person of restraint and rectitude such as the departing senator Mitt Romney, who has the piety of a true believer but does not possess the ferocity of the fundamentalist. Thus Romney was culturally out of step with the millions of Christians who wanted, in the words of Jeffress, “the meanest, toughest son of a gun” they could find.That’s why Trumpism, too, is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s engineered to destroy, not to build. The very characteristics that give it life also plant the seeds of its destruction. And so as we watch the continued marriage between Trumpism and fundamentalism dominate the right, the proper question isn’t whether fundamentalism will permanently remake American culture in its own image. Rather, it’s how much damage it will do before it collapses under the weight of its own rage and sin. More

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      Why Haley Is Rising Among the Rivals to Trump

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      She has gained with educated and relatively moderate Republicans and independents, but that is also a big liability in today’s G.O.P.Nikki Haley is No. 2 in polling in New Hampshire.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIf you dozed off while following the Republican primary, I wouldn’t blame you. But it might be worth perking up for a moment.Over the last few months, Nikki Haley has gained enough in the polls that she might be on the verge of surpassing Ron DeSantis as Donald J. Trump’s principal rival in the race.With Ms. Haley still a full 50 percentage points behind Mr. Trump in national polls, her ascent doesn’t exactly endanger his path to the nomination. If anything, she is a classic factional candidate — someone who’s built a resilient base of support by catering to the wishes of a minority of the party. So if you were reading this only on the off chance that Mr. Trump might be in jeopardy, you can doze off again.But even if it’s still hard to imagine a Haley win, her rise may nonetheless make this race more interesting, especially in the early states, which will begin to vote in six weeks. Ms. Haley is now neck-and-neck with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, a state he is counting on to reverse a yearlong downward spiral in the polls. She’s well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two states where a moderate South Carolinian like her ought to fare relatively well.Ms. Haley finds herself in an intriguing position. Even without any additional gains over the next 40 days, a result in line with today’s Iowa polling could be enough for her to claim a moral victory heading into New Hampshire and potentially even clear the field of her major rivals. Mr. DeSantis would be hard pressed to continue in the race if he finished 27 points behind Mr. Trump, as the polls show today. And Chris Christie would face pressure to withdraw from the race or risk enabling Mr. Trump, just as he did at this same time and place in 2016. If the stars align, it’s not inconceivable that Ms. Haley could become highly competitive in New Hampshire, where today she and Mr. Christie already combine for around 30 percent of the vote.When primary season began, it seemed unlikely that Ms. Haley would have a chance to surpass Ron DeSantis.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe idea that Ms. Haley might win New Hampshire might seem far-fetched but, historically, much crazier things have happened. Late surges in Iowa and New Hampshire are so common that they’re closer to being the norm than the exception. Of course, there’s still a chance that such a surge could belong to Mr. DeSantis, who has earned important Iowa endorsements from the prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and Gov. Kim Reynolds. It’s also possible that nothing really changes in the next 40 days. But there’s no reason to be terribly surprised if Ms. Haley simply keeps gaining. She’ll have the resources to compete, especially having recently earned the support of the political network founded by the Koch brothers.For a precedent, John McCain is probably the best analogy. By the numbers, George W. Bush is a strong comparison to Mr. Trump. Both held 60 percent or more of the Republican vote nationwide and started with a seemingly comfortable lead of around 45-15 in New Hampshire. At first, Mr. McCain did not seem to be Mr. Bush’s strongest challenger. But in the end, he won New Hampshire, 49-30, cleared the field, and ultimately won seven states.Winning seven states would be very impressive for Ms. Haley, just as it was for Mr. McCain. It would also represent a fairly marked shift from