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      Britain’s Tories Expected to Face Election Losses

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      Almost the first thing I saw when I arrived in the London suburb of Uxbridge was two teenage girls in school uniforms getting into a fistfight in the shopping mall outside the underground station. Uxbridge is a middle-class place, stodgy but diversifying, whose voters are squeezed by a cost of living crisis and anxious about rising public disorder. Until last month, it was represented by Boris Johnson, and, as Labour lawmaker Steve Reed told me, it hasn’t sent a member of the left-leaning Labour Party to Parliament since 1966.But last month Johnson, who’d stepped down as prime minister in 2022, resigned his seat rather than face discipline for lying to Parliament regarding his shameless socializing during the pandemic lockdown. And in the election next week to replace him, Labour candidate Danny Beales is considered the favorite, a sign of just how far Tory fortunes have fallen.The contest in Uxbridge and South Ruislip — the full name of Johnson’s former constituency — is one of three elections happening next Thursday to fill seats that Conservatives have vacated. There’s also an election in Selby and Ainsty, where Johnson’s ally Nigel Adams quit shortly after Johnson did, reportedly furious about the political machinations that had thwarted his elevation to the House of Lords. And there’s one in Somerton and Frome, where the Conservative David Warburton resigned in a scandal involving cocaine and allegations of sexual misconduct.A recent poll shows the Labour candidate ahead in Selby and Ainsty, where in 2019 Adams won more than 60 percent of the vote. In Somerton and Frome, the candidate of the centrist Liberal Democrats appears to have a strong chance of prevailing. “My central expectation is that we lose all three,” a Conservative lawmaker told the BBC.Obviously, that’s not guaranteed. When I spoke to Joshua Simons, head of Labour Together, a think tank close to Labour leadership, he suggested that Conservatives were strategically exaggerating their pessimism to lower expectations. Still, there’s a broad sense that, with national elections due sometime in the next 18 months, the Conservative Party is imploding. “We Are on For a Massive Defeat,” blared a headline in the Financial Times, quoting a former Tory cabinet minister.The U.K.’s conservative collapse looks particularly stark when set against the ascendant right in much of the rest of Europe. Italy has a prime minister from a party with fascist roots. The far-right Vox could be part of the next government in Spain. There are right-wing governments in Sweden and Finland. Conservatives just won a second term in Greece. The last French election was a contest between the center-right Emmanuel Macron and the far- right Marine Le Pen, and though Le Pen lost, she appears to be gaining support in the wake of the recent riots. Even in Germany, where shame about the Holocaust once seemed to inoculate its people against right-wing extremism, the reactionary Alternative for Germany just won its first mayoral election, and in a recent poll it was the second most popular party in the country.Yet in Britain, the right appears to be approaching something like free fall, with a recent poll showing Labour with a 21-point lead nationally. It’s quite a turnaround, given that, until recently, the Tories were often called the most successful political party in the world. Less than four years ago, the party won its fourth consecutive national election by a staggering margin, leaving Labour, then led by the leftist Jeremy Corbyn, decimated. “It was catastrophic,” said Reed. “It was really in question as to whether the Labour Party could survive.” A 2021 New Republic article was subtitled, “How the Tories Became Unbeatable.”It would be nice, as someone who wants to see social democracy thrive, to report that Labour has since discovered some brilliant strategy for beating the right. In truth, though, if conservative hegemony in Britain is starting to break down, the Tories deserve most of the credit, both for their dissipation and their mismanagement.There have been so many Conservative sex and corruption scandals that the phrase “Tory sleaze” has become a cliché, and the ruling party’s decadence is matched by its incompetence. Covid created economic misery worldwide, but since the pandemic the U.K. has performed significantly worse than its peers in the rest of Europe. Among the reasons for this malaise are the fallout from Brexit, finalized in 2020, and the supply-side fantasies of Liz Truss, Johnson’s successor, who sent the economy into a tailspin during her 44 days in office.Today inflation is no longer in the double digits, but as of May, it was still at 8.7 percent, “the highest among the world’s big, rich economies,” as Reuters reported. Rent has reached record highs, and spiking interest rates are clobbering homeowners, since unlike in America, most British mortgages have their rates locked in for only two or five years. “People are seeing, you know, £500 to £600 a month increases in their mortgages, which people just can’t afford at the moment,” said Reed.Britain’s prized National Health Service is in crisis as well, with a record 7.47 million people on waiting lists for routine hospital care. On Thursday, junior doctors — postgraduate trainees who make up about half of doctors in English hospitals — went on strike over low pay. That comes after a nurses’ strike that ended late last month. Reed, who is chairing Beales’s Labour campaign in Uxbridge, points out that the hospital there is crumbling. “There is literally masonry falling out of the roofs, and parts of it are closed off because water is leaking through the roof,” he said.Simons of Labour Together told me he’s visited Uxbridge twice in the last week, and said that voters there “hate the Tories, and hate British politics at the moment.” Now, that’s very different from saying that people like or trust Labour. Scarred by the mortifying rout of the 2019 election, the Labour politicians I spoke to were decidedly humble about their own connection with voters. But they at least see things trending their way.“I think they’re going to show just how incredibly unpopular the Tories are at the moment,” Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, said of next week’s elections. “And I think they’ll show how much work the Labour Party has done to regain the trust. We’re still on that journey, by the way. I’m not complacent about that. But I think people are starting to listen to the Labour Party now.” For that, they have the Tories to thank.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What Really Happened in the Midterms?

