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      Analysis: Amid Biden’s Dismal Polling, Don’t Expect Him to Shift Strategy

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      Officials in the president’s orbit say polls won’t change a strategy centered on comparing the Biden agenda with a Republican one, even as some allies feel betrayed by his policies.For weeks, polls have shown President Biden trailing his likely challenger, former President Donald J. Trump. Protesters have streamed through Washington, demanding that Mr. Biden call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Groups of key voters, including young people and voters of color, have suggested that they might not support Mr. Biden in the 2024 election.With so many troubling signals, what is a president seeking re-election to do? The answer, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, is to stay the course.Several officials in the Biden campaign and the White House are adamant that unflattering polls and vocal criticism from key constituents over Gaza, immigration and other issues simply have not been enough to shift a strategy that is centered on comparing the Biden agenda with policies favored by Republicans.The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would turn up the volume on that battle cry beginning in 2024.The polls — and the reams of what officials see as negative news coverage — have at times frustrated everyone, including Mr. Biden. But the polling has not changed the president’s mind on any of the issues that could bring political peril next year, including his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza or place conditions on military aid to Israel, the officials said.“They’re not freaking out,” Ted Kaufman, a longtime confidant to Mr. Biden, said in an interview about the president and his team. “When you signed up for this thing, you didn’t sign up to be at 80 percent in the polls. These are genuine veterans, and they’re picked because of their ability to be calm in difficult times.”This thinking is not likely to satisfy a cacophony of voices outside that small circle. Immigration has been one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities. In recent weeks, the White House has considered major new restrictions on migration to satisfy Republicans who refuse to approve aid for Ukraine or Israel without a crackdown at the border.Although members of Congress have not yet secured a deal, the fact that the White House has signaled openness to even some of the policies has drawn enormous criticism from progressives in his own party and immigration advocates who supported him in the past.“For the White House to endorse such cruel policies would be a betrayal to millions of Americans who believed President Biden’s campaign promises to restore our humanitarian leadership and the rule of law,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a refugee advocacy organization.Democrats are clamoring for the president to do more and say more about the threat Mr. Trump poses to democracy. Others want Mr. Biden to encourage the Israelis to end their large-scale campaign in Gaza. Still others say he is running out of time to make the strongest case possible for himself against an opponent who is skillful at commandeering a news cycle.A poll released by The New York Times on Tuesday showed widespread disapproval of Mr. Biden’s decisions around the war in the Middle East. But the polling also showed that those surveyed care much more about the state of the economy than they do about foreign policy, and that a majority of them still support providing military and economic aid to Israel.“The very real investments, resources and work we’re putting in right now aren’t for the next poll of the day — they’re to win an election next November,” said Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman.He also pointed to several other polls published this week that show better odds for Mr. Biden in 2024, including polling from The Times that showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump among likely voters.The plan for Mr. Biden to dig out of the bad news swirling around him in Washington, his advisers say, is to relentlessly focus on his agenda during visits to key states, like the one he made to Wisconsin on Wednesday.The state is crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects — he won there by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and recent polling suggests a close race in 2024. Ms. Harris chose the state to kick off a countrywide tour in support of reproductive rights, beginning in January.During a visit to Milwaukee on Wednesday, Mr. Biden did not focus on foreign policy or immigration or polls. Instead, he talked about investments in the business community during remarks at a Black chamber of commerce.Mr. Biden also said his administration had worked to forgive student loan debt — another point of criticism among Democrats — despite a Supreme Court decision that invalidated his plan for even more relief. According to figures released this month by the Education Department, the administration has wiped out $132 billion in debt for more than 3.6 million Americans.During his remarks, Mr. Biden highlighted Mr. Trump’s recent comments on immigrants “poisoning” the blood of the country, words that echoed Adolf Hitler’s comments about Jewish people.“Well, I don’t believe, as the president — former president — said again yesterday, that immigrants are polluting our blood,” Mr. Biden said. “The economy and our nation are stronger when we’re tapped into the full range of talents in this nation.”Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, said in an interview that the next year would be about addressing the concerns of different groups of voters but also about drawing a clear comparison with Mr. Trump.“Our job will be to make sure people know that they’ve been heard,” Mr. Wilker said, but also to present a comparison between Mr. Trump and “a seasoned leader who actually knows how to listen to people, bring people together and get things done.” In Wisconsin, the Biden campaign has hired a state campaign manager and piloted a volunteer program, with a focus on colleges and Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The program, which also has a pilot in Arizona, will focus on leveraging the social networks of volunteers rather than the door-knocking campaigns of past elections. (A graphic designer, Mr. Wilker said, is on hand to create shareable memes and graphics around topics — basically, an emoji-friendly version of a bumper sticker.)This week, the Biden campaign spent money on advertisements centered on Mr. Biden’s visit that promoted local investments that had come through infrastructure legislation. When Wisconsinites Google political news coverage, the Biden campaign will have paid for search results to surface local stories about the president’s visit.But Mr. Biden’s advisers know that he is a more important messenger than any campaign ad. On Wednesday, the president stopped twice to talk to reporters.In one exchange after landing in Milwaukee, Mr. Biden departed from his usual tendency to abstain when asked about the latest story swirling around Mr. Trump — a court ruling in Colorado that declared the former president ineligible to be placed on the primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection during the Jan. 6 attacks. Mr. Biden said it was “self evident” that his opponent was an insurrectionist, though he said whether Mr. Trump was on the ballot was up to the court.“You saw it all,” Mr. Biden told reporters. “And he seems to be doubling down on — about everything.”Then he acknowledged that his day job was calling.“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got to go do this event.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Dean Phillips, an Upstart Challenger to Biden, Embraces ‘Medicare for All’