today’s currently uncompetitive Republican race. (Mr. Trump would probably win all 50 states if we had a national primary today.) But to state the obvious: Winning seven states would leave her much further from winning the nomination than it probably sounds. And while caveats about Mr. Trump’s legal challenges are worth flagging here, it’s probably something pretty close to the best case for Ms. Haley.That’s because she has gained traction only by catering to the needs of a party wing, especially one that’s dissatisfied with the party’s front-runner — in other words, an archetypal factional candidate.These kind of candidates are a common feature of contested primaries, as even the most formidable front-runners struggle to appeal to every element of a diverse party. George W. Bush, for instance, was one of the strongest primary candidates on record, but as a Southern evangelical conservative he was always an imperfect fit for Northern moderates, leaving a natural opening in 2000 for a candidate who appealed to that faction: Mr. McCain.If you look back, you can probably think of a factional candidate in almost every presidential primary cycle. Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Howard Dean, Pat Buchanan and Jesse Jackson are only the beginning of a very long list of candidates who gained a foothold by offering an often-but-not-always disgruntled faction exactly what it wanted.If you haven’t noticed, all these factional candidates lost their races. That’s not a coincidence. It’s very challenging to make a powerful appeal to a faction and somehow still become the favorite of the rest of the party. It’s not impossible to pull off, but it takes a special set of circumstances — like an unpopular front-runner, or a faction that’s so large and popular as to blur the distinction between a mere “faction” and the “mainstream,” like the conservative movement in the 1970s.But if factional candidates usually lose, under the right circumstances they can have a big advantage in gaining a toehold in the race. By definition, these candidates have a powerful appeal to a narrow but often still quite sizable base of support. Broadly appealing candidates, on the other hand, can struggle to become anyone’s favorite — especially if there’s already a strong, broadly appealing front-runner like a Mr. Trump or Mr. Bush.Just consider how often factional favorites outlast more conventional, mainstream candidates who, in many respects, seem to be stronger candidates. Was Jesse Jackson stronger than John Glenn in 1984? Was Rick Santorum vastly stronger than Tim Pawlenty in 2012? Probably not. In a hypothetical one-on-one matchup, Mr. Glenn and Mr. Pawlenty would have probably defeated the likes of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Santorum. But these losing mainstream candidates couldn’t find a distinct base in a race against a broadly appealing front-runner, whereas the factional candidates built resilient and insulated bases of support.The same can be said of Ms. Haley today. Is she a stronger candidate than Mr. DeSantis? It doesn’t seem so. A HarrisX/The Messenger poll shows Mr. DeSantis with a two-to-one lead over Ms. Haley if Mr. Trump dropped out of the race. But Ms. Haley appeals squarely to the relatively moderate, highly educated independents and Republicans who do not support Mr. Trump, giving her the inside path to a resilient base. It’s a base that, almost by definition, even Mr. Trump can’t touch.Mr. DeSantis, on the other hand, has done surprisingly little to appeal to the voters who dislike Mr. Trump. He’s running as an orthodox conservative — another Ted Cruz, except this time against a version of Mr. Trump with far stronger conservative credentials than the one who lost Iowa eight years ago. If Ms. Haley weren’t in the race, perhaps Mr. DeSantis would grudgingly win many of her supporters, but his transformation into a Cruz-like Republican is part of what created the space for a Ms. Haley in the first place.As with factional candidates before her, the same attributes that help Ms. Haley appeal to Mr. Trump’s detractors make her a poor fit for the rest of the party. Most Republicans agree with Mr. Trump on immigration, foreign policy, trade and other policies that distinguish Mr. Trump from his skeptics. This is a conservative, populist party. A moderate, establishment-backed candidate might have the path of least resistance to earning 25 percent of the vote in a race against a populist, conservative like Mr. Trump. But the path to 50 percent is far harder. More

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      It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Fascism.

