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      Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less

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      Affective polarization — “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — has prompted an explosion of research as the threat to democratic norms and procedures mount.Intensely felt divisions over race, ethnicity and culture have become more deeply entrenched in the American political system, reflected in part in the election denialism found in roughly a third of the electorate and in state legislative initiatives giving politicians the power to overturn election results.Many researchers have begun to focus on this question: Is there a causal relationship between the intensification of hostility between Democrats and Republicans and the deterioration of support for democratic standards?“Growing affective polarization and negative partisanship,” Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, political scientists at Georgia State University and Koç University-Istanbul, write in a 2019 essay, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies,”contribute to a perception among citizens that the opposing party and their policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power.What is affective polarization? In 2016, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote that when a voter’s “partisan social identity” merges with his or her racial, religious, sexual and cultural identities, “these various identities work together to drive an emotional type of polarization that cannot be explained by parties or issues alone.”Mason argues that “threats to a party’s status tend to drive anger, while reassurances drive enthusiasm” so thata party loss generates very negative, particularly angry, emotional reactions. This anger is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.One optimistic proposal to reduce partisan animosity is to focus public attention on the commonality of Democratic and Republican voters in their shared identity as Americans. Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on this subject, including in his 2018 paper “Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?” and in his soon-to-be-published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide.”“I show,” Levendusky contends in his 2018 paper, “that when subjects’ sense of American national identity is heightened, they come to see members of the opposing party as fellow Americans rather than rival partisans. As a result, they like the opposing party more, thereby reducing affective polarization.”There are serious problems, however, with a depolarization strategy based on American identity, problems that go to the heart of the relentless power of issues of race, ethnicity and immigration­ to splinter the electorate.In their December 2022 paper, “ ‘American’ Is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans,” Ryan Dawkins and Abigail Hanson write thatWhite Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump era, largely because of Democrats adopting a more racially inclusive conception of American identity. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party matches their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.Dawkins and Hanson acknowledge that “national identity is perhaps the only superordinate identity that holds the promise of uniting partisans and closing the social distance between White Democrats and White Republicans,” but, they continue,If conceptions of national identity itself become the subject of the very sorting process that is driving affective polarization, then it can no longer serve as a unifying identity that binds the entire country together. In fact, frames that highlight the association of American identity to historic norms of whiteness can ultimately divide the country further, especially as the United States transitions into a majority-minority country. Indeed, continued demographic change will likely make the schism between White Democrats and White Republicans wider before things have any hope to improve.I asked Levendusky about the Dawkins-Hanson paper. He replied by email that he was now “convinced that there is no simple path from animosity (or affective polarization) to far downstream outcomes (albeit important ones)” — adding that “there’s a long way from ‘I dislike members of the other party’ to ‘I will vote for a candidate who broke democratic norms rather than a candidate from the other party’ and the process is likely complex and subtle.”In an August 2022 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” David E. Broockman, a political scientist at Berkeley, Joshua L. Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, and Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, pointedly reject the claim made by a number of scholars “that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions. A large, influential literature speculates as such.”Instead, Broockman, Kalla and Westwood contend, their own studies “find no evidence that these changes in affective polarization influence a broad range of political behaviors — only interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about the widespread assumption that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.”Broockman and his co-authors measured the effect of reducing affective polarization on five domains: “electoral accountability, adopting one’s party’s policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perceptions of objective conditions.”“Our results,” they write, “run contrary to the literature’s widespread speculation: in these political domains, our estimates of the causal effects of reducing affective polarization are consistently null.”In an email, Westwood argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”Westwood’s point is well-taken. In a country marked by battles over sex, race, religion, gender, regional disparities in economic growth, traditionalist-vs-postmaterialist values and, broadly, inequality, it is difficult to see how relatively short, survey based experiments could produce a significant, long-term dent in partisan hostility.Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight of his colleagues, report similar results in their October 2022 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Anti-democratic Attitudes.” “Scholars and practitioners alike,” they write, “have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments toward outpartisans.”Why?Because much prior work has focused on treating affective polarization itself, and assumed that these interventions would in turn improve downstream outcomes that pose consequential threats to democracy. Although this assumption may seem reasonable, there is little evidence evaluating its implications for the benefits of depolarization interventions.In “Megastudy Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes,” a separate analysis of 32,059 American voters “testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” however, Voelkel and many of his co-authors, Michael N. Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph S. Mernyk, Chrystal Redekopp, Matthew Cashman, James N. Druckman, David G. Rand and Robb Willer significantly amended their earlier findings.In an email, Willer explained what was going on:One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions, such as not acknowledging the results of a lost election or removing polling stations from areas that benefit the rival party.Voelkel and his co-authors found that two interventions were the most effective.The first is known as the “Braley intervention” for Alia Braley, a political scientist at Berkeley and the lead author of “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” In the Braley intervention, participants are “asked what people from the other party believe when it comes to actions that undermine how democracy works (e.g., using violence to block laws, reducing the number of polling stations to help the other party, or not accepting the results of elections if they lose).” They are then given “the correct answer” and “the answers make clear the other party does not support actions that undermine democracy.”The second “top-performing intervention” was to give participants “a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”“To our knowledge,” Willer wrote in his email, “this is the first evidence that the same stimuli could both reduce affective polarization and improve some aspect of Americans’ democratic attitudes, and it suggests these two factors may be causally linked, more than prior work — including our own — would suggest.”Kalla disputed the conclusions Willer drew from the megastudy:The most successful interventions in the megastudy for reducing anti-democratic views were interventions that directly targeted those anti-democratic views. For example, Braley et al.’s successful intervention was able to reduce anti-democratic views by correcting misperceptions about the other party’s willingness to subvert democracy.This intervention, Kalla continued,was not about affective polarization. What this suggests is that for practitioners interested in reducing anti-democratic attitudes, they should use interventions that directly speak to and target those anti-democratic views. As our work finds and Voelkel et al. replicates, obliquely attempting to reduce anti-democratic views through the causal pathway of affective polarization does not appear to be a successful strategy.I sent Kalla’s critique to Willer, who replied:I agree with Josh’s point that the most effective interventions for reducing support for undemocratic practices and candidates were interventions that were pretty clearly crafted with the primary goal in mind of targeting democratic attitudes. And while we find some relationships here that suggest there is a path to reducing support for undemocratic candidates via reducing affective polarization, the larger point that most interventions reducing affective polarization do not affect anti-democratic attitudes still stands, and our evidence continues to contradict the widespread popular assumption that affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes are closely linked. We continue to find evidence in this newest study against that idea.One scholar, Herbert P. Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended that too much of the debate over affective polarization and democratic backsliding has been restricted to the analysis of competing psychological pressures, when in fact the scope in much larger. “The United States,” Kitschelt wrote in an email,has experienced a “black swan” confluence, interaction and mutual reinforcement of general factors that affect all advanced knowledge societies with specific historical and institutional factors unique to the U.S. that have created a poisonous concoction threatening U.S. democracy more so than that of any other Western society. Taken together, these conditions have created the scenario in which affective polarization thrives.Like most of the developed world, the United States is undergoing three disruptive transformations compounded by three additional historical factors specific to the United States, Kitschelt suggests. These transformations, he wrote, are:“The postindustrial change of the occupational structure expanding higher education and the income and status educational dividend, together with a transformation of gender and family relations, dismantling the paternalist family and improving the bargaining power of women, making less educated people — and especially males — the more likely socio-economic and cultural losers of the process.”“The expansion of education goes together with a secularization of society that has undercut the ideological foundations of paternalism, but created fierce resistance in certain quarters.”“The sociocultural and economic divisions furthermore correlate with residential patterns in which the growing higher educated, younger, secular and more gender-egalitarian share of the population lives in metropolitan and suburban areas, while the declining, less educated, older, more religious and more paternalists share of the population lives in exurbia or the countryside.”The three factors unique to this country, in his view, are:“The legacy of enslavement and racial oppression in the United States in which — following W.E.B. DuBois — the white lower class of less skilled laborers derived a ‘quasi-wage’ satisfaction from racist subordination of the minority, the satisfaction of enjoying a higher rank in society than African Americans.”“The vibrancy of evangelical ‘born again’ Christianity, sharply separated from the old European moderate, cerebral mainline Protestantism. The former attracts support over-proportionally among less educated people, and strictly segregates churches by race, thereby making it possible to convert white Evangelical churches into platforms of white racism. They have become political transmission belts of right-wing populism in the United States, with 80 percent of those whites who consider themselves ‘born again’ voting for the Trump presidential candidacy.”“The institutional particularities of the U.S. voting system that tends to divide populations into two rival parties, the first-past-the-post electoral system for the U.S. legislature and the directly elected presidency. While received wisdom has claimed that it moderates divisions, under conditions of mutually reinforcing economic, social, and cultural divides, it is likely to have the opposite effect. The most important additional upshot of this system is the overrepresentation of the countryside (i.e. the areas where the social, economic, and cultural losers of knowledge society tend to be located) in the legislative process and presidential elections/Electoral College.”Kitschelt argues that in order to understand affective polarization it is necessary to go “beyond the myopic and US-centric narrow vision field of American political psychologists.” The incentives “for politicians to prime this polarization and stoke the divides, including fanning the flames of affective polarization, can be understood only against the backdrop of these underlying socio-economic and cultural legacies and processes.”Kitschelt is not alone in this view. He pointed to a 2020 book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” by Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, political scientists at Harvard, the University of California-Davis and Georgia State University, in which they make a case thatAmericans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly than in most other Western publics. We show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high, when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions.Writing just before the 2020 election, Gidron, Adams and Horne point out that theissue of cultural disagreements appears highly pertinent in light of the ongoing nationwide protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement which has sparked a wider cultural debate over questions relating to race, police funding and broader questions over interpretations of America’s history. In a July 4th speech delivered at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump starkly framed these types of “culture war” debates as a defining political and social divide in America, asserting “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”The study of affective polarization sheds light on how vicious American politics has become, and on how this viciousness has enabled Trump and those Republicans who have followed his lead, while hurting Democrats whose policy and legislative initiatives have been obstructed as much as they have succeeded.Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., addressed this point when he delivered the following remarks from his paper “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West” in 2021 at a legal colloquium in New York:There is little question that recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of government, whether measured in the number of important bills Congress is able to enact, the proportion of all issues people identity as most important that Congress manages to address, or the number of enacted bills that update old policies enacted many decades earlier. Social scientists now write books with titles like Can America Govern Itself? Longitudinal data confirm the obvious, which is the more polarized Congress is, the less it enacts significant legislation; in the ten most polarized congressional terms, a bit more than 10.6 significant laws were enacted, while in the ten least polarized terms, that number goes up 60 percent, to around 16 significant enactments per term. The inability of democratic governments to deliver on the issues their populations care most about poses serious risks.What are the chances of reversing this trend?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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      Education Issues Vault to Top of the G.O.P.’s Presidential Race

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      Donald Trump and possible rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are making appeals to conservative voters on race and gender issues, but such messages had a mixed record in November’s midterm elections.With a presidential primary starting to stir, Republicans are returning with force to the education debates that mobilized their staunchest voters during the pandemic and set off a wave of conservative activism around how schools teach about racism in American history and tolerate gender fluidity.The messaging casts Republicans as defenders of parents who feel that schools have run amok with “wokeness.” Its loudest champion has been Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week scored an apparent victory attacking the College Board’s curriculum on African American studies. Former President Donald J. Trump has sought to catch up with even hotter language, recently threatening “severe consequences” for educators who “suggest to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, who has used Twitter to preview her planned presidential campaign announcement this month, recently tweeted “CRT is un-American,” referring to critical race theory.Yet, in its appeal to voters, culture-war messaging concerning education has a decidedly mixed track record. While some Republicans believe that the issue can win over independents, especially suburban women, the 2022 midterms showed that attacks on school curriculums — specifically on critical race theory and so-called gender ideology — largely were a dud in the general election.While Mr. DeSantis won re-election handily, many other Republican candidates for governor who raised attacks on schools — against drag queen story hours, for example, or books that examine white privilege — went down in defeat, including in Kansas, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.Democratic strategists, pointing to the midterm results and to polling, said voters viewed cultural issues in education as far less important than school funding, teacher shortages and school safety.Even the Republican National Committee advised candidates last year to appeal to swing voters by speaking broadly about parental control and quality schools, not critical race theory, the idea that racism is baked into American institutions.Still, Mr. Trump, the only declared Republican presidential candidate so far, and potential rivals, are putting cultural fights at the center of their education agendas. Strategists say the push is motivated by evidence that the issues have the power to elicit strong emotions in parents and at least some potential to cut across partisan lines.In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 on a “parents’ rights” platform awakened Republicans to the political potency of education with swing voters. Mr. Youngkin, who remains popular in his state, began an investigation last month of whether Virginia high schools delayed telling some students that they had earned merit awards, which he has called “a maniacal focus” on equal outcomes.Mr. DeSantis, too, has framed his opposition to progressive values as an attempt to give parents control over what their children are taught.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.Taking Aim at Trump: The Koch brothers’ donor network is preparing to get involved in the Republican primaries, with the aim of turning “the page on the past”  — a thinly veiled rebuke of Donald J. Trump.Trump’s Support: Is Mr. Trump the front-runner to win the Republican nomination? Or is he an underdog against Ron DeSantis? The polls are divided, but higher-quality surveys point to an answer.Falling in Line: With the vulnerabilities of Mr. Trump’s campaign becoming evident, the bickering among Democrats about President Biden’s potential bid for re-election has subsided.Democrats’ Primary Calendar: Upending decades of political tradition, members of the Democratic National Committee voted to approve a sweeping overhaul of the party’s primary process.Last year, he signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary grades.Democrats decried that and other education policies from the governor as censorship and as attacks on the civil rights of gay and transgender people. Critics called the Florida law “Don’t Say Gay.”Polling has shown strong support for a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. topics in elementary school. In a New York Times/Siena College poll last year, 70 percent of registered voters nationally opposed instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary grades.“The culture war issues are most potent among Republican primary voters, but that doesn’t mean that an education message can’t be effective with independent voters or the electorate as a whole,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who worked for Mr. DeSantis during his first governor’s race in 2018.Gov. Glenn Youngkin made education during the pandemic a key part of his winning platform in blue Virginia.