Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Arizona Officials Charged With Conspiring to Delay Election Results

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      An indictment accuses two Cochise County supervisors of interfering with the state canvass of votes. The county has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories.Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were indicted Wednesday on felony charges related to their attempts to delay the certification of 2022 election results.Kris Mayes, the state attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three supervisors in Cochise County, face charges of interference with an election officer and conspiracy, criticizing what she described as their “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy.”Neither Ms. Judd nor Mr. Crosby could be reached for comment Wednesday.Last year, Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby sought to order a hand count of the ballots that had been cast in Cochise, a heavily Republican rural county, citing conspiracy theories that had been raised by local right-wing activists. When a judge ruled against them, they voted to delay certification of the election before eventually relenting under pressure of a court order.The episode was closely watched by democracy advocates and election law experts, who saw in the supervisors’ machinations a worrying precedent. As Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became widely accepted in the Republican Party, local Republican officials in several closely contested states used suspicion of the election system on the right to justify delaying the certification of 2022 election results.In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Judd said she did not actually suspect there were any irregularities in the vote in Cochise County. She characterized the move as a protest against the election certification in Maricopa, the large urban county that includes Phoenix, where right-wing activists had made an array of unproven claims of malfeasance.“Our small counties, we’re just sick and tired of getting kicked around and not being respected,” Ms. Judd said.Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the supervisors last November, arguing that their protest, which threatened to delay the statewide canvass, would disenfranchise the county’s voters. (The county’s third supervisor, Ann English, a Democrat, has opposed the others’ actions.) Republican candidates lost their races for most of the top statewide races in Arizona’s election, in which Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, was elected governor.In October, the local Herald/Review newspaper and Votebeat reported that Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby were subpoenaed by Ms. Mayes, a Democrat elected last year, to appear before a state grand jury in the attorney general’s investigation.Although local Republican officials interfering with election systems in other states since 2020 have faced criminal indictments on other grounds, the Cochise indictments are the first criminal charges filed over a refusal to certify an election.Jared Davidson, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a watchdog group, argued that the prosecution could set an important precedent.“Pushing for potential criminal accountability is an important message, not just to election deniers in Arizona but across the country that if they indulge conspiracy theories and ignore the law and try to disenfranchise voters, there are real consequences,” he said. More

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      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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      Overturning Roe Changed Everything. Overturning Affirmative Action Did Not.

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      What do the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action, suggest about the future prospects for the liberal agenda?Last year’s Dobbs decision — overturning the longstanding precedent set by Roe v. Wade in 1973 — angered both moderate and liberal voters, providing crucial momentum for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, as well as in elections earlier this month. The hostile reaction to Dobbs appears certain to be a key factor in 2024.Since Dobbs, there have been seven abortion referendums, including in red states like Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Abortion rights won every time.In contrast, the Supreme Court decision in June that ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions provoked a more modest outcry, and it played little, if any, role on Election Day 2023. As public interest fades, so too do the headlines and media attention generally.There have been no referendums on affirmative action since the June decision, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Six states held referendums on affirmative action before that ruling was issued, and five voted to prohibit it, including Michigan, Washington and California (twice). Colorado, the lone exception, voted in favor of affirmative action in 2008.Do the dissimilar responses to the court decisions ending two key components of the liberal agenda, as it was originally conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, suggest that one of them — the granting of preferences to minorities in order to level differences in admissions outcomes — has run its course?On the surface, the answer to that question is straightforward: Majorities of American voters support racial equality as a goal, but they oppose targets or quotas that grant preferential treatment to any specific group.In an email, Neil Malhotra, a political economist at Stanford — one of the scholars who, on an ongoing basis, oversees polling on Supreme Court decisions for The New York Times — pointed out that “race-based affirmative action is extremely unpopular. Sixty-nine percent of the public agreed with the court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, including 58 percent of Democrats.”On the other hand, Malhotra noted, “the majority of Americans did not want Roe overturned.”The July 1-5 Economist/YouGov poll posed questions that go directly to the question of affirmative action in higher education.“Do you think colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant’s race, among other factors, when making decisions on admissions?”The answer: 25 percent said they should allow racial preferences; 64 percent said they should not.“Do you approve or disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, which ruled that colleges are not allowed to consider an applicant’s race when making decisions on admissions?”Fifty-nine percent approved of the decision, including 46 percent who strongly approved. Twenty-seven percent disapproved, including 18 percent who strongly disapproved.I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, about the significance of the differing reactions to the abortion and affirmative action decisions, and he referred me to his July 2023 essay, “A Surprisingly Muted Reaction to the Supreme Court’s Decision on Affirmative Action”:In a marked contrast to last year’s Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the response to its recent decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions has been remarkably muted. The overall reason is clear: while voters wanted to preserve access to abortion by a margin of roughly 20 percentage points, they were willing by the same margin to accept the end of affirmative action.“To the surprise of many observers,” Galston writes, citing poll data, Black Americans “supported the court by 44 percent to 36 percent.”Key groups of swing voters also backed the court’s decision by wide margins, Galston goes on to say: “Moderates by 56 percent to 23 percent, independents by 57 percent to 24 percent, and suburban voters, a key battleground in contemporary elections, by 59 percent to 30 percent.”Sanford V. Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote me by email thatThere has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action. I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as “white” or “Black,” and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as “Hispanic” or “Asian.”In contrast, Levinson continued,Abortion has become more truly polarized as an issue, especially as the “pro-life” contingent has revealed its strong desire to ban all abortions. Moreover, it’s become immediately and obviously clear that the consequences of Dobbs are absolutely horrendous for many women in Texas, say, and that the “pro-life” contingent simply doesn’t seem to care about these consequences for actual people.I asked Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., about the divergent responses to the two decisions, and he emailed his reply:There are two reasons the public and political reaction differs so dramatically between the two decisions. The first is that in public opinion polling, affirmative action has always had significantly less than majority support.Pildes pointed out thatin perhaps the most liberal state in the country, California, 57 percent of voters in 2020 voted to keep in place the state’s ban on affirmative action, even as Biden won the state overwhelmingly. Popular opinion on abortion runs the other way: a majority of the country supports the basic right of access to abortion, and we see strong majorities even in red states voting to support that right, as in recent votes in Ohio and Kansas.Pildes’s second reason involves the advance preparation of the public for the decisions. In the case of affirmative action in college admissions,It was widely expected the Supreme Court was going to ban it. That outcome did not come as a surprise; it had long been discounted into the assumptions of those who follow these issues closely.In the case of the Dobbs, according to Pildes, “there was far more uncertainty in advance, even though the expectation was that the court would uphold Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks.”While the court majority might have decided the case “on narrow grounds, without overruling Roe,” Pildes wrote, it took “the far more extreme path of overruling Roe altogether. That came as a stunning shock to many people and it was the first time the court had taken away a personal constitutional right.”Nicholas Wu reported last month in Politico (in “Why Dems Aren’t Campaigning on Affirmative Action”) that some of the strongest proponents of affirmative action in the House do not see campaigning against the court decision as an effective strategy.Representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat who believes affirmative action helped get him into Harvard, told Wu, “I don’t see it as a rallying point for Democrats.”Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and Workforce, told Wu, “This is going to cause some heartburn, but we need to campaign on the fact that we are opening opportunities to everybody, and we’ll do everything we can to maintain opportunities.”“It’s difficult,” Scott added, “to bring back a strategy that the Supreme Court has directly ruled as unconstitutional.”Nicholas Dias, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, responded by email to my inquiry by noting that his “read of the existing data is that Americans care more about equality of opportunity than equality of outcome.”Dias conducted a study asking Americans how they prioritize three social goals in setting policies concerning wealth: “ensuring wealth is determined by effort (i.e., deservingness); providing for basic needs (sufficiency); and ensuring wealth equality.”He found that Republicans overwhelmingly give top priority to ensuring that wealth is determined by effort, at 70.5 percent, while Democrats give top priority, at 51.2 percent, to ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met.Dias noted that very few Democrats, Republicans or independents gave wealth equality top priority.Dias sent me a 2021 paper, “Desert and Redistribution: Justice as a Remedy for, and Cause of, Economic Inequality,” in which Jacob S. Bower-Bir, a political scientist affiliated with Indiana University, makes the case that:People tolerate grave inequalities if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Moreover, people who assign a significant role to personal responsibility in their definitions of economic desert oppose large-scale redistribution policies because government intervention makes it harder for people to (by their definition) deserve their economic station.In short, Bower-Bir argues, “people must perceive inequality as undeserved to motivate a policy response, and the means of combating inequality must not undermine desert.”In that context, Dias wrote in his email, it would be inaccurate to say thatpolicies designed to benefit minority constituencies have run their course. There’s plenty of evidence that members of these constituencies lack economic opportunities or cannot meet their needs. However, I think many Americans need to be convinced of that.In