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      To spend more than a little time toggling between news sites of different bents is to notice a fierce debate over the American economy right now. Which matters more — the easing of inflation or the persistence of prices that many people can’t afford or accept? Low unemployment or high interest rates? Is the intensity of Americans’ bad feelings about the economy a sane response or a senseless funk estranged from their actual financial circumstances?On such questions may the 2024 election turn, so the litigation of them is no surprise. It’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s the public relations war over it.But never in my adult lifetime has that battle seemed so agonizingly beside the point, such a distraction from the most important questions before us. In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.I’m not talking about what will influence voters most. I’m talking about what should. And I write that knowing that I’ll be branded an elitist whose good fortune puts him out of touch with the concerns of people living paycheck to paycheck or priced out of housing and medical care. I am lucky — privileged, to use and own the word of the moment — and I’m an imperfect messenger, as blinded by the peculiarities of his experience in the world as others are by theirs.But I don’t see any clear evidence that a change of presidents would equal an uptick in Americans’ living standards. And 2024, in any case, isn’t shaping up to be a normal election with normal stakes or anything close to that, at least not if Donald Trump winds up with the Republican presidential nomination — the likeliest outcome, to judge by current conditions. Not if he’s beaten by a Republican who had to buy into his fictions or emulate his ugliness to claim the prize. Not if the Republican Party remains hostage to the extremism on display in the House over these past few months.That assessment isn’t Trump derangement syndrome. It’s straightforward observation, consistent with Liz Cheney’s new memoir, “Oath and Honor,” at which my Times colleague Peter Baker got an advance peek. Cheney describes House Republicans’ enduring surrender to Trump as cowardly and cynical, and she’s cleareyed on what his nomination in 2024 would mean. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she writes. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why Biden’s Weakness Among Young Voters Should Be Taken Seriously

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      Almost all the polling shows the same pattern. Could the coming campaign restore Democrats’ usual advantage?A solid youth vote edge could be in doubt for Democrats in 2024. Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesCould President Biden and Donald J. Trump really be locked in a close race among young voters — a group Democrats typically carry by double digits — as the recent Times/Siena polls suggest?To many of our readers and others, it’s a little hard to believe — so hard to believe that it seems to them the polls are flat-out wrong.Of course, it’s always possible that the polls are wrong. I’ve thought our own polling might be wrong before, and I would be very apprehensive if it were just our poll out on a limb. But this isn’t about one Times/Siena poll: Virtually every poll shows a close race between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump among young voters.When dozens of polls all say the same thing, it’s worth taking the polling seriously. It’s easy to remember that the polling can be wrong, but it can be easy to forget that the polling is usually in the ballpark. It’s a losing game to dismiss all polling simply because it doesn’t comport with expectations.Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with those who question whether the final election results will look like recent polls. Personally, I’m skeptical the final results will look quite like these polls. But even if you think the final results will be very different, it does not mean that the polls are “wrong” today.In fact, the belief that Mr. Biden will ultimately win young voters handily next year does nothing to distinguish two very different explanations for what we see in the polling:The polls are mostly wrong. They’re biased. For whatever reason, they fail to reach the Democratic-leaning young voters who propelled Mr. Biden to victory in 2020.The polls are mostly right. They’re reaching the young voters who backed Mr. Biden. But for now, these voters don’t support him. Over the next year, things could change.When it comes to the Times/Siena poll, we’ve put forward a lot of evidence consistent with the theory that the polling is mostly right, but that things might change.By the measures at our disposal, the voters 18 to 29 in our survey “look” right. They say they backed Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump in the last presidential election by a wide margin, 57-35, right in line with our expectations. They “look” right by other measures of partisanship as well. In the states with party registration, for instance, the Times/Siena young voters were registered Democrats by a 13-point margin, 35 percent to 22 percent. That’s almost exactly in line with their actual 13-point registration advantage, 36 percent to 23 percent.It’s important to emphasize that just because the polls “look” right doesn’t mean they are right. Our polls looked “right” by these kind of indicators in 2020. They were still wrong in important ways (though they were right about plenty as well, including racial and generational depolarization). But these data points nonetheless raise the burden on those who assert that the issue is partisan nonresponse bias, in which young Democrats simply aren’t answering their cellphones (99.8 percent of our young respondents were reached by cellphone).We see no evidence of that. In our polling, the problem for