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      Ahead of 2022, House Democrats Aim to Fix Their Polling Problem

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      This time, party leaders hope, they won’t be stunned by Republican voters coming out of the woodwork.Democrats control both houses of Congress — but just barely.Cast your mind back to October 2020, and you might remember expecting things to turn out a bit different. Polls suggested that Democratic House candidates were on track to nearly match their historic margins in the 2018 midterms. But that didn’t happen.For the second presidential cycle in a row, Democrats were stunned by the number of voters who came out in support of Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies down the ballot.This week, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, presented the results of an inquiry into the 2020 election, aimed at understanding what had gone askew for the party — and why, after the corrections that pollsters made in the wake of 2016, surveys were still missing the mark.The report came to two interrelated conclusions, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the campaign committee chairman, said in a phone interview today. One is that Trump voters are disproportionately likely to refuse to take a poll, a conclusion echoed in other post-mortem reports that have recently been released by private Democratic pollsters. The other is that Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot appears to have driven up turnout among the Republican base.“In 2020, what we realized is that the polling error really equaled Trump turnout,” Mr. Maloney said. “So in polling, you’ve got this mistake in the assumption about what the electorate will look like.”Because support for Mr. Trump lines up with a relative unwillingness to be polled, survey researchers may think they’ve reached the right share of, say, rural-dwelling, white men without college degrees. But in fact what they’ve reached is often a Democratic-skewing segment of that demographic.In 2018, when polls were relatively accurate, this didn’t factor in as much, presumably because the most anti-institutional and anti-polling voters were also those who were likely to turn out only if Mr. Trump himself was on the ballot.In 2020, Mr. Trump’s popularity with a typically low-turnout base meant that an upsurge in turnout actually helped Republicans more than Democrats — a rare occurrence. “Because low-propensity voters turned out for Trump in much higher numbers than our low-propensity voters turned out for us, it ripples through the data and has a big effect,” Mr. Maloney said.He has been through this process before: In 2017, after Mr. Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton, the congressman, then in his third term, led an inquiry into what had gone wrong for the Democrats. That work helped put him in position for his current role as the head of the party’s House campaign arm.This time around, he put together a team including campaign consultants, academics and other Democratic members of Congress, and they assembled what he called “a first-of-its-kind national polling database,” drawing from over 600 polls of House races, as well as voter-file and other local-level data.Last year, because Democrats underestimated the extent to which Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot would drive up Republican turnout, their strategists mistakenly thought that a number of seats that had flipped blue in the 2018 midterms would remain safe in 2020. Six Democrats who had won for the first time in 2018 lost their 2020 races by less than two percentage points.Mr. Maloney said he was only half-swayed by arguments that ascribed a lot of impact to Republican attacks on the “defund the police” movement and “democratic socialism.” He said that the messenger had been far more important than the message.“What you realize is that it is true that the lies and distortions about socialism and ‘defund’ carried a punch — no argument from me,” Mr. Maloney said.“But I think the power of those lies has been exaggerated when you understand that Trump,” he added, was responsible for turning out “a bunch of people who were going into the voting booth.”In next year’s midterms, he said that Republicans would be running a risk if they were counting on Trump-level engagement from base voters, given that his name wouldn’t be on the ballot.“It leads you to ask: Will this post-Trump toxicity of QAnon and conspiracy theories and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the attack on the Capitol — will that message work without Trump’s turnout?” Mr. Maloney said. “The research suggests that they have taken too much comfort in the power of messages that were effective, yes, but that were enormously helped by Trump’s power to turn out voters.”Still, he cautioned against taking comfort in the results of the report, which at the end of the day serves as a reminder of just how out-of-reach an entire swath of the population remains — for mainstream pollsters and Democratic candidates alike.On the tactics front, the report concluded that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic spending had been heavily tilted away from grass-roots campaigning and toward TV ads, which mostly ran late in the campaign and ended up doing little to tip things in the party’s favor.Going forward, Mr. Maloney said, he plans to keep the 600-poll database in use. The D.C.C.C. has already been using it in special elections this year to analyze messages for effectiveness.“We think there’s a lot to learn, we’re going to learn as we go, and you’re always building the ship as you’re sailing it,” he said. “In this case it’s important that we apply what we’ve learned to as many contexts as we can.”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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      Here's How Disinformation Drives Voting Laws