a further elaboration of the affirmative action debate, three sociologists, Leslie McCall, Derek Burk and Marie Laperrière, and Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale, discuss public perceptions of inequality in their 2017 paper “Exposure to Rising Inequality Shapes Americans’ Opportunity Beliefs and Policy Support”:Research across the social sciences repeatedly concludes that Americans are largely unconcerned about it. Considerable research has documented, for instance, the important role of psychological processes, such as system justification and American dream ideology, in engendering Americans’ relative insensitivity to economic inequality.Challenging that research, the four scholars contend that when “American adults were exposed to information about rising economic inequality in the United States,” they demonstrated increased “skepticism regarding the opportunity structure in society. Exposure to rising economic inequality reliably increased beliefs about the importance of structural factors in getting ahead.” Receiving information on inequality “also increased support for government redistribution, as well as for business actors (i.e., major companies) to enhance economic opportunities in the labor market.”The intricacies don’t end there.In their April 2017 paper, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” three professors of psychology, Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom, write thatThere is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies.How can these two seemingly contradictory findings be resolved?The authors’ answer:These two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.Human beings, Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom write, “naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”My interest in the subdued political response to the court’s affirmative action decision was prompted by a 2021 book, “The Dynamics of Public Opinion,” by four political scientists, Mary Layton Atkinson, James A. Stimson and Frank R. Baumgartner, all of the University of North Carolina, and K. Elizabeth Coggins of Colorado College.The four scholars argue that there are three types of issues. The first two types are partisan issues (safety net spending, taxation, gun rights etc.) and nonpartisan issues, like the space program. Public opinion does not change much over time on these two types of issues, they write: “Aggregate opinion moves up and down (or, left and right) but fifty years later remains roughly where it started.”Such stability is not the case with the third category:These are social transformations affecting society in powerful ways, literally shifting the norms of cultural acceptability of a given issue position. These can be so powerful that they overwhelm the influence of any short-term partisan differences, driving substantial shifts in public opinion over time, all in the same direction.Two factors drive these transformations:Large swaths of the American public progressively adopting new, pro-equality positions on the issue, and the generational replacement of individuals with once-widespread but no-longer-majority anti-equality opinions — with younger individuals coming-of-age during a different time, and reflecting more progressive positions on these cultural shift issues.Opinion on these mega issues, Atkinson and her co-authors argue, has been moving steadily leftward. “The overall trend is unmistakable,” they write: “The public becomes more liberal on these rights issues over time,” in what Atkinson and her co-authors describe as the shifting “equality mood.”While trends like these would seem to lead to support for affirmative action, that is not the case. “We cannot treat belief in equality as a normative value as interchangeable with a pro-equality policy preference,” Atkinson and her co-authors write:This is particularly true because many pro-equality policies emphasize equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. And while equality of opportunity is the touchstone of a liberal society (i.e., all Americans are entitled to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness), the right to equality of outcomes has not been equally embraced by Americans. Once equality of opportunity is significantly advanced, or de jure equality is established, public support for further government action focused on equalizing outcomes may not exist, or at least wanes significantly.In other words, there has been a steady leftward movement on issues of equality when they are described as abstract principles, but much less so when the equality agenda is translated into specific policies, like busing or affirmative action.Atkinson and her co-authors point specifically to growing support for women’s equality in both theory and in practice, reporting on an analysis of four questions posed by the General Social Survey from the mid-1970s to 2004:When asked whether women should let men run the country and whether wives should put their husbands’ careers first, the policy responses look nearly identical to women’s ‘equality mood.’ The series trend in the liberal direction over time and reach a level of approximately 80 percent liberal responses by 2004.But when asked whether it is better for women to tend the home and for men to work, and whether preschool children suffer if their mothers work, the responses are far less liberal and the slopes of the lines are less steep. While responses to these questions trend in the liberal direction during the 1970s and 1980s, by the mid-1990s the series flattens out with liberalism holding between 50 and 60 percent.I asked Stimson to elaborate on this, and he emailed in reply:We have long known that the mass public does not connect problem and solution in the way that policy analysts do. Thus, for example, most people would sincerely like to see a higher level of racial integration in schools, but the idea of putting their kids on a bus to achieve that objective is flatly rejected. I used to see that as hypocrisy. But I no longer do. I think the real issue is that they just do not make the connection between problem and solution. That is why affirmative action has such a troubled history. People are quite capable of supporting policy goals (e.g., racial balance in higher education) and rejecting the means.Where does that leave the nation? Galston, in his Brooking essay, provided an answer:In sum, the country’s half-century experiment with affirmative action failed to persuade a majority of Americans — or even a majority of those whom the policy was intended to benefit — that it was effective and appropriate. University employers — indeed the entire country — must now decide what to do next to advance the cause of equal opportunity for all, one of the nation’s most honored but never achieved principles.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Nancy Dahlstrom, Alaska’s Lieutenant Governor, Is Running for Its Sole House Seat

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      Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom is challenging Mary Peltola, who scored upset wins last year against Sarah Palin to flip Alaska’s sole seat in the House to the Democrats for the first time in 50 years.A second Republican has joined the race in Alaska to challenge Representative Mary S. Peltola, a popular Democrat who holds the state’s sole House seat.Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who was elected last year, is taking on Ms. Peltola, who became the first Alaska Native woman ever elected to Congress after she defeated former Gov. Sarah Palin in two 2022 elections. Ms. Peltola’s first victory against Ms. Palin, in a special election after the death of Alaska’s longtime congressman, Don Young, flipped the seat to the Democrats for the first time in 50 years.Her second victory, in the November midterms, dealt a political blow for Ms. Palin, once considered a standard-bearer in the national Republican Party.Ms. Dahlstrom, a former state representative and the former commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections, is the second Republican to enter the House race, following Nick Begich III. A scion of a prominent liberal political family in Alaska, Mr. Begich finished in third place in previous races against Ms. Peltola.“Alaska needs a proven tough fighter,” Ms. Dahlstrom said in a statement announcing her candidacy and criticizing President Biden. She vowed that if elected to the House she would “stop Biden and the extreme liberals ruining our future.”The House Republican campaign arm has made this seat a priority target in 2024. Will Reinert, a spokesman for the group, said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Ms. Dahlstrom “is a top-tier recruit who will win this Trump won state.”Ms. Peltola’s election to a full term with 55 percent of the vote last November — after playing up her bipartisan credentials and local issues on the campaign trail — demonstrated her ability to hold on to the seat despite political headwinds. Alaska has long been a red state, and former President Donald J. Trump handily won Alaska in the 2020 election. Mr. Young, a Republican who was one of the longest-serving members in the House, won re-election that year with 54 percent of the vote.But Ms. Peltola’s popularity will still pose a significant obstacle for Republicans, despite their advantages. The race was competitive but leaning toward Ms. Peltola, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report earlier this year.Activists and former Republican candidates in the state, including Ms. Palin, are also trying to repeal the state’s recently adopted ranked-choice voting system. They argue that the system can allow a Democrat to win even when a majority of voters pick a Republican on the first ballot. Ms. Peltola was the most popular choice on the first ballot in both of her previous races, but she did not secure outright majorities until the second round.Proponents of the system say that when voters have more choices, they’re less likely to follow strict party lines, and that it reduces polarization and gives more moderate candidates a better shot. More

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      Why Less Engaged Voters Are Biden’s Biggest Problem

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      His weakness is concentrated among those who stayed home in the midterms but who may show up in 2024.Higher turnout is not necessarily positive for Democrats. Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesIf you’re looking to reconcile the surprisingly strong Democratic showing in the midterm elections with President Biden’s weakness in the polls today, consider the political attitudes of two groups of respondents from New York Times/Siena College polls over the last year.First, let’s consider the 2,775 respondents from Group A:It’s relatively old: 31 percent are 65 or older; 9 percent are under 30.It’s split politically: 33 percent identify as Republicans compared with 31 percent who consider themselves Democrats. About 72 percent are white. Black and Hispanic respondents are at 9 percent each.It’s relatively well educated: 41 percent have a college degree. Next, let’s look at the 1,534 respondents from Group B:It’s relatively young: 26 percent are 18 to 29; 17 percent are 65 or older.It’s relatively Democratic: 26 percent identify as Democrats, compared with 19 percent who identify as Republicans. Only 54 percent are white; 13 percent are Black and 19 percent are Hispanic.Just 28 percent have a college degree.Mr. Biden probably won Group B by a comfortable margin in the 2020 presidential election, whether based on fancy statistical models or based on what those respondents told us themselves.But it’s actually Group B that backs Donald J. Trump in Times/Siena polling over the last year. Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden, 41-39, among Group B respondents, while Group A backs Mr. Biden, 47-43.OK, now the reveal:“Group A” is people who voted in the 2022 midterm elections.“Group B” is people who did not vote in the 2022 midterms.Is this a surprising finding? Yes. But it also makes sense of a lot of what’s going on in the polling today.Mr. Biden may be weak among young, Black and Hispanic voters today, but that weakness is almost entirely concentrated among the voters who stayed home last November. As a consequence, Democrats paid little to no price for it in the midterms, even as polls of all registered voters or adults show Mr. Biden struggling mightily among these same groups against Mr. Trump.These less engaged voters might just be the single biggest problem facing Mr. Biden in his pursuit of re-election, the Times/Siena data suggests. If there’s any good news for Mr. Biden, it’s that his challenge is concentrated among voters who still consider themselves Democrats — a group that, in theory, ought to be open to returning to the president’s side.Whom Voters Say They’ll Support in 2024 More

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      The Speakership Is Yours, Mike Johnson. Good Luck With That.