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      A segment of swing voters decided to back Democratic candidates in many critical races.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesMore than eight months later, all the data from the 2022 midterm elections is — finally — final. The two most rigorous reports, from the Pew Research Center and Catalist, are finished.And yet despite all the data, there is a piece of the midterm puzzle that still hasn’t quite been resolved: How exactly did the Democrats manage to nearly sweep every competitive House and Senate race, even though they often fared quite miserably elsewhere?The Catalist report suggested it was the turnout, finding that Democrats won “with electorates in these contests looking more like the 2020 and 2018 electorates than a typical midterm.” Pew also pointed to turnout, but with a different interpretation, writing that Republicans won control of the House “largely on the strength of higher turnout,” and found that disproportionate numbers of Biden voters and Democrats from 2018 stayed home.You might imagine ways to square the two claims, but neither report offers a clear way to reconcile these competing stories. Catalist, a Democratic data firm, doesn’t mention a word on the partisan makeup of the electorate, despite possessing the data to do so. The Pew report, meanwhile, is framed around explaining how Republicans won the House popular vote by three points — an important outcome, but one overshadowed by the Democratic hold in the Senate and the razor-thin Republican House majority.Fortunately, our data at The New York Times can help piece together what remains of the puzzle. Over the last few years via Times/Siena College polls, we’ve interviewed tens of thousands of voters nationwide and in the crucial battleground states and districts. This data can be linked to voter registration files — the backbone of both the Catalist and Pew reports — that show exactly who voted and who did not (though not whom they voted for, of course), including in the states and districts that decided the midterm election.The findings suggest that the turnout was mostly typical of a midterm election and helped Republicans nationwide, but there are good reasons to doubt whether it was as helpful to the party out of power as it had been in previous midterms.It certainly wasn’t enough to overcome what truly distinguished the 2022 midterm election: the critical sliver of voters who were repelled by specific Republican nominees, Donald J. Trump’s “stop the steal” movement and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.At a glance, a typical midterm electorateTo some degree, every midterm leans toward the party out of power, and has an older, whiter electorate. Last November was no exception. Just consider these figures on 2022 voters nationwide:73 percent of registered Republicans (defined by whether someone is registered as a Republican or participated in a recent Republican primary) turned out in 2022, compared with 63 percent of registered Democrats. The 10-point turnout advantage meant Republicans narrowly outnumbered Democrats among 2022 voters given that there are about five percentage points more registered Democrats than registered Republicans by this measure.Just 45 percent of Black and 38 percent of Hispanic voters turned out, compared with 58 percent of non-Hispanic whites, according to data from the Census Bureau. The findings are consistent with data from voter registration files and the actual results, as we reported last fall, along with the Pew and Catalist reports, in showing a weak turnout among Black voters.Voters over 65 represented 33 percent of the electorate, according to the L2 data, compared with just 10 percent for those 18 to 29.All of these patterns are consistent with a typical midterm turnout.The size of the Republican registration advantage is almost exactly in line with the available historical data. It also aligns neatly with our pre-election estimates, which you can see for yourself in our final (and highly accurate) Times/Siena polls.And as we reported in December, this basic story holds up in the battleground states as well. Republicans outvoted Democrats everywhere, including in the very states where Democrats excelled.A hidden Democratic turnout advantage?All of this seems to add up to a stark Republican turnout advantage, powered by an older, whiter and more Republican electorate.But perhaps surprisingly, there are reasons to think the actual turnout advantage for Republican candidates might not have been nearly so large as these figures suggest.Just start with the Pew report, which found that Trump voters were four points likelier to turn out than Biden voters, 71 percent to 67 percent. That’s an important advantage, but it’s less than half the size of the 10-point Republican turnout advantage by registration. The Pew figures actually suggest the 2022 midterm electorate backed Joe Biden in 2020, even though registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats.The Times data suggests something similar. According to our estimates, 69.1 percent of Trump voters turned out compared with 66.7 percent of Biden voters — essentially the same as the Pew figures, though edging even closer to parity.These estimates are based on a statistical model that marries Times/Siena polling data and voter records (including someone’s party registration) to predict how registrants voted in the 2020 election. I’ve forced you through that wonky sentence because it means that these estimates are entirely consistent with and inclusive of all of those various Republican-friendly turnout figures offered earlier: Our estimate is that Republicans outvoted Democrats by 10 points but that Trump voters nonetheless outvoted Biden voters by only two points.Looking at the data more carefully, the source of this disparity is mostly among Democrats. The registered Democrats who stayed home in 2022 were disproportionately likely to be those who sometimes vote Republican. The Democrats who turned out, on the other hand, were especially loyal Democrats who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. This is partly because of education — midterm voters are more highly educated — but the survey data suggests that this Democratic advantage ran a lot deeper.It’s worth being cautious about this finding. The 10-point G.O.P. turnout advantage cited earlier is essentially a fact. The possibility that the practical turnout advantage for Republican candidates might have been only a third of that or less is an estimate based on fallible survey data. It’s also dependent on accurately surveying a group of people — nonvoters — who are very difficult for pollsters to measure.But the Times and Pew data tell a very similar story, despite very different methodologies, and the accurate topline results of the pre-election surveys add additional harmony. The possibility of some kind of hidden underlying Democratic advantage in motivation is also consistent with other data points on 2022, like Democrats’ astonishing success in ultra-low-turnout special elections.Close to parity in the battlegrounds?The 2022 midterm election was not a simple election decided by a national electorate. It was unusually heterogenous, with Republicans enjoying a “red wave” in states like Florida or New York while other states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, could be argued to have ridden a “blue wave.”As we’ll see, nowhere near all of the difference between these states can be attributed to turnout. But part of the difference was the disparate turnout, with Republicans enjoying a far larger turnout advantage than they did nationwide in states like Florida, while Democrats did better than they did nationwide in states like Pennsylvania. And since our estimates suggest that the Republican turnout advantage nationwide was fairly modest — more modest than the party registration figures suggest — the estimates also show that neither party enjoyed a significant turnout advantage in many battleground states where Democrats turned in above-average performances.In Northern battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Ohio, Biden and Trump voters turned out at nearly identical rates, according to our estimates.In contrast, Trump voters were likelier to turn out than Biden voters by around 10 percentage points or more in states like Florida and New York. In practice, this meant that the Florida electorate most likely voted for Mr. Trump by double digits, even though he carried the state by just three points in 2020.Most states, including the key Sun Belt battlegrounds like Arizona and Georgia, fell in between the Northern battlegrounds and the red-wave states like New York or Florida.A decisive advantage among swing votersThe resilient Democratic turnout in many key Northern battleground states might seem like a key that unlocks what happened in 2022, but it explains less than you might think.According to our estimates, Biden voters only narrowly outnumbered Trump voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Democratic candidates for Senate and governor won in landslides that greatly exceeded Mr. Biden’s margin of victory. Similarly, Trump voters outnumbered Biden voters in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, where Democrats posted crucial wins that assured control of the Senate.Ultimately, the Democratic performance depended on something that went far beyond turnout: A segment of swing voters decided to back Democratic candidates in many critical races.For all the talk about turnout, this is what distinguished the 2022 midterms from any other in recent memory. Looking back over 15 years, the party out of power has typically won independent voters by an average margin of 14 points, as a crucial segment of voters either has soured on the president or has acted as a check against the excesses of the party in power.This did not happen in 2022. Every major study — the exit polls, the AP/VoteCast study, the Pew study published this week — showed Democrats narrowly won self-identified independent voters, despite an unfavorable national political environment and an older, whiter group of independent voters. A post-election analysis of Times/Siena surveys adjusted to match the final vote count and the validated electorate show the same thing. It took the Democratic resilience among swing voters together with the Democratic resilience in turnout, especially in the Northern battlegrounds, to nearly allow Democrats to hold the U.S. House.In many crucial states, Democratic candidates for Senate and governor often outright excelled among swing voters, plainly winning over a sliver of voters who probably backed Mr. Trump for president in 2020 and certainly supported Republican candidates for U.S. House in 2022. This was most pronounced in the states where Republicans nominated stop-the-steal candidates or where the abortion issue was prominent, like Michigan.Democratic strength among swing voters in key states allowed the party to overcome an important turnout disadvantage in states like Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. That strength turned Pennsylvania and Michigan into landslides. And it ensured that the 2022 midterm election would not go down as an easy Republican victory, despite their takeover of the House, but would instead seem like a setback for conservatives. More

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      Will New Yorkers Ever Have Another Mayor They Like?