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      After former President Donald J. Trump undermined public confidence in elections, Republican lawmakers are defending voting restrictions by citing a lack of public confidence.When State Representative Bobby Kaufmann of Iowa spoke in February in support of a restrictive voting bill he was sponsoring, he made what might once have been a startling acknowledgment: He could not point to any problems with November’s election that demonstrated a need for new rules.But many Iowans believed there had been problems, he said. And that was reason enough to allow less early voting, shorten Election Day polling hours, put new limits on absentee balloting and forbid counties to have more than one ballot drop box.“The ultimate voter suppression is a very large swath of the electorate not having faith in our election systems,” Mr. Kaufmann, a Republican, said in defense of his bill, which was signed into law in March. “And for whatever reason, political or not, there are thousands upon thousands of Iowans that do not have faith in our election systems.”State Representative Bobby Kaufmann of Iowa said new voting restrictions were needed because many voters believed the 2020 election had been insecure.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressFormer President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election didn’t overturn the results. But his unfounded claims gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system, laying the foundation for numerous Republican-led bills pushing more restrictive voter rules.The bills demonstrate how disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come. When promoted with sufficient intensity, falsehoods — whether about election security or the coronavirus or other topics — can shape voters’ attitudes toward policies, and lawmakers can cite those attitudes as the basis for major changes.The embrace of the falsehoods also showcases the continuing power of Mr. Trump inside the Republican Party, which has widely adopted and weaponized his election claims. Many Republicans, eager to gain his support, have raced to champion the new voting laws. Those who have stood up to his falsehoods have paid the price. Representative Liz Cheney was ousted from her House leadership post on Wednesday after repudiating what she called the “big lie.”Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a justification for bills to restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times. In several states — including Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa — the bills have already been signed into law, and legislation in Texas is very close to passage.Voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States, and officials in every state and at the federal level affirmed that the 2020 election was secure.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump in December, protesting what they claimed was a stolen election.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“It’s like a perpetual motion machine — you create the fear of fraud out of vapors and then cut down on people’s votes because of the fog you’ve created,” said Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “Politicians, for partisan purposes, lied to supporters about widespread fraud. The supporters believe the lies, and then that belief creates this rationale for the politicians to say, ‘Well, I know it’s not really true, but look how worried everybody is.’”Calls to change election laws because of public perceptions are not new: Reports in 2001, 2005 and 2008, for example, warned of the potential repercussions of voter distrust. In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law based partly on the argument that it would increase confidence in the state’s elections. And confidence tends to fall at least somewhat after every election among voters in the losing party, according to Charles Stewart III, a director of the Election Data and Science Lab at M.I.T.But there are some key differences this year, voting rights and disinformation experts say. First, the scale of the legislative efforts — as measured both by the number of bills introduced and the extent of the restrictions they propose — is greater than in past election cycles. Second, the falling confidence in the electoral system is directly traceable to a disinformation campaign. And the drop in confidence among Republicans is far steeper than anything seen in past cycles.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, told reporters in January, “We have to improve the process when literally hundreds of thousands of people in Wisconsin doubt that the election was held in a way that didn’t have substantial charges of fraud.” State Senator Judy Ward of Pennsylvania, a Republican, wrote in a memo that a bill she had introduced would free elections “from the shadow of doubt that has been cast over the democratic process.” State Senator Ralph Hise of North Carolina, also a Republican, said in March, “Even if there is no cause for that suspicion, perception impacts trust, and that’s something to take seriously.”In an email to The Times, Mr. Hise said it would be wrong to suggest “that Republicans are ‘evolving’ their arguments in bad faith to try to suppress votes.”“Lack of voter confidence is real; the rhetoric surrounding the 2020 election certainly contributes to that, but it existed for many years before 2020 and impacts voters from both parties,” he said. “Elected officials have a responsibility to respond to declining voter confidence, and failure to do so is dangerous to the health of our republic.”Ms. Ward, when asked whether she considered low voter confidence a sufficient basis for new laws, said, “We must work in a bipartisan way to restore confidence in our elections or, I fear, many people will walk away from the process because they no longer believe in the integrity of our election system.”A spokesman for Mr. Vos did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Mr. Kaufmann, the Iowa representative.Democrats from the Georgia House protested a restrictive voting law outside the State Capitol in March.