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      That House speaker mess was all Donald Trump’s fault. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not going to argue with me if I blame him for something bad. (“Saturday night’s block party was canceled because of the threat of rain and … Donald Trump.”) Still, follow this thought.The House Republicans are a rancorous crew, and they’ve got only a nine-member majority, one of the tightest in recent history. We’ve been hearing all week that a mere five rebels can halt progress on anything, even a basic task like electing a speaker. Interesting how narrow that majority is. Normally, in nonpresidential-election years, the party that didn’t win the White House gets a lift — often a huge one. Some voters are looking for balance, others are just kinda bored. Given the deeply nonelectric nature of Joe Biden’s victory, you’d figure the Republicans would have made a scary sweep in 2022.But no — and one of the reasons was the completely loopy candidates running on Republican lines in districts that should have been up for grabs. Some had been handpicked by Trump, like Bo Hines, a 28-year-old former college football star who moved into a North Carolina swing district a month before the May primary, won the nomination with the ex-president’s enthusiastic support and then, well, went down the drain.Trump endorsed three candidates in tossup districts last year; all of them lost. Plus there were lots of other dreadful Trump-backed contenders on the ballots — like Mehmet Oz, the longtime New Jersey resident who ran a disastrous race for the Senate in Pennsylvania and almost certainly pulled down the rest of his party’s ticket.POP QUIZ:Donald Trump, who’s facing 91 criminal charges around the country, is now on trial in New York for falsifying records to make himself look like an, um, non-failure in the real estate business. This week, he compared himself to a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner who served time in prison for his battles against apartheid. (“I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela, because I’m doing it for a reason.”) He’s also compared himself to:A) Abraham LincolnB) JesusC) George WashingtonD) The Mona LisaThe answer is everybody but Jesus. And he did recently post a sketch on Truth Social showing Christ next to him in the courtroom.All that flailing around over selecting a House speaker was due, in part, to the Republicans’ failure to corral their Flimsy Five around any of the original contenders. But it was also very, very much about Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for logical candidates like Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, who’d made the dreaded mistake of voting to certify the results of the last presidential election.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump declaimed. “RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.”RINO, of course, stands for Republican in Name Only, something Trump has truly hated ever since he registered as a Republican in Manhattan back in 1987. Until he registered with the Independence Party in 1999, followed by the Democratic Party in 2001. But hey, he became a Republican again in 2009, then dropped his party affiliation in 2011, and switched back to being a Republican in 2012. There is absolutely no reason to imagine he would ever switch again. Unless, you know, there was something in it for him.Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who finally won the speaker’s job, is exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to come up on top. Right-wing anti-abortion activist who gets along with his colleagues and who, crucially, has items in his résumé that won Trump’s heart. A former radio talk show host who helped lead the Republicans’ battle to overturn the election results! What could be more perfect?“GET IT DONE, FAST! LOVE, DJT!” our ex-president posted on Truth Social.(Earlier, once Emmer had crashed, Trump praised all the possible successors to the ousted Kevin McCarthy as “fine and very talented men.” Quick question: What’s missing in that description? One minor detail — the candidate swarm was notably lacking in female representation. Just saying.)So the beat goes on. Mike Johnson’s friends are celebrating. Much of the rest of the nation is wondering why the heck anybody would ever want to be speaker of the House with its current crush of Republican crazies.Welcome to your new job, Mike. Hope you enjoyed your big day. Just remember that it won’t be long before Congress has to pass another bill to keep the government operating or send the country teetering into disaster.Details, details.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In Search of Kamala Harris

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      All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected.“I spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor,” Harris said in her speech, in which she announced that the United States had formally concluded that Russia had committed crimes against humanity. “I know firsthand the importance of gathering facts and holding them up against the law.”As I scanned the crowd from a balcony in the ballroom, its makeup was a visual reminder of the shattered glass ceilings in Harris’s wake. They were nearly all men; she’s a woman. They were nearly all white; she’s Black and South Asian, a first-generation American from the Bay Area.In 2017, when Harris arrived in Washington as a senator from California, these contrasts were supposed to make her the Next Face of the Party, the rising star with an inside track to be the next Democratic presidential nominee. But after a disappointing 2020 campaign, and the reputational sting that has lasted ever since, Harris has often been a politician in search of a moment, rather than a leader defining this one.In Munich, it was another case of what could have been. Harris’s stilted delivery of her speech caused the international audience to miss certain applause lines. Her chief of staff, seated in the front row, tried to start some clapping herself, but the members of the Biden administration in the audience only tepidly joined her efforts. Harris returned to Washington a day earlier than originally scheduled. Later, the reason for the switch became clear: President Biden was secretly traveling to Kyiv. The impact on the vice president was all too familiar. Her three-day trip to Munich, intended to be a showcase, would be largely ignored.Biden and Harris should — theoretically — be entering the 2024 contest riding high. Democrats staved off a “red wave” in the 2022 midterms and continue to perform well in special elections and on ballot referendums, driven by a backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, poll after poll shows Biden, who will be 81 in November, locked in a close race with his most likely opponent, Donald Trump, and hounded by voter concerns about his advanced age and his ability to complete a second four-year term.But if Biden’s age is the Democrats’ explicit electoral challenge, Harris, 59 this month, is the unspoken one. Three years after she and Biden were presented as a package deal, a two-for-one special that included a younger, nonwhite candidate to counterbalance Biden’s shortcomings, Democrats have not embraced the president in waiting. In interviews with more than 75 people in the vice president’s orbit, there is little agreement about Harris at all, except an acknowledgment that she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls, compounded by the realities of racism and sexism. This year, an NBC News poll found that 49 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of Harris, with the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president since the poll began in 1989.Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden during a recent meeting with the presidential advisory board on historically Black colleges and universities.Susan Walsh/Associated PressRepublican presidential candidates like former Ambassador Nikki Haley have already argued that a vote for Biden next November is a vote for a President Kamala Harris. Trump recently gave an interview to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he mocked Harris’s speaking style and also said aloud what many people seem to be whispering: that the closer Harris gets to the presidency, the further she has become from convincing the country that she is presidential.“This is not a president of the United States’ future,” Trump said in a preview of Republican attacks against her in the coming election. “And I think they probably have some kind of a primary and other people will get involved.”Trump isn’t the only one floating a Harris-replacement scenario. In September, New York Magazine published “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris,” and a Washington Post column argued that “Biden could encourage a more open vice-presidential selection process that could produce a stronger running mate.” In the same week, two Democratic House members — Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party titan and fellow Bay Area native who has known Harris for decades, though the two are not particularly close — evaded saying on CNN whether they thought Harris remained the strongest running mate for Biden in 2024. (Raskin, after receiving backlash, later went on a different network to clarify his support).Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the progressive who ran against Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary, demurred early this year when asked by a local radio station if Biden should keep Harris as his running mate in 2024, saying, “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team.” (Warren later called Harris twice to apologize. Harris initially ignored the calls, CNN reported at the time.)The doubts have prompted a public-relations blitz. Harris was featured 13 times in a video announcing Biden’s re-election bid. White House senior advisers have exhorted Democrats to stop criticizing Harris to the press, on the record or off, telling them that it’s harmful to the overall ticket. Emily’s List, the liberal advocacy group that supports Democratic female candidates who champion abortion rights, pledged to spend “tens of millions” of dollars in 2024 specifically to support Harris. The communications department of the Democratic National Committee has made a point to blast out announcements of her public events.And the people closest to Harris, the tight-knit group of Black women in national Democratic politics who helped make her Biden’s choice for vice president, are increasingly becoming incensed with how she’s being treated. Their disgust is as close as you’ll get to hearing it from Harris herself.Laphonza Butler, a former adviser of the vice president and the president of Emily’s List until Gov. Gavin Newsom of California appointed her to the U.S. Senate after the death of Dianne Feinstein, said the Harris naysayers in her party need to “cut the bullshit.” “It’s disrespectful,” Butler told me in an interview before her Senate appointment. “And the thing that makes it more disrespectful is that we’re talking about a historic V.P. who has been a high-quality partner and asset to the country at a time when everything is at stake. Right now is the time to respect what she’s done and what she brings.”LaTosha Brown, a founder of Black Voters Matter, went a step further. She said she’s convinced that some in the party — and in the White House — do not want Harris to succeed. “I think there have been saboteurs within the administration,” she said. “I think that they are worried about the age contrast. And they are worried about Kamala outshining Biden.”Over eight months of reporting this article, I conducted interviews with Harris’s former staff members, advisers, childhood friends, family members, senior figures in the Democratic Party and key players in the White House and Biden’s re-election campaign — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the vice president and the White House.I called top Democratic pollsters to gauge whether a Harris-led party kept them up at night. I talked with members of Biden’s vice-presidential selection committee to ask the question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to: Was Kamala Harris really chosen as a running mate because she had the right identity at the right time, the highest-profile diversity hire in America?In nearly three years in office, Harris has stood dutifully by Biden’s side. But in terms of her own political profile, she has remained a vacuum of negative space, a vessel for supporters and detractors to fill as they choose, not least because she refuses to do so herself.“My career, for the most part, has not been one of being focused on giving lovely speeches or trying to pass a bill,” Harris said to me in an interview in Chicago after an event for Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group that has endorsed Biden and Harris for re-election. “And so that’s how I approach public policy. I’m probably oriented to think about, What does this actually mean, as opposed to how does this just sound?”Harris has leaned on this sentiment for years, even as lovely speeches are considered core to the job of president. It reflects a figure who is fundamentally uncomfortable with having to make an affirmative case for herself to the public — and feels she shouldn’t have to. Since 2019, the year I first covered Harris for The Times, I have often asked her variations of the same questions about her vision for the future and where it fits within the Democratic Party. Sometimes I can sense the frustrations of an elected official who clearly is skeptical of the press — a career prosecutor who is more comfortable asking pressing questions than giving straightforward answers.In Chicago, I directly placed in front of her the question others had only insinuated.“When someone asks, ‘What does Vice President Kamala Harris bring to the ticket?’ what is that clear answer?” I asked. Her team made clear it would be my final question. “Were you in this room of 2,000 people?” she asked. I nodded.“Did you see them cheering and standing?”“Yes.”“That’s what I say.”She stood up and walked out of the room.The unofficial end to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign came four months before she formally dropped out. In late July 2019, at a Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, the California senator faced an unexpected attack from Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who has since left Congress — and the party.“The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not,” Gabbard said to Harris, arguing that the former prosecutor, who had criticized Biden for creating policies that contributed to mass incarceration, was also part of the problem. ‘‘She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.’’ The left-wing critique that “Kamala is a cop” had been raging on social media for months, complete with a meme that depicted Harris handcuffing a child, a viral interview where she laughed about smoking marijuana and a photo in which Harris donned a police jacket during her time as California’s attorney general. But Harris was rarely forced to answer it directly, and not in such a public setting, from a candidate she considered beneath her. “I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor but actually doing the work,” Harris said onstage, broadly defending her record, citing the re-entry program she started as attorney general. Gabbard came back at her: “People who suffered under your reign as prosecutor — you owe them an apology.” After the debate, Harris was more dismissive. “This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I’m a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I’d be on the stage and take some hits tonight,” she said on CNN. “When people are at 0 or 1 percent or whatever she might be at.”Biden and Harris during a Democratic presidential primary debate in July 2019.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesHer response did little to quell the line of criticism, but it did expose a fundamental fact about Harris: In the last five years, as social movements have shifted the Democrats’ message on criminal justice and public safety leftward, the figure whose career seems to speak the most to that conversation has refused to lead it.In 2019, when Harris was running for president, she released a criminal-justice plan six months into her campaign, after rivals like Biden, Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey had already done so, setting the terms of the debate. Advisers privy to campaign details said the delay was caused by the candidate’s tendency to get pulled in multiple directions from outside voices, even on the issue to which she had dedicated her career. Some of this spilled into public view, including when Harris was asked in April 2019 whether convicted felons should be able to vote from prison.“I think we should have that conversation,” she said on CNN, only to back off the next day.The episode was an outward expression of an inner conflict. Unlike Biden, who also faced questions about his tough-on-crime past during the 2020 presidential primary, Harris craved the approval of the party’s left wing, particularly the class of liberal, college-educated women who had grown more interested in Warren’s unabashed progressivism. Brown, of Black Voters Matter, said Harris is “absolutely a progressive.” Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino and a longtime political ally in California, said Harris is neither a moderate nor a progressive, but “ideologically pragmatic.” Jamal Simmons, who served as Harris’s communications director before leaving the role at the beginning of this year, suggested that her identity lies elsewhere. “She’s a Christian, but strength is her religion.”In September 2019, Harris told me in an interview that the criticism of her record had taken an emotional toll. It feels “awful,” she said. “I understand it intellectually. Emotionally, it’s hurtful,” Harris said at the time. “I know what motivated me to become a prosecutor, I know what motivated me to do the kind of work we did, and I know that it was groundbreaking work.”The problem is, outside her record in law enforcement, Harris does not have much of a legislative history to be judged on — even Barack Obama served eight years in the Illinois Statehouse. She was elected to the Senate on the same night in 2016 that Trump beat Hillary Clinton. After just two years in the Senate, she was already a presidential candidate — pitching herself as a bridge between the party’s progressive and moderate wings. In her current role as vice president, Harris is a professional support act, in a position that has both made her more visible and given her less of a distinctive voice.“I love my job,” Harris told me in Chicago. “There are certain opportunities that come only with a position like being vice president of the United States to uplift the voices of the people in a way that I think matters and makes a difference.”When Harris’s name was first introduced on the national political stage in 2009, it was accompanied by a set of sky-high expectations. The week before Obama was inaugurated as president, the PBS journalist Gwen Ifill name-checked Harris during an appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman,” adding rocket fuel for Harris’s political ambitions. Ifill said Harris, who was the San Francisco district attorney at the time, was “brilliant” and “tough.” Then she went further: “They call her the ‘female Barack Obama.’”But that label, and the expectations that came with it, would also have a downside. Harris was not the “female Obama,” nor was she the mixed-race Hillary Clinton, the only other woman who has come this close to the presidency. Without a clear ideological brand, and because she has avoided the issue with which she has firsthand expertise, the historic nature of Harris’s role seems to have boxed her in. A year away from the election and a heartbeat away from the presidency, Harris is an avatar for the idea of representation itself, a litmus test for its political power and its inherent limits.Harris in 2004, when she was the San Francisco district attorney.Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesTo that end, the facts of her life — born to immigrant parents who met as activists in Berkeley, raised in the Bay Area amid the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, studied at Howard University, one of the country’s premier historically Black institutions — help explain why this vice president not only looks different, but is different too.She wears her self-belief with pride. And she always has, according to family members who attend her Sunday dinners, childhood friends who grew up with her in Oakland and Harris herself. “I grew up when Aretha Franklin was telling me I was young, gifted and Black,” Harris told me. “I will tell you this, and maybe it’s a radical notion. I have never believed that I don’t belong somewhere, and I was raised to believe that I belong anywhere that I choose to go.”Harris, in this way, is the antithesis of Obama. While he was defined by a sense of alienation growing up among his mother’s white family and found refuge in Black communities as an adult in Chicago, Harris’s journey bears no such resemblance. Her Bay Area childhood was rooted in Black affirmation and community, even as her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, remained close to her family in India and kept Hindu traditions in the home. If anything, Harris’s childhood stands out for its insulation from whiteness, more multiracial and multiethnic than strictly Black and white. “I remember we were in middle school just sitting on the bed, and she walked me through her name, K-a-m-a-l-a D-e-v-i H-a-r-r-i-s,” says Cynthia Bagby, a childhood friend from Oakland. “She was very clear about her heritage, where her mother was from and what it meant. She’s always been one of those people that’s like, ‘This is who I am. Deal with it.’”But Harris is also conscious of being “ghettoized” — which is how one close Biden adviser described her fear of being put into a box that was solely ascribed to her race or gender. Throughout the majority of her career, the substance was never in question: She was a prosecutor, a similar early career track as other Democratic women in the Senate, including Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. But Harris always came with an air of star power — Ifill’s label, a network of Bay Area donors and her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” which introduced her to a national audience by highlighting her criminal-justice philosophy.