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      Michael Wolff: I'm Sure Trump Will Run for President in 2024

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      To write three books in four years about Donald Trump has been an immersion into his obsessions and fixations. This is why I know the obvious: Donald Trump will run for president again.This spring, in another of his compulsive bids for attention — indifferent to whether it is good or bad — he hosted me at Mar-a-Lago, even after I had written two unflattering books about him (one whose publication he tried to stop), for an interview and dinner. After dinner, I asked about his plans for a presidential library, the traditional retirement project and fund-raising scheme of ex-presidents. There was a flash of confusion on his uniquely readable face, and then anger, aroused, I figured, by the implication of what I seemed to be saying — that his time in office was past.“No way, no way,” he snarled, “no way.”It is an existential predicament: He can’t be Donald Trump without a claim on the presidency. He can’t hold the attention and devotion of the Republican Party if he is not both once and future king — and why would he ever give that up? Indeed, it seemed to be that I was strategically seated in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago when I arrived precisely so I could overhear the efforts by a Republican delegation to court and grovel before Mr. Trump and to observe his dismissive dominance over them.More than a bit of his subsequent conversation with me was about his contempt for any Republican who might be less than absolute in his or her devotion to him — after all, he had the power to make or break the people who have since disappointed him (like Senator Mitch McConnell and Justice Brett Kavanaugh). He seemed not so much paranoid about challenges to him but warlike, savoring his future retributions.He repeatedly returns to his grudge against his once obsequious vice president with relish; Mike Pence has become more public about his own political ambitions. In his telling, it is Mr. Pence whose actions confirmed “the steal,” by his refusal to overturn the electoral vote count, over which he presided in January in the Senate. I believe he will run again just to stop the men who, in his view, helped take the presidency from him from trying to get it for themselves. The reports that reach him of the West Wing and members of his administration who refuse to subscribe to the idea of “the steal” only feeds his fury and determination to punish all doubters — “some very weak people who have worked for me but won’t in the future,” as he told me.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has become another frequent subject at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where the former president is spending the summer away from the Florida heat. Many members of Trumpworld believe Mr. DeSantis, who came in second to Mr. Trump in a CPAC straw poll this month, might, unbelievably, run for the 2024 nomination even if Mr. Trump runs. The idea that Mr. DeSantis, who Mr. Trump believes he “made” by his endorsement, might not accept his dependence on and obligation to Mr. Trump would be a personal affront that must be met. Mr. Trump pointedly blew off the governor’s request that he postpone a Florida rally in the aftermath of the Surfside building collapse. Clear message: The governor is not the boss of him. (Mr. DeSantis has denied making this request.)The continued career of Mr. McConnell, to whom Mr. Trump has not spoken since vilifying him with a heap of obscenity after Mr. McConnell acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory, is unfinished business. (Trump aides believe the two are likely to never speak again.)Mr. Trump believes that Mr. McConnell retained his Senate seat in 2020 only because of his support. The war against Mr. McConnell is a war about who controls the Republican Party — if it’s Mr. Trump’s party, it can’t be Mr. McConnell’s. If candidates win because of his endorsements, thereby making Mr. Trump himself the ultimate winner, and inevitable front-runner, then it’s surely his party. Mr. Trump, whose political muscle helped oust some Republican enemies from office in 2018, is confident about evicting Mr. McConnell once back in power. (I doubt he pays attention to the fact that Mr. McConnell was re-elected to a six-year term and has a reasonable chance of becoming the Senate majority leader again.)Many Democrats believe that the legal pursuit of the former president’s family business in New York, and other cases, including the investigation of his attempt to overturn election results in Georgia, might seriously impede his political future. But in Mr. Trump’s logic, this will run the opposite way: Running for president is the best way to directly challenge the prosecutors.Mr. Trump also believes he has a magic bullet. In his telling, the Republicans almost took back the House in 2020 because of his “telerallies,” telephone conference calls in congressional districts that attracted in some instances tens of thousands of callers. Who has that draw? he asked me, nearly smacking his lips. In 2022, with his draw, the Republicans, he is certain, will retake the House with his chosen slate of candidates. And indeed, this actually might be true.But perhaps most important, there is his classic hucksterism, and his synoptic U.S.P. — unique selling proposition. In 2016 it was “the wall.” For 2022 and 2024 he will have another proposition available: “the steal,” a rallying cry of rage and simplicity.For Democrats, who see him exiled to Mar-a-Lago, stripped of his key social media platforms and facing determined prosecutors, his future seems risible if not pathetic. But this is Donald Trump, always ready to strike back harder than he has been struck, to blame anyone but himself, to silence any doubts with the sound of his own voice, to take what he believes is his and, most of all, to seize all available attention. Sound the alarm.Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is a journalist and the author, most recently, of “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.”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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      German Candidates Fail to Find Footing in Flood Response