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesArguments about the public’s flagging confidence in elections have made their way into the official text of bills, including in Georgia, which enacted a sweeping law limiting drop boxes and provisional balloting, requiring identification for absentee voting and making it illegal to give food or water to people waiting in line to vote, among other changes.The legislation, 98 pages long, was an opening salvo in a Republican effort that has resulted in new restrictions in several swing states and is still continuing. It put Georgia at the center of a national storm, with Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game and big employers like Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola denouncing the restrictions under public pressure. And its supporters’ stated rationale, as outlined in a lengthy introduction to the bill, was almost entirely about voter confidence..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Following the 2018 and 2020 elections, there was a significant lack of confidence in Georgia election systems, with many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter suppression and many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” the bill said. “The changes made in this legislation in 2021 are designed to address the lack of elector confidence in the election system on all sides of the political spectrum, to reduce the burden on election officials, and to streamline the process of conducting elections in Georgia by promoting uniformity in voting.”The “all sides” framing belied the fact that the bill was supported only by Republican lawmakers and that, while it contained some provisions expanding voting access, it was geared mostly toward mollifying those who believed “allegations of rampant voter fraud” — without ever saying those allegations, which are false — were true.These sorts of arguments are unsurprising after a disinformation campaign like Mr. Trump’s, experts said, and they tend to insulate legislative efforts from challenges based on the facts of how rare fraud is.“We are not going to fact-check our way out of problems of trust,” said Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “People believe these claims because they trust the people who are making these claims, and they’ve also been conditioned to believe that anyone not making these claims and anyone on the other side is inherently untrustworthy.”Disinformation experts said improving voter confidence in elections was a sensible legislative goal. But they denounced the circularity of the current push and the extent to which it was premised on disinformation.“It is absolutely legitimate to be concerned about election integrity,” said David J. Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Even though fraud isn’t widespread, it’s good for voters to know there are protections in place against it. What’s not OK is to invent fake threats and to ignore the evidence and to act in a way that’s clearly designed to result in a partisan outcome.”The best way to combat a lack of voter confidence is “not to manufacture a false narrative and then prescribe a solution that would presumably fix the false narrative,” but “to correct the false narrative,” Mr. Becker said. “Say out loud, ‘The 2020 election was secure.’” More

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      Cuomo’s Approval Rating Has Fallen. He Could Still Win Re-Election.

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      Allegations of sexual harassment have hurt Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s favorability rating. But 57 percent of Democrats say he is doing a good job, a new poll shows, enough support to give him a decent chance at a fourth term.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has not had much good news over the past few months. His poll numbers have not been much of an exception.A new Siena College poll this week found that Mr. Cuomo’s ratings had fallen to the lowest level of his tenure, with allegations of sexual harassment continuing to erode his support.But for Mr. Cuomo, the worst poll numbers of his time as governor may still be enough to win re-election. His ratings are worse than they were in early 2014 or 2018, when he went on to win easily, but not by so much that it would make him an obvious underdog in pursuit of a fourth term.The governor’s favorability rating among Democrats in the Siena poll was 56 percent, while 37 percent had an unfavorable view of him. The poll found that registered Democrats were divided on whether they would vote to re-elect Mr. Cuomo. By these measures, Mr. Cuomo is more vulnerable than he was four years ago, but he has not lost so much ground as to close off his path to renomination, either.And by another measure, Mr. Cuomo’s position is also stronger now than it was in 2018: 57 percent of Democrats say he is doing a good or excellent job as governor.That Mr. Cuomo could still win is not an indication of any great political resilience. Nor does it imply he is an overwhelming favorite, even without considering whether his standing may diminish further with new revelations.Much will depend on the conclusions of several investigations that are underway, including one by the F.B.I. on whether his administration provided false data on deaths from Covid-19 in nursing homes, and another by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, into the sexual harassment allegations. Findings by Ms. James that lead to an embarrassing impeachment trial could prompt more voters to shun him.Yet so far, Mr. Cuomo maintains enough support to have a good chance to prevail. If he does in the final account, he will have overcome allegations of impropriety — and a pummeling from progressive activists on social media — with persistent support from the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party.In some ways, Mr. Cuomo’s