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      Eric Adams — like most of his recent predecessors — hovers around a 50 percent approval rating. It’s hard to govern when only half the city is on your side.In the early 1990s, the historian Melvin Holli set out to solve a problem with a book called “America’s Big City Mayors.” Although governing a place like New York or Philadelphia was one of the most important political jobs in the country, we had no scholarly ranking of mayors, no orderly system of evaluating them as we did for presidents, thanks to the work of midcentury academics. Relying on surveys of biographers, social scientists and experts in urban policy and on an elaborate methodology, Mr. Holli concluded that Fiorello La Guardia was the best mayor in the history of the United States. No other New York mayor appeared on the “best” list; three were included among the worst.New York City is a notoriously difficult place to manage, and measuring success in real time is also complicated. On the face of it, the question of whether the current mayor is popular or not would appear to be a simple one determined by statistics, anecdote and so on, but it is knottier than that. In polling at the end of June, fewer than half of New Yorkers — 46 percent — indicated that they had a favorable opinion of Eric Adams, a decline of four points from his numbers in December.By contrast, Bill de Blasio, whose mayoralty was dominated by conversations about his irresponsible gym habits and deficits of personality, was doing a lot better at the same point in his tenure. Even as the bourgeois creative class and the business elites were coming to reject him as if he were rancid fast food, 18 months in, he was holding at a 58 percent favorability rating, with 81 percent of Black voters expressing a positive view of him.Mr. Adams’s problems occupy a wide space well outside the parameters of charisma. He has been criticized for a lack of vision or signature initiatives analogous to universal pre-K; a cronyist’s approach to staffing; a habit of petty and bizarre distortions of the truth. Some of this was predictable. During the campaign, his evasiveness led to headlines like, “Where Does Eric Adams Really Live?” because it was not obvious, a confusion that he blamed on shoddy paperwork at the hands of a homeless accountant.Last week, we learned that a picture of an old friend, a cop who died in the line of duty 36 years ago, had not in fact been held closely by the mayor in his wallet for decades as he had previously suggested. Rather, it was printed in his office last year by underlings, in response to the death of two police officers in Harlem.These shortcomings justify apprehension and may lead voters to turn toward someone new in 2025. And yet it is also true that New Yorkers hoping for a galvanizing figure, a mayor for all people, might need to adjust their expectations and make do with a mayor for half the people.Our current political landscape makes it too hard for a broad-consensus affection to emerge for anyone — it’s almost impossible to imagine how widely embraced La Guardia was, or even Ed Koch in his first term. Over the past 10 years, most mayoral approval ratings have hovered just above or below 50 percent. Although Michael Bloomberg had an approval rate of 31 percent early in his tenure, he briefly reached 75 percent during his deft handling of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, before slipping down in the years ahead.The 50 percent benchmark is so hard to surpass now, said George Arzt, a longtime political consultant in the city, because the electorate is so fragmented. La Guardia could govern well in part because as a liberal Republican who supported the New Deal he could connect to voters across constituencies. And there were simply fewer constituencies to think about.Lacking the sharp ideological divisions that burden the party today, Northeastern Democrats were unified by a strong labor movement. La Guardia had to forge an alliance with Jews and Protestants, with immigrants from Northern Europe and Southern Europe, but he was not operating in a city of 600 spoken languages. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Dominican immigrants to the city alone multiplied more than tenfold, reaching 1.1 million.Supporters of Eric Adams — and most people presumably — appreciate that violent crime and hate crimes are trending downward. Shootings have fallen 25 percent year to date. “I don’t think people are looking for vision; I think they’re looking not to get killed,” Alan Fishman, a banker, philanthropist and Adams backer, told me. “What you hear about cronyism and dysfunction, that doesn’t affect people day to day. It’s inside baseball.”What does touch people is the sincerity of the commitment. Whatever you thought of his policies, it was hard to doubt Michael Bloomberg’s devotion to New York. Mr. Adams and Mr. de Blasio have been cast as temperamental opposites, but they share a prominent trait, a deep investment in their own marketing. (This was evident most recently in Mr. de Blasio’s case, with the long, moody interview he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, gave The Times announcing their separation, when the alternative in situations like this is typically an aloof three-line news release.)Mr. de Blasio chased a national profile more or less from the moment he was elected mayor, and he was absent from the city for stretches when he ran for president, remaining in the race even though it had become clear his bid would go nowhere. Eager to engage the high-style factions of New York his predecessor ignored, Mr. Adams has been selling us on his “swagger” since his first week in office. History shows us that it is a very rare for the mayor of New York to move on to higher office. The goal ought to be legacy rather than fame. More

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      Polls Were Great in 2022. Can They Repeat Their Success in 2024?

