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      This Economy Has Bigger Problems Than ‘Bad Vibes’

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      The economy is growing. Wages are up. Unemployment is low. Income inequality is narrowing. The fearmongering about inflation proved to be, well, wrong. According to many economy-watchers, Americans should be sending the Biden administration a gift basket full of positive vibes — and votes.Instead, consumer confidence polling paints a different picture. A recent Times/Siena poll found that only 2 percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” and only a further 16 percent said they were “good.” While economic indicators suggest that the economy is healthy and growing, the American public doesn’t feel that way. Why the perception gap?One popular theory is that media narratives have duped Americans into believing that they’re having a rough time, when, in fact, they’re doing fine. Kyla Scanlon coined “vibe-cession” last year to describe this gap between perception and economic indicators. Since then, a story has emerged about consumer confidence: that poor perception and political polarization are mostly to blame. Brian Beutler, who writes the newsletter “Off Message,” calls out social media and misinformation for reinforcing the “bad economy” belief. Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy leads to consumer pessimism.The Biden administration’s messaging about the strength of the economy will shape President Biden’s presidential campaign. If Americans’ negative vibes about the economy persist, Donald Trump will surely bludgeon Biden with a line of attack that he relishes delivering. One of Trump’s favorite claims is that he is a successful businessman who ran a strong economy as president. Too few people believe that Trump, the G.O.P.’s favored candidate, will go to jail between now and the 2024 election. And so it should worry Biden that, according to that Times/Siena poll, a majority of likely voters trust Trump more than Biden on the economy.Why aren’t more voters giving President Biden credit for his strong economy?The bad vibes explanation is sound on the indicators, but that story doesn’t think too highly of Americans. It does not acknowledge voters’ dissatisfaction. It also does not offer a way forward. What do you do about bad vibes, exactly? Hire an exorcist?Looking at the economy through more than macroeconomic indicators could tell us a more compelling, empowering story. What if people are not being manipulated by the media, confused about the fundamentals or biased against Democrats? What we know about historical changes to how the economy works and for whom it works might tell a different story with more potential for the future.One such story considers what we consume and how much harder (and expensive) it is to procure it. A lot of our consumption is about meeting our basic needs. Housing, food, and energy come to mind. The economic fundamentals on these may be trending positively, but the bad vibes narrative undersells how miserable that part of the economy can feel.People are struggling with mortgage interest rates, housing shortages and pricey grocery bills. They’re also consuming to make their lives work: on expensive, hard-to-manage child care, health care and convenience spending — things like restaurants, travel, delivery services, and on-demand help — which are necessary for balancing work and life demands. Even when those services are affordable, they are full of friction. That is a nice way of saying the consumer experience sucks. It is hard to schedule things, hard to get customer service, hard to judge the quality of what you are buying, and hard to get amends when an experience goes bad. There is a reason industry analysts have reported that customer brand loyalty is low and customer rage is high.In 2021, the American Rescue Plan created a temporary social safety net for millions of Americans that may have changed how they feel about their spending. For younger Americans, massive stimulus was a taste of the Great Society investment that benefited their grandparents and great-grandparents. Child care subsidies, direct cash transfers, food supplements, eviction moratoriums, and flexible work from home arrangements temporarily lifted many low-income people out of poverty. Those provisions also exposed many working and middle class workers to the difference that economic policy could make — for the better — in their lives.Then, fearing inflationary pressures on the economy, Congress let the American Rescue Plan’s most powerful investments, and therefore the most substantial government support for social reproduction in a generation, end. But social reproduction — the caretaking of people, relationships and systems that make our society work — still had to be done. Reallocating your spending from child care to student loan payments, for example, might be feasible, but it is not particularly enjoyable. That assumes one can find accessible child care or an in-network doctor or apartment. When stimulus funding ended, a lot of services people rely on became harder to find and afford.When people talk about the work that makes the economy possible, they often think first and most about child care. There is a good reason for that. Child care is necessary work. It is often unpaid work (when done by mothers) or underpaid work (when done by child care workers). The American Rescue Plan sent $39 billion to states, with the aim of stabilizing child care centers. After some of that funding expired in September, the problems typical of our country’s child care shortage re-emerged. Depending on where one lives, child care centers’ capacity may not have returned to prepandemic levels, producing a lot of anxiety and wait-lists for families. As one of my colleagues recently put it, anyone who thinks he just has bad vibes hasn’t tried to find summer day care for young children.Then there is the rest of the hidden labor that has to happen so people can go to work, that is so often invisible and has historically been the domain of women: caring for a household and aging relatives, receiving the plumber or delivery truck and, of course, having the time (and money) to make meals, manage doctors appointments, chauffeur kids to after-school activities and clean the house.For the most part, the industries that support that kind of invisible labor are more difficult to find, harder to obtain and more expensive to buy than they were four years ago. Those industries also gained a lot of not-so-enjoyable friction. Industry surveys suggest that customer service has gotten worse and consumers are angry about it. That coarsening of consumerism affects millions, but women, in particular, pay a price due to the outsize role they play in managing hidden labor.Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, calls the way our society relies on families to independently support social reproduction a “D.I.Y. society.” Research demonstrates repeatedly that women, especially, are sacrificing to balance paid work with all that D.I.Y. labor. Healthy economic indicators, like low unemployment, also put the squeeze on women by raising the price and increasing the difficulty of hiring a little help.The bad vibes story emphasizes that lower-income workers have benefited the most from the growing economy. It is true. Over the past four years, at the macro level, workers at the bottom of the income distribution made greater gains than those at the top. That wage compression means some good things, for example: People without college degrees are benefiting from a strong labor market. The female-dominated child care field is a good example. Acknowledging that child care is skilled labor empowers the workers to demand better working conditions.However, those positives also present a challenge. Using child care workers as an example again, as their wages stagnated and their skills upgraded, many of them left for better paying jobs. That is the case for a lot of the jobs that do the vital social reproduction work in our economy. There are now fewer people to do the low-paid, low status work than there was before the Covid-19 pandemic. Illness pushed some workers out. Others left for better economic opportunities. The social reproduction work needs to be done but there are fewer workers able or willing to do it.Low unemployment means more Americans are working. It also means more people are experiencing our social reproduction crisis firsthand. This has long been a reality for female workers. Our crisis of who is supposed to do all the undervalued labor that underpins economic life has pushed many women out of the work force, reduced their participation, and generally made work more stressful. Men now take on moderately more responsibility for household tasks. With that shift, the problem of balancing care work and paid work has become urgent for both men and women. Even as millions of Americans are earning more, they face stiff competition from high-income earners for a smaller pool of services — including schools, health care, home maintenance and retail services — to make it all work.In short, people may have more money. But it has become harder to buy the services they need and more expensive to buy the goods that they want. The very wealthy can spend their way out of that bind, simply by paying more for housekeeping and grocery delivery and nannies. But everyone else needs some sort of partnership with the government to make the act of working not just affordable, but accessible. The Biden administration has not solved that bigger crisis (neither did the Trump administration). Whether Americans are blaming the right administration for their woes, their economic lives legitimately feel tougher even as they work more and earn more money.Bad economic storytelling tells millions of Americans in an election year that they only think that they are struggling financially. Good economic storytelling would figure out how to account for their experiences and imagine a better future. People need child care, and dentists, and affordable housing, and safe transportation, and accessible education. Telling them that to instead enjoy the fact that they can buy a Tesla is a fundamental misunderstanding of what economic policy is supposed to do, which is to make people’s lives better.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.Source images by Ivan Bajic and kutaytanir/Getty ImagesThe 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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Mayor Adams’s Swagger Is Diminished. His Foes Are Ready to Pounce

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      Eric Adams is facing stronger pushback from the City Council and progressives, and prominent Democrats in New York are considering running for mayor.If Mayor Eric Adams were in search of evidence that his recent spate of troubles had cost him some standing in New York, he would not need to look far.The city comptroller, Brad Lander, recently restricted the mayor’s spending powers on the migrant crisis, and has playfully alluded to the F.B.I.’s investigation of Mr. Adams’s fund-raising in his own pitch to donors.The City Council is preparing to fight the mayor over his painful budget cuts to city services and could soon override his objection to banning solitary confinement in city jails. Even his friend, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, is eyeing his job.The reasons for the discontent surrounding Mr. Adams are plenty. He faces a federal investigation into his campaign fund-raising, and widespread criticism over his handling of the migrant crisis. He was named in a legal claim accusing him of sexual assault in 1993 and he made unpopular budget cuts to the police, schools and libraries.The extent of his unpopularity was quantified this week in a stunning Quinnipiac University poll: Only 28 percent of New Yorkers approve of the job Mr. Adams is doing, the lowest for any New York City mayor in a Quinnipiac poll since it began surveying the city in 1996.Mr. Adams has not been accused of wrongdoing in the F.B.I. investigation, and he is hardly the first mayor who has faced an investigation: His predecessor, Bill de Blasio, also faced an inquiry into his campaign’s finances. But the political world remains abuzz about his future, especially after the F.B.I. seized his cellphones on the street.One political consulting firm was so curious to know how far the mayor’s star had fallen that it commissioned its own poll to ask New Yorkers who they would support in a special election if Mr. Adams resigned.“We’re in a period of enormous political uncertainty,” said Evan Roth Smith, a founding partner at Slingshot Strategies. He added, “A special election is far from a certainty, but it’s clearly a possibility.”The poll found that Mr. Cuomo would be the most popular candidate at 22 percent, followed by the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, at 15 percent. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who finished second in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, came in third at 12 percent.Mr. Adams, famously known for his swagger, has appeared chastened in recent weeks, and has seemed on the defensive.His aides immediately responded to the Quinnipiac poll by calling it “misleading” and sending out a torrent of book blurb-like hosannas of the mayor — some with nearly identical wording — from loyalists like Representative Adriano Espaillat, a key Dominican American power broker, and Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar.Rob Speyer, the chief executive of the real estate investment firm Tishman Speyer, praised Mr. Adams’s “hustle and successes.” Steven Rubenstein, chairman of the Association for a Better New York, called the mayor a “champion for all New Yorkers.” The mayor’s stalwarts included other business and union leaders, a signal to potential challengers that the mayor still enjoys broad support from some of the city’s most influential constituencies.At a recent town hall meeting in East Harlem, Mr. Adams addressed his weaknesses head on. He started the event by addressing “two tough issues that you have been reading about,” and told the crowd that he did not break the law by helping the Turkish Consulate and that he did not sexually assault a woman who filed a legal claim against him for an incident she said happened in 1993.Mr. Adams’s ties to Turkish interests, including the Turkish Consulate, are being examined by federal investigators.Sara Hylton for The New York Times“You know my character,” he said. “You know what I stand for.”In most mayoral election cycles in New York, Democratic incumbents are virtually untouchable. But amid Mr. Adams’s problems, more Democrats are weighing potential candidacies — either when Mr. Adams faces re-election in 2025, or in the case of a special election if he were to resign or be forced from office.One past Adams donor, Jean Shafiroff, the wife of a prominent banker, said that she was waiting to see what happens with the F.B.I. investigation and the sexual assault allegation before participating in any more fund-raisers. She said that she works on women’s rights issues and felt conflicted.“It’s difficult for me right now, as much as I believe the mayor is innocent,” she said in a phone interview on Friday from Miami where she was attending the Art Basel art event.Mr. Cuomo has spoken to people about potentially running for mayor under the right circumstances, according to three people who have spoken to him and who were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.Mr. Cuomo’s allies have insisted that the former governor, who resigned in 2021 after facing a series of sexual harassment allegations, would consider running for mayor only if Mr. Adams was no longer in the race.“He is not going to run against the mayor,” Charlie King, a Democratic strategist who is close to Mr. Cuomo, said in an interview.Matt Wing, a former adviser to Ms. Garcia, signaled that she might be open to running, saying in a statement: “In the chaos of a special election, New York City will need stability over political spectacle. And there’s only one leader in the potential field ready to meet the moment with competence, character and deep-rooted city management experience, which is perhaps why Kathryn stands out.”Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller whose bid for mayor in 2021 was derailed by sexual misconduct allegations, has had conversations with former staffers about moving quickly to run in a special election, according to a person who was familiar with the matter.When Mr. Adams took office two years ago, he was heralded as a national Democratic star and a moderate who made a compelling case for improving public safety. He called himself the “Biden of Brooklyn.”President Biden, who once counted the mayor as a trusted ally, has not spoken to Mr. Adams in months, and his aides and allies now view the mayor as a grandstanding opportunist because he publicly criticized the White House for not providing enough help to the city to deal with the migrant crisis.Now, as the mayor faces questions about his management ability, even his agenda seems more uncertain.On Monday, City Council leaders will hold an oversight hearing to scrutinize the mayor’s cuts to the Police Department, schools and libraries. They are hoping to reverse some of the cuts and to find ways to raise additional revenue.Progressive leaders say that the mayor’s low approval rating shows that his budget cuts are unpopular, and they are hoping to capitalize on his weakened political position by pushing to raise taxes on the wealthy.“What we hear from this poll is that New Yorkers are asking elected officials to invest in a progressive agenda — affordable housing, schools, sanitation, libraries,” said Ana María Archila, a state director of the Working Families Party, which has had conversations with left-leaning candidates about running against Mr. Adams.Later this month, the mayor may face a battle with the City Council over solitary confinement in city jails. Mr. Adams has threatened to veto a ban, arguing that it would put correction officers in harm’s way. But Mr. Williams and City Council leaders have pushed forward with a bill, saying that the practice is torture.The City Council may vote on the ban at its Dec. 20 meeting, and likely has enough votes to override a veto, should the mayor choose to do so. Mr. Adams’s first major veto in June — aimed to stop a housing bill that expanded a rental voucher program — was overridden by the Council.That rental voucher expansion is nearing a Jan. 9 deadline for implementation, and leaders in the City Council are contemplating suing the Adams administration because they believe it is intentionally not moving forward with the plan, according to Council officials.Diana Ayala, the deputy speaker of the City Council who is considering running for mayor, said that Mr. Adams had undermined the Council and refused to work with leadership to address the city’s many crises.“He’s arrogant, and that arrogance is not helpful,” she said.Shahana Hanif, a chair of the Council’s progressive caucus, said that Council members were becoming more comfortable challenging the mayor given his issues.“These incidents are emboldening our colleagues to feel like this is a mayor who doesn’t have his campaign, personal life, nor the city’s best interests at heart,” Ms. Hanif said. “He is a mess.”Perhaps the most telling sign of Mr. Adams’s diminished stature can be seen in the recent responses of Mr. Lander, the city comptroller and another possible mayoral candidate. He recently curtailed Mr. Adams’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis.Earlier this year, Mr. Adams openly mocked Mr. Lander’s voice and his left-leaning politics at news conferences. Now Mr. Lander has returned the favor in a recent fund-raising email, chiding the mayor for his campaign’s ties to the Turkish government.“Turkey should have a special place on your Thanksgiving table,” Mr. Lander’s fund-raising email said. “And that’s the only kind of special treatment that Turkey should have in New York City.”Nicholas Fandos More

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      Should Biden Really Run Again? He Prolongs an Awkward Conversation.

