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      Trump Is About to Face the Choice That Dooms Many Presidencies

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      As happens every time a new president is elected, Donald Trump is experiencing a sudden role reversal. His campaign to earn support from voters has ended abruptly and a new one has begun among donors and activists to earn his support for their priorities. The election was about tax cuts, or maybe cryptocurrency, the arguments go. What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net.This is the first moment when presidencies go wrong. Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes, huddle with his supporters at Mar-a-Lago and then see how much of their agenda he can advance before his popularity falls too far to effect further change. That is the formula that has left a nation seemingly resigned to the loss of both common purpose and institutional competence. It is not a formula for a successful presidency, let alone for making America great again.He has another option. He is an iconoclastic leader with a uniquely unfiltered relationship to the American people and a disdain for the chattering class of consultants. He is also the first president since Grover Cleveland to get a second shot at a first term. He has already experienced the bruising tax fight that helped bring his approval rating down to 36 percent a year after his inauguration, the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the loss of more than 40 House seats and control of the chamber in a midterm election. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he made a promise to “every citizen” that he would “fight for you, for your family and your future” and that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Achieving that will require focusing on the challenges and respecting the values broadly shared by not only his voters, but also many others who might come to support him.Take immigration. A promise to secure the border has long been a central aspect of Mr. Trump’s appeal, and Democrats are now clambering to get on his side of the issue. A Trump administration serving American voters would stanch the flow of migrants with tough border enforcement and asylum restrictions, reverse the Biden administration’s lawlessness by removing recent arrivals and protect American workers and businesses by mandating that employers use the E-Verify program to confirm the legal status of the people who work for them. That program, which strikes at the harm that illegal immigration does to American workers, is wildly popular. A recent survey of 2,000 adults conducted by my organization, American Compass, in partnership with YouGov, found 78 percent support overall and 68 percent support even among Democrats. Law-abiding businesses tend to like it, too — they’re tired of getting undercut by competitors that get away with breaking the rules.That’s the path to solving the problem. Mr. Trump will hear a lot of counterarguments from the affluent and influential class that builds its business model on underpaid, undocumented labor, especially in industries such as construction and hospitality, where he has personal experience, as well as in agriculture. Those voices are likely to suggest that instead he condescend to the masses with border theater and hostile rhetoric, while expanding temporary worker programs. To this end, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes the E-Verify program on libertarian grounds, has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for secretary of agriculture. Moves like that will keep the guests at Mr. Trump’s golf clubs happy but ensure growing frustration and disillusion elsewhere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Need Working-Class Voters. Maybe Now They’ll Act Like It.

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      The other day I was supposed to visit a friend who had been released from prison. He had to cancel to rescue his sister, who is using drugs again.Another old friend needed a ride: It turned out that his car had broken down again, and until his next paycheck came, he couldn’t afford a $2 bolt to fix it.I think of friends like these here in rural Oregon, in an area that mostly supports Donald Trump, when people ask me why America’s working class rejected the Democrats on Tuesday. My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas five dollars at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing. Election postmortems have been dissecting Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but the challenge for Democrats goes far beyond any of that.For several decades, voters have identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. Looking ahead at the specific Senate seats that will be in contention in 2026 and 2028, it’s not easy to see when the Democrats will have a chance to recover the chamber.I see the disenchantment with Democrats in my hometown, Yamhill, which traditionally was dependent on timber, agriculture and light manufacturing. But then good union jobs left, meth arrived and everything changed. Today more than a third of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus are dead from drugs, alcohol, suicide and reckless accidents.Here’s an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election