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      Experiments that yielded promising results in 2022 may not be enough if Trump is on the ballot again.With a highly successful polling cycle behind them, some pollsters believe a tactic that gained widespread adoption in 2022 may help carry them through the next presidential election. But even the tactic’s adherents say it may not be a panacea, particularly if former President Donald J. Trump is once again on the ballot.Pollsters have increasingly been weighting surveys based on whom respondents recall voting for in a previous election, in addition to adjusting for standard demographics such as race and age. This tactic has long been used in other countries to improve poll accuracy, but has become widely used in the United States only in recent years.“We are all terrified,” said Cameron McPhee, the chief methodologist at SSRS, CNN’s polling partner and a pollster that weighted some of its polls on recalled vote in 2022. She added, “We all feel good about the changes we made in 2022, but I think there is still a big question mark” headed into 2024.By weighting on recalled vote, pollsters can more easily correct partisan imbalances in who responds to polls, and in recent years Democrats have tended to respond to polls at higher rates than Republicans. Perhaps more important, weighting on recalled vote can specifically increase the influence of Trump supporters, a group that polls struggled to measure accurately in 2016 and 2020.The tactic’s adoption by pollsters in the United States remains far from universal. Several prominent pollsters achieved accurate results without it — including The New York Times/Siena College, which was named America’s most accurate political pollster by FiveThirtyEight after the 2022 cycle.Overall, 2022 was one of the most accurate years for polling in recent history, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight. Many pollsters “probably would have gotten 2022 right even without that extra weighting step, because we did,” said Patrick Murray of the Monmouth University Poll.After 2016, post-election analyses found that polls had consistently underrepresented less educated voters, who tended to disproportionately support Mr. Trump. To fix this, pollsters widely adopted education as an additional survey weight, and a cycle of accurate polls in 2018 seemed to reflect a return to normalcy.But in 2020, polls were more biased than they had been in any modern election, over-representing Democratic support by nearly five percentage points, as opposed to three percentage points — a more normal amount of error — in 2016.“I think one of the reasons 2022 was successful — and even to some extent 2018 — was that Trump himself was not on the ballot.” Mr. Murray said. “If history is any guide, we are probably going to see that nonresponse going into 2024 based on how the Republican nomination is going.”The 2020 election presented another distinct challenge — it took place amid the pandemic. Pollsters found that some Americans, stuck at home and lonely, were more likely to respond to surveys. While that was initially seen as a boon, it might have led to even more bias if it meant the uneven adherence to stay-at-home orders added another source of bias to who picked up the phone.Weighting on recalled vote is not without its concerns.Voters have been shown to have poor recall of whom they voted for or even whether they voted at all, typically being more likely to recall voting for the winner. One study of Canadian voters found up to a quarter of voters were inconsistent when recalling whom they had voted for.This misrepresentation of past vote can push polls in different directions depending on who won the most recent election. In 2022, that meant respondents were more likely to say they had supported Joe Biden, and pollsters using recalled vote would end up giving them less weight, meaning Republican support was bolstered.But with a prior winner from a different party, the effect would be reversed. An assessment by The Times found that weighting its 2020 polls using recalled 2016 vote would have made them even more biased toward Mr. Biden. And a report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examining how 2020 polls could have been improved found that polls that weighted on recalled vote were no better than those that didn’t.Similarly, in 2022, weighting by recalled vote would have made Times/Siena polls less accurate. As published, without weighting on recalled vote, the final polls of Senate, governor and House races had an average error of less than two percentage points and zero bias toward Democrats or Republicans. When weighted using recalled vote to 2020 election results, average error would have increased by a percentage point, and overall the polls would have been slightly biased toward Republicans.But that might have been a consequence of other decisions The Times makes, which includes weighting to demographic information available on the voter file that is not always available to other pollsters.Other pollsters have found the recalled vote method to yield significant improvements over typical weighting schemes. SSRS used a range of weighting methods in 2022, including recalled vote for some of its polls, and also experimented with weighting on political identification. Its post-election analysis found that using recalled vote as a weight would have been the most accurate overall approach, increasing average accuracy by more than three percentage points over just weighting on standard demographics.“It’s a brute force method,” said Clifford Young, the president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos. “That is, we don’t really know what it corrects for. Does it correct for only nonignorable nonresponse? Or does it correct for coverage bias? Or maybe a likely voter problem? Maybe all three.”Even so, pollsters are generally optimistic. “What the evidence is showing is that it gets us in a much better place in our polls than not using it,” Mr. Young said, noting that he believed most pollsters would be weighting on past vote in 2024. “I think the evidence thus far suggests it does more good than harm.” He added, “If we use the same weighting and correction methods that we used in 2020 in 2024, we’re going to miss the mark.” More

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      Republican Midterm Turnout Is a Warning for Democrats in 2024, Report Finds

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      Even though Democrats held the Senate and other key offices, Republican turnout was more robust, and the party showed strength among women, Latinos and rural voters, a new report found.Even though Democrats held off a widely expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, Republican turnout was in fact stronger, and the party energized key demographic groups including women, Latinos and rural voters, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.The report serves as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with early polls pointing toward a possible rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.Though Democrats maintained control of the Senate, all but one of their governor’s mansions and only narrowly lost the House, the Pew data shows that a larger percentage of voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2020 cast ballots in November than those who backed Mr. Biden did. People who had voted in past elections but sat out 2022 were overwhelmingly Democrats.And for all the Democratic emphasis on finding Republican voters who could be persuaded to buck their party in the Trump era, Pew found that a vast majority of voters stuck with the same party through the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections. Just 6 percent of voters cast ballots for more than one party over those three elections — and those voters were more likely to be Democrats flipping to Republican candidates than Republicans to Democratic candidates.“An eternal debate among political analysts after each election is what was a bigger factor in the outcome — persuading voters to switch their allegiance, or getting more of their core party loyalists to vote,” said Hannah Hartig, one of the authors of the Pew report.Voters who cast a ballot in 2018 but skipped the 2022 midterms had favored Democrats by two to one in the 2018 election.Democrats tried last year to energize these voters, seeking to inflate Mr. Trump’s profile and tie other Republicans to him. Mr. Biden coined the phrase “ultra-MAGA” to describe Republicans in an effort to engage Democratic voters.In the end, what most likely drove Democrats to the polls was less about Mr. Biden’s actions than a broader reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.Dan Sena, a former executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said the Pew results suggested that the key to 2024 would be persuading independent and moderate Republican voters who dislike both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump to support Democrats. Abortion rights, he said, is the issue most likely to do so.“There is a group of persuadable Republicans that the Democrats were able to win over,” Mr. Sena said. “Those voters align very closely with those who see choice and personal freedom on health care in alignment.”Pew’s analysis is based on a panel of over 7,000 Americans whose attitudes and voting behavior the group has tracked through multiple election cycles. Pew also compared voters to state voting rolls to verify that they actually cast ballots in 2022. Taken together, this provides a portrait of the 2022 electorate.In most midterm years, the party that is not in the White House fares well. And while Republicans enjoyed a turnout advantage in 2022, they nevertheless fell short of expectations and did not match Democrats’ turnout advantage in 2018, the first midterm election after Mr. Trump took office.Still, midterm voters historically skew older and whiter than voters in presidential years, a phenomenon that tends to benefit Republicans. The 2018 midterms were, in many ways, the exception to that rule, with increased turnout across age groups, but especially among young people. The 2022 electorate was more in line with historical trends.Much of the narrative around the 2022 election has centered on Democratic energy after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. And while that played out in key governor’s races in states where abortion was on the ballot, nationally, Democrats appear to have lost ground with a crucial group: women.In the 2018 election cycle, when increased activism — including the Women’s March — fueled record turnout among women, Democrats had an advantage of 18 percentage points. That edge shrunk to just three points in 2022, Pew found.However, the study found that few women actually switched the party they were supporting. Instead, most of the drop for Democrats stemmed from the fact that Republican women voted at a higher rate than Democratic women.Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats overall, but by a much smaller margin than four years earlier. In 2018, Democrats won 72 percent of Hispanic voters, but in 2022 they won only 60 percent. The decline began in 2020, when Democrats also won about 60 percent of Hispanic voters.And Republicans also continued to increase their support from rural voters. The party made gains with them not only through increased turnout, but also among rural voters who had voted for Democrats in the past but cast ballots for Republicans in 2022.“The Trump base continues to be motivated,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who ran the party’s House super PAC in 2018.Yet, Mr. Bliss added, “In a handful of races that really matter, we had bad candidates, and in all the races that matter, we were dramatically outspent.” More