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      A longtime moderate, the Democratic congressman now says he had been “convinced through propaganda” that calls for universal health care were “a nonsensical leftist notion.”As he mounts a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, Representative Dean Phillips says he has had an epiphany about American health care policy.Gone is his yearslong skepticism about adopting a national single-payer health care system. Now Mr. Phillips, a moderate Democrat from Minnesota, is embracing the “Medicare for all” proposal championed in two presidential campaigns by Senator Bernie Sanders — whose former top aide is now advising Mr. Phillips’s campaign.Mr. Phillips said in an interview on Tuesday that he would join as a co-sponsor to a House proposal that would expand Medicare by creating a national health insurance program available to all Americans, a shift that comes seven weeks into a presidential campaign that has yet to show significant progress in public polling.“I was a good example of someone who had been convinced through propaganda that it was a nonsensical leftist notion,” Mr. Phillips said. “It’s not. It really isn’t. And that’s I think that’s part of my migration, if you will, a migration of understanding and due diligence and intellectual curiosity and most importantly, listening to people.”Embracing the House bill is a low-stakes maneuver. With Republicans in control of the chamber, there is little chance it will come to a vote. Even when Representative Nancy Pelosi of California was speaker, Democrats never held a vote on proposals for Medicare for all that were championed by their progressive caucus — largely because President Biden didn’t support such a move, and centrist Democrats believed it was a bridge too far.Mr. Phillips — who spoke in the interview by videoconference, from an onscreen profile identifying him as “Generic Democrat” in a sly nod to the party’s best performer in polls — argued that his recent evolution on health care was not an effort to outflank Mr. Biden from the left.Instead, he said, he has become convinced that expanding Medicare, the government-run insurance program for older people, to cover all Americans would end up saving the federal government money and should attract support not just from progressives but also from conservatives — including backers of former President Donald J. Trump.“This is not a Hail Mary, by any stretch,” Mr. Phillips said. “It’s not an olive branch to progressives. You know what it really is? It’s an invitation to Trumpers.”Mr. Biden’s campaign spokesman, Kevin Munoz, declined to comment about Mr. Phillips.Mr. Phillips, a businessman who grew wealthy helping to run his family’s liquor distilling empire and later helped build a gelato behemoth, is a former board chairman of Allina Health, one of Minnesota’s largest health care systems. He said his beliefs began to change about 10 years ago, when his daughter Pia, then 13, received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he saw “the gaps between the haves and the have-nots.”In July 2020, as a first-term congressman, he embraced a “state public option” that would allow Americans to buy into Medicaid. More recently, he said, he has been consulting with Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who is a lead sponsor of the House Medicare for all bill, backed by more than half of House Democrats.Mr. Biden has moved the Democratic conversation about health care away from the idea of a single-payer plan, focusing instead on narrower issues like lowering drug costs and improving maternal health.“This is not a serious proposal in today’s environment,” Leslie Dach, the chair of the health advocacy group Protect Our Care and a former Obama administration official, said of Mr. Phillips’s switch. “We’re living in an era where it takes all of our energy to protect what we have from Republicans in Congress.” Mr. Phillips has not gained much traction. A poll last month from CNN and the University of New Hampshire found that he had support from about 10 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, the only state where he has a campaign apparatus. Mr. Biden’s name will not be on the ballot there, but the same CNN poll found that 65 percent of voters said they would write in his name.Mr. Phillips said he hoped to do well in New Hampshire before moving on to Michigan, where Mr. Biden’s approval ratings in recent polls have taken a hit from Black and Arab American voters who disapprove of his support for Israel in its war against Hamas.But Mr. Phillips offered little in the way of daylight between himself and Mr. Biden on that conflict, which has left Democratic voters fiercely divided. The congressman said that he would not call for an immediate cease-fire and that he did not consider Israel “an apartheid state,” as many on the left argue.Yet Mr. Phillips contended that Democrats were so disenchanted with Mr. Biden that when presented with another option, they would take it. “The good news is that 66 percent of the country does not yet hate me,” Mr. Phillips said, in a dig at the president’s dismal approval ratings. “America has already made up its mind about President Biden and Vice President Harris.” More