“I came up with the phrase,” Harris proudly reminded me during our interview in Chicago. “I proposed we should ask, Are we smart on crime? And in asking that question, measure our effectiveness similar to how the private sector does,” she said. I told Harris that I read the book and came away struck by how differently she — and Democrats — talk about criminal justice now, 14 years later. And like Gabbard, I decided to ask her how I should think about the changes in her philosophy. Were they “an evolution based on new evidence? Or is that a kind of tacit admission that the view from 20 years ago might have been incorrect?” I asked.“Why don’t we break it down to which part you’re talking about, and then I can tell you,” she said, leaning forward.I mentioned the elimination of cash bail, which Harris embraced during her run for president but never during her time in California.“I think it depends on what kind of crime you’re talking about, to be honest,” she said.I tried to ask another way.“When you think about what changed from then to now, is there anything you look back and say, I wish we did differently?”“You have to be more specific,” Harris said.By this point, the vice president would not break eye contact, and suddenly I had more in common with Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh than I ever expected. Just as in those Senate confirmation hearings, Harris’s tone was perfectly pitched, firm but not menacing — confrontational but not abrasive, just enough for you to know she thought these questions were a waste of her time.I asked her where she would define herself politically on a spectrum of moderate to progressive.Harris during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation process in 2018, when she served in the Senate.Damon Winter/The New York Times“Why don’t you define each one for me, and then I can tell you where I fit,” she responded. “If you want to say, for example, that believing that working people should receive a fair wage and be treated with dignity and that there is dignity in all work, well then, I don’t know what label do you give that one. If you believe that parents should have affordable child care? I’m not sure what the label is for that.”“The labels are used as kind of proxies for kind of root-cause conversations,” I said. “Progressives believe that structural inequality is such that it has to be upended. Liberals are thinking more about working within a system.”“Well, name the issue and then I’ll tell you,” she said.“OK, inequality,” I proposed.“Let’s just take the African American experience from slavery on. And we don’t have to even go back that far to to understand where the inequality came from,” she said, listing redlining, the Tulsa riots, the G.I. Bill. “There were issues that were about policy and practice that excluded, purposely, people based on their race.”“But one of the quotes I most remember from your presidential run was you saying, when asked what you believe in, that you weren’t trying to restructure society. How do you solve those kind of deep systemic inequalities?”“I think you have to be more specific,” she parried, “because I’m not really into labels.”The words had barely left Joe Biden’s mouth before Representative Maxine Waters picked up the phone. “What are we going to do?” she asked Leah Daughtry, a longtime operative at the Democratic National Committee and, more important, one of the chief conveners of the party’s informal network of influential Black women. It was March 2020, during the final Democratic presidential debate between Biden and Bernie Sanders, in which Biden tried to wrap up the nomination with an explicit appeal to the party’s base. “Biden just said he was going to pick a woman to be his running mate,” Waters informed her, before repeating her question. “What are we going to do?”The phone call was the origin point of a two-pronged plan, Daughtry told me, recounting their conversation for the first time for this article. They didn’t want just any woman — they wanted a Black woman — and they were determined to make the case on multiple fronts. To the Biden campaign directly, in the kind of back-room jockeying among political insiders that has long defined the vice-presidential sweepstakes, but also to the public, hoping to create a political environment in which the Biden campaign felt it had no other option.Their work would culminate in the most public lobbying effort for a vice-presidential selection in modern American history. There were public letters, planted news stories, cable-news segments and statements of support from celebrities like Sean (Diddy) Combs and Ty Dolla $ign. ‘‘As soon as it sounded like it was something that could really happen, we definitely wanted to weigh in,” said Melanie Campbell, an activist whom Daughtry turned to for help and who organized the first open letter calling for a Black woman on the ticket.For a while, the Biden campaign kept its distance. Advisers held a phone call in early May with some activists who signed onto Campbell’s letter — but they also dispatched allies to make clear that Biden was also considering white candidates, like Warren, Klobuchar and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.But between Biden’s initial pledge to select a woman and when it was time to announce his choice, ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August, the world had effectively turned on its head. Suddenly, amid the coronavirus pandemic and travel restrictions, there was no campaign trail, and most of the meetings to discuss selecting the vice president were happening on Zoom. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May would spark nationwide protests calling for racial justice. And in the absence of in-person politicking, social media took on more importance, helping push the conversation about Biden’s running mate to explicitly racial terms.Biden’s vice-presidential selection committee would eventually contact a smaller group of Black women — including Campbell, Daughtry, the former Democratic Party chairwoman Donna Brazile and the longtime Democratic strategist Minyon Moore — with a more specific request: The next time they met, Biden’s team wanted to hear a case for one individual candidate, not a general call for a Black woman.At the time, after Harris ended her own presidential campaign the previous December, she was experiencing a spate of good will with many of the same activists who once preferred other candidates. Brown, of Black Voters Matter, for example, publicly endorsed Warren in the primary but told me she felt that she had misjudged Harris and that championing her as Biden’s running mate was a kind of spiritual mea culpa. Others held Harris up as a victim of Democratic racism and sexism, particularly when what had begun as a historically diverse field winnowed to Biden and Sanders, two white men over age 75.But not everyone who had Biden’s ear agreed with the public efforts, including the dean of Black Democratic politics in Washington. Representative James E. Clyburn, the influential lawmaker whose well-timed endorsement of Biden helped him win the South Carolina primary, and in turn, the Democratic nomination, told me that he always told Biden that selecting a Black woman as a running mate “was a plus, not a must.”But by the time Biden was in the final stages of his selection, even more traditional party figures were telling the campaign to heed calls to choose a Black woman. Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and party chairman, said he would have preferred for Biden to select a Black woman as his running mate without a public pledge at the debate, because “when you start picking people by category, it’s important to talk about qualifications first,” he told me.Dean, however, compared the summer of 2020 and the moment Biden was in to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, when protests over the Vietnam War forced the party to reckon with its relationship to an emerging generation of voters. Biden needed to show that Democrats value the party’s Black base, Dean said, whichever way he could. Selecting a Black running mate “became a way of healing the country — of saying, ‘White Democrats don’t have a good record on this issue, and I mean business,’” he said.Inside Biden’s camp, represented by longtime aides like Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain and Jen O’Malley Dillon, multiple discussions were happening. The traditional vetting process, led by the search committee, eventually narrowed a broader short list of 11 down to four finalists: Harris, Warren, Whitmer and Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser and is also a Black woman. Biden, who is known to dial up trusted voices and ask for input, the more the better, was leading his own line of inquiry.After Whitmer impressed Biden during an in-person meeting in the veepstakes’ final stages, one question rose to the top: Could two white Democrats win?Campaign research said yes — Biden could win with any of the four. Klain argued for Harris specifically. Obama played the role of sounding board, weighing the pros and cons of Biden’s options rather than backing anyone, including Harris, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But Harris was the only candidate who had the full complement of qualifications: She had won statewide, was a familiar name with voters because of her presidential run and enjoyed a personal connection with the Biden family, having been a close working partner of Biden’s son, Beau, when he served as attorney general of Delaware.And she was Black, meaning the announcement would be met with enthusiasm rather than controversy. On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.Biden’s advisers say he selected who he felt would be the best governing partner, independent of race, gender or future political considerations. Because of Biden’s age, however, and his promise to be “a bridge’’ to ‘‘an entire generation of leaders,” Harris’s selection was immediately interpreted as a sign that a nominee who might serve only one term was already setting up his successor. “By choosing her as his political partner, Mr. Biden, if he wins, may well be anointing her as the de facto leader of the party in four or eight years,” read the Times article that announced her selection in August. But that was not the campaign’s thinking, Biden advisers told me, arguing that he chose Harris as a running mate for 2020 and a governing partner for his first term — not necessarily as a future president.