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s approach to education is a far stretch from traditional issues that Republicans used to line up behind, such as charter schools and merit pay for teachers who raise test scores. But it has had an impact.Last week, the College Board purged its Advanced Placement course on African American Studies after the DeSantis administration banned a pilot version, citing readings on queer theory and reparations for slavery. The College Board said the changes were not a bow to political pressure, and had been decided in December.Mr. DeSantis next rolled out an initiative to end diversity and equity programs in universities, to require courses in Western civilization and to weaken professors’ tenure protections.Mr. DeSantis’s communications staff did not respond to a request for comment.The current era of Republican culture-driven attacks on education began in 2020 during the pandemic with a tandem crusade against mask mandates in schools and the supposed influence of critical race theory.Yet, the political power of opposition to the critical race theory — which became a grab bag for conservative complaints about the teaching of American history and racial inequality — largely petered out by last year’s midterm general elections. A September polling memo by the Republican National Committee warned candidates that “focusing on C.R.T. and masks excites the G.O.P. base, but parental rights and quality education drive independents.”Of $9.3 million spent on campaign ads that mentioned critical race theory in 2022, in nearly 50 races for House, Senate and governor, almost all was spent during the primaries, according to an analysis by AdImpact. The issue was raised in only eight general election ads. The theme of “parents’ rights,” invoked in ads worth $9.8 million in 19 races, proved a more popular general election topic; it was used in 14 of those races.Conservative groups in 2022 also supported hundreds of candidates in local school board races with limited success. In nearly 1,800 races nationwide, conservative school board candidates who opposed discussions of race or gender in classrooms, or who opposed pandemic responses such as mask requirements, won just 30 percent of races, according to Ballotpedia, a site that tracks U.S. elections.“The Republicans do a great job of creating issues that aren’t issues,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has worked for President Biden. He predicted that, in 2024, education issues that are now being raised by potential Republican presidential candidates would figure in the primary but would turn off voters in the general election.“The big lesson of 2022 is that Republicans didn’t have an economic agenda,” Mr. Anzalone said. “All they talked about was incredibly extreme positions, like on abortion and guns. Will they also talk about only extreme positions on these other things?”Kristin Davison, a political adviser to Mr. Youngkin, said that his 2021 campaign in blue Virginia was successful in part because it delivered nuanced and tailored messages on education. The campaign micro-targeted messages to each segment, including voters most interested in school choice, those opposed to critical race theory and those concerned about safety, she said.The strategy aimed to reverse Democrats’ historical advantage on which party voters trust on education.“Governor Youngkin started a movement in Virginia, standing with parents and going on offense on education,” she said.Republicans point to a May 2022 survey for the American Federation of Teachers union showing that voters in battleground states had slightly more confidence in Republicans than in Democrats, 39 percent to 38 percent, to handle education issues.Geoff Garin, whose firm, Hart Research, conducted that poll, said later surveys showed that Democrats had regained the advantage on education, a gain he attributed to Republicans’ focus on race being out of sync with parents.In a December survey by Hart for the teachers’ union, voters who were asked for the most important problems facing schools ranked teacher shortages and inadequate funding at the top. Critical race theory and “students being shamed over issues of race and racism” were near the bottom.“In addition to focusing on things that voters see as the wrong priorities, I expect that Republicans will deepen their problems with suburban voters by identifying so closely with book banning and whitewashing the treatment of race in schools and society,” Mr. Garin said.As Mr. DeSantis rolled out his latest plans last week to push Florida public universities to the right, he called universities’ diversity statements akin to “making people take a political oath.”Mr. DeSantis is believed to be weighing a presidential bid, but so far Donald Trump is the only declared candidate.USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters ConnectDays earlier, Mr. Trump presented an education agenda of his own in a scripted 4-minute, 33-second video. It attacked many of the same targets that have made Mr. DeSantis both an intensely disliked figure to national Democrats and a star of Republicans, many of them once Trump supporters.After spending the past two years focused on the lie of a stolen 2020 election, Mr. Trump is playing catch-up, starting with education proposals.In his video, the former president called to cut school funding for critical race theory as well as “inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.”He also proposed measures that seemed to echo those of Mr. Youngkin, including putting “parents back in charge” and investigating school districts for “race-based discrimination,” singling out “discrimination against Asian Americans.”Francis Rooney, a former Republican congressman from Florida and a Trump critic, said that the former president’s education proposals were an effort to become relevant on issues that drive conservative voters.“I think he’s becoming Mr. Me-Too,” he said of the former president. More

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      Is Trump Way Up or Way Down?

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      The polls are surprisingly divided, but higher-quality surveys point to an answer.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and President Trump in July 2020, when they were working together. Al Drago for The New York TimesIs Donald J. Trump the clear favorite and front-runner to win the Republican nomination? Or is he badly weakened and even an underdog against Ron DeSantis?At the onset of the Republican campaign, the polls are exceptionally divided on Mr. Trump’s support among Republican primary voters.In national surveys since last November’s midterm election, different pollsters have shown him with anywhere between 25 percent and 55 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field.That’s right: a mere 30-point gap.Huge Variance in Support for TrumpIn national surveys since November, different pollsters have shown Mr. Trump with anywhere between 25 percent and 55 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field. More

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      Will Americans Even Notice an Improving Economy?