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      The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term. But this week, he has drawn new attention to the question of what is best for the party.President Biden has a way of explaining away his gaffes that can let him defuse the situation without causing himself long-term political damage.“No one ever doubts I mean what I say,” he often says. The problem, he admits, is that “sometimes I say all that I mean.”So it went this week when Mr. Biden told donors on Tuesday night near Boston that “I’m not sure I’d be running” if former President Donald J. Trump were not trying to reclaim the Oval Office.It was a forehead-slapping moment for a president whose drooping approval ratings have forced him to turn his re-election campaign into a referendum on his predecessor, and a reminder that the political forecast for the next 11 months suggests America will be inundated with two candidates most of the country doesn’t want.Within hours, Mr. Biden walked back the sentiment. After returning to the White House, he approached reporters and said he wouldn’t drop out of the race even if Mr. Trump did so.Then came Wednesday.After delivering a speech urging Congress to pass a multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine, Mr. Biden walked away and reporters shouted questions at him.One grabbed his attention: Could any other Democrat defeat Mr. Trump?The president could have left and closed the door. The chatter about his 2024 decision would have been put to bed, at least for this week. But he could not resist. Once again, he reminded America why Democratic allies, and not Mr. Biden himself, are often viewed as his best messengers.“Probably 50” Democrats could beat Mr. Trump, he said. Then, seeming to laugh off his remark with a wry smile, he added, “I’m not the only one who could defeat him, but I will defeat him.”Whether Mr. Biden was joking, or again accidentally saying all that he meant, is for him to know. But his perhaps-too-candid moments, combined with many voters’ dissatisfaction about his performance, have worked to undercut his rationale for running — that he is the indispensable Democrat best positioned to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House, protect democracy and retain the “soul of America.”If he’s not indispensable, it opens the door to an uncomfortable question from skeptics in his party: Why not let some other Democrat have a chance to run for president?The reasons Mr. Biden is running again are fairly obvious. He considered a presidential bid in 1984, mounted his first White House campaign four years later, served for eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, wanted to run in 2016 and finally won the nation’s top office in 2020.People who think about running for president for 36 years tend not to give up the White House without a fight. No president since Rutherford B. Hayes has served the four full years of his first term and then declined to run again.Mr. Biden had left some Democratic voters under the impression that he might gracefully step aside: During his 2020 campaign, he stood on a Detroit stage with three next-generation Democrats — Senator Kamala Harris of California, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — and said, “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”But his own ambition and the enormous political advantage of incumbency always suggested he would seek to remain president into his mid-80s.Former Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a devoted Biden supporter who has known him since the early 1980s, said voters she heard from in Southern California were far more interested in stopping Mr. Trump from returning to power than they were worried about Mr. Biden’s age or competence.“They say, ‘We’ve got to win this,’” Ms. Boxer said. “They don’t talk so much about Joe. They say our democracy is on the line. They just assume it will be Joe.”Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s first chief of staff, allowed in an interview on Thursday that “it is possible that there are other Democrats in America who could beat Trump.” But because Mr. Biden is the only one to have actually done it, Mr. Klain said, he has the best chance to do so again. Mr. Klain said he did not know who the 50 Democrats mentioned by Mr. Biden were.“This is a life-or-death moment for democracy, and we need someone who has beaten Trump before,” Mr. Klain said.Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman, dismissed any close reading of Mr. Biden’s latest comments. The campaign, Mr. Munoz said, would not be “distracted by the same Beltway narratives that President Biden has proven wrong for years.”And Mr. Biden’s latest verbal adventures didn’t exactly prompt a reckoning in Democratic politics. Most simply rolled their eyes at his struggle to keep the political conversation on favorable terrain — especially during a week in which Mr. Trump pledged not to be a dictator “except for Day 1.”“He’s one of the most honest people you’re ever going to meet in terms of expressing what he is feeling at the moment,” former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota said of Mr. Biden, with whom he served for 18 years in the Senate. “There isn’t a politician alive that hasn’t wanted to reframe things. We all do it.”Mr. Trump, at age 77, has not exactly been a smooth operator himself. He has long strayed off message, and has his own growing record of verbal slips. He has confused Mr. Biden with Mr. Obama, suggested America is on the verge of entering World War II, praised Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, and told supporters not to worry about voting.David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who helped choose Mr. Biden to be Mr. Obama’s running mate in 2008, said it was understood at the time that Mr. Biden’s occasional deviation from the prescribed political script was part of the package.He said Mr. Biden’s gaffes gave him an authenticity in the minds of voters that other veteran Washington politicians lacked, even if they caused a few headaches for Mr. Obama and his aides.“Joe Biden has been a guy who has spoken his mind for 50 years in politics,” said Mr. Axelrod, who has repeatedly suggested that the president’s age will be a top concern for voters in 2024. “Sometimes that’s gotten him into some hot water, but it’s also part of a whole package of a guy who is authentic and willing to say exactly what he’s thinking.” More

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      Nikki Haley’s Moment

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      Rob Szypko, Mary Wilson and Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicOver the last few months, Nikki Haley has gained enough in the polls to suggest she is on the verge of surpassing Ron DeSantis as the main threat to Donald J. Trump in the race to become the Republican candidate for 2024.Jazmine Ulloa, a national politics reporter for The Times; and Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, discuss her building momentum and examine how far she might go.On today’s episodeJazmine Ulloa, a national politics reporter for The New York Times.Nate Cohn, The New York Times’s chief political analyst.Nikki Haley has gained with educated and relatively moderate Republicans and independents, but that could also be a big liability in today’s G.O.P.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBackground readingNikki Haley’s path from Trump critic to defender and back.Why is Ms. Haley’s star rising among the rivals to Mr. Trump?Here are five takeaways from the Republican debate last night.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Why Our “Great” Economy Is Making Young Americans Grumpy

