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    Biden Sharpens Focus on Trump as He Tries to Re-Energize Democrats for 2024

    Months before the first Republican primaries, the president is turning his attention to his old adversary as he tries to re-energize his party’s voters and donors.This spring, as the Republican presidential primary race was just beginning, the Democratic National Committee commissioned polling on how the leading Republicans — Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis — fared against President Biden in battleground states.But now, as Mr. Trump’s lead in the primary has grown and hardened, the party has dropped Mr. DeSantis from such hypothetical matchups. And the Biden campaign’s polling on Republican candidates is now directed squarely at Mr. Trump, according to officials familiar with the surveys.The sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.On Sunday, after Mr. Trump sought to muddy the waters on his position on abortion, the Biden operation and its surrogates pushed back with uncommon intensity. On Monday, Mr. Biden told donors at a New York fund-raiser that Mr. Trump was out to “destroy” American democracy, in some of his most forceful language so far about the implications of a second Trump term. And on Wednesday, as the president spoke to donors at a Manhattan hotel, he acknowledged in the most explicit way yet that he now expected to be running against “the same fella.”The mileposts all point to a general election that has, in many ways, already arrived.David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said engaging now with Mr. Trump would help Mr. Biden in “getting past this hand-wringing period” about whether the president is the strongest Democratic nominee.“The whole predicate of Biden’s campaign is that he would be running against Trump,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Their operative theory is, once this is focused on the race between Biden and Trump, that nervousness will fade away into a shared sense of mission. Their mission is in getting to that place quickly and ending this period of doubt.”Mr. Trump has undertaken a pivot of his own, skipping the Republican debates and seeking to position himself as the inevitable G.O.P. nominee, with allies urging the party to line up behind him even before any primary votes are cast.Mr. Biden, in his remarks to donors on Monday on Broadway, issued a blunt warning about his likely Republican opponent.“Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” the president said. “And I will always defend, protect and fight for our democracy. That’s why I’m running.”Mr. Biden is planning to follow up those off-camera remarks with what he has billed as a “major speech” about democracy. The White House said the speech, in the Phoenix area the day after the next Republican debate, would be about “honoring the legacy of Senator John McCain and the work we must do together to strengthen our democracy.”Instead of attending that debate, on Wednesday, Mr. Trump is making a trip to Michigan planned during the autoworker strike — aiming to appeal to the blue-collar workers who helped deliver him the White House in 2016. The Biden campaign has been building out a plan to counter him there, in addition to its planned response to the Republican debate.Mr. Trump has maintained dominance in the Republican primary, both in national polls and in Iowa and New Hampshire.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesMr. Biden is facing a moment of turbulence. His son Hunter was just indicted. The Republican-controlled House is moving toward impeachment. Polls show a lack of Democratic excitement for his re-election. And voters continue to dismiss rosy economic indicators and hold a more dour financial outlook, even as the president has tried to sell a success story under the banner of “Bidenomics.”The focus on democracy and Mr. Trump is not new for Mr. Biden. The opening images of his 2024 campaign kickoff video showed the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol, and he delivered two major addresses on the stakes for democracy before the 2022 midterm elections.Yet Mr. Biden, White House officials and his campaign have remained studiously silent on the biggest developments surrounding Mr. Trump this year: the 91 felony counts he faces in indictments in four jurisdictions. The president wants to avoid giving credence to the evidence-free idea that he is personally responsible for Mr. Trump’s legal travails.“Trump was his own worst enemy throughout the last year,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist. “While most of the punditry talked about how much the indictments helped with his base, it hurt with everyone else.”Ms. Greenberg said it was almost inevitable that Mr. Trump would energize Democratic voters if he won the Republican nomination again. “For better or worse, Trump has been the driver of the highest turnout we’ve seen in the last 100 years in the last three election cycles,” she said. “I fully believe Trump will be a driver of turnout in 2024 as well.”“Joe Biden is an unmitigated disaster and his policies have hurt Americans and made this country weaker,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump. “President Trump continues to dominate the primary because voters know he’s the only person who will beat Biden and take back the White House.”Mr. Biden also faces a key fund-raising deadline at the end of September. In his 2020 run, he struggled to raise money from small donors online — until he became the nominee against Mr. Trump, when he shattered fund-raising records.Mr. Biden’s fund-raising during the reporting period that ended in June showed that he was again slow to attract vigorous support from small donors online, though people familiar with the campaign’s fund-raising have said the numbers have been better during the current quarter.At the start of this year, Democrats close to the White House had hoped for a long and bloody Republican primary that would consume the party, leaving its eventual nominee undecided until deeper into 2024 and by then weakened.But as Mr. Trump has consolidated his lead — he has consistently drawn more than 50 percent support in national polling averages since late spring — Democrats are resigned to something of a political consolation prize: the chance to draw an early contrast with Mr. Trump.Some of Mr. Biden’s top aides and advisers have believed, despite ample polling earlier in the year that suggested the opposite, that Mr. Trump would be a tougher general-election opponent than Mr. DeSantis or any of the other Republican presidential candidates.This spring, months before the D.N.C.’s pollsters stopped testing matchups between Mr. Biden and Mr. DeSantis, the party’s polls showed the Florida governor faring better than Mr. Trump against the president in battleground states.Now, Democrats in the few states where the 2024 presidential election is likely to be decided have come to the same conclusion as Mr. Biden: It’s going to be Mr. Trump again.