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      Nikki Haley Is Focused on New Hampshire — and Moving Up in the Republican Primary

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      The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador is intensely focused on the state. But her brand of politics may not resonate in the 2024 political climate.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, five months into her first run for president, acknowledges the position she is in.Though she was the first Republican to announce a challenge to former President Donald J. Trump, she hasn’t spent a dime on television ads, is polling well behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and has struggled at times to make a case for her campaign.But in an interview on Friday, at a picnic table outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in the small town of Lancaster, N.H., Ms. Haley downplayed concerns about her standing in the primary. It’s early in the race, she said, and many voters have yet to tune in to the campaigns.“I look at it like one goal after another; I don’t look at the end,” she said. “I know that by mid-fall, this is going to be totally different. Once you pass Labor Day, the numbers start to shift. And you can look at history for that. That’s not me just hoping, that’s me knowing.”As she traversed small towns in the mountainous North Country region of New Hampshire last week, she tacitly acknowledged the uphill race, while also telling her story of overcoming long political odds to win South Carolina’s governorship in 2010, making her the first woman to serve as governor of the state and the second governor of Indian descent.During her appearances, Ms. Haley also mixed in subtle digs at her primary rivals.“I did not go to an Ivy League school like the fellas that are in this race,” she told voters in a North Conway community center on Thursday. “I went to a public university.” Touting her degree in accounting from Clemson University, she said: “I’m not a lawyer. Accountants are problem solvers.”Ms. Haley’s most recent swing through New Hampshire, which holds the party’s first primary, was billed by her campaign as a grass-roots-focused trip, and one intended to introduce her to voters in this part of the state as a former state executive with roots in the rural South, rather than an establishment figure with Washington ties.Frank Murphy, 54, who moved to northern New Hampshire from South Carolina in 2016, knows Ms. Haley as his former governor. When she introduced herself to the voters crowded into the Lancaster V.F.W. post, he raised his hand within the first few minutes of her speech to tell her he was from Charleston.“I got to see firsthand what she did to help the economy down there,” he said, adding that he was elated to see her running for president. “To come into a small town meeting like this and to speak to people and to get them to engage and to talk and ask questions? That’s what you want from a politician,” he said.The challenge for Ms. Haley is that her credentials might be more of a liability than an asset in a Republican primary that seems to be geared more toward personality than policy, with much attention concentrated on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles and Mr. DeSantis’s focus on social and cultural issues.In small events and meet-and-greets, Ms. Haley spoke as much about her family and personal background as she did about the economy and foreign policy.She complimented the scenery of the North Country, adding that its close-knit communities reminded her of her hometown, Bamberg, S.C. Her upbringing as a member of the only Indian American family in town — “We weren’t white enough to be white, we weren’t Black enough to be Black,” she said — taught her to look hard for the similarities she shared with others.Ms. Haley sought to connect with New Hampshire voters by noting her small-town roots.John Tully for The New York TimesSpeaking to voters at the V.F.W. outpost in Lancaster on Friday, she poked fun at the southern accents she is used to hearing in South Carolina and tested out a New England twang, asking those present if her saying “Lan-cah-stah” made her sound local.“Somebody said I sounded like I was from Boston,” she acknowledged, to sympathetic laughs.Ms. Haley has focused intensely on New Hampshire. By the end of this week she will have made 39 stops in the Granite State, far outpacing most of the Republican field. She is one of the few 2024 Republican contenders — along with Vivek Ramaswamy — to visit the counties in the state’s North Country region, which sits less than 200 miles from the Canadian border and has woodsy, winding roads stretching through the White Mountain range.Her campaign says it is hanging its hopes on a growing network of supporters and volunteers in the far corners of the state, rather than spending money on radio or television ads — a longstanding tradition of glad-handing and retail politicking.The strategy has yet to generate much momentum. Most polls of the primary in New Hampshire show her in fourth place, behind Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has also spent a significant amount of time in the state.Ms. Haley’s supporters have expressed frustration and confusion that their preferred candidate — whose past roles as U.N. ambassador and governor prompted an event moderator to ask a crowd on Thursday to decide by applause which title he should use to introduce her — has barely polled above 4 percent in most national public polls.“We don’t understand that because she’s doing so well,” said Beverly Schofield, an 84-year-old Republican voter, clad in red, white and blue, who drove from Vermont with her daughter to see Ms. Haley in New Hampshire on Friday. “It’s very impressive that she’s doing as well as she is. But I’d like to see her move up that ladder quickly.”Ms. Haley’s standing reflects the challenges of campaigning in this particular primary more than it does her political capabilities, her supporters say. The Republican field has ballooned to a dozen candidates, splintering the anti-Trump vote, while his recent and prospective indictments seem to have only put the former president closer to capturing the nomination. Ms. Haley’s supporters are wondering how the campaign intends to turn things around“That’s the question I wanted to ask her,” said Ted Kramer, 81, a retired marketing executive who attended Ms. Haley’s town hall in North Conway. “She’s got to get the profile up.”Ms. Haley said she was comfortable with her current position in the primary race, which she described as “a marathon, not a sprint.”John Tully for The New York TimesMs. Haley pointed to previous Republican front-runners who later fizzled out, such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. The race so far has been painted largely as a two-man race between Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley said, but voters are likely to sour on one.“I know the reality of how quickly somebody can go up and how quickly they can fall,” she said. “The shiny object today is not the shiny object tomorrow. So it’s about not peaking too soon.”She added, “I’m very realistic about what the benchmarks are and what we need to overcome.”Those markers include securing the required number of donors and funds to make the debate stage in August — which she has done. She also said she would continue to focus on Iowa and New Hampshire while building on the base she has in South Carolina, another early state, where she and Senator Tim Scott, who represents the state, are aiming to leverage similar voter bases and donor networks. The two have not spoken since he launched his campaign, she said.Ms. Haley also admitted to feeling underestimated in the race. She is often included in conversations about vice-presidential contenders, though she has emphatically said she is not eyeing the position. She also said that many, particularly in the news media, failed to recognize “the street cred that I have,” listing political wins and averted crises seen during her tenure as South Carolina governor and as United Nations ambassador. “I mean, these were no small jobs,” she said.Republicans longing for an alternative to Mr. Trump made up a large portion of the crowds at Ms. Haley’s events, along with moderate Republicans and independent voters. Few who attended Ms. Haley’s events this week said they were fully committed to supporting her, and many said they wanted to test the political waters, a signature of campaigning in New Hampshire, where most primary voters can expect to hear from every candidate in person, usually more than once.Ms. Haley, eager to sway some of those who were on the fence, made policy points on the stump and condemned Democrats on race, education and inclusion of transgender athletes. She criticized both Democrats and Republicans for the handling of Covid-19 and chastised Congress, asking voters if they could point to anything their representatives in Washington had done for them.She also drew on her foreign policy background, saying that the biggest threat to the United States is China and repeatedly criticizing the Biden administration on its approach, folding in terse words for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is visiting the country this week.Joanne Archambault, an independent voter who lives near North Conway, said she liked Ms. Haley’s message and saw her as an authoritative speaker on policy issues. Still, she said that Ms. Haley’s talk of foreign policy distracted from domestic priorities.“I think there’s too much focus about overseas stuff, too much talk about the border and about China,” she said. “Let’s talk about the problems we are facing — you know, gun violence, abortion, let’s talk about those things. Let’s focus on this country and not what other countries are doing.”Her closing message to voters has been an entreaty to them to tell others to support her. That was good news to Mr. Murphy the South Carolina Transplant who said he was committed to voting for Ms. Haley in the primary in January.“She said tell 10 people. I’ll probably tell 20,” he said. More

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      Kennedy, Christie and the Supreme Court: Are They Changing the Race?