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      Imagine that your picture of the U.S. economy came entirely from headlines and cable news chyrons. Would you know that real gross domestic product has risen 6.7 percent under President Biden, that America gained 4.5 million jobs in 2022 and that inflation over the past six months, which was indeed very high last winter, was less than 2 percent at an annual rate?This isn’t a hypothetical question. Most people don’t read long-form, data-driven essays on the economic outlook. Their sense of the economy is more likely to be shaped by snippets they read or hear.And there is a yawning gulf between public perceptions and economic reality. Recent economic data has been positive all around. Yet a plurality of adults believes that we’re in a recession. In an AP-NORC survey, three-quarters of Americans described the economy as “poor,” with only 25 percent saying it was “good.”You might be tempted to say, never mind the data, people know what’s happening to the economy from personal experience. But there’s a big disconnect on that front, too.Even with 75 percent of the public saying the economy is poor, a majority of Americans rate their own financial situation positively. On average, people seem to be saying that they’re doing reasonably well but that very bad things are happening to somebody else.This “I’m OK, you aren’t” syndrome was especially clear in a Federal Reserve survey carried out in late 2021; we won’t have the 2022 results until later this year, but I expect them to look similar. According to the 2021 survey, 78 percent of households said they were doing “at least OK” financially, a record high; only 24 percent said the national economy was “good or excellent,” a record low. Assessments of local economies, for which people have some personal knowledge, were in between.Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about the disconnect between economic perceptions and reality. In the past, however, I got a lot of pushback from people insisting that the public was in deep shock over the resurgence of inflation after years of more or less stable prices.At this point, however, that’s becoming a harder position to sustain. Since last summer prices of some goods, notably of eggs, have soared, but other prices, notably of gasoline, have plunged. As I said, the overall inflation rate in the second half of 2022 was around 2 percent, which has been normal for the past few decades, while the unemployment rate in December, at 3.5 percent, was at a 50-year low. Oh, and inflation-adjusted wages, which fell in the face of supply-chain problems and the Ukraine shock, have been rising again.So what explains the public’s sour view of what is objectively a pretty good economy?Partisanship is clearly part of the story. One striking aspect of that AP-NORC survey was that Democrats and Republicans weren’t that different in their assessments of their personal financial situation; majorities of both groups rated their condition as good. But 90 percent of Republicans said the national economy was poor. A longer view, from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, finds Republicans rating the current economy worse than they did in June 1980, when unemployment was above 7 percent and inflation was 14 percent.What about media coverage? Some of my colleagues get upset about any suggestion that economic reporting has had a negativity bias that affects public perceptions. Yet there’s actually hard evidence to that effect. The Michigan Survey asks respondents about what news they’ve heard about specific business conditions; all though 2022 — as the economy added 4.5 million jobs — more people reported hearing negative than positive news about employment.All of which raises an obviously important political question: Will Americans even notice an improving economy?To be fair, we don’t know whether the economic news will stay this good. Although many forecasters have backed off predictions of imminent recession, experts I talk to consider a growth hiccup over the next quarter or two to be likely. There’s also a raging debate among economists over whether we’ll need a sharp rise in unemployment to keep inflation low.But let’s assume that we get past any near-term wobbles and enter 2024 with both unemployment and inflation low. How many Americans will hear the good news?At this point we have to assume that as long as a Democrat sits in the White House, Fox News and Republicans in general will describe the economy as a disaster area whatever the reality. What’s less clear is how mainstream media will cover the economy, and what voters in general will perceive.Reports say that Biden’s political team plans to “lean into the economy” for the 2024 election. Indeed, while nothing is certain in economics (or life), Biden will most likely be able to run on a record of solid growth in incomes and jobs, with the inflation surge of 2021-22 receding in the rearview mirror.But we can safely predict that many people, not all of them Republican partisans, will insist, no matter what, that his record was a disaster. And I, at least, have no idea what voters will end up believing.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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      To Understand Why Republicans Are Divided on the Debt Ceiling, Consider Dr. Seuss

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      The Tea Party is over. Cultural issues seem to animate G.O.P. voters.“On Beyond Zebra!” is among the Dr. Seuss books that will no longer be published, a fact many Republicans are aware of. Scott Olson/Getty ImagesTo Understand Why Republicans Are Divided on the Debt Ceiling, Consider Dr. SeussOne of my favorite polling nuggets from the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency wasn’t about Afghanistan or inflation or classified documents.It was about Dr. Seuss.In early March 2021, a Morning Consult/Politico poll found that more Republicans said they had heard “a lot” about the news that the Seuss estate had decided to stop selling six books it deemed had offensive imagery than about the $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package enacted into the law that very week.The result was a vivid marker of how much the Republican Party had changed over the Trump era. Just a dozen years earlier, a much smaller stimulus package sparked the Tea Party movement that helped propel Republicans to a landslide victory in the 2010 midterm election. But in 2021 the right was so consumed by the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss that it could barely muster any outrage about big government spending.Whether issues like “On Beyond Zebra!” still arouse Republicans more than the national debt takes on renewed importance this year, as Washington seems to be hurtling toward another debt ceiling crisis. The answer will shape whether Republicans can unify around a debt ceiling fight, as they did a decade ago, or whether a fractious party will struggle to play a convincing game of chicken — with uncertain consequences.Unfortunately, our trusty Seuss-o-meter for gauging Republican interest in fiscal policy isn’t readily available today. But heading into the year, there were very few signs that the debt had reclaimed its Obama-era position at the top of the list of conservative policy priorities.Understand the U.S. Debt CeilingCard 1 of 5What is the debt ceiling? More