popularity at the peak of the pandemic — when he was earning raves for his daily updates — was an exception to the general rule of his tenure. He has often had fairly weak ratings, at least for the governor of a blue state. In April 2018, as Mr. Cuomo was vying for re-election, a Siena College poll found that just 62 percent of registered Democrats in New York had a favorable view of the governor, while 32 percent had an unfavorable view of him. Only 57 percent of Democrats said they would vote to re-elect him, while 32 percent said they would prefer someone else. Just 53 percent thought he was doing a good or excellent job.In the end, Mr. Cuomo won renomination with 64 percent of the vote. His 34 point margin of victory over Cynthia Nixon was slightly larger than his plus-30 favorability rating or the 24 point margin by which Democrats said they would prefer to re-elect him over someone else. It would be a mistake to assume on this basis that Mr. Cuomo is a clear favorite to win the primary so long as his ratings stay above water among Democrats. Indeed, Democrats are divided on whether they want to re-elect Mr. Cuomo, with only 46 percent saying they prefer to vote to re-elect him and 43 percent saying they would prefer someone else.Why is Mr. Cuomo still competitive for renomination? One factor is that New York Democrats remain equivocal about the severity or veracity of the allegations against him.Democrats continue to believe Mr. Cuomo has done a good job handling the pandemic in New York, despite the revelation that his administration has hid data about the death toll in nursing homes. While 59 percent in the Siena poll say he has done either a poor or “fair” job of making public all data about such deaths, a sizable 34 percent of registered Democrats believe that he has done a good or excellent job of making such data available. And a 64 percent majority of Democrats continue to say that Mr. Cuomo has, in general, done a good or excellent job of providing information during the pandemic.Democrats are even more divided on the multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Cuomo, which he has denied. Just 39 percent believe he has committed sexual harassment, the Siena poll showed, while 30 percent disagree and another 30 percent are not sure. The precipitous decline in his favorability ratings since the allegations became public suggest that many Democrats take the charges seriously and have re-evaluated him on that basis, but a larger number of Democrats are not ready to go so far. Most Democrats say they are satisfied with how he has addressed the allegations and do not support his immediate resignation.Perhaps the hesitancy of some New York Democrats to believe the allegations against Mr. Cuomo simply reflects their dispassionate read of the evidence. It might also be a reflection of the loyalty of the state’s rank-and-file Democratic voters to Mr. Cuomo.After all, many more registered Republicans believe the allegations against Mr. Cuomo than registered Democrats, a powerful reminder of the role of partisanship in shaping public opinion. Liberals, who generally argue that women should be believed when they allege sexual harassment, are the likeliest ideological group to say they do not believe Mr. Cuomo has committed sexual harassment. A majority of conservatives and Republicans, in contrast, believe the allegations.Mr. Cuomo’s resilience is also a reminder that New York Democrats are fairly moderate, despite counting some of the nation’s most famous progressive politicians, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a thriving Democratic Socialist left among their ranks. In recent Democratic primaries, New Yorkers backed Hillary Clinton and Mr. Cuomo over idealistic, reformist, good-government progressive challengers.Mr. Cuomo and other establishment-backed Democrats have often won with considerable support from nonwhite voters, especially those who are Black, in New York City, who often hold relatively moderate views on cultural and ideological issues compared with those of white progressives. And of all of the demographic groups surveyed in the Siena poll, Black voters, regardless of party registration, were the likeliest to have a favorable view of Mr. Cuomo or say he has not committed sexual harassment.Mr. Cuomo’s path to winning the general election is straightforward: capitalize on New York’s Democratic lean. The Siena College poll found that registered voters in the state said they preferred a Democrat for governor over a Republican by a 20 percentage point margin, presumably making it quite difficult for any Republican to win the general election.Difficult does not mean impossible. It is not wholly uncommon for Democratic states to elect Republican governors, or vice versa. The three states where President Biden’s performed the strongest — Vermont, Massachusetts and Maryland — all have Republican governors, albeit moderate ones; the Democratic governors of Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana offer examples on the other side of the political spectrum.Mr. Cuomo’s ratings are weak enough statewide that he could be vulnerable against a strong and moderate Republican challenger, who would probably need to accede to the state’s prevailing cultural views, perhaps even on abortion and Donald Trump’s presidency. Most of the Republican contenders so far do not fit into that category. Many have strong ties to national Republican politics, including several House Republicans and even Andrew Giuliani.There’s still time for a stronger challenger to emerge, but for now it is not easy to identify someone comparable to the three anti-Trump Republicans who currently govern blue states.In the final account, the most powerful force to help Mr. Cuomo overcome allegations of sexual harassment may be the partisan loyalty of Democratic voters in a blue state. More

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      Matthew McConaughey, Texas Governor? Voters Seem to Like the Idea.