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      As a part-time commentator on things economic, I’m often asked a seemingly straightforward question: If the economy is so good, why are Americans so grumpy?By many measures — unemployment, inflation, the stock market — the economy is strong. Yet only 23 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, a strong headwind for President Biden’s approval ratings. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s formidable base of disgruntled voters endures.As I’ve engaged with my many interlocutors, I’ve concluded that voters have valid reasons for their negativity. In my view, blame two culprits: one immediate and impacting everybody, and another that particularly affects young people and is coming into view like a giant iceberg. Both sit atop the leaderboard of reasons for the sour national mood.While inflation has provided the proximate trigger for unhappy feelings, an understandable grimness about our broader economic prospects, particularly for younger Americans, is playing a major part. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘This Is Grim,’ One Democratic Pollster Says

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      The predictive power of horse-race polling a year from the presidential election is weak at best. The Biden campaign can take some comfort in that. But what recent surveys do reveal is that the coalition that put Joe Biden in the White House in the first place is nowhere near as strong as it was four years ago.These danger signs include fraying support among core constituencies, including young voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, and the decline, if not the erasure, of traditional Democratic advantages in representing the interests of the middle class and speaking for the average voter.Any of these on their own might not be cause for alarm, but taken together they present a dangerous situation for Biden.From Nov. 5 through Nov. 11, Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, surveyed 2,500 voters in presidential and Senate battleground states as well as competitive House districts.In an email, Greenberg summarized the results: “This is grim.” The study, he said, found that collectively, voters in the Democratic base of “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.”On 32 subjects ranging from abortion to China, the Democracy Corps survey asked voters to choose which would be better, “Biden and the Democrats” or “Trump and the Republicans.”Biden and the Democrats led on six: women’s rights (ahead by 17 points), climate change (15 points), addressing racial inequality (10 points), health care (3 points), the president will not be an autocrat (plus 2) and protecting Democracy (plus 1). There was a tie on making democracy more secure.Donald Trump and the Republicans held leads on the remaining subjects, including being for working people (a 7-point advantage), standing up to elites (8 points), being able to get things done for the American people (12 points), feeling safe (12 points) and keeping wages and salaries up with the cost of living (17 points).In the case of issues that traditionally favor Republicans, Trump and his allies held commanding leads: patriotism (11 points), crime (17 points), immigration (20 points) and border security (22 points).Particularly worrisome for Democrats, who plan to demonize Trump as a threat to democracy, are the advantages Trump and Republicans have on opposing extremism (3 points), getting beyond the chaos (6 points) and protecting the Constitution (8 points).There is some evidence in both the Democracy Corp survey and in other polls that concerns specific to Biden — including his age and the surge in prices during his presidency — are driving the perception of Democratic weakness rather than discontent with the party itself.The survey found, for example, that Democratic candidates in House battleground districts are running even with their Republican opponents among all voters, and two points ahead among voters who say they are likely to cast ballots on Election Day.Along similar lines, a November 2023 NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden by two points, 46-44, but when voters were asked to choose between Trump and an unnamed Democratic candidate, the generic Democrat won 46-40.In a reflection of both Biden’s and Trump’s high unfavorability ratings, NBC reported that when voters were asked to choose between Biden and an unnamed generic Republican, the “Republican candidate” led Biden 48-37.Other nonpartisan polls describe similar Democratic weaknesses. A September Morning Consult survey found, for example, that “voters are now more likely to see the Republican Party as capable of governing, tackling big issues and keeping the country safe compared with the Democratic Party” and that “by a 9-point margin, voters also see the Democratic Party as more ideologically extreme than the G.O.P.”In the main, according to Morning Consult, these weaknesses result from declining confidence within Democratic ranks in their own party, rather than strong support for Trump and the Republican Party: “The trends against the Democratic Party are largely driven by worsening perceptions among its own voter base, which suggests that the party will have to rely more than ever on negative partisanship to keep control of the White House.”Morning Consult posed the same set of questions to voters about the political parties in 2020 and again this year in order to track shifting voter attitudes.Asked, for example which party is more “capable of governing,” 48 percent of voters in 2020 said the Democrats and 42 percent said the Republicans. This year, 47 percent said the Republicans and 44 percent said the Democrats.Similar shifts occurred on the question of which party will “keep the nation safe” and which party can “tackle the big issues.”In what amounts to a body blow to Biden and his Democratic allies, Republicans are now virtually tied with Democrats on a matter that has been a mainstay of Democratic support since the formation of the New Deal coalition during the Great Depression. A September 2023 NBC News survey “found that 34 percent of voters believe Republicans are better at looking out for the middle class, while 36 percent say the same of Democrats. The 2-point margin in favor of Democrats is the lowest it has been in the history of the poll.”