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      Older Voters Know Exactly What’s at Stake, and They’ll Be Here for Quite a While

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      Is it time to call the next election “the most important in American history”? Probably. It seems like it may involve a judgment on democracy itself. Americans with a lot of history will play a key role in determining its outcome.And judging in part by November’s midterms, they may not play the role that older voters are usually assigned. We at Third Act, the group we helped form in 2021, think older Americans are beginning a turn in the progressive direction, a turn that will accelerate as time goes on.A lot has been written about the impact of young voters in November’s contests, and rightly so. The enormous margins that Democrats ran up among voters under 30 let them squeak through in race after race. Progressives should be incredibly grateful that the next generation can see straight through Trumpism in a way too many of their elders can’t.But there were also intriguing hints of what looked like a gray countercurrent that helped damp the expected red wave. Yes, older people by and large voted Republican, in keeping with what political scientists have long insisted: that we become more conservative as we age. But in the 63 most competitive congressional districts, the places where big money was spent on ads and where the margin in the House was decided, polling by AARP, an advocacy group for people over 50, found some fascinating numbers.In early summer, Republicans had a sturdy lead among older voters in 50 of those districts, up 50 percent to 40 percent. Those had Republicans salivating. But on Election Day, voters over 65 actually broke for Democrats in those districts, 49 to 46.That doesn’t surprise us at Third Act. We’re nonpartisan, but we’ve learned that demographic is far less settled than people sometimes suppose.Some of the issues that benefited Democrats are obvious, of course. Republican messaging included calls for weakening Social Security and Medicare even though most older beneficiaries rely on Social Security for most of their income, and for an estimated 40 percent it’s all their retirement income. The cruelty of toying with people’s life support systems is matched only by its political foolishness. Among voters 65 and over, Social Security and Medicare were among the top concerns.But something else happened, too. When the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade in early summer, most of the pictures were of young women protesting, appropriately, since it’s their lives that will be turned upside down. But people we know in their 60s and 70s felt a real psychic upheaval: A woman’s right to choose had been part of their mental furniture for five decades. And they’ve lived their entire lives in what they had imagined was a stable and working democracy.The top concern to voters 65 and over, especially women, was “threats to democracy,” according to AARP. And exit polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among women 50 and older, the court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion had a major impact on which candidate they supported. Sixty-six percent of Black women said so, as did 61 percent of Hispanic women and 48 percent of white women. Voters who said the Supreme Court’s abortion decision was the single most important factor in their vote supported Democrats by a margin of 2 to 1.Some of our members helped organize access to abortion before Roe was decided in 1973; they don’t want to go back. And it’s not only abortion: The Supreme Court also took on the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We helped win these fights once, turning out by the tens of millions to oppose the war in Vietnam or for the first Earth Day. And we can help win them again — we have the muscle memory of what organizing on a big scale feels like.Hundreds of us from around the country converged on Nevada in the days before the midterm vote, because we determined — correctly, as it turned out — that it might be the place where control of the Senate would be decided. We may walk a tad slower door-to-door, but in this case slow and steady helped to win the race.With the election past, Third Act is now digging into work on climate change — in particular targeting the big American banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America) that are also the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. On March 21 we’ll be cutting up bank credit cards and picketing bank branches across the country. We know that young people have been in the lead in this fight, because they’ll have to live with the world we’re creating. But as long as we’re still here, we’ll have to live with the knowledge of what we’re leaving behind, so we want to change it while we still can.We recognize that this will require a sustained effort beyond the next election and the election after that. Numerous analysts and demographers do believe that coming demographic changes in the United States will generally favor Democrats. But complications abound. Partisan gerrymandering continues to favor Republicans, for instance, and at least five states that generally vote Democratic have each lost a seat from their congressional delegations.But here’s the thing. Many of us are going to be here for quite a while. Ten thousand Americans turn 60 every day, and on average we’ll live another 23 years. The last of the baby boomers, will be 65 or older in 2030. Youth voters, moreover, are youth voters for only about a decade. One guarantee for 2024: We’ll vote in huge numbers, as we always do. One possibility is that we’ll help turn back the clock a little, toward the world we actually built in our youth.We’re not your parent’s grandparents.Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, helped found the climate advocacy group 350.org and is the author of the memoir “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon.” Akaya Windwood is the lead adviser for Third Act and a co-author of “Leading With Joy.”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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      Ron Klain Expected to Step Down as Biden’s White House Chief of Staff

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      Mr. Klain’s departure would mark a rare moment of high-level turnover in an administration that has been remarkably stable through two years of crises and political battles.WASHINGTON — Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff who has steered President Biden’s administration through two years of triumphs and setbacks, is expected to step down in coming weeks in the most significant changing of the guard since Mr. Biden took office two years ago.Mr. Klain has been telling colleagues privately since the November midterm elections that after a grueling, nonstop stretch at Mr. Biden’s side going back to the 2020 campaign, he is ready to move on, according to senior administration officials, and a search for a replacement has been underway.The officials, who discussed internal matters on condition of anonymity, would not say whether a successor has already been picked or when the decision would be announced, but indicated that it would come at some point after the president outlined his agenda for the coming year in his State of the Union address on Feb. 7. Mr. Klain likely would stay around for a transition period to help the next chief settle into the corner office