Mr. Biden isn’t too few young Democrats. It’s that many young Democrats don’t like him. Mr. Biden has just a 76-20 lead among young voters either registered as Democrats or who have previously voted in a Democratic primary. It’s just a 69-24 lead among young nonwhite Democrats. The dissent exists among self-identified Democrats, Democratic-leaners, Biden ’20 voters, and so on.This kind of intraparty dissent is rare but not without precedent in our polling. I’ve seen it in our congressional polls of highly educated suburbs full of Romney-Clinton voters. And I’ve seen it once before in a statewide presidential race: our final polls in 2016, when Mr. Trump suddenly surged to obtain 30 percent of white working-class registered Democrats. It was hard to believe, but it was fairly easy to explain and it raised the serious possibility of a Trump win.Similarly, I think it’s fairly straightforward to explain Mr. Biden’s weakness among young voters today, much as it was easy to explain Mrs. Clinton’s among white working-class voters in 2016. Young voters are by far the likeliest to say he’s just too old to be an effective president. Many are upset about his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. And all of this is against the backdrop of Mr. Biden’s longstanding weakness among young voters, who weren’t enthusiastic about him in 2020, and Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters, who are disproportionately young.But even if you don’t buy these explanations, that’s mostly just a reason to believe the numbers will shift over the next year, not a reason to dismiss the polling.After all, these polls do not depict the usual, stable basis for vote choice that we’ve become accustomed to in our polarized country. This is not an election where almost all voters like their own party’s candidate while disliking the opposing party’s candidate and disagreeing with them on the issues. Instead, we have an unstable arrangement: Millions of voters dislike both candidates, entertain minor-party candidates and when pressed often say they would vote for someone from the other major political party whom they disagree with on many important issues. These are the textbook conditions for volatility, and it’s entirely reasonable to doubt whether the arrangement will last once the campaign gets underway.We tried to illustrate the abstract possibility that “things can change” more concretely through an article in which we called back the Kamala-not-Joe voters — the young voters who back Vice President Kamala Harris over Mr. Trump but not Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump. It’s worth noting that these are the kinds of voters we would expect to find in the data if Mr. Biden really were performing this badly among an otherwise typical sample of young voters — much as the 2016 polling featured plenty of white working-class Trump voters who approved of Barack Obama and who said they voted for him in 2012.There’s one other way the results might end up “normal,” even with today’s polling: a low youth turnout. Almost all of the polls nowadays are among registered voters, not likely voters, and most of Mr. Biden’s weakness is among disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate. In the latest Times/Siena polling, Mr. Biden leads by 15 points among young voters who turned out in the midterms, while he trails by three points among young voters who didn’t turn out. If these irregular, disaffected voters simply choose not to vote, Mr. Biden will most likely have a healthy lead with young voters.There are countless other reasons the polls today may not ultimately align with the final result. For one, Mr. Trump could be convicted of federal crimes in six months. But just because the polls aren’t necessarily “predictive” of the final outcome does not mean they’re wrong. It doesn’t mean they’re not worth taking seriously, either. For the campaigns, taking the numbers seriously today may wind up being exactly what changes the numbers tomorrow. More

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      We Did an Experiment to See How Much Democracy and Abortion Matter to Voters

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      Yes, the economy is important, but we found that election subversion attempts appear to matter more to voters than polling suggests.Voters usually penalize those supporting electoral subversion.Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesDo abortion and democracy matter to voters?If you look at the results of New York Times/Siena College polling, the answer often seems to be “not really.”Around 40 percent of voters agreed that Donald J. Trump was “bad” for democracy in our latest poll. Only around a quarter said that issues like democracy and abortion were more important to their vote than the economy.But in election after election, the final vote tallies seem to tell a very different story. Last fall, Democrats excelled when abortion and democracy were at stake, even though our pre-election polls offered little indication that these issues were driving voters. It raises the possibility that the usual poll questions simply failed to reveal the importance of abortion, democracy and perhaps other issues as well.With that in mind, we tried an experiment in our latest Times/Siena poll. We looked at the persuadable voters — those who were undecided or who said they were open to supporting the other candidate — and split them into two groups. We gave each group a set of two hypothetical Republican candidates based on views on abortion and democracy.While only an experiment, the findings suggest that democracy has the potential to be an extremely important factor in people’s voting — even among voters who say it’s not important to them at all.Here’s the democracy matchup:Hypothetical A: Would you be more likely to support a Democratic candidate who says Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy, or a Republican candidate who tried to overturn the 2020 election?Hypothetical B: Would you be more likely to support a Democratic candidate who says Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy, or a Republican candidate who says we should move on from the 2020 election?If democracy didn’t matter to voters, these two hypotheticals might not yield very different results.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      in Elections