“It was a governing decision,” Dunn said to me during an interview. “Who can be president, if necessary? But really, Who can be a good partner for me in terms of governing and bringing this country back from the precipice?”Two days after the announcement, another Times article quoted Harry Reid, the retired Democratic Senate leader from Nevada, who said approvingly that Biden selected Harris because “he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman.”“I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate,” Reid said.For years, Moore, Daughtry, Brazile and Yolanda Caraway, a political strategist, have formed what is colloquially called the Colored Girls, a group of Black female insiders in Democratic politics. Brazile said that when Biden selected Harris, the group “committed themselves to helping him get elected, but we also committed ourselves to her.”Harris greeting supporters at a celebratory rally in Wilmington, Del., after the 2020 presidential election was called in the Democrats’ favor.Robert Deutsch/EPA, via ShutterstockTheir investment in Harris speaks to why the diversity-hire framing is too simplistic. There is power in being the first, even if there are limits in being the only. Brown dismissed the idea that the public lobbying efforts for Harris’s selection created the impression of an affirmative-action hire: “When don’t white people think that?” she asked.During our interview in Chicago, I tried to ask Harris whether quotes like Reid’s bothered her, reducing her selection to her identity rather than her record.“I don’t think I understand your question,” Harris said.“I’m saying, does it matter — that kind of narrative around Biden needing to choose a Black woman as running mate still exists and that has hovered over your selection?”“He chose a Black woman. That woman is me,” Harris said. “So I don’t know that anything lingers about what he should choose. He has chosen.”The Biden-Harris administration never got to enjoy a honeymoon period. Amid the pandemic, the attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election and the shock of Jan. 6, Kamala Harris the presidential candidate didn’t get much of a chance to reintroduce herself to the country as Kamala Harris the vice president.Just when she was most in need of trusted counsel, becoming Joe Biden’s No. 2 had the effect of cutting Harris off from the political operation that had most closely guided her to that point. Almost none of Harris’s top advisers from California joined her in the Biden campaign or in the vice president’s office, planting the seeds of isolation. Harris has often cycled through senior staff at a far greater clip than her contemporaries (her policy director, Carmel Martin, left the role last month). And while Biden’s senior staff includes fixtures like Donilon, who has worked with him since 1981, few of Harris’s senior staff members date back to her time in California — or even her presidential campaign.By June of her first year in office, Politico had already declared that Harris’s office was “rife with dissent” and quoted an anonymous source claiming it was “an abusive environment.” A slew of staff departures fed a stream of headlines that only seemed to confirm the waywardness that had defined her presidential campaign. Her initial communications director, Ashley Etienne, left in less than a year. Simmons, her successor, stayed only a year and is now a commentator for CNN. The New York Post published a tally of Harris’s staff departures — 13 within 13 months. They included members of the advance team, her longtime policy adviser, her first chief of staff and her high-profile press secretary, Symone Sanders-Townsend, who now hosts a show on MSNBC. (Harris has yet to appear.)In June 2021, Harris would compound her problems with a widely panned interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which he repeatedly asked her why she had not been to the border. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris said. “And I mean, I don’t understand the point you’re making.”The Holt interview would publicly set the tone for Harris’s first two years. The flood of criticism stung Harris deeply, and she mused in private conversations about worrying that she had let down Biden and the White House. Over the following year, Harris traveled less often, and she mostly avoided further media interviews, preferring friendly settings like “The View” and a show on Comedy Central hosted by Charlamagne tha God. Harris’s staff argues that she had to carefully schedule her travel during this period because she often served as the tiebreaking vote in the Senate, with the chamber split 50-50 at the time. In private conversations, however, some Democrats close to Biden say that they encouraged her to stay visible and that it was Harris’s decision alone to step back, over the advice of her chief of staff and Biden’s senior advisers.Her public absence would not go unnoticed. In November of that year, The Los Angeles Times ran a column declaring Harris “the incredible disappearing vice president.” In January 2022, on the anniversary of her ascent to the office, the BBC ran an article that painted a dire picture of a flailing politician with the headline: “Kamala Harris one year: Where did it go wrong for her?”In that first year, she also had the opportunity to select several issues to fill out her policy portfolio, a chance for a vice president to own a signature policy lane. According to several people familiar with the discussions, though, Harris had no interest in taking on criminal-justice reform and policing, her area of career expertise.Instead, Harris insisted that she would take on voting rights after consulting with Black leaders in the party, including the team of Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who had previously made no secret of her desire to be Biden’s vice president, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The issue bears a civil rights legacy and is embraced by all sides of the party. One Biden adviser, however, said they made clear to Harris at the time that there was little chance that meaningful legislation could pass on the issue given the deadlocked Senate.Within a year, the prediction would come true. After Biden made an 11th-hour trip to Atlanta to give a speech exhorting the Senate to pass the administration’s expansive bills on voting rights and election reform — a speech some activists and even Abrams chose not to attend — it would be clear that the legislation would not go forward.Harris touring a Customs and Border Protection processing center in El Paso in June 2021, after facing criticism for not having visited the Southern border.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP, via Getty ImagesHarris also received an assignment she didn’t want, according to White House officials familiar with the discussions. The president charged her with addressing the root causes of migration in Central America — coordinating public and private funds that could support people in their home countries before they tried to flee for the United States. Some of that nuance was lost in June 2021, however, during the same international trip when she sat for the interview with Holt.In Guatemala, Harris warned migrants “do not come” to America, repeating the phrase for emphasis at a news conference alongside President Alejandro Giammattei. While the message wasn’t unique — other administration officials had communicated a similar stance — the messenger was, and it earned Harris the ire of some pro-immigration groups and progressive lawmakers.“This is disappointing to see,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response on Twitter. “The US spent decades contributing to regime change and destabilization in Latin America. We can’t help set someone’s house on fire and then blame them for fleeing.”Republicans also seized on the controversy, depicting Harris as the Biden administration’s unofficial “border czar,” overseeing a constant stream of migrants bringing fentanyl to the United States. Representative Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor closely aligned with Trump, has twice introduced legislation that would remove Harris from a role she doesn’t have.This month, the Biden administration authorized the construction of up to 20 miles of wall along the Southern border, highlighting its failure to curtail migrant crossings into the United States. The issue is sure to be a centerpiece of the 2024 election — particularly as Republicans say Democrats can’t address a crisis they refuse to acknowledge.In our interview, Harris made the case that the money that has been invested would be an important stopgap in the absence of congressional action. “We have raised over $4.2 billion dealing with issues like what we can do to support agriculture, which is a main facet of the economy of a lot of these countries,” Harris said.“I get the roadblocks in Congress, and I get that your root-cause work is long-term,” I responded. “I’m saying, if you’re a voter in the short term who is saying, ‘Is our border secure?’ And what is this administration’s answer to that? What’s that answer?”“The answer is that we are absolutely making it secure and putting resources into it to do that work,” Harris said.When Harris speaks in an interview or to an audience, it can sound as if she’s editing in real time, searching for the right calibration of talking points rather than displaying confidence in her message. It has contributed to a reputation as a politician who delivers “word salads,” but Simmons — her former communications director — argued that it’s a consequence of her career as a prosecutor and attorney general, law-enforcement roles that did not ask Harris to communicate with the press and the public in the same way. Even in Harris’s presidential race, staff members had to push her to share details about her life, family and career motivations. It was not always successful.