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      A new poll may put some wind in the actor Matthew McConaughey’s sails as he considers whether to run for governor of Texas.Forty-five percent of the state’s voters said that they would vote for Mr. McConaughey if he were to challenge Gov. Greg Abbott next year, according to the poll, conducted by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas, Tyler.An additional 33 percent of voters said they would support the incumbent, while 22 percent said that at this early stage, they would prefer to choose someone else.But such highly theoretical questions can sometimes produce wonky results, especially this far in advance of any actual campaigning. That’s doubly true when the hypothetical involves a figure with name recognition as high as Mr. McConaughey’s, particularly in his home state.The actor has repeatedly flirted with running for governor, though he has not said whether he would run as a Republican or a Democrat. Last month he said he was seriously considering a bid.“I’m looking into now again, what is my leadership role?” he said on a podcast. “Because I do think I have some things to teach and share, and what is my role? What’s my category in my next chapter of life that I’m going into?”His fortunes in the new poll were particularly good among independents, 44 percent of whom said they’d support him and only 18 percent of whom said they would back the governor, a Republican.Yet Mr. Abbott’s job approval rating was healthy, with 50 percent of voters giving him positive marks and 36 percent negative. Fifty-four percent said he had responded well to the state’s power failure crisis, driven by strong support from Republicans; independents tilted away from him here, with 50 percent saying he had handled it badly and 43 percent saying he responded well, the poll found.The survey was conducted from April 6-13 among 1,126 registered Texas voters, using a mixed-mode approach that included live phone interviews as well as online polling through the Dynata database. More

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      Democrats Were Lukewarm on Campaign Biden. They Love President Biden.

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      Joe Biden never captured the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama once did. But now that he is in office, he is drawing nearly universal approval from his party.The old cliché has it that when it comes to picking their presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love. But the party’s primary race last year was hardly a great political romance: Joseph R. Biden Jr. drew less than 21 percent of the Democratic vote in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and a dismal 8.4 percent in the New Hampshire primary.While Mr. Biden went on to win his party’s nomination, he was never widely seen as capturing the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama and Bill Clinton once did. For many of his supporters, he seemed simply like their best chance to defeat a president — Donald J. Trump — who inspired far more passion than he did.Yet in the first few months of his administration, Mr. Biden has garnered almost universal approval from members of his party, according to polls, emerging as a kind of man-for-all-Democrats after an election year riddled with intraparty squabbling.He began his term this winter with an approval rating of 98 percent among Democrats, according to Gallup. This represents a remarkable measure of partisan consensus — outpacing even the strongest moments of Republican unity during the presidency of Mr. Trump, whose political brand depended heavily on the devotion of his G.O.P. base.And as Mr. Biden nears his 100th day in office, most public polls have consistently shown him retaining the approval of more than nine in 10 Democrats nationwide.Pollsters and political observers mostly agree that Mr. Biden’s popularity among members of his party is driven by a combination of their gratitude to him for getting Mr. Trump out of office and their sense that Mr. Biden has refused to compromise on major Democratic priorities.“He has this ability to appeal to all factions of the party, which is no surprise to the centrists, but somewhat of a surprise to the progressives,” Patrick Murray, the director of polling at Monmouth University, said in an interview.During the primary, Mr. Biden was the establishment figure, a Washington centrist in a diverse field that included a number of younger and more progressive rivals. While he won a plurality of Democrats, he struggled to win support from the party’s younger and more liberal voters.But as president, he has been governing much like a progressive without abandoning his longtime public identity as a moderate.“He has found a winning formula, at least for now,” said David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Mr. Obama. “His tone and tenure reassure moderates and his agenda thrills progressives.”To that end, Mr. Biden has avoided taking up liberals’ most politically thorny proposals — like expanding the Supreme Court or canceling $1 trillion in student debt — while sticking to a public posture of bipartisan outreach and measured language. But his policy agenda has given progressives plenty to cheer, including the dozens of executive orders he has signed and the ambitious legislative agenda he has proposed, beginning with the passage of one of the largest economic stimulus packages in American history.Some progressives say the crises facing the country and the urgency of solving them have helped Mr. Biden, who was being evaluated against what Democrats saw as months of inaction by the previous administration.