“I don’t see any of the other Republicans gaining any traction against Trump,” said Representative Dina Titus of Nevada, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “DeSantis has dropped even further in the polls and nobody else has moved much ahead.”Most of the advertisements Mr. Biden’s campaign has broadcast so far have been positive messages highlighting his record on foreign policy and the economy. But a spot about abortion rights that has run for three weeks shows Mr. Trump boasting that “I’m the one who got rid of Roe v. Wade” and saying, in a quickly recanted 2016 interview, that women should be punished for having abortions. The ad also shows Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina speaking about legislation to restrict abortion.Mr. Biden has spoken, off and on, about Mr. Trump for months. He has also used several right-wing figures, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, as stand-ins to paint the whole Republican Party as in thrall to Mr. Trump.In a Labor Day speech in Philadelphia that Mr. Biden’s aides described as framing the forthcoming general-election campaign, he made five references to “the last guy” and one to “my predecessor” but never mentioned Mr. Trump by name.The shift toward Mr. Trump was reflected in Mr. Biden’s remarks to donors this week. At his New York fund-raiser, Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump’s name four times in 12 minutes.“I don’t believe America is a dark, negative nation — a nation of carnage driven by anger, fear and revenge,” he said. “Donald Trump does.”Mr. Biden’s Instagram feed, meanwhile, offers a road map of the issues on which his campaign wants to draw a contrast with Mr. Trump in 2024: abortion, guns, infrastructure, jobs and prescription drug prices.“I think,” said Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, “that we are set for a rematch.” More

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    Donald Trump Tests Pro-Life America

    On Sunday, Donald Trump sent shock waves through the Republican primary when an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” aired in which he said that Ron DeSantis did a “terrible thing” and made a “terrible mistake” when he signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban. It’s the kind of statement that could end virtually any other Republican presidential campaign. Opposition to abortion rights, after all, is every bit as fundamental to Republican identity as support for abortion rights is to Democratic identity. Breaking with the party on that issue is the kind of heresy that no national politician can survive.Or is it? When it comes to Republican identity, is support for Trump, the person, now more central than any other issue, including abortion?My colleague Michelle Goldberg speaks often of the distinction between movements that seek converts and movements that hunt heretics. It’s an extremely helpful one. Cultural and political projects centered around winning converts tend to be healthier. They’re outward-facing and bridge-building. Heretic hunters, by contrast, tend to be angrier. They turn movements inward. They believe in addition by subtraction.The G.O.P. under Trump hunts heretics. Oddly enough, it has grown more intolerant even as it has become less ideological. The reason is simple: Trump is ideologically erratic but personally relentless. He demands absolute loyalty and support. He relishes driving dissenters out of the party or, ideally, into political retirement.Trump presents the pro-life movement with multiple heresy-hunting problems. First, and most obviously, if support for Trump is the central plank of the new G.O.P. orthodoxy, then the pro-life movement will find its cause subordinated to Trump’s ambitions as long as he reigns. If he believes the pro-life movement helps him, the movement will enjoy the substantial benefits of his largess — for example, the nomination of pro-life judges, including the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. But if he perceives the movement to be hurting his political ambitions — as his comments to Welker suggest he feels now — then its members will be cast as the heretics and will stand outside, in the cold, complaining about their lost influence to a Republican public that will not care.Second, as long as the Trumpian right shapes the pro-life movement more than the other way around, the movement will adopt many of the same tactics. It won’t merely serve Trump, it will also imitate Trump. Every movement adopts the character of its leaders, and if Trump is the leader of the G.O.P. and by extension the pro-life movement, then his manners and methods will dominate the discourse.Finally, and more important, if the backlash to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision teaches us anything, it’s that the pro-life movement cannot be hunting heretics. As a strategy, heretic hunting is far less costly to the side with the more popular position, which can afford its purity, at least for a time. The same impulse can be utterly destructive to those in the minority, as the pro-life movement clearly is now.As I discussed in a Times Opinion Audio short last week, the Guttmacher Institute published new research suggesting that the number of legal abortions has actually increased after Dobbs. Even though abortion is illegal or sharply restricted in 14 states, there were roughly 10 percent more abortions in the remaining 36 states and Washington, D.C., in the first six months of 2023 than there were when abortion was legal across the country in 2020.At the same time that abortion numbers rise, the electoral results for the pro-life movement have been exceedingly grim. When abortion referendums have been placed on statewide ballots, the pro-choice movement has won. Every time. Even in states as red as Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The general polling numbers, moreover, are disastrous. There has been a marked increase in support for abortion rights positions, and there’s evidence that the pro-life movement began its sharp decline during the Trump administration. After years of stability in abortion polling, support for the pro-life cause is at an extraordinarily low ebb.In this context, heretic hunting is disastrous. The pro-life movement has to seek converts. Its first three priorities should be to persuade, persuade and, yes, persuade. Donald Trump is not the man for that job, not only because he’s a bully and a heretic hunter but also because