“Often in the White House, national leaders have to base their arguments on emotion and gut — and as a prosecutor that’s not the job,” Simmons told me. “So she’s getting more comfortable speaking about herself, her beliefs and the president’s beliefs — answering the ‘why’ question of what they do, not just what the policy is.”But Harris has not been a prosecutor since 2016, and many of her rhetorical quirks extend beyond policy — the unbridled laugh (Harris has become the face of a new internet term, IJBOL, for “I just burst out laughing”); her passion for Venn diagrams (she mentions them so much that the G.O.P. has made a one-minute compilation video); and even her dance moves have become punchlines, shrinking Kamala Harris the vice president to Kamala Harris the meme.The internet caricature comes as Harris has sought to recast herself as a consequential force within the party and the administration. When the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion rights in June 2022, Harris and the White House saw an opportunity for the vice president to speak authoritatively on an issue that has proved critical to Democratic voter turnout. This year, Harris has made protecting abortion rights a central tenet of her campaign message, her stump speech and her Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour.Jennifer Palmieri, the former Obama White House communications director, says she believes that the issue has given Harris an area of focus at a critical time and that the press coverage of Harris is too focused on previous missteps and not what lies ahead. This summer, after a different Washington Post op-ed praised Harris as an electoral asset, Palmieri phoned senior members of Harris’s team to offer congratulations, confident that they had turned a narrative corner.Now, even after open speculation about dropping Harris from the ticket, Palmieri is adamant that Harris is “the most valuable running mate for a ticket in recent history.’’“Nothing that has happened to her has surprised me,” Palmieri told me. “I knew, like, this is going to be a very hard road, no matter how talented you are. It is not a situation that’s set up to fail. But it is not a situation where you will be set up to succeed.”This month, in a swearing-in ceremony conducted by Harris, Laphonza Butler became only the third Black woman ever to serve in the United States Senate, following in the footsteps of her ally and mentor. Newsom’s decision to appoint the Emily’s List leader surprised many Democrats, but it shouldn’t have — in addition to her activism, Butler was a former partner in Ace Smith and Sean Clegg’s consulting group, which has close ties to the governor and the vice president.Newsom, like Biden, was also under significant pressure to appoint a Black woman in the role after he made a public pledge to do so in 2021, amid speculation about Feinstein’s possible retirement. Such pledges have become more common in liberal politics, a way to signal solidarity with an increasingly diverse electorate, and a go-to move for white male Democrats in particular.Harris swearing in her longtime friend Laphonza Butler to the U.S. Senate this month.Anna Rose Layden/Getty ImagesDunn, the president’s senior adviser, said Biden’s pledge to pick a woman as his running mate was born of a desire “to be very clear with people that he felt it was time.” And while Dunn acknowledged some initial difficulties for Harris during the first two years in office, she also said the vice president “has found her voice, and she’s found her role,” as issues like abortion rights and gun safety have given her a clearer message heading into 2024.Dunn’s confidence reflects that of the administration at large and serve as a reminder that the Harris-replacement scenarios amount to political wish-casting. Even off the record, Biden’s senior advisers say that there’s no desire to oust her and that the idea was never floated. One person in Biden’s inner circle suggested that the president would be personally offended by the suggestion: Obama’s campaign conducted polling on replacing Biden ahead of the 2012 election, and the subject stings the former vice president to this day.“This administration has never polled it,” Dunn said to me unequivocally. “Never thought about it. Never discussed it.” Jeff Zients, Biden’s chief of staff, said that Harris and Biden enjoy a close relationship and that she is often the last to leave the Oval Office after a meeting, just as Biden was during his time as Obama’s No. 2. “She has an uncanny ability to really drill down to what matters, clear out what doesn’t matter and hold people accountable for results,” he told me.“She can prosecute a case extremely well,” Dunn confirmed. “In a meeting, she will say, ‘But no, really, is that going to work?’ Or, ‘Oh, really, explain this,’ and she’s very effective. And it’s interesting to watch them together. Because sometimes it’s almost like, she’ll ask something, and he will look at her like, That’s exactly what I would have said.”But the confidence of the White House sets up an inevitable collision course. Even if Biden wins the election, he will only get older — and the concerns of the American public about his age and the prospect of Harris’s stepping in as president will most likely persist. Allies like James Clyburn believe that sentiment will shift if the Washington whisper machine were to pull back and decide to appreciate Kamala Harris for who she is, rather than deride her for what she is not. Clyburn said Harris’s “problem” is simple: Her race and gender have made her a Washington outsider. “Her only problem right now is what she looked like when she was born,” he said to me. “That’s what these people are holding against her.”Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial-justice advocacy group Color of Change, who traveled with Harris this year to Africa — a trip that included stops in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia and face time with prominent Black celebrities and activists, including the director Spike Lee and actors like Sheryl Lee Ralph and Idris Elba — said he feels that American media outlets refuse to cover her success, including the images from that trip. “When we arrived to Black Star Square in Ghana, there were upwards of 10,000 people who were excited to see her,” Robinson said. “And I thought, What’s the other vice president that could get that type of crowd outside the United States — or even inside the United States?”But not everyone agrees with these supporters, including a number of Democrats — when granted anonymity to speak freely. A top Democratic consultant said that “she has a little Ron DeSantis in her,” in terms of the disconnect between political talent and expectations. One major donor said there’s an agreement among the party’s heavy hitters that having Harris as vice president to Biden “is not ideal, but there’s a hope she can rise to the occasion.” Sometimes the arguments against her feel more petty: A member of Harris’s staff remarked on the amount of down time the vice president schedules on trips, which includes an inordinate amount of time dedicated to hair care.Harris is largely absent from the post-Biden jockeying that is already taking place among prospective candidates and donors. One major donor told me: “I’ve gotten invites from people like Whitmer and Booker. And even people like Buttigieg and Ro Khanna are cultivating meetings and donors. It’s radio silence from Kamala and Kamala World. They’re not keeping alive the network of people that supported her.”This summer and fall, Harris has sought to answer critics with a travel-heavy schedule that highlights her connection to key blocs in the Democratic coalition. She inaugurated her Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour at Hampton University, the historically Black college in coastal Virginia; the tour also includes lesser-known schools with large Latino student populations, like Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania.It was easy to see Harris as an underappreciated electoral asset for Biden at a gathering of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Orlando this August. In a crowd numbering thousands of older, predominantly Southern Black churchgoers, there was palpable pride in Harris, evident from the hundreds who lined up for pictures or the group of senior bishops who privately prayed for her.In a speech, Harris took direct aim at new statewide education standards restricting how race and Black history could be taught. “Right here in Florida,” Harris said, her voice rising in outrage, “they plan to teach students that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”The members of the audience rose to their feet in anticipation of what they sensed was coming next: a smackdown of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had sent a public letter that week challenging Harris to a debate. “Well, I’m here in Florida,” she said defiantly, “and I will tell you, there is no round table, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”The roar of approval served as an audible reminder — to DeSantis, the Republican Party, the Beltway press corps and even some Democrats too: Writing off Kamala Harris is a mistake, as overly simplistic and premature as the “female Barack Obama” label that once followed her.“When you are the first, serving at the national level, it is a significant responsibility and weight on your shoulder,” the Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Campbell, said at the annual N.A.A.C.P. convention this summer. She made it a point to stress that Harris, with whom she was in conversation at the event, was “our” vice president — implying Black people specifically. Campbell continued: “We were remarking, you know, ‘They’re coming for us.’ And what that means is that you have to sustain yourself. Of course, be protected, but also do the work.”She then asked the audience to rise, a manufactured standing ovation with a clear message: Harris needs your support.“As we go into this round of applause for our vice president, really thinking about what elected officials, particularly people of color, are going through in this moment in time,” Campbell said, “I ask everyone to just stand up — I’m going to do the same — and give our vice president a round of applause for the work she does every single day.”Harris and Biden in the White House Rose Garden in May.