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      The Book That Predicted the 2024 ElectionThe G.O.P. pollster Patrick Ruffini’s book “Party of the People” outlined the realignments reflected in this year’s election results.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now. At the very least, you should be if they didn’t tell you before the election.But Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster who is a founding partner at Echelon Insights, did tell you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”What he argued in that book is really two things: First, the educational divide reshaping American politics would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results, weird as they seemed to many, weren’t a fluke.Donald Trump performed a lot better in 2020 than the polls said he would. A major reason he performed so much better is that he did better among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. That was, to put it very mildly, not what Democrats expected. Trump was the xenophobe in chief. Democrats were appalled by the way he talked about immigrants, about Muslims, about China, about Black communities. The theory was that Trump was using racism and nationalism to drive up his margins among white voters.And then what actually happens after four years of his presidency is that Biden in 2020 does a bit better than Clinton did among white voters. And Trump in 2020 improves quite a bit among nonwhite voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On the Ballot, Abortion Rights Proved More Popular Than Kamala Harris

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      In states like Arizona and Nevada, some voters split their tickets, supporting abortion rights measures while also backing Donald Trump.Democrats headed into the election hoping that abortion rights initiatives would drive support for Kamala Harris in states where the measures appeared on the ballot, including two presidential swing states, Arizona and Nevada.But while the ballot measures, broadly put, performed well on Tuesday, succeeding in seven out of 10 states, Ms. Harris and other Democrats underperformed them across the map.In both Arizona and Nevada, more than 60 percent of voters approved measures to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions, though more votes remained to be counted on Thursday. But Donald J. Trump appeared on track to win both states, according to New York Times estimates. Abortion rights initiatives also passed in Missouri and Montana, two states Mr. Trump won easily.Even as a growing share of women said abortion access was central to their vote, pre-election polling suggested that it wasn’t voters’ top concern overall. Fifteen percent of likely voters in an October national New York Times/Siena College poll said abortion was the most important issue in their vote for president, but roughly twice as many listed the economy, or inflation.The voters who cited abortion as their top concern favored Ms. Harris, 88 percent to 11 percent, and the voters who prioritized economic issues favored Mr. Trump, 72 percent to 24 percent.In states where the ballot measures passed but Mr. Trump won or was leading, voters had, in effect, split their tickets, supporting abortion rights in their states while also backing a candidate who took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, which had established a nationwide right to abortion. Ms. Harris had made protecting abortion rights a central theme of her campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What the Collapse of Germany’s Ruling Coalition Means

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      After decades of relative stability, the country has entered a new era of political fragmentation and will hold new elections at a precarious time.The collapse of its governing coalition is an extraordinary moment for Germany, a country known for stable governments. It has happened only twice before in the 75 years since the modern state was founded.But like a marriage that has finally ended after years of fighting, the spectacular breakup on Wednesday night of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition was expected by most and welcomed by many.A recent national poll found that a majority of Germans wanted to end the “traffic light” coalition, named for the colors of the parties that made it up — red for the Social Democratic Party, yellow for the pro-business Free Democratic Party and green for the Greens. Only 14 percent still had confidence in the coalition, according to the same poll.Although the opposition is pushing for Mr. Scholz to end the government sooner, Wednesday’s announcement will very likely lead to early elections in March, at a precarious time for Germany both domestically and internationally.Here’s what we know about the collapse of the coalition.How did we get here?On Wednesday night, Mr. Scholz fired his finance minister, Christian Lindner, who is the head of the Free Democrats, over disagreements about the 2025 budget and the economy in general. That precipitated the end of the coalition.The coalition was initially both successful and popular. But a constitutional court ruling late in 2023, barring the government from repurposing finances left over from the pandemic, spelled the beginning of the end.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Got the Recovery They Wanted. It Wasn’t Enough.