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      Will Haley or a Trial Bring Trump Down? For Now, Our Poll Says No.

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      Republican primary voters seem unbothered by a coming trial, but a new obstacle looms.Nikki Haley and Donald Trump in warmer times, in 2018. Olivier Douliery/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDonald J. Trump is still leading in the race for the Republican nomination.By a lot.In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll Wednesday, he holds a 64-11 lead over Nikki Haley, with Ron DeSantis in third place at 9 percent.Does the poll provide any indication that Ms. Haley or a criminal trial will bring Mr. Trump down, as our headline asks?No, but given the latest news, let’s look at it anyway.Legal issuesWith Mr. Trump leading his nearest rival by more than 50 points, it will probably take something unprecedented for him to lose the nomination.But all year, there has been something unprecedented looming over the race: Mr. Trump’s legal problems. Tuesday night, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Mr. Trump was ineligible to serve as president under the 14th Amendment. That’s unprecedented. And so is the coming trial and possible conviction of Mr. Trump, right in the heart of the Republican primary season.I know you’re all wondering about the Colorado case, but our poll was concluded before the Colorado ruling and so we couldn’t ask people about it. Realistically, Mr. Trump will argue that the decision is only the latest example of the legal system treating him unfairly, and Republican voters will probably rally to his side, as they have done so many times before. If the Supreme Court decides that he remains eligible, it will be yet another victory in the eyes of many Republican primary voters. If the court concludes he’s ineligible, well, that’s a different story. As such, I must refer you to Adam Liptak, our Supreme Court correspondent, for the most relevant information.What our poll did ask about was Mr. Trump’s coming criminal trial, and the poll offered few signs that it was poised to undo his candidacy.In fact, 62 percent of Republican primary voters say he should be the party’s nominee even if he’s convicted after winning the primaries, while just 32 percent say he shouldn’t be the nominee if convicted. It’s enough support that it would be very challenging for Republicans to overturn the result of the primaries at the convention.It’s easy to see why these voters might still back Mr. Trump, even if convicted:Three-quarters of Republican primary voters do not believe Mr. Trump will receive a fair trial.Four-fifths say the charges against him are mostly politically motivated, not mostly because the prosecutors actually believed he committed a crime.Three-quarters of Republican primary voters say Mr. Trump should be found “not guilty,” and 70 percent say he should be sentenced to prison if found guilty.Four-fifths say he genuinely believed his claims that the election was stolen.Most voters aren’t paying attention yet, and Republicans say they don’t believe he’ll be convicted, so it’s possible their attitudes will shift once a trial gets underway.But while things certainly could change, it’s notable that the charges themselves certainly haven’t wound up hurting him.Nikki HaleyAs we mentioned a few weeks ago, Ms. Haley is becoming Mr. Trump’s primary rival, thanks to her natural appeal among Trump-skeptical, moderate and highly educated Republicans.In this particular poll, that’s exactly how she has overtaken Mr. DeSantis to claim (an extremely distant) second place. Just consider her lopsided appeal among voters on the periphery of the Republican electorate:She has 56 percent of Republican primary voters who do not back Mr. Trump against President Biden in the general election, compared with 4 percent of those who prefer Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. Mr. DeSantis has a mere 2 percent of these Not Trump voters — voters who almost by definition had to be part of a serious coalition to challenge Mr. Trump.She has the support of 39 percent of college graduates compared with a mere 3 percent of those without a degree. (I think I actually said “wow” aloud when I first saw that.)Ms. Haley has the support of 19 percent of moderates compared with 8 percent of conservatives.A candidate of moderate, highly educated Never Trumpers is not a candidate who will have an easy time winning over a populist working-class MAGA party. In fact, only 42 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Ms. Haley, while a pretty sizable 28 percent view her unfavorably.But Ms. Haley’s narrow base of support might just let her keep things interesting in states that play to her strengths — especially states with a high percentage of college graduates and with open primaries, where independent voters and even some Democrats might just vote.New Hampshire, where a CBS/YouGov poll this past weekend gave Ms. Haley 29 percent of the vote, is one of those states. Her home state, South Carolina, is one where Democrats and independents can vote.Plenty of primary polls limit themselves to self-identified Republican-leaning voters or people with a history of voting in Republican primaries (the Times/Siena poll allows any respondents to say they’ll vote in the Republican primary). It wouldn’t surprise me to see a candidate like Ms. Haley outperform the polls a bit in the states where other kinds of voters can participate. More