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe crowd rose to its feet — but it felt more like an act of politeness. Unlike in Orlando, where the audience was at rapt attention, the version of Harris in Boston more resembled the version I saw in Munich. It served as a reminder that Black communities are not a monolith and that their assumed kinship to Harris — or to the Democratic Party — cannot be taken for granted.During our interview in Chicago, which was supposed to be the first of two, I asked Harris about the party’s relationship with Black Americans and the policy priorities that matter most to them. I asked whether the administration’s ineffectiveness on voting rights was indicative of a broader pattern on things considered to be “Black issues” — lots of promises during the election season and lots of excuses during the time in office.“Has there been enough substance that the administration has put on its inequality agenda?” I asked, pointing out that Black turnout had softened for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. “Has that promise made to Black communities been kept?”Harris launched into a recitation of talking points: the amount of money the administration has invested in historically Black colleges and universities; how the capped price on insulin would help Black seniors; the new federal restrictions on no-knock entries and chokeholds by the police; Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge’s work on affordable housing. Her answer spoke to a fundamental tension facing Democrats ahead of next year’s election: No matter the administration’s policy accomplishments, which are real but often incremental rather than sweeping, they are not yet galvanizing the voters they most need.By this point in the interview, the window that was slightly open when Harris sat down felt as though it had been firmly shut. Over the weeks that followed, the vice president’s aides would repeatedly postpone the second interview that had been agreed to for this article. But here, while I still had the chance, I wanted to try once more to get at this important question: Maybe people are yearning for something policy can’t provide — not just a fancy speech, but a more forcefully declared vision.“What’s the disconnect then, between all that and it translating to more Black votes?” I asked, pressing further.Harris refused to entertain the scenario. Instead, she had a question for me.“Why don’t you talk to me after 2024?” More

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      Bavarian Election Results Signal Trouble for Scholz’s Government

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      The election served as a midterm report card for Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the grades were not good.German voters handed a victory on Sunday to mainstream conservatives in a state election in Bavaria — as well as in the smaller central state of Hesse — while punishing the three parties running the country.While all three of the governing parties lost votes, symbolically at least, the far-right Alternative for Germany and another populist party were the evening’s clear victors, notching record results in both states when compared with other western states.The results were considered an important midterm report card for the national coalition government of the Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, which received some tough grades. They were also seen as a bellwether of the larger political trends building in the country, not least the fracturing of the political landscape as populist and far-right parties make inroads.Here’s what happened and what it means.The mainstream is eroding.In Bavaria, the conservative Christian Social Union, which has governed the southern region for nearly seven decades, received its lowest level of support in more than a half-century, garnering less than 37 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results.That will allow the incumbent governor, Markus Söder, to serve another term, but only in coalition with the populist Free Voters, who came in at well over 15 percent of the vote, despite a last-minute antisemitism scandal involving the party’s firebrand leader, Hubert Aiwanger.In Hesse, which has fewer than half the voters of Bavaria, the incumbent governor for the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or C.D.U., won a decisive victory after an ineffective campaign by the federal interior minister, who ran for the Social Democrats and came in third, behind the far-right AfD.Bavaria’s governor, Markus Söder, left, and Hubert Aiwanger, the leader of the Bavarian Free Voters party, in 2018 after signing the coalition contract in Munich.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut it was the vote in Bavaria that was the most closely watched, and the outcome was taken as further evidence of the erosion of Germany’s traditional mainstream political parties, left and right. It is a phenomenon that has been witnessed across Europe — in Spain, Italy and France, as well as in Scandinavian countries.Less than a generation ago, the Christian Social Union could depend on the support of large masses of German voters, earning it the name Volkspartei, or people’s party.No more.“The crisis of the mainstream parties has also reached Bavaria and is hitting the CSU with increasing force,” said Thomas Schlemmer, a historian of Bavarian politics. “Today, you vote based on your individual lifestyle, not because of tradition.”Even before Sunday’s vote, Mr. Söder and his Christian Social Union were having to govern in coalition with the populist Free Voters. Now, they will be even more dependent on the Free Voters, underscoring the Christian Social Union’s increasing vulnerability.Much the same has happened nationally to its sister party, the much larger C.D.U., the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, as center-right support has been eaten into by populist and extremist parties, like AfD.Virtually the only reason the AfD, which came in second at just under 16 percent, did not do better in Bavaria was the presence of Free Voters, a homegrown Bavarian party with populist tendencies, which split the right-wing vote.Populists are rising.The Free Voters, a party that was founded by independent municipal and district politicians in 2009, is playing an ever-larger role in Bavarian state politics, where it is once again expected to be the junior partner in the state coalition.Its outsize role has underscored the rise of populist forces nationwide.Mr. Aiwanger, a fiery beer-tent speaker, has become the face of the party, bringing it further toward populism by criticizing immigration and environmental legislation.Mr. Aiwanger speaking at a campaign event on Thursday in Mainburg, Germany.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressAt an event this summer, Mr. Aiwanger called for the “silent majority” to “take back democracy” from the government in Berlin, in language that for many Germans evoked the country’s Nazi past. Although he was criticized by other politicians and the mainstream news media, the speech did nothing to quell his popularity among voters.“The success of the Free Voters is due to Hubert Aiwanger’s populist impulses and not to the constructive policies they have pursued in the municipalities for many decades,” said Roman Deininger, a reporter with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a daily newspaper based in Munich, who has followed Bavarian politics for decades.Mr. Aiwanger and his party managed to succeed despite a campaign marred by scandal in August, when Mr. Aiwanger was discovered to have had a homemade antisemitic handbill in his possession while he was in high school in the 1980s.Mr. Aiwanger quickly turned the scandal into an advantage, claiming that the newspaper that broke the story had waited until the heat of the campaign to discredit him. Voters apparently believed the narrative: Mr. Aiwanger and his party saw a bump in polling numbers.The Greens are despised.Throughout the campaign, conservative and populist parties made the left-leaning environmentalist Green party a stand-in for the governing coalition of Mr. Scholz.Though the Greens are just one of three parties in the coalition, along with the center-left Social Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats, they were singled out for special antipathy.“The Greens are the new enemy,” said Andrea Römmele, a political analyst at the Hertie School, a university in Berlin. “It’s a framing that the Greens are somehow the party of bans and the opponent in a culture war.”Election posters in Unterempfenbach, Germany, near Mainburg.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressThe verbal attacks seemed to have had an effect. During one campaign appearance in Neu-Ulm, in the west of the state, Katharina Schulze and Ludwig Hartmann, the co-chairs of the Bavarian Greens, were onstage when a man in the crowd threw a stone at them.“That really was a shock,” Ms. Schulze, who campaigns with a police security detail, said in an interview.There were no confrontations during a majority of her campaign stops, she said, but added, “Of course our political competitors like to pour oil on the fire.”Despite that, the Greens in Bavaria came in at well over 14 percent.Mr. Söder, the governor, himself vowed he would not form a coalition with the Greens — even though Sunday’s election returns gave him the numbers to do so — and instead said he would continue in coalition with the populist Free Voters.“With their worldview, the Greens do not fit Bavaria, and that is why there will be no Greens in the Bavarian state government,” Mr. Söder said during a campaign stop in September. “No way!”Mr. Scholz’s coalition is in trouble.Although the results in Bavaria have no direct consequence on the government in Berlin, all three parties in the national coalition lost significant voter share in the election.The liberal Free Democratic Party, which occupies the important post of finance minister, is predicted to fail entry into the state house because of its bad showing.That portends badly for Mr. Scholz, who is about two years into a four-year term, especially because parties in Bavaria ran against his coalition in Berlin as much as against each other.In their stump speeches, both Mr. Söder and Mr. Aiwanger made dissatisfaction with the Berlin government their theme, railing against perceived dictums on gender-neutral speech, vegetarianism and rules for heating private homes — a Green party push that has engendered special animus.Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany last month in Berlin.Clemens Bilan/EPA, via ShutterstockThey also pushed back against the unpopular decision to close the three remaining nuclear power plants this past April.“The coalition is the worst government Germany has ever had,” Mr. Söder said during a speech last month.While such statements are typical of over-the-top campaigning, a recent opinion poll shows that 79 percent of Germans are unhappy with the coalition. Only 19 percent are satisfied with its work.Those are the government’s lowest approval ratings since it was formed in December 2021. More