it is quite clear that he is not convictionally pro-life. He is conveniently pro-life, and the moment it stops being convenient, he stops having a meaningful opinion either way.How would someone who is convictionally pro-life and also eager to persuade have responded to Kristen Welker’s questions? Such a person wouldn’t condemn pro-life laws unless those laws were poorly written or had glaring flaws. Instead, he or she would use a challenging question from Welker as an opportunity to persuade, in terms that even skeptics could understand.For example, when speaking of so-called heartbeat bills that ban abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy, one could connect the concept to one of the happiest moments in parents’ lives — the first moment they heard their child’s heartbeat. Parents feel that joy because it is tangible evidence of life and health. Even for a parent who is anxious, or financially stressed, or caught in a terrible relationship, that heartbeat still signals a life that is precious.If a politician is challenged to describe the kind of pro-life legislation he’d seek in a nation or state that increasingly favors abortion rights, he could emphasize how a holistic pro-life movement can work with pro-choice allies on legislation that would improve the lives of mothers and children. It turns out that our nation can reduce abortions without banning abortions, and it did so for decades before the abortion rate rose under Trump.To take one example, in 2021, Mitt Romney advanced a child allowance proposal that would provide families with $4,200 per year per child for each child up to age 6, and $3,000 per year per child between the ages of 6 and 17. Crucially, benefits would begin before birth, helping financially distressed families to prepare to care for their new children.Not only would the plan cut childhood poverty (while paying for itself through cuts elsewhere), it would almost certainly also reduce the number of abortions. Writing in Public Discourse, the Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone analyzed the impact of financial support for mothers on abortion rates and found that not only does financial support decrease abortion, that decrease is also most pronounced in jurisdictions with the fewest restrictions on abortion.That’s what persuasion can look like — defending the source of your convictions by explaining and demonstrating love for kids and moms while also looking for areas of agreement and common purpose. But does any of that sound like Donald Trump to you?Despite generating interest from conservatives and progressives, Romney’s proposal went nowhere. An astute analysis by Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic noted that the Biden administration had a competing child tax credit plan and Romney himself was an “isolated figure” in his party. While some Republicans reject direct cash transfers, it’s also true that working with Romney meant crossing Trump, and that, of course, would be heresy.In the days after the Dobbs decision, I wrote a piece arguing that when Roe was reversed, the right wasn’t ready. A Trump movement animated by rage and fear wasn’t prepared to embrace life and love. And now the pro-life movement is forced to ponder: Is Donald Trump more important to the G.O.P. than even the cause of life itself? Is he under any circumstances the best ambassador for a cause that’s already losing ground?For a generation, the pro-life movement was powerful enough to hunt heretics right out of the Republican Party. Now, if it clashes with Trump, it might find itself the heretic. And if the movement is that weak — if it is that beholden to such a corrupt and cruel man — then we might look back at the Dobbs decision not as a great victory for the pro-life cause, but rather as the beginning of a long defeat, one of a movement that forgot how to persuade. More

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    Polls Show Ron DeSantis Sliding in the Republican Primary

    Several recent surveys, nationally and in early-voting states, undermine the governor’s argument that the primary is a two-way race between him and former President Donald J. Trump.Several recent polls show Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida losing ground in the Republican presidential primary, both nationally and in early-voting states.The numbers undermine an argument pushed by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign: that the primary is effectively a two-way race in which he is the only candidate who can consolidate support against former President Donald J. Trump.A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Wednesday found that in New Hampshire, home to the first Republican primary, Mr. DeSantis had lost more than half of his support since the last U.N.H. poll two months ago. He had just 10 percent in the poll — not only far behind Mr. Trump (39 percent), but roughly tied with Vivek Ramaswamy (13 percent), Nikki Haley (12 percent) and Chris Christie (11 percent).In Iowa, which will hold the first Republican caucus in January, a Fox Business poll released Wednesday showed him at 15 percent, more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump and not far from third place, with Ms. Haley at 11 percent. Unlike the New Hampshire poll, the Fox poll didn’t show Mr. DeSantis actively shedding support — he was down only one point compared with the outlet’s July survey, which is not significant. But it showed no progress for him as the time he has to make gains grows shorter.The picture was similar in South Carolina, where another Fox Business poll found him at 10 percent, significantly behind not only Mr. Trump, who was at 46 percent, but also Ms. Haley, the state’s former governor, at 18 percent. In July, he had been roughly tied with Ms. Haley.And nationally, a Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Mr. DeSantis at 12 percent — a full 50 points behind Mr. Trump and six points below where he was in August.A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.Ruth Igielnik More

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    It’s Not a Race, Yet, in the Republican Primary

    Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern history of contested presidential primaries.Reba Saldanha/ReutersDonald J. Trump’s lead in the Republican primary just keeps growing.He breached 60 percent of the vote in Fox News and Quinnipiac polls last week, including 60-13 and 62-12 leads over his nearest rival, the not-so-near Ron DeSantis.Even more notable: His gains follow what would be considered a disastrous 50-day stretch for any other campaign. Since early August, he has faced new federal and state criminal indictments for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. He skipped the first presidential debate, which was nonetheless watched by over 10 million people. Not only did it not hurt him, but he came out stronger.With these latest gains, Mr. Trump is inching into rarefied territory. The latest surveys show him polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries. He’s approaching the position of George W. Bush, who led John McCain by a similar margin at this stage of the 2000 race. And in the two aforementioned polls, he’s matching Mr. Bush’s position.The 2000 election is a helpful reminder that the race might still become more competitive. Mr. Bush skipped the first two debates, but Mr. McCain ultimately won New Hampshire, cleared the field of significant opponents, and ultimately won six more contests. He didn’t win, of course. He didn’t come close. But it was at least a race. That’s more than can be said right now for Mr. Trump’s competition, which would probably go 0 for 50 if states voted today.On paper, Mr. Trump faces greater risks than Mr. Bush did — including the risk of imprisonment. On the trail, he’s relatively weak in Iowa, where his recent comments about abortion — he called a six-week ban a “terrible thing” — might raise additional skepticism from the state’s religious conservatives. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in Iowa (roughly 45-15) is quite similar to where Mr. Bush stood in New Hampshire at this time 24 years ago.Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Trump hasn’t consolidated the support of Republican elites. Unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. DeSantis is not a mere factional candidate. There remains a chance, unlikely though it may seem today, that Mr. Trump’s skeptics could consolidate against him, perhaps fueled by an unprecedented criminal trial in the heart of the primary season.But to this point, the theoretical risks to Mr. Trump haven’t materialized. More than anything, this probably reflects his unique strengths. He’s a former president, not the son of a former president. Perhaps this race is more like a president seeking re-election than a typical open, contested primary. At the very least, his resilience in the face of electoral defeat and criminal indictment is a powerful indication of his unusual standing.And in contrast with Mr. McCain at this stage in the 2000 race, Mr. Trump’s opposition is well known. It’s probably fair to say that Mr. DeSantis has faded more than he has been outright defeated, so there’s room for a resurgence — something like Mr. McCain’s comeback in 2008. But the easiest path to surge in a primary is usually to be discovered by voters for the first time, and that path will not be available to the likes of Mr. DeSantis, Mike Pence and Chris Christie.The winner of the first debate might have been Nikki Haley, but she represents something of a best case for Mr. Trump: moderate and strong enough to peel away anti-Trump votes from Mr. DeSantis; far too moderate to pose a serious threat to Mr. DeSantis or to win the nomination.So while history and today’s circumstances suggest a path toward a tighter race, it’s worth being frank about what we’re watching today. This race currently has many of the features of a noncompetitive contest, like an overwhelming polling lead, a leading candidate who doesn’t need to debate and party leadership that’s unwilling to attack the front-runner, despite major reservations. It’s a lot like what we see in the Democratic race, which is not considered competitive. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in the latest polls is getting about as large as President Biden’s recent leads over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Of course, there are several ways in which the Republican contest is different from the Democratic one. Unlike Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has mainstream challengers. The G.O.P. race is closer in the early states, where Mr. Trump is beneath 50 percent. If Mr. DeSantis beat Mr. Trump in Iowa, perhaps Republicans could rapidly coalesce around him, much as moderates did for Mr. Biden against Bernie Sanders in 2020. And there is the extraordinary prospect of a federal trial in March. Together, it’s easy to imagine how this becomes a competitive race again.But while the race might become hotly competitive in the future, it isn’t exactly a competitive one today. More

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    Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

    Low poll numbers could keep the long-shot Republicans off the stage next Wednesday in the second presidential primary debate.After eking their way into the first Republican presidential debate last month, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, long-shot candidates, appear to be in jeopardy of failing to qualify for the party’s second debate next week.Both have been registering support in the low single digits in national polls and in the polls from early nominating states that the Republican National Committee uses to determine eligibility.The threshold is higher for this debate, happening on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Several better-known G.O.P. rivals are expected to make the cut — but the candidate who is perhaps best known, former President Donald J. Trump, is again planning to skip the debate.Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination despite a maelstrom of indictments against him, will instead give a speech to striking union autoworkers in Michigan.Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?Six candidates appear to have made the cut for the next debate. Donald J. Trump is not expected to attend.Some of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics in the G.O.P. have stepped up calls for the party’s bottom-tier candidates to leave the crowded race, consolidating support for a more viable alternative to the former president.Lance Trover, a spokesman for the Burgum campaign, contended in an email on Wednesday that Mr. Burgum was still positioned to qualify for the debate. Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said in an email on Wednesday that candidates have until 48 hours before the debate to qualify. She declined to comment further about which ones had already done so.Before the first debate on Aug. 23, the R.N.C. announced it was raising its polling and fund-raising thresholds to qualify for the second debate, which will be televised by Fox Business. Candidates must now register at least 3 percent support in a minimum of two national polls accepted by the R.N.C. The threshold for the first debate was 1 percent.Debate organizers will also recognize a combination of one national poll and polls from at least two of the following early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.