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      Nearly a Quarter of Trump Voters Say He Shouldn’t Be Nominated if Convicted

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      While Donald Trump’s Republican support remains robust, a not-insignificant minority of his backers oppose having him lead the G.O.P. ticket if he is found guilty of a crime, a Times poll found.Nearly a quarter of former President Donald J. Trump’s own supporters believe that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee for president next year if he is found guilty of a crime, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.Mr. Trump continues to enjoy an enormous lead among the Republican candidates vying for the party’s presidential nomination, and he has used the prosecutions he faces to cast himself as the target of political persecution by Democrats and President Biden. But the poll suggests that a not-insignificant minority of those who would otherwise want him at the top of the Republican ticket in November could change their mind if he were found guilty in any of the four criminal cases he is facing, even if he has won the primary contest.Another 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters went so far as to say that he should go to prison if he is convicted in the federal case in Washington in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. And 23 percent of his supporters said they believe that he has committed “serious federal crimes,” up from 11 percent in July.The poll was conducted before the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Mr. Trump should be disqualified from the Republican primary ballot in that state. The court ruled that Mr. Trump was ineligible under the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies anyone found to have participated in an insurrection from holding office.The findings in the poll underscore the importance to Mr. Trump of the strategy he and his lawyers are pursuing to delay his trials, especially the federal election interference case in Washington.That case, scheduled to start in early March, has long been considered likely to be the first of the four to go before a jury, though Mr. Trump has also sought to postpone the other trials.Those include a federal case in Florida accusing him of illegally holding on to classified documents after leaving office, another in Manhattan stemming from hush money payments made to a porn star in the run-up to the 2016 election, and one in Georgia in which Mr. Trump has been charged in a racketeering conspiracy with tampering with that state’s election.Mr. Trump at his civil trial in Manhattan in October. Eighty-four percent of his supporters believe the various charges he is facing are “mostly politically motivated.”Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMr. Trump has repeatedly described the cases, including the ones brought against him by state prosecutors, as political “witch hunts” designed solely to impede his candidacy. The Times poll found that 84 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters — and 46 percent of all registered voters surveyed — believe that the various charges he is facing are “mostly politically motivated.”Mr. Trump has a long history of using delay tactics in the civil litigation he has faced. But the criminal cases are different, in that Mr. Trump and some of his advisers have been blunt in private conversations that he would have the Justice Department simply drop the cases against him should he be re-elected.Some of those advisers believe that it would be virtually impossible under the Constitution for the state cases to proceed against him while he was a sitting president, even though he would have no authority over local prosecutors’ offices.Postponing the trials until after the election would also have another effect: It would keep voters from hearing the expansive evidence against Mr. Trump that prosecutors have collected before they went to the polls.If the election interference case in particular were put off until after the race was decided, it would mean that millions of Americans would never hear the details of Mr. Trump’s attempts to derail the results of the last election before considering him for office again in 2024.When asked in a previous poll about Mr. Trump’s actions to try to remain in power after the 2020 election, 51 percent of swing state voters — including 13 percent of Mr. Trump’s own supporters — said he went so far as to threaten democracy. In the same poll, most of Mr. Trump’s supporters across the battleground states said they would still support Mr. Trump if he were convicted, but about 6 percent said they would switch their votes to Mr. Biden — potentially enough to swing the election. More

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      Trump’s Legal Jeopardy Hasn’t Hurt His G.O.P. Support, Times/Siena Poll Finds