      The Crisis in Issue Polling, and What We’re Doing About It

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      A poll can be very close to the actual result but miss the key story line. We’ll try new question forms; we might even try an experiment or two.Protecting democracy has been a potent message in recent elections. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesBy the usual measures, last year’s midterm polls were among the most accurate on record.But in harder-to-measure ways, there’s a case those same polls were extraordinarily bad.Poll after poll seemed to tell a clear story before the election: Voters were driven more by the economy, immigration and crime than abortion and democracy, helping to raise the specter of a “red wave.”In the end, the final results looked just about like the final polls, but they told a completely different story about the election: When abortion and democracy were at stake, Democrats excelled. And while the polls had sometimes or even often showed Democrats excelling, they almost always failed to convincingly explain why they were ahead — making it seem that Democratic polling leads were fragile and tenuous.Take our own Times/Siena polls. Our results in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona were very close to the final results and showed Democrats with the lead. By all accounts, abortion and democracy were major factors helping to explain Democratic strength in these states, especially against election deniers like Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake.But although these polls performed well, they simply didn’t explain what happened. If anything, the polls were showing the conditions for a Republican win. They showed that voters wanted Republican control of the Senate. They showed that a majority of voters didn’t really care whether a candidate thought Joe Biden won the 2020 election, even though election deniers wound up being clearly punished at the ballot box. Voters said they cared more about the economy than issues like abortion or democracy, and so on.The Times/Siena polling wasn’t alone in this regard. Virtually all of the major public pollsters told the same basic story, and it’s the opposite of the story that we told after the election. If we judge these poll questions about the issues by the same standard that we judge the main election results — a comparison between the pre-election polls and what we believe to be true after the election, with the benefit of the results — I think we’d have to say this was a complete misfire.If you do this exercise for previous elections, issue polling failures look more like the norm than the exception. There just aren’t many elections when you can read a pre-election poll story, line it up with the post-election story, and say that the pre-election poll captured the most important dynamics of the election. The final CBS/NYT, Pew Research and ABC/Washington Post polls from the 2016 election, for instance, barely shed any light at all on Donald J. Trump’s strength. They contributed essentially nothing to the decade-long debate about whether the economy, racial resentment, immigration or anything else helped explain Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters in that election.With such a poor track record, there’s a case that “issue” polling faces a far graver crisis than “horse race” polling. I can imagine many public pollsters recoiling at that assertion, but they can’t prove it wrong, either. The crisis facing issue polling is almost entirely non-falsifiable — just like the issue polling itself. Indeed, the fact that the problems with issue polling are so hard to quantify is probably why problems have been allowed to fester. Most pollsters probably assume they’re good at issue polling; after all, unlike with horse race polls, they’re almost never demonstrably wrong.In fairness to pollsters, the problem isn’t only that the usual questions probably don’t fully portray the attitudes of the electorate. It’s also that pollsters are trying to figure out what’s driving the behavior of voters, and that’s a different and more challenging question than simply measuring whom they’ll vote for or what they believe. These causal questions are beyond what a single poll with “issue” questions can realistically be expected to answer. The worlds of political campaigning and social science research, with everything from experimental designs to messaging testing, probably have more of the relevant tools than public pollsters.Over the next year, we’re going to try to bring some of those tools into our polling. We’ll focus more on analyzing what factors predict whether voters have “flipped” since 2020, rather than look at what attitudes prevail over a majority of the electorate. We’ll try new question forms. We might even try an experiment or two.We already tried one such experiment in our latest Times/Siena battleground state poll. We split the sample into two halves: One half was asked whether they’d vote for a typical Democrat against a Republican expressing a moderate view on abortion or democracy; the other half was given the same Democrat against a Republican expressing more conservative or MAGA views on abortion or democracy.In the next newsletter, I’ll tell you about the results of that experiment. I think it was promising. More

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      in Elections

      Are We Looking at George H.W. Biden?