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      A painful ruling from the court can sometimes free a party from an unpopular stance.A recent Supreme Court decision won’t necessarily hurt Democrats politically. J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressWhen I returned from a trip to China almost exactly eight years ago, I found my inbox full of requests from editors to write about two huge stories that unfolded while I was gone: the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage and the emergence of a surprising candidate who entered the race after my departure, Donald J. Trump.Needless to say, my inbox this week after a couple of weeks off in the Pacific Northwest does not have nearly as many requests as it did in the wake of the Obergefell decision and Mr. Trump’s trip down the escalator. But the requests I do have nonetheless center on a similar set of topics: a major Supreme Court decision, this time to end affirmative action programs, and two upstart candidates who weren’t receiving a lot of attention before I left, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chris Christie.Court gives Democrats some coverAs I wrote at the time, the Supreme Court’s decision to make same-sex marriage a fundamental right was probably politically advantageous for Republicans. Yes, the court decision was popular and the Republican position on same-sex marriage was increasingly unpopular, but that’s precisely why that decision did them a favor: It all but removed the issue from political discourse, freeing Republicans from an issue that might have otherwise hobbled them.In theory, something similar can be said for the court’s affirmative action ruling, but this time with the decision helping Democrats. Here again, the court is taking a popular position that potentially frees a political party — this time the Democrats — from an issue that could hurt it, including with the fast-growing group of Asian American voters.It’s worth noting that this would be nothing like how the court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade helped Democrats. Then, the court ruling sparked a backlash that energized liberals and gave Democrats a new campaign issue with appeal to the base and moderates alike. If the most recent case were to help Democrats, it would do so in nearly the opposite manner: To take advantage of the ruling politically, Democrats might need to stop talking about it.It was fairly easy for Republican elites to stop talking about same-sex marriage in 2015, as many were already keen to move on from a losing political fight. It is not as obvious that Democratic elites are keen to move away from the fight over affirmative action or whether they even can, given their base’s passion for racial equality.About those other candidatesObviously, any analogy between the first few weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the slow emergence of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie will be much more strained. For one, Mr. Christie and Mr. Kennedy were already making ripples in the race when I left, and I did think I might need to write about them at some point. In contrast, Mr. Trump couldn’t have been further from my mind in mid-June 2015. Upon hearing about his bid on my return, I thought he might fade so quickly that I would never even have to write about him. Whatever you think about Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie, there’s not much reason to think they simply might go “pop.”Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie don’t have much in common — other than their unequivocally low chance of actually winning — but they have, in their own ways, become factors in the race simply by being the best or even only vessel for expressing explicit opposition to their party’s front-runners, Joe Biden and Mr. Trump.Chris Christie has been direct in his criticism of Donald Trump.John Tully for The New York TimesUsually, willingness to oppose a front-runner isn’t enough to distinguish an aspiring candidate. This year, it is. No current or former elected official has challenged the incumbent president thus far in the Democratic primary. And while many prominent Republicans appear willing to enter the race against Mr. Trump, few appear willing to directly, forcefully and consistently attack him. When they do attack him — as Ron DeSantis recently did for supporting L.G.B.T.Q. people a decade ago — it’s often from the right, and not on the issues that animate the base of any hypothetical not-Trump coalition: relatively moderate, highly educated Republicans.Of the two, Mr. Christie is probably the one who is most effectively fulfilling this demand for direct opposition to the front-runner. There may not be a large constituency for anti-Trump campaigning, but it exists and Mr. Christie is feeding it what it wants. Just as important, directly attacking Mr. Trump ensures a steady diet of media coverage.All of this makes Mr. Christie a classic factional candidate, the kind that doesn’t usually win presidential nominations but can nonetheless play an important role in the outcome of the campaign. If he gains the allegiance of those outright opposed to Mr. Trump, he’ll deny an essential not-Trump voting bloc to another Republican who might have broader appeal throughout the party — say, Mr. DeSantis. This is most likely to play out in New Hampshire, where fragmentary survey data (often from Republican-aligned firms) shows Mr. Christie creeping up into the mid-to-high single digits.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a critic of vaccination.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy is a more complicated case. With the help of a famous family name, he’s nudged ahead of Marianne Williamson for the minor distinction of being Mr. Biden’s top rival in Democratic primary polls. On average, Mr. Kennedy polls in the mid-teens, with some surveys still showing him in the single digits and one poll showing him above 20 percent. That’s more than Mr. Christie can say.But unlike Mr. Christie, Mr. Kennedy is not exactly feeding Biden skeptics what they want. Instead, he’s advancing conspiracy theories, appearing on right-wing media and earning praise from conservative figures. And unlike Mr. Trump, whose most ardent opposition is probably toward the center, Mr. Biden is probably most vulnerable to a challenge from the ideological left. This is not what Mr. Kennedy is offering, and it’s reflected in the polls. While Times/Siena polling last summer showed Mr. Biden most vulnerable among “very liberal” voters and on progressive issues, Mr. Kennedy actually fares much better among self-described moderates than liberals. He doesn’t clearly fare better among younger Democrats than older ones, despite Mr. Biden’s longstanding weakness among the younger group.It’s too early to say whether Mr. Kennedy’s modest foothold among moderate and conservative Democrats reflects a constituency for anti-modernist, anti-establishment liberalism, or whether Mr. Kennedy’s family name is simply getting him farther among less engaged Democrats, who are likelier to identify as moderate. Either way, his ability to play an important role in the race is limited by embracing conservatives and conspiratorial positions, even if he may continue to earn modest support in the race because of the absence of another prominent not-Biden option. More

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      The Biden-Trump Rematch Is Already Here