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      Donald J. Trump continues to march to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination with a commanding lead over his primary rivals, even as a strong majority of voters nationwide believe he has committed serious federal crimes, including a growing faction of Republicans, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College.The results show the remarkable degree to which Republican voters are willing to look past Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy — the former president has been indicted four times in 2023 and faces 91 felony counts — and line up behind his potential return to power.Overall, 58 percent of voters nationwide believe Mr. Trump committed serious federal crimes, according to the survey, including 66 percent of independent voters.Yet Mr. Trump continues to clobber his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, pulling in the support of 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide. Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, is now in a distant second place, with 11 percent, followed by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has fallen to third, with 9 percent.The poll was conducted before a court ruling on Tuesday injected more legal uncertainty into the 2024 presidential race. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump is disqualified from holding office again because he engaged in insurrection leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, a decision the former president plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. More

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      Biden’s Rating Dips on Gaza, and Marvel Drops Actor

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about five minutes.President Biden during a broadcast from the Oval Office after visiting Israel in October, following the breakout of the war against Hamas.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Poll Finds Wide Disapproval of Biden on Gaza, by Jonathan Weisman, Ruth Igielnik and Alyce McFaddenCompanies divert ships from Red Sea route, by Andrés R. MartínezAbbott Signs Law Allowing Texas to Arrest Migrants, Setting Up Federal Showdown, by J. David GoodmanMarvel Will Part Ways With Jonathan Majors After Guilty Verdict, by Jonah Bromwich, Erin Nolan and Nicole SperlingAfter Weeks of Warnings, Iceland Volcano Erupts in Plumes of Fire, by Egill Bjarnason and Claire MosesJessica Metzger and More

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      How Much Is Biden’s Support of Israel Hurting Him With Young Voters?

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      Donald Trump leads him among those 18 to 29, a new poll shows.Palestine supporters in Washington on Sunday.Tasos Katopodis/Getty ImagesAs recently as this summer, a poll with Donald J. Trump leading among young voters would have been eye-popping.Now, it’s increasingly familiar — and our new New York Times/Siena College national survey released Tuesday morning is no exception.For the first time, Mr. Trump leads President Biden among young voters in a Times/Siena national survey, 49 percent to 43 percent. It’s enough to give him a narrow 46-44 lead among registered voters overall.Usually, it’s not worth dwelling too much on a subsample from a single poll, but this basic story about young voters is present in nearly every major survey at this point. Our own battleground state surveys in the fall showed something similar, with Mr. Biden ahead by a single point among those 18 to 29. Either figure is a big shift from Mr. Biden’s 21-point lead in our final poll before the midterms or his 10-point lead in our last national poll in July.And there’s a plausible explanation for the shift in recent months: Israel.As my colleagues Jonathan Weisman, Ruth Igielnik and Alyce McFadden report, young voters in the survey took an extraordinarily negative view of Israel’s recent conduct: They overwhelming say Israel isn’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, and think Israel should stop its military campaign, even if it means Hamas isn’t eliminated.You might think that the young voters with these progressive or even left-wing views would be among the most likely to stick with Mr. Biden. At least for now, that’s not the case. The young Biden ’20 voters with anti-Israel views are the likeliest to report switching to Mr. Trump.Overall, Mr. Trump is winning 21 percent of young Biden ’20 voters who sympathize more with Palestinians than Israel, while winning 12 percent of other young Biden ’20 voters. In an even more striking sign of defections among his own supporters, Mr. Biden holds just a 64-24 lead among the young Biden ’20 voters who say Israel is intentionally killing civilians, compared with an 84-8 lead among the Biden ’20 voters who don’t think Israel is intentionally killing civilians.It’s possible that the kinds of young voters opposed to Israel already opposed Mr. Biden back before the war. That can’t be ruled out. But it’s still evidence that opposition to the war itself is probably contributing to Mr. Biden’s unusual weakness among young voters.Here are a few other findings from the poll:Biden ahead among likely voters?Even though he trails among registered voters, Mr. Biden actually leads Mr. Trump in our first measure of the 2024 likely electorate, 47 percent to 45 percent.If you’re a close reader of this newsletter, this might not come completely out of nowhere. Our polls have consistently shown Mr. Biden doing better among highly regular and engaged voters — especially those who voted in the last midterm election. In those polls, the most heavily Republican voters have been those who voted in 2020, but not 2022. It helps explain why Democrats keep doing so well in low-turnout special elections even though they struggle in polls of registered voters or adults.But in this particular poll, the split isn’t just between midterm and non-midterm voters. It’s between people who voted in the 2020 general election and those who didn’t. Mr. Biden leads by six points among voters who participated in the 2020 election, while Mr. Trump holds an overwhelming 22-point lead among those who did not vote in 2020. In our estimation, needless to say, 2020 nonvoters are less likely to vote in 2024, and that’s why we show Mr. Biden ahead among likely voters.It’s an intriguing pattern, but there’s good reason for caution here.For one: Our previous polling hasn’t shown anything this extreme, including our battleground polling conducted eight weeks ago. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but our sample of 2020 nonvoters includes only 296 respondents — a sample that’s too small for any serious conclusions.For another: The people who voted in 2020 reported backing Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by 10 points in the 2020 election, 51 percent to 41 percent. In reality, Mr. Biden won by 4.5 points.Now, there’s a good reason respondents might have been less likely to report backing Mr. Trump in our poll: We concluded the substantive portion of the survey with a series of questions about Mr. Trump’s coming legal battles, including whether he committed crimes, whether he’ll be convicted, whether he should go to jail and so on. Then, at the very end of the survey, we asked them how they voted in 2020.It’s possible these questions about Mr. Trump’s legal problems made his supporters less likely to admit supporting him in the 2020 election. Indeed, registered Republicans with a record of voting in 2020 were three times as likely as Democrats to refuse to tell us whom they supported in the last presidential election. But it’s also possible that our sample really does just contain too many Biden ’20 voters with respect to nonvoters, yielding a lopsided shift in his direction among likely voters.The underlying data still looks mostly normal.Every time I see what looks like a crazy result — such as Mr. Trump leading among young voters or a nearly 30-point gap between 2020 voters and nonvoters — I think that I’m going to peer deeper into the data and see the signs that something is off.I haven’t seen it yet.In fact, this survey has a more Democratic sample of young people by party registration than in the past, but a much more Trump-friendly result.A similar story holds for the 2020 nonvoters. They may back Mr. Trump by a wide margin, but 27 percent are registered as Democrats compared with 17 percent as Republicans. Mr. Trump nonetheless leads among them because Mr. Biden has only a 49-34 lead among registered Democrats who didn’t turn out in the 2020 election. He has an 83-8 lead among registered Democrats who did vote.A mere 49-34 lead for Mr. Biden among Democratic nonvoters sounds pretty far-fetched, but it’s at least easy to imagine why these kinds of Democrats might be less likely to support Mr. Biden. If you’re a Democrat who didn’t vote in 2020, you probably aren’t as vigorously and passionately opposed to Mr. Trump as those who did show up. Nonvoters also tend to be young, nonwhite, less educated and have low incomes — all groups Mr. Biden has struggled with. They also tend to be less partisan and less ideological, and therefore may be less loyal to the party.But for now, it’s just one relatively small data point. And curiously, it’s a data point we might never get a chance to validate. Nonvoters don’t vote, after all. In all likelihood, people with a robust track record of voting will play an outsize role in the election, and at least in this poll, that’s good news for Mr. Biden. More