“Democrats have held over 30 years as high as a 29-point advantage as being the party better able to deal with and handle issues of concern to the middle class, ” Bill McInturff, a partner in the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which joined with the Democratic firm Hart Research to conduct the NBC poll, told me.Neil Newhouse, who is also a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, emailed me to say that the opinion trends among Black and Hispanic voters “are figures G.O.P.’ers could only dream about a few years ago.”Although many of those with whom I discussed the data voiced deep concern over Biden’s prospects, let me cite a couple of experts who are more optimistic.Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic operative and former president of the New Democratic Network, emailed me a series of bullet points:The last four presidential elections have gone 51 percent-46 percent Democratic, best run for Dems since F.D.R.’s elections. Only 1 R — George W. Bush 2004 — has broken 48 percent since the 1992 election, and Dems have won more votes in seven of last eight presidential elections. If there is a party with a coalition problem, it is them, not us.Our performance since Dobbs remains remarkable, and important. In 2022 we gained in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA over 2020, getting to 59 percent in CO, 57 percent in PA, 55 percent in MI, 54 percent in NH in that “red wave” year. This year we’ve won and outperformed across the country in every kind of election, essentially leaving this a blue wave year.We got to 56 percent in the WI SCOTUS race, 57 percent in Ohio, flipped Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, flipped the VA House, Kentucky Governor Andrew Beshear grew his margin, we won mayoralties and school board races across the United States. Elections are about winning and losing, and we keep winning and they keep losing.In a recent post on his Substack, “Why I Am Optimistic About 2024,” Rosenberg elaborated:Opposition and fear of MAGA is the dominant force in U.S. politics today, and that is a big problem for super-MAGA Trump in 2024. Fear and opposition to MAGA has been propelling our electoral wins since 2018, and will almost certainly do so again next year.Alex Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, expressed similar optimism concerning Biden’s chances: “Once Democrats come to terms with the fact that Biden will be the nominee (and, more importantly, that Trump will in all likelihood be the G.O.P. nominee), a lot of the internal malaise expressed in current polls should dissipate.”When Biden begins campaigning in earnest, Theodoridis wrote,He will likely still come across as relatively competent and steady. And, while Trump always looms over G.O.P. politics, we will certainly see more coverage of him as G.O.P. nominee to remind less engaged Democrats and the few true independents that he is a deeply flawed figure who has and would again pose a real threat to our Republic.When voters finally make up their minds, Theodoridis predicted, “The anti-MAGA, pro-democracy, pro-reproductive-rights message that has boosted turnout and served Democratic candidates well the last two Novembers will likely do so again.”Jim Kessler, a senior vice president of Third Way, a Democratic think tank, is nowhere near as confident in Democratic prospects as Rosenberg and Theodoridis are. In an email, Kessler observed that polls at this time need to be taken with a grain of salt — remarking that in 1991, George H.W. Bush appeared to be the prohibitive favorite to win a second term and that in 2011, Mitt Romney was well ahead of President Barack Obama.In addition, Kessler wrote, in the past month,The price of gasoline has fallen 20 cents to a national average of $3.24 a gallon. Headline and core inflation have begun their final descent toward benign, historic levels. Interest rates have fallen about 40 basis points in the past several months. The so-called “misery index” (inflation + unemployment rate) could very well be at a level that is incumbent friendly.That said, Kessler continued, there are clear danger signs:Biden won in 2020 because he was perceived as having a more positive brand than the Democratic Party. That brand advantage over the Democratic Party is now gone. Exhibits A and B are crime and immigration. In 2020, Biden was perceived as tougher on crime and the border than the typical Democrat.In one primary debate, Kessler pointed out,Biden was the only candidate onstage not to raise his hand on a question that essentially could be interpreted as wanting open borders. He also loudly and repeatedly voiced his opposition to “defund the police” and never ran away from the 1994 crime bill that he authored in the Senate.That, in Kessler’s view, “is not the Joe Biden voters are hearing today. Voters actually hear almost nothing from the administration on crime or the border, and this allows the opposition to define them on an issue of great salience.”Biden, Kessler argued, has a credible record on tougher border enforcement and cracking down on crime, but he and other members of the administration don’t promote itbecause these are issues on which our active, progressive base is split. But if you are silent on these issues, it is like an admission of guilt to voters. They believe you do not care or are dismissive of their very real concerns. That means Biden must accept some griping from the left to get this story out to the vast middle.Will Marshall, president and founder of the center-left Public Policy Institute think tank, responded to my query with an emailed question: “Trump is Kryptonite for American democracy, so why isn’t President Biden leading him by 15 points?”Marshall’s answer:Biden’s basic problem is that the Democratic Party keeps shrinking, leaving it with a drastically slender margin of error. It’s losing working class voters — whites — by enormous, 30-point margins — but nonwhites without college degrees are slipping away too.The ascendance of largely white, college-educated liberals within party ranks, in Marshall’s view, haspushed Democrats far to the dogmatic left, even as their base grows smaller. Young progressives have identified the party with stances on immigration, crime, gender, climate change and Palestinian resistance that are so far from mainstream sentiment that they can even eclipse MAGA extremism.“Democrats,” Marshall wrote, in a line of argument similar to Kessler’s,have been aiming at the wrong target and have less than a year to adjust their sights. That means putting high prices and living costs front and center, embracing cultural pragmatism, confronting left-wing radicalism on the border, public safety and Israel and embracing a post-populist economics that speaks to working Americans’ aspirations for growth and upward mobility rather than their presumed sense of economic victimhood.Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, contended that the view of Biden and the Democratic Party as elitist and weak on the very values that were Democratic strengths in the past lacks foundation in practice. Instead, the adverse portrait of the Democrats represents a major success on the part of right-wing media — and a complicit mainstream media — in creating a false picture of the party.In a forthcoming paper, “Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats’ New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution,” Hacker said he and three colleagues found thatDemocrats have not changed their orientation nearly as much as critics of the party argue. In particular, the party has not shifted its emphasis from economic to social/identity issues, nor has it moderated its economic positions overall. Instead, it has placed a high priority on an ambitious economic program that involves a wider range of policy aims and instruments than in the past (including industrial policy and pro-labor initiatives as well as social and health policies and public investments) as well as levels of public spending that dwarf those contemplated by party elites in at least a half century.Why then, Hacker asked, is “the Democratic Party widely perceived to have abandoned pocketbook politics in favor of identity politics?”His answer:Conservative media have relentlessly focused on this critique and there’s strong evidence that media framing shapes how voters view the parties. Indeed, the role of the media in shaping the negative current climate — including more mainstream sources — should not be neglected. The obsessions of right-wing media with the “wokeness” of the Democratic Party seeps into the broader media coverage, and mainstream sources focus on criticisms of the Democrats, in part to uphold their nonpartisan ideal.Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, warned that there are major consequences that could result from the weakness of Biden’s support. In an email, Enos wrote:There is no doubt that Democrats and — given that the likely Republican nominee is a would-be authoritarian — Americans more generally should be alarmed by Biden’s poll numbers. He is saddled with the need to dig economic perceptions out of a deep inflationary hole, an unsteady international world and the view that his party went too far to the left on social issues.If the election were held today, Enos argued, “Biden would likely lose.”During the campaign, “Biden’s numbers will improve,” Enos wrote, but Biden faces a large number of idealistic young voters who maynever come back to him because they believe that he has abandoned the core values that animated their support in the first place. Faced with the reality of surging immigration across the southern border, Biden has largely failed to liberalize his administration’s approach to immigration — in fact, he has left much of the Trump era policies in place. To many young voters, who were first attracted to Biden’s social progressivism, such moves may feel like a betrayal. Additionally, Biden has seemed to greenlight Israel’s campaign of violence against civilians in Gaza. Especially for young voters of color, this seems like a betrayal and could cost Biden crucial states such as Michigan.Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, stands somewhere between Rosenberg and Marshall.“There’s no gainsaying Biden’s poor polling numbers at the present,” Weiler wrote by email:However unhinged Trump appears increasingly to be, for now that’s an abstraction for many voters. In the meantime, what they see in ways that feel up close and personal are signs of an unsettled and unsettling world impinging on their day to day lives, including inflation, higher crime and a big increase in migrants across our southern border and into cities around the United States.On the plus side for Biden, Weiler wrote, “the data show clearly that inflation is trending substantially downward.” In addition,Violent crime has returned to prepandemic levels. Americans always think crime is going up, no matter what the data say. But if the actual drop in crime results in people thinking about it less, that could also lessen people’s sense of a chaotic and unsettled reality.Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, made the case that Biden’s age and his visible infirmities interfere with his ability to reassure the electorate:The biggest factor that is neglected in many polls is the widespread belief that Biden is simply too old and insufficiently vigorous to remain president for four more years. This belief is reinforced by the reality that Biden does not inspire confidence in his vigor or energy in most of his public presentations. The problem is particularly acute among young voters but goes throughout the electorate, Democrats and Republicans alike. It means that voters don’t give much weight to Biden’s arguments on the issues.Democrats are trapped, Smith maintained:None will challenge Biden; he must choose to step aside. If he did so, he would feel compelled to support Kamala Harris. But most Democrats, and probably Biden himself, rightly believe that she would do even worse than he is doing.The one ace in the hole for Democrats is Donald Trump himself. As the center of attention in the elections of 2018, 2020 and even 2022, Trump was the key to Democratic victory. Trump is doing all he can to become the focus in 2024, but the question remains whether the Democrats, with Biden at the top of the ticket, can successfully demonize him again.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Biden Says ‘I’m Not Sure I’d Be Running’ if Not for Trump

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      President Biden has portrayed a second term for Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy.President Biden suggested on Tuesday that he might have been content to serve only a single term if his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump, were not attempting to recapture the White House.At a campaign fund-raiser in the Boston area, Mr. Biden presented his decision to run for re-election as driven largely by his determination to defeat Mr. Trump a second time and prevent him from returning to power. Mr. Biden has at times portrayed a second term for Mr. Trump as an existential threat to American democracy.“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” he told donors at the Weston, Mass., home of Alan Solomont, a longtime Democratic financial backer who served as ambassador to Spain. “But we cannot let him win.”The president’s remark came at a time when polls show that most Democrats would prefer someone other than Mr. Biden, who turned 81 last month, to represent the party in next year’s election. A survey by CNN in August found that 67 percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic wanted another nominee, and 70 percent listed Mr. Biden’s age, health, mental competence or ability to handle the job as their main concern about him.Although he described himself as “a bridge” to the next generation during his 2020 campaign, a comment that some interpreted as a hint that he would serve only one term, Mr. Biden has concluded that he is best positioned to beat Mr. Trump again, justifying a re-election campaign. He faces only long-shot challengers in the Democratic primaries in the form of Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and Marianne Williamson, the author.Mr. Trump, who is 77 and has demonstrated his own cognitive issues lately, has outpaced his rivals for the Republican nomination by double digits in the polls and appears poised to steamroller to his third general election. That is despite four criminal indictments on 91 felony counts of illegally trying to overthrow an election, endangering national security and other charges. Despite his political liabilities, surveys show he is either tied with Mr. Biden or leading slightly both nationally and in the battleground states that will decide the Electoral College.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Republicans Weigh New Debate Rules That Could Lead to More Onstage Clashes