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      One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million.Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million.These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump. President Biden won whites with college degrees in 2020, 51-48, but Trump won by a landslide, 67-32, among whites without degrees, according to network exit polls.Even so, there is new data that reflects Trump’s ongoing and disruptive quest for power.In a paper published last year, “Donald Trump and the Lie,” Kevin Arceneaux and Rory Truex, political scientists at Sciences Po-Paris and Princeton, analyzed 40 days of polling conducted intermittently over the crucial period from Oct. 27, 2020, through Jan. 29, 2021.The authors found that Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him has had continuing ramifications:The lie is pervasive and sticky: the number of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the election was fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem.In reaction to the lie, Arceneaux and Truex write, “there was a significant rise in support for violent political activism among Democrats, which only waned after efforts to overturn the election clearly failed.”Endorsement of the lie pays off for Republicans, Arceneaux and Truex argue: “Republican voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie, giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in the next electoral cycle.”These trends are among the most striking developments setting the stage for the 2024 elections.Among the additional conditions working to the advantage of Democrats are the increase in Democratic Party loyalty and ideological consistency; the political mobilization of liberal constituencies by adverse Supreme Court rulings; an initial edge in the fight for an Electoral College majority; and the increase in nonreligious voters along with a decline in churchgoing believers.These and other factors have prompted two Democratic strategists, Celinda Lake and Mike Lux, to declare, “All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024.” In “Democrats Could Win a Trifecta in 2024,” a May 9 memo released to the public, the two even voiced optimism over the biggest hurdle facing Democrats, retaining control of the Senate in 2024, when as many as eight Democratic-held seats are competitive while the Republican seats are in solidly red states:While these challenges are real, they can be overcome, and the problems are overstated. Remember that this same tough Senate map produced a net of five Democratic pickups in the 2000 election, which Gore narrowly lost to Bush; six Democratic pickups in 2006, allowing Democrats to retake the Senate; and two more in 2012. If we have a good election year overall, we have a very good chance at Democrats holding the Senate.Republican advantages include high rates of crime (although modestly declining in 2023 so far), homelessness and dysfunction in cities run by Democrats; a parents’ rights movement opposed to teaching of so-called critical race theory and gender-fluid concepts; and declining public support for gay rights and especially trans rights.There are, needless to say, a host of uncertainties.One key factor will be the salience on Election Day of issues closely linked to race in many voters’ minds, including school integration, affordable housing, the end of affirmative action, crime, urban disorder and government spending on social programs. As a general rule, the higher these issues rank in voters’ priorities, the better Republicans do. In that respect, the success of conservatives in barring the use of race in college admissions has taken a Republican issue off the table.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, noted in an email that in the “sour environment” of today’s politics, “many voters may be tempted toward a protest vote, and it is likely that there will be some options available for such voters.” It is not clear, Lee added, “what No Labels will do, but the potential there introduces considerable additional uncertainty.”Asked what factors he would cite as crucial to determining the outcome of the 2024 election, Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, pointed out by email:The economy is the source of the most uncertainty — it is doing well, although inflation is not fully tamed. Will things continue to improve and will Biden start to get credit? This is especially important for white working-class voters in swing states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, documents growing Democratic unity in two 2023 papers, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats Are Moving Left” and “The Transformation of the American Electorate.”As a result of these trends toward intraparty consensus, there has been a steady drop in the percentage of Democratic defections to the opposition, as the party’s voters have become less vulnerable to wedge-issue tactics, especially wedge issues closely tied to race.From 2012 to 2020, Abramowitz wrote in the Transformation paper, “there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters.” As a result of these shifts, he continued, “Democratic voters are now as consistent in their liberalism as Republican voters are in their conservatism.”Most important, Abramowitz wrote, therise in ideological congruence among Democratic voters — and especially among white Democratic voters — has had important consequences for voting behavior. For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.Three Supreme Court decisions handed down in the last week of June — rejecting the Biden administration’s program to forgive student loan debt, affirming the right of a web designer to refuse to construct wedding websites for same-sex couples and ruling unconstitutional the use of race by colleges in student admissions — are, in turn, quite likely to increase Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout on Election Day.Politically, one of the most effective tools for mobilizing voters is to emphasize lost rights and resources.This was the case after last June’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the right to abortion and in the 2022 midterm elections mobilized millions of pro-choice voters. By that logic, the three decisions I mentioned should raise turnout among students, gays and African Americans, all Democratic constituencies.My Times colleague Jonathan Weisman argued in a July 1 article, “Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening,” that the rulings giveDemocrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.In addition, Weisman wrote, “Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024.”The education trends favoring Democrats are reinforced by Americans’ changing religious beliefs. From 2006 to 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute found, the white evangelical Protestant share of the population fell from 23 percent to 13.9 percent. Over the same period, the nonreligious share of the population rose from 16 to 26.8 percent.Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, found that the nonreligious can be broken down into three groups: atheists, who are the most Democratic, voting 85-11 for Biden over Trump; followed by agnostics, 78-18 for Biden; and those Burge calls “nothing in particular,” 63-35 for Biden.The last of the pro-Democratic developments is an initial advantage in Electoral College votes, according to an analysis at this early stage in the contest.Kyle D. Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, published “Electoral College Ratings: Expect Another Highly Competitive Election” last week.“We are starting 260 electoral votes worth of states as at least leaning Democratic,” Kondik writes, “and 235 as at least leaning Republican,” with “just 43 tossup electoral votes at the outset.”In other words, if this prediction holds true until November 2024, the Democratic candidate would need to win 20 more Electoral College votes while the Republican nominee would need to win 35.The competitive states, Kondik continues, “are Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16) and Wisconsin (10) — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada (6), which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time.”In the case of Arizona, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, argued in an email that domestic migration from California to Arizona is substantial enough to help shift the state from red to purple.