that has been his command post for many crises and legislative battles.His resignation would be a striking moment of turnover at the top of an administration that has been relatively stable through the first half of Mr. Biden’s term, and Mr. Klain takes pride that he has lasted longer than any other Democratic president’s first chief of staff in more than half a century. But with Mr. Biden expected to announce by spring that he is running for re-election, advisers predict more moves as some aides shift from the White House to the campaign.The departure would also come at a time when the White House faces a widening array of political and legal threats from a newly appointed special counsel investigating the improper handling of classified documents and a flurry of other inquiries by the newly installed Republican majority in the House. The next chief of staff will be charged with managing the defense of Mr. Biden’s White House and any counterattack as the 2024 election approaches.Among the possible choices to replace Mr. Klain mentioned by senior officials are Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh; former Gov. Jack A. Markell of Delaware, now serving as ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden; Steven J. Ricchetti, the counselor to the president; Jeffrey D. Zients, the administration’s former coronavirus response coordinator; Susan Rice, the White House domestic policy adviser; and Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture.Neither Mr. Klain nor any of those named as possible candidates to succeed him had any immediate comment on Saturday in response to messages. Ms. Dunn has flatly ruled out taking the job in conversations with colleagues.Mr. Klain has been a singularly important figure in Mr. Biden’s administration. Having worked for Mr. Biden off and on for more than three decades, Mr. Klain channels the president as few others can, admirers say. He is seen as so influential that Republicans derisively call him a virtual prime minister and Democrats blame him when they are disappointed in a decision.For all the crossfire, Mr. Klain helped rack up an impressive string of legislative victories, including a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan, a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure program, the largest investment in combating climate change in history and measures to expand benefits for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, lower prescription drug costs for seniors, spur development in the semiconductor industry and create a minimum 15 percent tax rate for major corporations.Mr. Klain also helped oversee the distribution of vaccines that have curbed if not ended the Covid-19 pandemic and the enactment of a plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt for millions of Americans. And he set the tone for the White House message to the world through an active Twitter account that he used to promote victories and jab critics.On Friday, for instance, he chided Republicans for their approach to federal spending. “How extreme is the House GOP plan to cut Social Security and Medicare?” he wrote. “So extreme that even Donald Trump is saying, ‘Hey, that’s too extreme for me!’”He also reflected on the second anniversary of Mr. Biden’s inauguration. “Two hard years,” Mr. Klain wrote. “So much to be done. But so much progress.”At the same time, Mr. Klain has presided over a rash of troubles that have drained public support for Mr. Biden. While unemployment has remained near record lows and job creation was robust, inflation reached its highest rate in 40 years, gas prices shot up to an all-time high, economic growth stalled for a time and illegal immigration at the southwestern border surged to record levels..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Likely as a result, Mr. Biden’s approval rating has been mired in the low 40 percent range for more than a year. But Mr. Klain is preparing to leave at a moment when gas prices have come back down, inflation is falling and Mr. Biden’s political standing appears to have recovered somewhat after better-than-expected midterm elections.“He is a truly unique chief of staff,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution who studies administration personnel. Mr. Klain’s broad experience in multiple administrations as well as on Capitol Hill, his reputation for managing tough political challenges and his long history with Mr. Biden made him the most important figure in the White House besides the president.“Finding a successor who encompasses all of those skills will not be easy and may well be impossible,” Ms. Tenpas said. “They are headed into a re-election campaign that also increases Ron’s value in that he has campaign experience and political skills. In addition, the chief of staff’s Capitol Hill experience could come in handy as they confront divided government.”By this point in his presidency, Donald J. Trump was already on his third chief of staff and his third national security adviser and had lost more than half of his original 15 cabinet secretaries. By contrast, none of Mr. Biden’s statutory cabinet members have left. In fact, even Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, who some had speculated might step down after the midterm elections, recently told Mr. Biden that she would stay.Ms. Tenpas calculates Mr. Biden’s turnover in his most important positions at 40 percent in the first two years, far lower than the 66 percent turnover in the same period under Mr. Trump, although higher than other recent presidents, like Barack Obama, who saw just 24 percent in his first two years.Still, few of those who left were at the senior-most level or part of the president’s inner circle, which has remained broadly intact. Mr. Biden’s overall turnover rate is higher than it would have been otherwise in part because of turmoil in Vice President Kamala Harris’s office, where staff members have come and gone with more frequency.Other departures are anticipated, possibly after the president’s State of the Union address, scheduled for Feb. 7. Brian Deese, the president’s national economic adviser, is expected to leave later this year, while Cecilia Rouse is expected to leave her post as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers to return to Princeton University.Mr. Klain, 61, who grew up in Indiana, graduated from Georgetown and earned a law degree from Harvard, has now served under three presidents and brought more White House experience to his post than perhaps any of his predecessors. He was associate counsel to President Bill Clinton, counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno and then chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. A central figure in Mr. Gore’s futile fight to win the election recount in Florida in 2000, Mr. Klain was later played by Kevin Spacey in the 2008 HBO film “Recount.”Mr. Klain also worked for Mr. Biden’s Senate office and served as Mr. Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president before becoming Mr. Obama’s Ebola response coordinator. Altogether, he served under nine previous White House chiefs of staff. “I have worked for more White House chiefs of staff than any other White House chief of staff,” Mr. Klain once boasted.In 2015, Mr. Klain enlisted with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign without waiting until Mr. Biden announced he was not running, an act that was seen as a betrayal by some in Biden world. In an email later made public, Mr. Klain even lamented that he was “dead to them,” meaning Mr. Biden’s circle. But several current and former Biden advisers said it is a testament to Mr. Klain’s strategic value that he worked his way back into the good graces of not only the president but also his wife, Jill Biden.Mr. Klain has long been open that he expected to leave at the two-year mark, especially since the midterm elections. He told Chris Whipple, author of “The Fight of His Life,” a new book on Mr. Biden’s presidency published last Tuesday, that he was readying to depart at that point and predicted that his successor could be a woman, without naming her.Officials said in recent days that it was not at all certain it will be a woman after all, however. But after the rough and tumble of his tenure, Mr. Klain took the midterm results as validation. “Maybe,” he wrote Mr. Whipple in an email at 1:16 a.m. on election night, “we don’t suck as much as people thought.” More