“While debate stages are nice, we know there is no such thing as a national primary,” Mr. Trover said in a statement, adding, “Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are the real people that narrow the field.”Mr. Burgum’s campaign has a plan to give him a boost just before the debate, Mr. Trover added, targeting certain Republicans and conservative-leaning independents through video text messages. A super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in Republican polls, has used a similar text messaging strategy.Mr. Burgum, a former software executive, is also harnessing his wealth to introduce himself to Republicans through television — and at considerable expense. Since the first debate, a super PAC aligned with him has booked about $8 million in national broadcast, live sports and radio advertising, including a $2 million infusion last week, according to Mr. Burgum’s campaign, which is a separate entity. His TV ads appeared during Monday Night Football on ESPN.As of Wednesday, there were six Republicans who appeared to be meeting the national polling requirement, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation site.That list was led by Mr. Trump, who is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by an average of more than 40 percentage points. The list also includes the multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was averaging only 2.4 percent support nationally as of Wednesday, he is also expected to make the debate stage by relying on a combination of national and early nominating state polls to qualify.Mr. Scott has performed better in places like Iowa and his home state than in national polls, and his campaign has pressed the R.N.C. to place more emphasis on early nominating states.The R.N.C. also lifted its fund-raising benchmarks for the second debate. Only candidates who have received financial support from 50,000 donors will make the debate stage — 10,000 more than they needed for the first debate. They must also have at least 200 donors in 20 or more states or territories.While Mr. Burgum’s campaign said that it had reached the fund-raising threshold, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Hutchinson had.Both candidates resorted to some unusual tactics to qualify for the first debate.Mr. Burgum offered $20 gift cards to anyone who gave at least $1 to his campaign, while Politico reported that Mr. Hutchinson had paid college students for each person they could persuade to contribute to his campaign.Candidates will still be required to sign a loyalty pledge promising to support the eventual Republican nominee, something that Mr. Trump refused to do before skipping the first debate.Shane Goldmacher More

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    Young Voters Are Frustrated. They’re Staying Engaged ‘Out of Sheer Self-Defense.’

    A Pew Research Center report released this week called Americans’ views of our politics “dismal.”That might be too kind a word.On metric after metric, the report ticked through markers of our persistent pessimism. In 1994, it says, “just 6 percent” of Americans viewed both political parties negatively. That number has now more than quadrupled to 28 percent. The percentage who believe our political system is working “extremely or very well”: just 4 percent.And on many measures, younger people are the most frustrated, and supportive of disruptive change as a remedy.Younger voters recognize that our political system is broken, and they have little nostalgia about a less broken time. They have almost no memory of an era when government was less partisan and less gridlocked. Their instincts are to fix the system they’ve inherited, not to wind back the clock to a yesteryear.According to Pew, among American adults under 30, 70 percent favor having a national popular vote for president, 58 percent favor expansion of the Supreme Court, 44 percent favor expansion of the House of Representatives, and 45 percent favor amending the Constitution to change the way representation in the Senate is apportioned — numbers higher than their older counterparts, particularly those over 50.But the American political system wasn’t built to make radical change easy. Yes, our political system needs a major overhaul, but such an overhaul is almost inconceivable given current political constraints.This can be a bracing reality when youthful idealism crashes into it.The knot that the country finds itself in may be one reason Pew found that younger voters are the least likely to believe that voting can have at least some effect on the country’s future direction.And yet, according to a poll this spring of 18- to 29-year-olds by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, they’re still engaged. As John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the institute and the author of “Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America,” put it, “From the midterms through the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election, we are seeing young Americans increasingly motivated to engage in politics out of sheer self-defense and a responsibility to fight for those even more vulnerable than themselves.”This defensive posture is understandable when you think about the political era in which these younger voters came of age: a dizzying period of dysfunction, calamity and activism.Among voters 30 to 49, the oldest were in their 20s on Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day would roll into America’s longest war — 20 years in Afghanistan. Those voters would see the hopefulness around the election of Barack Obama as president, but also the extreme backlash to his election that would culminate in the election of Donald Trump, Obama’s intellectual and moral antithesis.Voters 18 to 29 ranged from their preteen years to their early 20s when Trump was elected in 2016. Only the oldest of them were eligible to vote at the time. The Trump years saw a president who has been accused of sexual assault, was openly hostile to minorities and disdainful of civil rights protests, and lied incessantly as those supporting him repeatedly excused or covered for him.The oldest of this group were in their late teens when Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, so they lived the birth and rise of Black Lives Matter and are now living the backlash to it.The Trump years exposed the inability — the ineptitude — of our system to hold leaders accountable and ended with an attempt to overturn an election and a storming of the Capitol.Those years also saw a surge in mass shootings and warnings about the effects of climate change growing more dire, two issues that have become important to young voters. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was the clincher.It’s no wonder that younger voters are so frustrated and so thirsty for change, and they spare no one in pursuing it.While younger voters are more likely to have a favorable view of Democrats than of Republicans, they’re also more likely than older generations to have unfavorable views of both parties. More than half of Americans under 30 said it is usually the case that none of candidates running for political office in recent years represent their views well.This all hints at a profound frustration with a lack of results, the professionalization of politics, and incrementalism and intransigence.And yet this frustrated army of voters could still have a major impact in 2024. The Brookings Institution did the math on how important this voting bloc will be:According to our projections, based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates, if Americans under 45 (plurals and millennials) vote at the same rate as they did in the 2020 presidential election, they will represent more than one-third (37 percent) of the 2024 electorate. If that generational cohort’s contribution to the electorate in next year’s presidential general election is the same as its contribution to the U.S. voting age population, it will comprise nearly half (49 percent) of the vote on Nov. 5, 2024.In recent elections, younger voters have been voting nearly two to one for Democrats. And the Republican Party may be pushing more of that group in that direction as the party digs in its heels on social positions unpopular with them.But it’s a sad state of affairs that our current political system starves young people of hope and optimism, and instead forces them to cast their ballots as if under existential threat, regardless of which party benefits.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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    Democratic Leaders Are More Optimistic About Biden 2024 Than Voters

    Party leaders have rallied behind the president’s re-election bid, but as one top Democratic strategist put it, “The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll.”As President Biden shifts his re-election campaign into higher gear, the strength of his candidacy is being tested by a striking divide between Democratic leaders, who are overwhelmingly unified behind his bid, and rank-and-file voters in the party who harbor persistent doubts about whether he is their best option.From the highest levels of the party on down, Democratic politicians and party officials have long dismissed the idea that Mr. Biden should have any credible primary challenger. Yet despite their efforts — and the president’s lack of a serious opponent within his party — they have been unable to dispel Democratic concerns about him that center largely on his age and vitality.The discord between the party’s elite and its voters leaves Democrats confronting a level of disunity over a president running for re-election not seen for decades.Interviews with more than a dozen strategists, elected officials and voters this past week, conversations with Democrats since Mr. Biden’s campaign began in April, and months of public polling data show that this disconnect has emerged as a defining obstacle for his candidacy, worrying Democrats from liberal enclaves to swing states to the halls of power in Washington.Mr. Biden’s campaign and his allies argue that much of the intraparty dissent will fade away next year, once the election becomes a clear choice between the president and former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the Republican primary field.But their assurances have not tamped down worries about Mr. Biden from some top Democratic strategists and many of the party’s voters, who approve of his performance but worry that Mr. Biden, who will be 82 on Inauguration Day, may simply not be up for another four years — or even the exhausting slog of another election.“The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll,” said James Carville, a longtime party strategist, who worries that a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden could lead to lower Democratic turnout in 2024. “You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here.”James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, is among those who worry that the party’s voters are not enthusiastic enough about Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.Raul E. Diego/Anadolu Agency, via Getty ImagesIn recent days, a barrage of grim news for Mr. Biden, including an autoworkers strike in the Midwest that poses a challenge to his economic agenda and the beginning of impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, has made this intraparty tension increasingly difficult to ignore. Those developments come amid a darkening polling picture, as recent surveys found that majorities of Democrats do not want him to run again, are open to an alternative in the primary and dread the idea of a Biden-Trump rematch.A CNN poll released this month found that 67 percent of Democrats would prefer Mr. Biden not be renominated, a higher percentage than in polling conducted by The New York Times and Siena College over the summer that found half would prefer someone else.In quiet conversations and off-the-record gatherings, Democratic officials frequently acknowledge their worries about Mr. Biden’s age and sagging approval ratings. But publicly, they project total confidence about his ability to lead and win.“It’s definitely got a paradoxical element to it,” said Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who is among a group of governors who put aside their national ambitions to support Mr. Biden’s re-election bid. “This is only a matter of time until the broad party, and broadly speaking, Americans, converge with the opinions of folks like myself.”Many party officials say that Mr. Biden is making a high-stakes bet that the power of incumbency, a good political environment for his party and the fact that Democrats generally like the president will eventually outweigh the blaring signs of concern from loyal supporters. Any discussion of an alternative is little more than a fantasy, they say, since challenging Mr. Biden would not only appear disloyal but would also most likely fail — and potentially weaken the president’s general-election standing.One Democratic voter who backed Mr. Biden in 2020, James Collier, an accountant in Houston, sees the situation slightly differently. He said he would like Mr. Biden to clear the way for a new generation that could energize the party’s base.