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      When you played second fiddle to a revered, charismatic, transformative president who chose you as his running mate not because you dazzled him but because you dully rounded him out, not because he saw you as the party’s future but because you were a link to its past, can you ever shine as brightly as you deserve to?When you’ve been in government forever and almost everything about you smacks of tradition, can you beat back complaints that you’re out of touch and sweet-talk voters who are soured on the status quo?George H.W. Bush, running for a second term more than three decades ago, couldn’t.Joe Biden, running for a second term now, is about to find out.Among Democrats justly nervous about Biden’s poll numbers and rightly angry about the dearth of respect he gets, it has recently been popular — and consoling — to compare him to a different commander in chief, the one for whom he served as vice president, Barack Obama. At this point in Obama’s first term, surveys strongly suggested that he would lose his re-election effort.Voters in late 2011 shortchanged Obama on credit for steering the nation out of the 2008 housing bust and recession, just as voters in late 2023 are shortchanging Biden for steering the nation out of the pandemic. They didn’t wrestle seriously with whether Obama merited a renewal on his White House lease until much closer to Election Day, and they won’t give Biden an accurate report card any sooner, or so the thinking goes. It also holds that once Obama focused on his campaign, he was able to cast his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, as an unacceptable choice. When Biden buckles down, he’ll do the same to his likely Republican rival, Donald Trump. Heck, he already did it in 2020.I’d buy that forecast — I want nothing more than for it to be true — but for a few pesky details. Obama was 50 then. Biden is 80 now. Obama, our first Black president, still had the perfume of history around him. Biden has no such bouquet. And the Tea Party of Obama’s era may have been a precursor to our MAGA moment, but it was a firecracker beside this dynamite, as the wreckage at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, showed. We live, and quiver, in more explosive times.The Bush-Biden parallels come easier. George H.W. Biden has a plausibility that Barack Biden doesn’t.Admittedly, it’s not a tidy fit, for a range of reasons: The first President Bush immediately succeeded his boss, Ronald Reagan, so it was as if the same presidency went on and on, while there were four years between Obama and Biden, who represented not a continuation of the Obama administration but a merciful reprieve from the Trump interruption. “Poppy Bush” had a famously patrician aura, while “Scranton Joe” is a scruffier sort.Then there’s the biggest difference of all. Bush faced an idealistic Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, who presented a much younger, fresher face and whose liabilities didn’t include 91 felony charges tracing a contempt for democracy and appetite for insurrection. A vote for Clinton wasn’t a gesture of furious protest or expression of acrid contempt.Biden is staring at a nihilistic Republican opponent who raged through the West Wing once already and, to cleareyed voters, is an autocrat in waiting. A vote for Trump is like a civic suicide pact.Do the election results from Tuesday reflect an awareness of that? Democrats did very, very well: Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat in a deep-red state, secured a second term. Democrats won control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature. Ohioans rejected Republican calls for limits on abortion, enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution.“Democracy won and MAGA lost,” Biden said in a statement distributed by his re-election campaign. “It’s what we’ve always said. Voters vote. Polls don’t.”That’s indisputable. But there are nonetheless facets of Biden’s circumstances that prompt flashbacks to Bush during the 1992 race for the White House.The questions about whether Vice President Kamala Harris is a drag on Biden and should be replaced have nothing on the questions about whether Vice President Dan Quayle was a drag on Bush and had to go. Time magazine published a whole cover story on the dump-Dan movement, complete with a list of promising alternatives that included one Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary. And the dumping was seen as especially important because the president’s age made the possibility of the vice president’s ascent to the Oval Office seem