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      So far, none of the main contenders to replace Angela Merkel have come across as strong leaders in the aftermath of floods that killed 170 people and caused billions in damages.BERLIN — Floods have had a way of reshaping German politics.Helmut Schmidt made a name for himself responding to deadly floods in Hamburg in 1962, and went on to become chancellor in the 1970s. Images of Gerhard Schröder wading through muddy water along the Elbe River in 2002 are credited with helping him win another term.The floods that ravaged Germany last week — more severe than any in centuries — are already doing their work in this election year. But the striking thing they have revealed, political analysts say, is that none of the major candidates has been able to demonstrate the level of leadership in a crisis the public has grown accustomed to under Chancellor Angela Merkel.While the deadly flash floods have offered the candidates a chance to show their stuff, political experts said that each has struggled to communicate competence and reassurance. Voters seem to agree.The first poll since the flooding showed a drop in popularity for the two leading candidates — the conservative Armin Laschet and his Green party rival, Annalena Baerbock — after what political experts say have been lackluster performances by both this week.“This will not be an election in which the candidates play a deciding role,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at the University of Trier. “None of the candidates have the kind of overwhelming charisma that is able to fully convince voters.”The floods have killed 170 people, with more than 150 still unaccounted for, the police said on Wednesday. The number of missing is significantly lower than figures announced last week, when downed communication networks and blocked roads rendered many people unreachable.In the latest polling, which was carried out from Tuesday to Sunday, Mr. Laschet’s leading Christian Democratic Union dipped below 30 percent support, to 28 percent, while their main rivals, the second-place Greens, held steady at 19 percent.When asked if they could vote for an individual candidate (Germans cast votes only for parties), which one would receive their endorsement, only 23 percent said Mr. Laschet, according to the survey by the Forsa polling group.On Saturday, Mr. Laschet came under fierce public criticism after he was caught on camera chatting and laughing with colleagues, while President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was giving a solemn statement to reporters after the two had met with flood victims in the city of Erftstadt.Mr. Laschet, 60, who is the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, was forced to apologize. On Tuesday he visited another devastated town alongside the chancellor.Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party’s chancellor candidate, Armin Laschet, behind her, visiting the flood-ravaged city of Iversheim on Tuesday. The town is in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Mr. Laschet is governor.Pool photo by Wolfgang RattayIf there is one thing Ms. Merkel has learned in her four terms in offices, it is how to be calm in the face of calamity — whether pledging to keep Germans’ savings safe in 2008, or wading through the flooded streets of eastern Germany five years later.Standing beside her Tuesday after meeting with volunteers in the city of Bad Münstereifel, Mr. Laschet tried a more statesmanlike tone. He offered an open ear and a supportive clap on the shoulder to people cleaning the mud and debris from their homes, as well as condolences for victims.“Nothing we can do can bring them back, and we barely have words for the suffering of those who survived,” he said, pledging to double his state’s contribution to emergency aid. “So that we, too, are doing our part,” he said.Ms. Merkel’s government on Wednesday approved a 200 million euro, or $235 million, package of emergency assistance to be paid out to flood victims immediately. That figure will be matched by the affected states.An estimated 6 billion euros, $7 billion, will be needed to repair the infrastructure that has been damaged, including roads, bridges, homes and buildings.Much of that money will flow through the finance ministry run by Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, who is also running for chancellor. Getting financial aid to people quickly could give him an edge, but so far he has failed to translate his position into a political advantage, experts say.“If we need more money, then we will make it available,” Mr. Scholz, 63, told reporters in Berlin, “We will do what we have to do to help everyone who needs it.”Markus Söder, Bavaria’s governor, right, and Olaf Scholz, the country’s finance minister and another chancellor candidate, visited the municipality of Schoenau am Koenigssee on Sunday.Lukas Barth-Tuttas/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Scholz visited stricken communities in Rhineland-Palatinate last week and then headed to the southern state of Bavaria just days after the heavy rains stopped there. But he has failed to connect with voters in a meaningful way, experts said. His party gained only 1 percentage point in the most recent survey and Mr. Scholz’s personal popularity remained unchanged.“He is a candidate that people just can’t really warm up to,” Mr. Jun said.But if any party should be in a position to find a political advantage in the events of the past week, it should be the Greens, who have been pushing for Germany to speed up its transformation to a green economy for decades.Especially popular among the country’s younger voters, climate issues have helped the Greens to replace the Social Democrats as the second most popular party in recent years. But after their candidate for chancellor, Ms. Baerbock, 40, stumbled over accusations of plagiarism in a recently published book and inaccuracies on her résumé, even a deadly weather catastrophe appeared unable to lift the party’s standing significantly.The Greens remained firmly in second place, according to the most recent poll, with 19 percent support — enough to create a majority if they were to agree to join forces in a government led by Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, in a tie-up that many observers believe would be the most likely coalition.Making Ms. Baerbock’s position more difficult is the fact that she currently does not hold a political office that would give her the opportunity to make a public visit to the stricken regions, as do both of her competitors. Last week she decided against taking members of the news media with her when she visited communities in Rhineland-Palatinate afflicted by the severe weather.In several interviews afterward, Ms. Baerbock called for Germany to move more quickly on its exit from coal, currently planned for 2030, and to increase spending to better prepare communities for the dangers posed by extreme weather. She also laid out a three-point plan that included adapting to the changing climate, amid attempts to halt it.“This is not an either-or between climate precaution, climate adaptation and climate protection, but a triad that is actually decided in the same way in all the climate protection treaties worldwide,” Ms. Baerbock told ARD public television.In the wake of last week’s flooding, the Greens are no longer the only party making such calls, but as the images of devastation retreat from the headlines, her party remains in the strongest position to gain voters from the renewed focus on the threat posed by changes to the world’s climate.“I assume that the weather events will indeed raise the issue of climate change to the top of the electorate’s agenda, which will help the Greens,” said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy of Political Education in Tützing, but added that it would not be enough of an advantage to close the gap with the leading conservatives. “It still won’t help Ms. Baerbock into the chancellor’s office.” More