“I think he’s a little — not a little — he’s a lot old,” Mr. Collier, 57, said. “I’m hoping he would in his own mind think, ‘I need to sit this out and let someone else do this.’”There are no indications that anyone prominent will mount a late challenge to Mr. Biden, though strategists working for other elected officials say that a number of well-known politicians would probably jump into the race if, anytime before the end of the year, the president signaled he was not running.The situation is almost the opposite of the Republican field, where Mr. Trump holds a commanding lead among the party’s base but remains far less beloved by a political class that fears his unpopularity among moderate and swing voters will lead to defeat in 2024.William Owen, a Democratic National Committee member from Tennessee, was full of praise for Mr. Biden and said he was puzzled by surveys that consistently showed the president struggling to win over Democratic voters.“I’m looking at all the polling, and I’m amazed that it has so little to do with reality,” he said in an interview this past week. “A big part of it is just pure ageism. The American people are prejudiced against old people.”Yet in describing his interactions with Democrats around Knoxville, which he represented for years in the Tennessee legislature, Mr. Owen said he could not escape questions about Mr. Biden’s health.“People ask me: ‘How’s Joe doing? Will he last another four years?’” Mr. Owen said. “That’s the real question. Will Joe Biden last another four years? I’m happy to say, yes, he will. He’s going to live to be 103.”Officials in Mr. Biden’s campaign insist that hand-wringing about his age is driven by news coverage, not by voters’ concerns. They dismiss his low approval ratings and middling polling numbers as typical of an incumbent president more than a year away from Election Day.A campaign spokesman cited articles about Democrats’ fretting about President Barack Obama before his second term and noted the limitations of polls so far from an election, suggesting that Mr. Biden had ample time to make his case.“President Biden is delivering results, his agenda is popular with the American people and we are mobilizing our winning coalition of voters well ahead of next year’s general election,” said Kevin Munoz, the spokesman. “Next year’s election will be a stark choice between President Biden and the extreme, unpopular MAGA agenda.”Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania, who is Black and has issued public warnings about Mr. Biden’s standing with Black voters, said that simply casting the election as a referendum on Mr. Trump and his right-wing movement — as Mr. Biden’s campaign did in 2020 — would not be enough to energize the Democratic base. Mr. Davis has urged the White House to be more aggressive about highlighting the impact of Mr. Biden’s accomplishments, particularly with Black voters.“Everyone is kind of exhausted by the fight between Biden and Trump,” he said. “People really want to hear leaders talk about how they’re going to improve the lives of their families.”Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania has cautioned Democrats against framing the 2024 election as a referendum on former President Donald J. Trump.Matt Rourke/Associated PressOther Democrats argue that Mr. Biden’s campaign must make clearer that the stakes are bigger than just the president.“It’s about showing people that the future of American democracy is at stake,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan of Virginia, who is a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “It’s not just about which president can get through the day without tripping or stumbling over their words, which everybody is going to do, but which president is going to lead this country forward in a way that helps people solve problems and keeps American democracy intact.”Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid, said Mr. Biden needed to show voters that he was fighting for the American public, pointing to battles like his administration’s legal fight with pharmaceutical companies over their new Medicare pricing plan.“The question that I would want to answer is, is he is a strong leader?” Mr. Shakir said. “When people see he is a strong leader, they will feel different about his age. They will feel different about the economy. They will feel different about a lot of things.”Malcolm Peterson, 34, a waiter in St. Paul, Minn., said he thought Mr. Biden had done a good job tackling issues related to climate change during his first term, but worried about the president’s outlook for a second term.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesMalcolm Peterson, a waiter from St. Paul, Minn., whose foremost political concern is climate change, said he generally approved of Mr. Biden’s work as president and thought he had done a good job tackling environmental issues. But he said he worried about whether the president would be able to continue that work in a second term.“I just wonder, because he’s quite old, what does he look like in another four years?” Mr. Peterson, 34, said. “I’m not a doctor. I just know what I’ve seen.” More

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    Biden Defends Striking Autoworkers: They Deserve a ‘Fair Share’

    President Biden forcefully sided with the striking United Auto Workers on Friday, dispatching two of his top aides to Detroit and calling for the three biggest American car companies to share their profits with employees whose wages and benefits he said have been unfairly eroded for years.In brief remarks from the White House hours after the union began what they called a targeted strike, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the automakers had made “significant offers” during contract negotiations, but he left no doubt his intention to make good on a 2020 promise to always have the backs of unions.“Over generations, autoworkers sacrificed so much to keep the industry alive and strong, especially the economic crisis and the pandemic,” Mr. Biden said. “Workers deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create.”Mr. Biden said that Julie Su, the acting secretary of labor, and Gene Sperling, a top White House economic adviser, would go to Michigan immediately to support both sides in the negotiations. But he said the automakers “should go further to ensure record corporate profits mean record contracts for the U.A.W.”For decades, Mr. Biden has been an unapologetic backer of unions who rejects even the approach of some Democrats when it comes to balancing the interests of corporate America and the labor movement.During the past several years, he has helped nurture what polls suggest is a resurgence of support for unions, as younger Americans in new-economy jobs push for the right to organize at the workplace. Mr. Biden declares that “unions built the middle class” in virtually every speech he delivers.