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      Poll Finds Wide Disapproval of Biden on Gaza, and Little Room to Shift Gears

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      Voters broadly disapprove of the way President Biden is handling the bloody strife between Israelis and Palestinians, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found, with younger Americans far more critical than older voters of both Israel’s conduct and of the administration’s response to the war in Gaza.Voters are also sending decidedly mixed signals about the direction U.S. policy-making should take as the war in Gaza grinds into its third month, with Israelis still reeling from the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, thousands of Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the Biden administration trying to pressure Israel to scale back its military campaign. Nearly as many Americans want Israel to continue its military campaign as want it to stop now to avoid further civilian casualties.That split appears to leave the president with few politically palatable options.The findings of the Times/Siena poll hold portents not only for Mr. Biden as he enters the 2024 re-election year but also for long-term relations between the Jewish state and its most powerful benefactor, the United States.The fractured views on the conflict among traditionally Democratic voter groups show the continued difficulty Mr. Biden faces of holding together the coalition he built in 2020 — a challenge that is likely to persist even as economic indicators grow more positive and legal troubles swirl around his expected opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.Overall, registered voters say they favor Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden in next year’s presidential election by two percentage points, 46 percent to 44 percent. The president’s job approval rating has slid to 37 percent, down two points from July.But there is considerable uncertainty over whether disaffected voters will even vote. While it is still early, the race is flipped among the likely electorate, with Mr. Biden leading by two percentage points.Economic concerns remain paramount, with 34 percent of registered voters listing economic- or inflation-related concerns as the top issue facing the country. That’s down from 45 percent in October 2022, but still high. More