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      Why Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc

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      The gender gap is well known in politics. The marriage gap is more obscure — but could inform how campaigns think about key groups of voters in the next elections.The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in “The West Wing” put it: “If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.”)Similar, but more obscure, is the “marriage gap,” which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative.If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats.What’s going on here? And what could it mean for the political future?“Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald J. Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women.Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Mr. Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates.“That’s definitely statistically significant,” said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. “Married men are a pretty big group,” he added, “so that’s pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin.”A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Mr. Biden won 48 percent of men while Mrs. Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Mr. Biden also improved on Mrs. Clinton’s margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist.Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Mr. Biden’s outperforming Mrs. Clinton among this group “doesn’t surprise me at all.”In other words, this story may have less to do with Mr. Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Mr. Trump. Rather, it is a story about Mrs. Clinton and sexism — a “gendered” view of the candidate, as Ms. Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place.“She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men,” said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. “There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic.”The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Dr. Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic.“This is not your father’s married man,” Dr. Schaffner said.Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other’s ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. “Wife Guys” for Biden?Ms. Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that “vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic.”Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Mr. Biden and those without headed toward Mr. Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Dr. Schaffner said.For Dr. Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. “This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization,” he said. “This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives.”Mr. Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: “Since Biden’s taken office,” he said, “in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall.”To Ms. Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said.But that could change as soon as the midterms. “There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year,” Ms. Greenberg added, “where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      ‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