very real. Sound familiar?Bush struggled to please a fractious Republican Party, its divisions clear in the primary challenge mounted by Pat Buchanan. Biden struggles to please a fractious Democratic Party, its divisions clear in the fact that 22 Democrats just joined House Republicans in voting to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, for her remarks about Israel.And those divisions matter more in the context of something else that Biden shares with Bush: “Biden is the first person elected president since George H.W. Bush without a political base,” Doug Sosnik, a political strategist who worked in the Clinton administration, told me. “Bush got elected basically as a Reagan third term, and Biden got elected as a vote against Trump.”By a “base,” Sosnik means a large core group of passionate supporters who see the candidate as more than just the best option available, who will stick with the candidate through thick and thin. Reagan and Obama had that. Trump has that, which is why the other Republican candidates for president can’t muscle him out of the frame.“A base is critical, because it becomes the foundation from which they’re able to persuade the remaining voters,” Sosnik added. “It’s critical because of the inevitable ebbs and flows when you’re in office — when things aren’t going well. It’s critical because it creates a higher floor for your support.”Bush hoped that his experience on the world stage and proven stewardship of tricky international relations — his elder statesman bona fides — might counteract voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy. There’s a similar wish in Biden’s camp, and it makes Bush’s experience in 1992 not just an interesting point of reference but also an instructive one, with an important lesson: Fail to project extreme attentiveness to Americans’ financial anxieties at your electoral peril. They want their pain felt.And it’s tough for a longtime Washington insider who lives in the bubble of the presidency to project that he’s sufficiently in touch. That required more intense and sustained effort than Bush managed in his day, and Biden will have to do better than “Bidenomics,” a nifty but nebulous portmanteau.Not that Trump is some exquisitely sensitive man of the people! He is, however, the challenger, and even with his own stint as president behind him, he represents change. Biden embodies continuity, which is often the harder sell, and an aged incumbent is a vulnerable creature. Bush learned as much. For all of our sakes, Biden should study that history.For the Love of SentencesA yak.Getty ImagesIn a recent essay about aging in The Washington Post, Anne Lamott fashioned one memorable sentence after another: “Getting older is almost like changing species, from cute middle-aged white-tailed deer to yak. We are both grass eaters, but that’s about the only similarity.” “Some weeks, it feels as though there is a sniper in the trees, picking off people we have loved for years. It breaks your heart, but as Carly Simon sang, there is more room in a broken heart. My heart is the roomiest it has ever been.” “In my experience, most of us age away from brain and ambition toward heart and soul, and we bathe in relief that things are not worse.” (Thanks to Melissa France of Flemington, N.J., and Steve Aldrich of Minneapolis, among others, for nominating passages from Lamott’s essay.)On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.” Had she just seen “Oppenheimer”? (Jo Radner, Lovell, Maine)In the unsigned Lexington column of The Economist (which I happen to know is written by my former Times boss and colleague James Bennet), there was this description of the G.O.P. in 2016, when Donald Trump was its presidential nominee, versus 2012, when Mitt Romney was: “The Republicans’ swing in four years to Mr. Trump from Mr. Romney seems neck-snapping even now; it was a kind of penance in reverse, a brawling, bankrupting bender in a strip club after a quiet morning in the pews.” Give me the pews. (Roger Tellefsen, Berwyn, Pa.)In Slate, Luke Winkie marveled at the athleticism of Cooper Flagg, a precocious 16-year-old who recently joined the Duke basketball team. I didn’t understand all of Winkie’s terms — I’m a perversely but proudly stubborn naïf when it comes to college basketball — but could appreciate the writing even so: “At 6-foot-8 and still growing, Flagg can protect the rim, he can drift out for threes, he possesses a silky handle, and he can absolutely yam on any of the puny teenagers who step in the lane on his way to the basket. Flagg’s highlight mixtapes are downright gratuitous — look at him reducing these poor