“Democrats were demanding shots in the arms and true economic help from the government,” said Faiz Shakir, who is a political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and managed Mr. Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “There was incredible unity in the Democratic Party of rising to the moment and acting quickly.”Mr. Shakir pointed to the passing of a popular $1.9 trillion relief package shortly after Mr. Biden took office, a bill he muscled through without any Republican support — opting for Democratic unity over bipartisan compromise. The president’s embrace of stimulus payments as part of that legislation — a policy that put money in the pockets of 127 million Americans — within weeks of taking office certainly didn’t hurt his standing, Mr. Shakir said.“It just had so many benefits for so many people,” he said.That bill was especially well liked within Mr. Biden’s party: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted just before it passed found that it enjoyed support from 97 percent of Democrats. As a result, the president has been able to unify his party around major initiatives tied to liberal investments in the social safety net.“The Democratic Party has shifted itself,” Mr. Murray said. “It has become more progressive, and you even have centrists who are on board with a few things that they wouldn’t have been happy with a few years ago.”But Mr. Biden may also be benefiting from some forms of progress that were not entirely of his own making. Millions of Americans are being vaccinated daily, moving the country closer to emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. As the United States moves slowly but steadily toward herd immunity, forecasters anticipate a quickly expanding economy, with even Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, predicting a financial boom that could last into 2023.Mr. Biden took steps to hasten virus vaccine production, but some of his political success on that front can be attributed to savvy public positioning. By tamping down expectations for vaccine distribution during his first weeks in office, when Mr. Biden beat his own expectations, his team conjured an image of a White House working overtime to leave the efforts of the previous administration in the dust.Though Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for widespread vaccine production with his Operation Warp Speed program, it is Mr. Biden who may be reaping the political benefit from that push — especially within his own party.Indeed, Democrats’ antipathy for Mr. Trump has a lot to do with their fondness for the new president, said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “Democrats utterly detested Donald Trump and Joe Biden saved them from Donald Trump, and so they love him,” Mr. Ayres said. “If you look at the overall job approval, not just among Democrats, Biden’s job approval is the inverse of Donald Trump’s.”Mr. Biden is hardly the first president to enjoy broad support from his party upon taking office. It is typical for commanders in chief to start their first term with a broadly positive approval rating, as Mr. Biden did, although that is always subject to the pull of gravity after the first few weeks are over.But in the history of Gallup polling going back to the mid-20th century, Mr. Biden is the first president to have started his term with the approval of more than 90 percent of partisans.To a degree, this reflects the fact that as the two major parties have grown more entrenched in their ideological identities, voters at the center have become slightly less likely to identify with either one. As a result, there has been a recent uptick in the share of Americans calling themselves political independents.“The partisan tribalism is such that you really are, in many ways, a true believer if you’re still going to call yourself a Democrat or a Republican,” Mr. Murray said. “What you’re left behind with is people who are going to be more staunch in their partisanship.”Just a few decades ago, a president with sky-high approval within his party would also be relatively popular outside it. But Mr. Biden’s approval rating, though positive over all, remains low among Republicans and stuck in the low-to-mid-50s among independents.“If you go back a generation and somebody has a 95 percent approval rating within their own party, that probably means they have about 50 percent approval among voters in the other party,” Mr. Murray said. “We don’t have that. We have this partisan split. His overall job rating is just above 50 percent. It’s still positive, but we would expect in former days that that would translate to a 60-percent approval rating.” More

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      Can These Democratic Pollsters Figure Out What Went Wrong?