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      Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.He emailed me his reply:It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.Galston put it like this:When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”A Nation DividedDemocrats and Republicans have drifted further apart over the years, as measured by a 10-point scale of political values. More

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      Why America’s Politics Are Stubbornly Fixed, Despite Momentous Changes

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      The country is recovering from a pandemic and an economic crisis, and its former president is in legal and financial peril. But no political realignment appears to be at hand.In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”Supporters cheered former President Donald J. Trump during a rally in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAmerican voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.” More

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      Altering Our Vision of Voting

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      It has long been clear to me that we are teaching the concept of voting wrong, that we are buying into an idea of false hope and optimism that is easily exploited by those who want fewer people to vote and fewer votes to be counted. More

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      Biden Gained With Moderate and Conservative Voting Groups, New Data Shows

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      President Biden cut into Donald Trump’s margins with married men and veteran households, a Pew survey shows. But there was a far deeper well of support for Mr. Trump than many progressives had imagined.Married men and veteran households were probably not the demographic groups that Democrats assumed would carry the party to victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election.But Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s apparent strength among traditionally moderate or even conservative constituencies, and especially men, is emerging as one of the hallmarks of his victory, according to new data from Pew Research.Mr. Trump won married men by just a 54 to 44 percent margin — a net 20 point decline from his 62 to 32 percent victory in 2016. He won veteran households by a similar 55 to 43 percent margin, down a net 14 points from his 61 to 35 percent victory.In both cases, the size of Mr. Biden’s gains among these relatively conservative groups rivals Mr. Trump’s far more publicized surge among Latino voters. Each group represents a larger share of the electorate than Latinos, as well.The Pew data, released on Wednesday, is the latest and perhaps the last major tranche of high-quality data on voter preference and turnout in the 2020 election, bringing analysts close to a final, if still imperfect, account of the outcome.The data suggests that the progressive vision of winning a presidential election simply by mobilizing strong support from Democratic constituencies simply did not materialize for Mr. Biden. While many Democrats had hoped to overwhelm Mr. Trump with a surge in turnout among young and nonwhite voters, the new data confirms that neither candidate claimed a decisive advantage in the highest turnout election since 1900.Instead, Mr. Trump enjoyed a turnout advantage fairly similar to his edge in 2016, when many Democrats blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat on a failure to mobilize young and nonwhite voters. If anything, Mr. Trump enjoyed an even larger turnout edge while Mr. Biden lost ground among nearly every Democratic base constituency. Only his gains among moderate to conservative voting groups allowed him to prevail.The Pew data represents the only large, traditional “gold standard” survey linked to voter registration files. The files reveal exactly who voted in the election, offering an authoritative evaluation of the role of turnout; but they become available only months after the election.In previous cycles, the higher-quality data released months or years after the election has complicated or even overturned the narratives that emerge on election night. For this cycle, the Pew data — and other late analyses, like a study from the Democratic data firm Catalist — has largely confirmed what analysts gleaned from the vote tallies in the days after the election.If anything, the newest data depicts a more pronounced version of the early analysis.The Pew data, for instance, shows Mr. Trump faring even better among Latino voters than any previous estimate, with Mr. Biden winning the group by a 59 to 38 percent margin — a net 17 point decline from Hillary Clinton’s 66 to 28 percent victory in the same survey four years ago.Mr. Trump’s breakthrough among Latino voters was the most extreme example of the broader inroads he made among Democratic constituencies. According to the data, Mr. Biden failed to improve his margins among virtually every voting group that backed Mrs. Clinton in 2016, whether it was young voters, women, Black voters, unmarried voters or voters in urban areas. Often, Mr. Trump improved over his 2016 performance, even though he was largely seen as trying to appeal to his own base.Higher turnout did not reshape the electorate to the favor of Democrats, either. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many Democrats blamed Mrs. Clinton’s defeat on low turnout and support from young and nonwhite voters. Many progressives even believed that mobilizing Democratic constituencies alone could oust the president, based in part on the assumption that Mr. Trump had all but maxed-out his support among white, rural voters without a degree.At the same time, Democrats supposed that higher turnout would draw more young and nonwhite voters to the polls, bolstering the party.Overall, 73 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters voted in the 2020 election compared with 68 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters. In comparison, Mr. Trump’s supporters were only 2 percentage points more likely to vote than Mrs. Clinton’s in 2016, according to the Pew data.New voters, who did not participate in 2016 or 2018, split about evenly between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, with Mr. Biden winning 49 percent of new voters to 47 percent for Mr. Trump.In the end, there was a far deeper well of support and enthusiasm for Mr. Trump than many progressives had imagined. An additional 13 million people voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 than in 2016. Voter records in states with party registration — like Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona — suggest that registered Republicans continued to turn out at a higher rate than registered Democrats, and in some cases even expanded their turnout advantage over the 2016 cycle.There was a far deeper well of support and enthusiasm for former President Donald J. Trump than many progressives had imagined.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNationwide, Catalist found that the turnout among ‘historical’ Republican and Democratic voters both increased by 3 percentage points, leaving the basic turnout pattern of the 2016 election intact.Whether the Democratic turnout should be considered strong or weak has been a matter of some consternation for Democrats, who are understandably reluctant to diminish the contributions their base made in ousting Mr. Trump. And of course, Mr. Biden absolutely could not have won the election if Democratic turnout did not rise to at least keep pace with that of Republicans.Perhaps another Democrat would have mobilized voters more decisively. But the strong turnout for Mr. Trump implies that it would have been very challenging for any Democrat to win simply by outmuscling the other side.Instead, Mr. Biden prevailed by making significant inroads among moderate or conservative constituencies.Mr. Biden’s strength among these groups was not obvious on election night. His gains were largest in suburban areas, which are so heterogenous that it’s often hard to say exactly what kinds of voters might explain his inroads.Mr. Biden’s weakness among Hispanic voters, in contrast, was obvious in overwhelmingly Hispanic areas like Miami-Dade County or the Rio Grande Valley.But according to Pew Research, Mr. Biden made larger gains among married men than any other demographic group analyzed in the survey. He won 44 percent of married men, up from 32 percent for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. It’s an even larger surge for Mr. Biden than Pew showed Mr. Trump making among Latino voters, even though they do not stand out on the electoral map.In a similar analysis, Catalist also showed that Mr. Biden made his largest inroads among married white men, though they showed smaller gains for Mr. Biden than Pew Research.Mr. Biden also made significant, double-digit gains among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, a persuadable but somewhat conservative voting bloc. He won 16 percent of moderate to liberal Republicans, up from 9 percent for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. And Mr. Biden gained among men, even while making no ground or, according to Pew, losing ground, among women. As a result, the gender gap was cut in half over the last four years, to 13 points from 26 points in 2016.The shrunken gender gap in 2020 defies the pre-election conventional wisdom and polling, which predicted that a record gender gap would propel Mr. Biden to victory. The Pew findings offer no insight into why the gender gap may have decreased; any number of interpretations are possible. In this case, it is possible that attitudes about Mrs. Clinton may be a more important factor than attitudes about either of the 2020 election candidates. More

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      Is the U.S. in Crisis? Republicans Want Voters to Think So.