kids into piles of gristle and bone! It should honestly come with a content warning.” (Matthew Dallett, Brooklin, Maine)In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” (Paul Shikany, the Bronx)In The Times, David Streitfeld summarized the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried: “It’s impossible to read the sad saga of Mr. Bankman-Fried without thinking he, and many of those around him, would have been better off if they had spent less time at math camp and more time in English class. Sometimes in books, the characters find their moral compass; in the best books, the reader does, too.” (Paula Huguenin, Collex, Switzerland, and Christine Thielman, Arlington, Mass.)Also in The Times, David French puzzled over the supposed religiousness of Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson, contrasting him with another Republican, Mike Pence: “One Christian man tells the truth, and it kills his career. Another Christian man helps lead one of the most comprehensively dishonest and dangerous political and legal efforts in American history, and he gets the speaker’s gavel.” (Phil Ryburn, Seattle)Also from that column: “This is precisely indicative of the political ruthlessness that’s overtaken evangelical Republicans. They are inflexible about policy positions even when the Bible is silent or vague. They are flexible about morality even when the Bible is clear.” (Joel Parkes, Altadena, Calif., and Michelle Cheatham, Calgary, Alberta, 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 Writing, Watching and DoingJoe Raedle/Getty ImagesIn advance of the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, I talked with the polling analyst Nate Silver and Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason, about the 2024 election. You can read our online political round table here.Chris Christie’s composure amid the jeers when he appeared at the Florida Freedom Summit on Saturday was neither any surprise nor any great credit to him: He has spent enough time in public life and dished out enough that he should be able to take it. But the accuracy and bluntness with which he called the puerile hecklers on their behavior and told them precisely how they were degrading themselves and the country were beautiful to behold: a firm spanking of the noblest order. Please watch.I’m excited to welcome my Times colleague Wesley Morris, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, to Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy on Monday, Nov. 20. That evening, I’ll interview him at an event open to the public, so if you’ll be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, please consider popping by. Here are the details.On a Personal NoteDamon Winter/The New York TimesThe day after his election as the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson gave his first extended interview — on Fox News, of course — and said this: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”Those remarks drew enormous scrutiny, including from my Times colleague David French, who cited them in his excellent column — mentioned above — about the fickleness and hollowness of many Republicans’ professed religiousness.But while most commentators focused on the glimmers of Christian nationalism in Johnson’s words, I’m struck as well by their hints of simple-mindedness. Where’s the independence of thought in outsourcing all your judgments to a single source? Where’s the openness to evolving knowledge, to fresh perspectives, to different ones?I say that not to be besmirch Christianity or religion: I know and greatly respect many Christians and many other people who use the Bible, the Torah, the Quran or some other sacred text as a trove of inspiration, a store of wisdom, a repository of counsel. Their relationships with religion allow for broad interpretation and plenty of disagreement. They recognize the need for that.And maybe Johnson was speaking of the Bible in such a vein. But he didn’t say “guide.” He said “worldview.” His tone, his record and much else about him suggest an uncritical obeisance, and he’s emblematic of many current Republicans’ reductive and oppressive piety.He’s also emblematic of something broader, something by no means limited to certain strains of religiousness, something with secular examples aplenty: the temptation to quiet the jangle and resolve the complications of our maddening world by latching onto one answer, lining up behind one leader, taking the oath of one tribe and then reveling in its smug and censorious rightness.That’s undoubtedly a clarifying decision and a comfort. But it can be hell on a democracy. More