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      Five competing Democratic polling firms put their heads (and their data) together about 2020.Everybody agrees the polls missed the mark in 2020, as they had four years earlier. But nobody’s certain why.In search of answers, five competing Democratic polling firms have decided to put their heads (and their data) together, forming a group that will undertake a major effort to figure out what went wrong in 2020 — and how the polling industry can adjust.The team released a memo today announcing the project and offering some preliminary findings that seek to address why polls again underestimated support for Donald Trump. But over all, the message was one of openness and uncertainty. The big takeaway: Things need to change, including the very nature of how polls are conducted.Innovation aheadThe authors wrote that their analysis thus far had pushed them toward thinking that pollsters must take a boldly innovative approach when mapping out the road ahead.“We know we have to explore all possibilities,” Fred Yang of Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, one of the five firms involved in the study, said in an interview today.That will probably mean embracing some tools that had been considered too untested for mainstream public polling: Officially, the survey-research community still considers live-interview phone calls to be the gold standard, but there is growing evidence that innovative methods, like sending respondents text messages that prompt them to respond to a survey online, could become essential.And it could also mean going back to some methods that have become less common in recent decades, including conducting polls via door-to-door interviews, or paying respondents to participate.“We are going to put every solution, no matter how difficult, on the table,” the memo read.The consortium of Democratic firms plans to release a fuller report this year; so will a number of traditional survey-research institutions. The American Association for Public Opinion Research, which undertook a widely discussed post-mortem analysis in 2016, is already at work on another. AAPOR is a bastion of polling traditionalism, but if the Democratic groups’ preliminary report is any indication, even the association’s coming analysis might acknowledge that the industry should embrace more experimental approaches to data collection.In a separate analysis released late last month, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight found that traditional, live-interview phone polls weren’t meaningfully more accurate than others. In fact, out of dozens of polling firms analyzed, none of those with the lowest average error had exclusively used live-interview phone calls (and some hadn’t used them at all). Two of the three most accurate firms were Republican-aligned companies that are held in suspicion by most leaders in the social-science world, partly because they use methods that have long been considered suspect — including robo-calling, as well as newer techniques like contacting respondents via text message.What drove polling errorThe Democratic firms’ memo said polls had slightly missed the mark when determining the makeup of the electorate last year. This means they misunderstood, to some degree, who was likely to vote and who wasn’t: a crucial “X” factor in pre-election polling.Among so-called low-propensity voters — that is, the ones pollsters consider the least likely to turn out — Republicans proved four times as likely as Democrats to actually end up casting a ballot in November. This can be taken as another indication of how effective Donald Trump was at expanding the Republican electorate, and pollsters’ difficulties accounting for that, particularly among white voters without college degrees and those in rural areas.Tellingly, the researchers found that voters who considered Trump “presidential” were underrepresented in polls.But a greater source of concern was so-called measurement error. That’s a fancy way of saying polls have had trouble figuring out what percentage of people in certain demographic groups plan to vote for one candidate over the other.The report proposed some explanations for why there was significant measurement error in 2020 pre-election polling, and it landed on two big potential culprits. One was the higher prevalence of anti-institutional views (sometimes referred to as “social distrust”) among Trump supporters, meaning those voters would be less willing to respond to official surveys. The second explanation was the lower incidence of pandemic-related fears among Trump voters, meaning they were more likely than Biden voters to be willing to turn out to vote.“What we have settled on is the idea there is something systematically different about the people we reached, and the people we did not,” the report’s authors wrote. “This problem appears to have been amplified when Trump was on the ballot, and it is these particular voters who Trump activated that did not participate in polls.”New York Times PodcastsThe Improvement Association: A true story about election fraudWhy do election fraud allegations live on, even after they’ve been debunked? In our new audio series with Serial Productions, we went to one rural county to try to find out. Listen to the first episode now.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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      In Peru’s Presidential Election, the Most Popular Choice Is No One

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      Peruvians head to the polls at a moment that many are calling one of the lowest points in the country’s young democracy, and many plan to cast empty ballots.LIMA, Peru — Vicenta Escobar, 62, sells fruit from a stand on the streets in Peru’s capital, Lima. In every presidential election over the last four decades, she has chosen a candidate she believed in, in the hope that he or she would deliver change.Not this time, though. This Sunday, she plans to arrive at her polling station to vote — as is required by Peruvian law. But she will cast her ballot without making a single mark.