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      Chris Hipkins Poised to Replace Jacinda Ardern as New Zealand’s Leader

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      Mr. Hipkins, a household name in New Zealand for his role overseeing the country’s response to the pandemic, was nominated to succeed Jacinda Ardern as leader of the governing Labour Party.Chris Hipkins, who has been serving as New Zealand’s education and policing minister, is set to become the country’s new prime minister next month after he was the only member of the governing Labour Party to be nominated for the party leadership post.Members of the Labour caucus will meet on Sunday in the New Zealand city of Napier, where they are currently at their summer retreat, to endorse the nomination and confirm Mr. Hipkins as their party’s new leader. At least 10 percent of the caucus must vote for Mr. Hipkins to confirm him.His nomination comes after the surprise resignation on Thursday of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had become a global liberal icon during her tenure.“I believe that leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also one of the more challenging,” Ms. Ardern said at the news conference announcing her decision. “You cannot and should not do it unless you have a full tank.”Ms. Ardern has said she will leave her post “no later” than Feb. 7, giving the party about two weeks to complete the transition.A clear front-runner from the moment Ms. Ardern revealed her decision to step down, Mr. Hipkins promised a seamless leadership transition without the infighting and back-alley machinations common to many political parties.“We will select a new leader that the party will then unite behind,” he said, after Ms. Ardern’s resignation. “Leadership contests don’t have to be like the Hunger Games.”Jacinda Ardern on Thursday, the day she announced she was resigning as New Zealand’s prime minister.Kerry Marshall/Getty ImagesMr. Hipkins, nicknamed Chippy, became a household name in New Zealand during his daily televised briefings throughout the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic.As first as the health minister and then as the minister for the Covid-19 response, Mr. Hipkins, 44, became the face of — and often the driving force of the policies behind — the country’s stringent, but widely applauded approach to the virus.The country’s policies resulted in few deaths but included some of the world’s most extensive restrictions in the first months of the pandemic — before the rules were all removed when the virus had been eradicated from the country, allowing New Zealanders to lead largely normal lives for most of the pandemic.But as the Labour Party’s next leader, he will face a number of major challenges when the country goes to the polls on Oct. 14.In a clash of two Chrises, Mr. Hipkins will go head-to-head against Christopher Luxon, the leader of the National Party and the former chief executive of New Zealand’s national airline, Air New Zealand.Voters, facing the same pocketbook strains as people in many other parts of the world, are looking for solutions to biting inflation, an ongoing housing crisis and other entrenched social problems such as child poverty and crime. Polling suggests many believe the governing party has not provided the policy answers to those problems, with 38 percent favoring the center-right National Party compared with Labour’s 33 percent, as of last month.Mr. Hipkins may also struggle to get beyond his association with pandemic policy, potentially a double-edged sword with voters eager to put the worst of the last three years behind them.Christopher Luxon, the leader of the National Party, who will be challenging Mr. Hipkins for the prime minister’s job when New Zealand votes in October.Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesThe country’s rigorous restrictions and vaccine mandates were initially popular with most New Zealanders. But as the rest of the world opened up and New Zealand’s borders remained shut, resentment began to grow, spurring a backlash and resulting in a crowd of protesters camping outside Parliament’s grounds in Wellington for more than three weeks.Even as her party slumped in the polls, Ms. Ardern had retained a certain star power that her successor may struggle to match. Instead, Mr. Hipkins, who has been a lawmaker since 2008, may bring to the campaign a reputation as a champion debater and an experienced policymaker, as well as a face familiar to most in the country.Certain idiosyncrasies and odd moments — including a well-known fondness for Diet Coke; a time when he posed with a birthday cake made entirely of sausage rolls; and, ahead of a news conference held in a nature reserve, the surprise appearance of his mother, who apologized for his lateness — have been memorialized in countless internet jokes, earning him the unofficial title of “minister for memes.”In a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Hipkins, who has cultivated a political brand of being approachable and down to earth, said that he was “humbled and honored” to assume the party’s leadership and that he was “incredibly optimistic” about New Zealand’s future.He added: “I’m a human being. I’ll make the odd mistake from time to time, I try and own the mistakes that I make. I don’t pretend to be someone that I’m not. I’ve never done that in the past. And I don’t intend to start doing it.”A “boy from the Hutt,” as he described himself in the news conference, Mr. Hipkins grew up in the industrial and unglamorous Hutt Valley north of Wellington, the New Zealand capital.He majored in politics and criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, where he was twice elected student body president. As a first-year student in 1997, he was arrested, strip-searched and detained overnight for protesting a higher education reform bill that he later said would “turn academic entities into corporate entities, treat students as customers.”The government in 2009 apologized to and compensated the protesters.In his first speech in Parliament as a newly elected member in 2008, Mr. Hipkins cited family, community spirit and state support as chief priorities, and called for reform to New Zealand’s welfare system, which he said should help those “at the bottom” to scale “the ladder of opportunity.”“The needs of the competitive free market are balanced by the need for the government to set a few boundaries and ensure that the most vulnerable are protected,” he said. More