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      The party is considering whether to open the door to debates not sponsored by the Republican National Committee, which could lead to more onstage clashes but also diminish their fanfare.The next Republican debate on Wednesday could be the last one sponsored by the Republican National Committee in the 2024 primary race, with the party considering debate rule changes that would open the door to more onstage clashes but also diminish the fanfare around them.The debate in Tuscaloosa, Ala., comes as Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, is trying to assert herself as the main rival to former President Donald J. Trump, after months in which Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has ceded ground. The R.N.C. is weighing a proposal to end its demand that candidates participate exclusively in the party’s debates, with a final decision expected this week.Few have been happy with how the debates, which are overseen by the R.N.C., have unfolded so far. Mr. Trump has boycotted them, dampening interest and lessening the stakes. His rivals have been forced to fight among themselves. And lower-polling candidates have steadily been pushed out by rising thresholds to qualify.Debates are traditionally the marquee events of a presidential primary contest, with voters eagerly tuning in to watch the candidates disagree on policy and vie for their support. But the Republican front-runner’s stubborn absence this election cycle has robbed them of much of their drama.The debate on Wednesday will feature four candidates, the R.N.C. announced on Monday evening: Ms. Haley, Mr. DeSantis, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who appeared to have reached the polling requirement over the weekend as party officials met on Monday to approve a final poll that would allow him to qualify.“The fourth debate is another fantastic opportunity for our Republican candidates to share our winning agenda with the American people,” Ronna McDaniel, the party chairwoman, said in a statement.The party had previously signaled plans to hold forums in January in both Iowa and New Hampshire before those states’ nominating contests. Now, those debates may not happen as events sponsored by the party, according to four people involved in the process, though no final decisions have been made. The party could also still sponsor future debates even after stripping away the exclusivity requirement. Other news outlets have continued to engage in talks to hold debates.The debate rule change idea was presented last week to the R.N.C.’s debate committee by David Bossie, who has led that group and was a former top political aide to Mr. Trump. The proposal was first reported by The Washington Post.Multiple candidates have complained about the current limits, believing they have been denied the chance for exposure elsewhere. Still, some 2024 campaigns have been leery of the role that Mr. Bossie is playing for the party given his past close ties to Mr. Trump. The party’s debate committee will formally consider the proposal in a meeting after the debate in Alabama.“As has been the process throughout the entire year, the debate committee will meet to decide the details of future debates,” said Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, declining to answer specific questions.Ratings for the debates have steadily shrunk. The first clash in Milwaukee, on Fox News, had 12.8 million viewers. The second debate, hosted by Fox Business, had 9.5 million. The third debate, on NBC News and other platforms, dwindled to 7.5 million, according to Nielsen figures.And the fourth debate will be on a lesser-known platform than the first three, NewsNation. The moderators will be Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and Eliana Johnson of the Washington Free Beacon.Mr. DeSantis, whose super PAC has been caught in a cycle of turmoil, has been aggressively seeking more opportunities in the national spotlight, including an unusual debate last week on Fox News with the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom. And in a recent appearance on Newsmax, Mr. DeSantis said that network should get a debate. “Maybe as we go forward, maybe there will be more freewheeling debates,” he said.Asked about the R.N.C.’s potential rules change, Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, said in a text message, “Ron DeSantis wants to debate Donald Trump and/or Nikki Haley in the early states regardless of who sponsors it.”Ms. Haley’s team was more circumspect.A spokeswoman for her campaign, Olivia Perez-Cubas, said in a statement: “Everyone knows Nikki Haley has shined in all the debates. We look forward to debating Donald Trump.”It’s not clear that Mr. Trump will be debating anyone anytime soon, coasting on his polling dominance despite four criminal indictments and 91 felony counts.The former president has boycotted all of the debates to date, arguing that it makes little sense for him to give rivals who are so far behind him any platform to hit him. Even as his campaign hopes for as many debates as possible in a general election against President Biden, he and his team have publicly called for the Republican Party to cancel its remaining debates, targeting the potential Iowa one in particular.Previously, the party has squashed efforts for candidates to debate one another. At one point, Mr. Christie and Mr. Ramaswamy scheduled a debate on Fox News to gin up interest in their candidacies, but the party said it would violate the pledge.“Trump allies in the RNC put an end to it,” Mr. Christie complained on social media. “Nothing new… Party bosses doing everything possible to keep Trump in power.”Mr. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, used the last debate to attack Ms. McDaniel, the party chairwoman, and later circulated a petition to fire her. “Where is the accountability for years of losing: 2018, 2020, 2022 and now 2023?” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.His post did not mention Mr. Trump, who has been the face of the party during all of those elections. Mr. Ramaswamy has lavished praise on the former president even while running against him.The criteria to make the party debates have significantly ratcheted up since August. The minimum threshold is now 6 percent in national or early-state polling, as well as 80,000 donors. The first debate required only 1 percent support.Mr. Trump has been particularly keen on ending the debates before Iowa. The driver of his concerns isn’t clear. But Iowa was a particularly thorny state for him in early 2016, when he lost the caucuses after boycotting a debate in the state hosted by Fox News.Citing Mr. Trump’s substantial polling lead, Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said, “He’s going to be the nominee, so it’s time for everyone to get behind him.” More