“That was most pro-union statement from a White House in decades, if not longer,” Eddie Vale, a veteran Democratic strategist who worked for years at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said after the president’s remarks.The president’s decision to weigh in on the side of the union without much reservation will most likely to draw fierce criticism from different quarters. Earlier in the day — even before the president’s White House comments — Suzanne P. Clark, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, issued a searing statement blaming the strike on Mr. Biden for “promoting unionization at all costs.”After Mr. Biden’s remarks, Neil Bradley, the group’s top lobbyist in Washington, said the president’s message and the pro-union policies his administration has pursued have “emboldened these demands that just aren’t grounded in reality.”And in a possible preview of a rematch with former President Donald J. Trump, NBC on Friday aired part of an interview in which Mr. Trump sided just as forcefully with the car companies against the unions.“The autoworkers will not have any jobs, Kristen, because all of these cars are going to be made in China,” Mr. Trump said in an interview set to air Sunday on the network’s “Meet the Press” program. “The autoworkers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump.”Friday’s walkout by the U.A.W. is in some ways a broader test of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda beyond just his pro-union stand. It also touches on his call for higher wages for the middle class; his climate-driven push to reimagine an electric vehicle future for car companies; and his call for higher taxes for the wealthy. The strike is centered in Michigan, a state that the president practically must win in 2024 to remain in the Oval Office.“You’ve got rebuilding the middle class and building things again here,” Mr. Vale said. “You’ve got green energy, technology and jobs. You’ve got important states for the election. So all of these are sort of together here in a swirl.”At the White House, Mr. Biden’s aides believe the battle between the car companies and its workers will underscore many of the president’s arguments about the need to reduce income inequality, the benefits of empowered employees, and the surge in profits for companies like the automakers that makes them able to afford paying higher wages.That approach is at the heart of the economic argument that Mr. Biden and his campaign team are preparing to make in the year ahead. But it sometimes comes into conflict with the president’s other priorities, including a shift toward electric vehicles.Mr. Biden’s push for automobiles powered by batteries instead of combustion engines is seen by many unions as a threat to the workers who have toiled for decades to build cars that run on gas. The unions want factories that make electric cars — most of which are not unionized — to see higher wages and benefits too.So far, Mr. Biden has sidestepped the question of whether his push for a green auto industry will hasten the demise of the unions. But Friday’s remarks are an indication that he remains as committed as ever to the political organizations that have been at the center of his governing coalition for years.In his remarks on Friday, he hinted at the tension inherent in the technological transition from one mode of propulsion to another.“I believe that transition should be fair, and a win-win for autoworkers and auto companies,” he said. But he added: “I also believe the contract agreement must lead to a vibrant ‘Made in America’ future that promotes good, strong middle class jobs that workers can raise a family on, where the U.A.W. remains at the heart of our economy, and where the Big Three companies continue to lead in innovation, excellence, quality and leadership.”The targeted strike is designed to disrupt one of America’s oldest industries at a time that Mr. Biden is sharpening the contrast between what rivals and allies call “Bidenomics” and a Republican plan that the president warns is a darker version of trickle-down economics that mostly benefits the rich.“Their plan — MAGAnomics — is more extreme than anything America has ever seen before,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday, hours before the union voted to strike.Mr. Biden was joined on Friday by several of the more liberal members of his party, who assailed the automakers and stood by the striking workers.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, sent out a fund-raising appeal accusing the companies of refusing “to meet the demands of workers negotiating for better pay” despite having “netted nearly a quarter trillion dollars in profit over the last decade.”Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, visited striking Jeep workers at a Toledo plant that makes the popular Wrangler sport-utility vehicle and declared that “Ohioans stand in solidarity with autoworkers around our state as they demand the Big Three automakers respect the work they do to make these companies successful.”How Mr. Biden navigates the strike and its consequences could have a significant impact on his hopes for re-election. In a CNN poll earlier this month, just 39 percent of people approved of the job he is doing as president and 58 percent said his policies have made economic conditions in the United States worse, not better.The fact that the strike is centered in Michigan is also critical. Mr. Biden won the state over Mr. Trump in 2020 with just over 50 percent of the vote. Without the state’s 16 electoral votes, Mr. Biden would not have defeated his rival.Unlike previous strikes involving rail workers or air traffic controllers, Mr. Biden has no special legal authority to intervene. Still, he is not exactly just an observer either.Just before the strike vote, Mr. Biden called Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., as well as top executives of the car companies. Aides said that the president told the parties to ensure that workers get a fair contract and he urged both sides to stay at the negotiating table.Economists say a lengthy strike, if it goes on for weeks or even months, could be a blow to the American economy, especially in the middle of the country.Still, the president is unwavering on policies toward both unions and the environment. In a Labor Day speech in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden renewed both his vision about what he called a “transition to an electric vehicle future made in America” — which he said would protect jobs — and his rock-solid belief in unions.“You know, there are a lot of politicians in this country who don’t know how to say the word ‘union,’” he said. “They talk about labor, but they don’t say ‘union.’ It’s ‘union.’ I’m one of the — I’m proud to say ‘union.’ I’m proud to be the most pro-union president.” More