“In some recent work we have done comparing California, Arizona and Texas,” Cain added, “we find that the movement of Californians is greater in absolute numbers to Texas, but proportionately more impactful to Arizona.”People who move, Cain continued,make Arizona a bit more polarized and close to the Arizona purple profile. They contribute to polarized purpleness. Enough move over a four-year period to have a measurable impact in a close race. Unlike immigrants, domestic migrants can become voters instantly.How about the other side of the aisle?Daniel Kreiss, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina, writing by email, cited the Republican advantage gained from diminished content regulation on social media platforms: “This platform rollback stems broadly from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which gave other platforms a green light to drop electoral and public health protections.”The beneficiaries of this deregulation, Kreiss continued, are “Trump and Republicans more broadly who use disinformation as a strategic political tool.”These content regulation policies are a sharp policy shift on the part of the owners and managers of social media websites, Bridget Barrett, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, and Kreiss write in a June 29 paper, “Platforms Are Abandoning U.S. Democracy.”They argue that in the aftermath of the 2020 electionplatforms took serious steps to protect elections and the peaceful transfer of power, including creating policies against electoral disinformation and enforcing violations — including by Trump and other candidates and elected officials. And deplatforming the former president after an illegitimate attempt to seize power was a necessary step to quell the violence.More recently, Barrett and Kreiss note, “social media platforms have walked away from their commitments to protect democracy. So much so that the current state of platform content moderation is more like 2016 than 2020.”Frances Lee pointed out that Cornel West’s entry into the presidential election as a candidate of the Green Party will siphon some liberal voters away from Biden: “West has announced a presidential bid and has now moved from the People’s Party to the Green Party, which will have ballot access in most states,” she wrote.Insofar as West gains support, it will in all likelihood be at Democrats’ expense. West is a prominent figure in progressive circles and his agenda is explicitly an appeal to the left.In a June 28 appearance on C-SPAN, West declared:We need jobs with a living wage. We need decent housing, quality education, the basic social needs. You can imagine disproportionately Black and brown are wrestling with poverty. The abolition of poverty and homelessness. I want jobs with a living wage across the board. I want a U.S. foreign policy that is not tied to big money and corporate interests.While West will draw support from very liberal Democrats, there is another factor that may well weaken Democratic support among some moderate voters: the seeming insolubility of homeless encampments, shoplifting, carjacking and crime generally in major cities. This has the potential to tilt the playing field in favor of Republican law-and-order candidates, as it did in the 2023 Wisconsin Senate race and in suburban New York House contests.In 2022, crime ranked high among voter concerns, but Republicans who campaigned on themes attacking Democrats as weak on crime met with mixed results.A recent trend raising Republican prospects is the Gallup Poll finding that the percentage of people “who say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable” fell by 7 percentage points, from a record high of 71 percent in 2022 to 64 percent this year.There was a six-point drop among Democrats on this question, from 85 to 79 percent approval, and a precipitous 15-point falloff among Republicans, 56 to 41 percent. Independents, in contrast, went from 71 percent approval to 72 percent. The overall decline reversed 20 years of steadily rising approval, which has grown from 39 percent in 2002 to 71 percent in 2022. Gallup also found that the public is holding increasingly conservative views on key issues related to gender transition.Asked “Do you think transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” the public favored birth gender by 28 points, 62-34, in May 2021. In May 2023, the margin grew to 41 points, 69-28.Similarly, Gallup asked “Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong to change one’s gender.” In May 2021, 51 percent said morally wrong, 46 percent said acceptable. In May 2023, 55 percent said morally wrong, 43 percent said acceptable.President Biden is a strong supporter of transgender rights. On March 31, the White House released “Statement From President Joe Biden on Transgender Day of Visibility,” in which Biden vowed:My administration will never quit fighting to end discrimination, to stand against unjust state laws, and to guarantee everyone the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are. We’ll never stop working to create a world where everyone can live without fear; where parents, teachers and whole communities come together to support kids, no matter how they identify; and every child is surrounded by compassion and love.Republican candidates are moving in the opposite direction. At the Faith and Freedom conference last month in Washington, Mike Pence promised to “end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18.”Ron DeSantis told the gathering:The left is lighting the fire of a cultural revolution all across this land. The fire smolders in our schools. It smolders in corporate board rooms. It smolders in the homes of government. We’re told that we must accept that men can get pregnant. We are told to celebrate a swimmer who swam for three years on the men’s team, then switches to the women’s team and somehow is named the women’s champion.The 2020 election raised a new concern for Democrats: Trump’s success in increasing his support from 2016 among Latino voters.Kyle Kondik’s analysis shows that Nevada (17 percent of the vote was Hispanic in 2020) and Arizona (19 percent was Hispanic) are two of the four tossup states in 2024. This suggests that the Latino vote will be crucial.While acknowledging the gains Trump and fellow Republicans have made among Latino voters, a June 2023 analysis of the 2022 election, “Latino Voters & The Case of the Missing Red Wave,” by Equis, a network of three allied, nonpartisan research groups, found that with the exception of Florida, “at the end of the day, there turned out to be basic stability in support levels among Latinos in highly contested races.” In short, the report’s authors continued, “the G.O.P. held gains they had made since 2016/2018 but weren’t able to build on them.”In Florida, the report documented a six-year collapse in Democratic voting among Hispanics: In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 66 percent of the Latino vote; in 2020, Biden won 51 percent and in 2022 Democratic congressional candidates won 44 percent.The Equis study also pointed to some significant Democratic liabilities among Latino voters: Substantial percentages of a key bloc of pro-Democratic Hispanics — those who say they believe Democrats “are better for Hispanics” — harbor significant doubts about the party. For example, 44 percent agreed that “Democrats don’t keep their promises” and 44 percent agreed that “Democrats take Latinos for granted.”In addition, the percentage of Latino voters describing immigration as the top issue — a stance favoring Democrats — has nose-dived, according to the Equis analysis, from 39 percent in 2016 to 16 percent in 2020 and 12 percent in 2022.Where, then, does all this contradictory information leave us as to the probable outcome of the 2024 election? The reasonable answer is: in the dark.The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent Trump vs. Biden polls has Trump up by a statistically insignificant 0.6 percent. From August 2021 to the present, RealClear has tracked a total of 101 polls pitting these two against each other. Trump led in 56, Biden 38, and the remainder were ties.While this polling suggests Trump has an even chance, surveys do not fully capture the weight of Trump’s indictments and falsehoods on his own candidacy and, as evidenced in competitive races in 2022, on Republicans who are closely tied to the former president.Among the key voters who, in all likelihood, will pick the next president — relatively well-educated suburbanites — Trump has become toxic. He is, at least in that sense, Biden’s best hope for winning a second term.Even before the votes are counted on Nov. 5, 2024, the most important question may well turn out to be: If Trump is the Republican candidate for a third straight time and loses the election for a second, will he once again attempt to claim victory was stolen from him? And if he does, what will his followers — and for that matter, everyone else — do?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More