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      Looking ahead to the midterms, the G.O.P. is pushing a message that the country is in peril on numerous fronts.The coronavirus pandemic is receding. The economy is gradually climbing back. And according to recent surveys, a wide majority of Americans is feeling optimistic about the future.On Thursday, the Consumer Comfort Index, a polling measure of Americans’ confidence in the economy, hit its highest level since before the pandemic.But as our congressional correspondent Jonathan Weisman points out in a new article, House Republicans are pushing a much different interpretation of what’s going on. During a news conference they held on Tuesday, the buzzword was “crisis”: It was used about once every minute for nearly half an hour. Republican leaders are arguing that the economy, national security, the U.S.-Mexico border and more are all in peril.Such arguments are often used by the party out of power. But with Republicans leaning so hard into the message, the question is whether it will resonate enough to throw a wrench in President Biden’s efforts to advance his sweeping agenda — and if, over a year from now, it will have enough staying power to rile up the Republican Party’s base in the midterm elections.For his article, Jonathan spoke to a number of Republican elected officials, among others, about the G.O.P.’s new message. I caught up with him on Thursday to hear about what he’d learned.Hi Jonathan. As you outline in your article, House Republicans have begun to push a narrative about the country being in “crisis.” All kinds of crises, in fact. But polls seem to suggest that Americans’ spirits are rising as the pandemic recedes. Why this message from the G.O.P., and why now?It’s true that they don’t seem to be capturing the nation’s general postpandemic joy. But core Republican voters are apparently feeling unsettled by all this Bidenism — a huge pandemic relief bill; proposed social and infrastructure spending bills measuring in the trillions, not billions; about-faces on countless Trump policies.Republicans in Washington want to push that discomfort into panic mode, in hopes that the agitation spreads beyond the base to generalized anger in next year’s midterm season. Hence the mantra: crisis, crisis, crisis.How much would you say that the catastrophe narrative is a product of today’s polarized media landscape? Many of the arguments outlined in your piece sound like red meat for the Republican base — the kinds of folks who might click on a web ad bashing Biden, or donate to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — but it seems less certain that they would resonate with middle-of-the-road voters. Is that a concern for Republican leaders?Oh, it is all about the polarized media landscape. Republican leaders will see their narrative echoed on Fox, One America News, Newsmax and Grandpa’s Facebook feed, and declare victory. They might not even notice that it is not getting much traction elsewhere.But for them, that’s OK. Historically, the party out of power in the White House scores big in midterm elections. That party’s base voters are usually smarting over their defeat in the presidential election and have something to prove. Voters for the party in the White House feel secure that their guy will stop anything awful from happening, and they relax.So turnout favors those out of power, and in this case, those out of power in Washington have enough leverage in key states — think Georgia, Texas and Florida — to redraw congressional districts in their favor. Republicans just need to keep their voters angry, agitated and ready to vote.The most prominent recent example of “crisis” messaging came on the immigration front. Soon after Biden took office, Republican officials and conservative commentators began hammering him for what they branded the “border crisis.” How effective have G.O.P. strategists found that message to be, and is it affecting their thinking going forward?One politician’s crisis is another politician’s bad situation. The border is at the very least a bad situation, with apprehensions of people crossing illegally at levels unseen since Bill Clinton was president.The problem for Republicans is that the bad optics have faded, with the Biden administration’s diligent efforts to get unaccompanied children out of Border Patrol jails and into less visible shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. And unless you’re living near the border, you’re not seeing the “crisis.” So Republicans have moved on, throwing more visible spaghetti on the wall, like rising prices and labor shortages, to see what sticks.Perhaps the biggest actual political crisis of the past year has been one of Donald Trump’s making: His falsehoods led many of his supporters to lose faith in American democracy itself, with some even attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6. Today, G.O.P. legislators across the country are still re-litigating the election, passing voting restrictions and leading sometimes-chaotic recounts of the 2020 election results. Is there any concern among Republicans that sounding the “crisis” alarm could lead voters to think a little bit too hard about who is the real source of the problem?Good question. But if there is concern about that, they aren’t letting on. You could see much of the outrage machine’s output as a multipronged diversion from the crisis of faith in democracy.The other actual crisis is a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed at least 600,000 people in the U.S. The effort to spin up outrage over the Wuhan lab-leak theory — to blame China entirely for all of those deaths — is clearly an effort to try to make Americans forgive Trump for his mishandling of the coronavirus by convincing them it was all a Chinese plot. For the most pro-Trump partisans, that’s a slam dunk. For everyone else, it’s probably a stretch.Even if it is somehow proved that the coronavirus was invented in a Chinese laboratory, its spread in the United States was far more the fault of Trump than of Xi Jinping.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More