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      America’s economic growth is the envy of its global counterparts. But voters wanted more from the Biden administration — specifically, lower prices.Every major U.S. ally is uncomfortably familiar with one of President Biden’s favorite charts. It is a graph of economic recoveries in the wealthy world since the end of the pandemic recession. It shows growth flatlining for the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan over the past two years — while in the United States, growth keeps rocketing up.That chart helps explain why voters have punished ruling parties in election after post-Covid election around the world. Sluggish growth, coupled with a surge in consumer prices, proved toxic for the Conservative Party in Britain. It helped hobble President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition in France and contributed to Japan’s longtime leaders, the Liberal Democrats, losing their majority this fall.Germany’s governing coalition has been so weakened by recession and so flustered by disagreements over how to revive growth that it teetered this week on the brink of collapse.Advisers to Mr. Biden and to Vice President Kamala Harris, his successor candidate in the presidential election, had hoped that America’s outlier economy would rescue them from a similar fate.It did not.Ms. Harris lost to former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats will spend at least months parsing data for conclusions on what drove the defeat. Certainly, economic factors were only one contributor.But as Europe’s stumbling economies woke on Wednesday to the news of Ms. Harris’s defeat, one thing was immediately clear: America’s growth engine may be the envy of the world, but it is not the envy of the American public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ¿La Corte Suprema podría decidir estas elecciones presidenciales?

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      Los expertos señalan que es poco probable que el tribunal termine ejerciendo un papel importante en el resultado, pero es posible. Te contamos por qué.Es día de elecciones y la contienda entre la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y el expresidente Donald Trump parece estar empatada, lo que lleva a algunos a temer que la elección se alargue y la Corte Suprema de EE. UU. pueda determinar el resultado.Un puñado de disputas relacionadas con las elecciones ya han llegado a la Corte Suprema. La semana pasada, el tribunal emitió decisiones que permitieron a Virginia eliminar a 1600 personas de su censo electoral, se negó a retirar a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. de la papeleta electoral en dos estados disputados y permitió a los votantes de Pensilvania cuyos votos por correo se habían considerado inválidos emitir votos provisionales en persona.La cuestión sigue siendo si las elecciones presidenciales serán tan reñidas que el tribunal, que tiene una mayoría conservadora de 6-3, se ocupará en los próximos días o semanas de un caso que decida quién ocupará la presidencia.Según los expertos en elecciones, es poco probable que la Corte Suprema acabe desempeñando un papel importante en el resultado, pero es posible. Esto es lo que hay que saber.¿Qué papel podría desempeñar la Corte Suprema?Por lo general, la Corte Suprema ha tratado de mantenerse al margen de las luchas políticas y electorales, y la mayoría de los litigios relacionados con las elecciones permanecerán en los tribunales inferiores. Pero una vez que un caso está en el sistema judicial, es posible que la Corte Suprema decida asumirlo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Polls Are Close. The Results Might Not Be.

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      These two things are true about the presidential race: The polls currently show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump effectively tied. And close polls do not necessarily mean there will be a close result.This may feel counterintuitive, but the fact is that we are just a very normal polling error away from either candidate landing a decisive victory, especially in the Electoral College.This is a point my colleague Nate Cohn has made regularly in his election race updates over the last few weeks. But it bears repeating, because a lopsided result when there is an expectation of only razor-thin margins could further fan distrust in the polls and in the electoral process itself.“You can have a close election in the popular vote and somebody could break 315 Electoral College votes, which will not look close,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “Or you could get a popular vote that is five points” apart, he added, “which is, by today’s standards, a landslide — a word no one has used this year.”Since 1998, election polls in presidential, House, Senate and governor’s races have diverged from the final vote tally by an average of six percentage points, according to an analysis from FiveThirtyEight. But in the 2022 midterm elections, that average error was 4.8 points, making it the most accurate polling cycle in the last quarter of a century. If polls were off this year, in either direction, by the same margin, the winning candidate would score a decisive victory.Based on where the polling averages stood on Monday, if the polls are underestimating Ms. Harris by 4.8 points in each of the seven swing states, she would win every one of them, and a total of 319 electoral votes, compared with only 219 for Mr. Trump. If those same polls underestimate Mr. Trump by the same margin, he would win all the battleground states, for a total of 312 electoral votes. More