“I’m planning on leaving it blank,” she said on Thursday afternoon. She was fed up, she said, with “all the lies and robberies.”Peruvians are voting on Sunday at a moment many are calling one of the lowest points in the country’s young democracy. Eighteen candidates are on the ballot, but about 15 percent of voters are expected to cast a blank vote, according to several recent polls, and no candidate has been able to garner much more than 10 percent support. The leading two candidates will advance to a runoff if no one captures more than half the vote.The election follows a tumultuous five-year period in which the country cycled through four presidents and two Congresses, and it comes amid growing frustration over corruption, the pandemic and a political system that many say has served the interests of corporations and officials — but not of regular people.Whoever is sworn in later this year is likely to have the weakest mandate of any elected president in recent history, and will be forced to deal with dual economic and health crises likely to shape the country for years to come.Peru has one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the world, and daily deaths climbed to new highs this month as the Brazilian variant of the virus spread through the country. Many Covid patients have died amid lack of access to oxygen or ventilators, working-class families are struggling to secure enough food, and school closures have pushed children into the labor force.The economy shrank 12 percent last year in the country’s worst recession in three decades — the second-worst downturn in Latin America, after Venezuela’s.Voters interviewed this month in Lima, the capital, appeared to coalesce around their shared frustration with the system.“We used to trust our leaders somewhat. But now no one believes any of them,” said Teresa Vásquez, 49, a housekeeper.Ms. Vásquez had supported one of the recent presidents, Martín Vizcarra, even as legislators impeached him amid corruption charges.Then she learned he had been secretly vaccinated last year with extra doses from a clinical trial in Peru that researchers distributed among political elites.This year, she had narrowed her options to two candidates who seemed clean. But with less than a week to go before the election, was still struggling to decide.“It’s the same with my whole family,” she said. “No one knows who to trust.”Opinion polls released before Sunday’s vote showed that any two of half a dozen candidates might move on to a likely June runoff.Among the candidates pulling in about 10 percent of the vote in recent polls are Pedro Castillo, a socially conservative union activist who has surged in the last week on promises to invest heavily in health care and education, and Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing opposition leader and the daughter of the former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori, who has said she would end Covid lockdowns and crack down on crime with an “iron fist.”Residents of the Villa El Salvador neighborhood in Lima observed a campaign rally last week.Sebastian Castaneda/ReutersThis year’s election coincides with the 200th anniversary of Peru’s independence. But instead of celebrating, many Peruvians are questioning the validity of their democracy and their free-market economic model.Even before the pandemic threw the country into disarray, support for democracy in Peru had slipped to one of the lowest levels in the region, according to a 2018-2019 survey by the Latin American Public Opinion Project, with the military seen as the most trustworthy institution.Since the last general election produced a divided government five years ago, Peru has seen constant clashes between the legislative and executive branches, as opposition lawmakers have sought to impeach two presidents and Mr. Vizcarra dissolved Congress, calling new legislative elections to push through reforms.Three former presidents have spent time in jail during bribery investigations, including one candidate in this year’s election; a fourth killed himself to avoid arrest; and a fifth, Mr. Vizcarra, one of the most popular recent leaders, was impeached in November.His replacement, who lasted less than a week in office, is under investigation in connection with the fatal shootings of two young men at protests, which led to his resignation.One reason for the country’s endemic corruption is that political parties often barter their loyalties to presidential candidates in back-room deals, and are often captive to special interests.A soldier stands guard near voting booths in Lima, Peru on Saturday.Sebastian Castaneda/Reuters“Political parties are no longer a vehicle for representation of the citizenry,” said Adriana Urrutia, a political scientist who leads the pro-democracy organization Transparencia.“There are parties in the current Parliament that represent the interests of private universities facing penalties for failing to fulfill minimum requirements,” she added. “There are parties that represent the interests of illegal economies, like illegal logging and illegal mining.”Some candidates are tailoring their messages to appeal to the growing skepticism about democracy.Mr. Castillo, the union activist, has promised to replace the Constitutional Tribunal with a court elected “by popular mandate,” and said he would dissolve Congress if it blocked a proposal to replace the Constitution. Rafael López Aliaga, a businessman and a member of the ultraconservative Catholic group Opus Dei, has said Peru must stop a leftist “dictatorship” from consolidating power and has promised to jail corrupt officials for life.Ms. Fujimori has abandoned efforts to moderate her platform in her third presidential bid. She has promised to pardon her father, who is serving a sentence for human rights abuses and graft.The constant political turmoil has analysts worried for the country’s future.“I think the scenario that’s coming is really frightening,” said Patricia Zárate, the lead researcher for the Institute of Peruvian Studies, a polling organization. “Congress knows they can impeach the president easily and it’s also easy for the president to close Congress. Now it will be easier to do again. It’s dispiriting.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Elecciones en Perú: los votantes van a las urnas sin candidato favorito

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      Los peruanos votarán en lo que muchos califican como el peor momento de su joven democracia. Numerosos electores se inclinan por el voto en blanco.LIMA, Perú — Vicenta Escobar, de 62 años, vende fruta en un puesto de las calles de Lima, la capital de Perú. En todas las elecciones presidenciales de las últimas cuatro décadas, ella ha votado a un candidato en el que creía, con la esperanza de que esa persona fuera a cambiar las cosas.Pero no en esta ocasión. Este domingo, piensa llegar a la casilla para votar, como lo exige la ley peruana. Pero dejará la boleta sin poner una sola marca.“Esta vez pienso marcar blanco”, comentó el jueves por la tarde. Dijo que estaba harta de “todos los engaños, los robos”.Los peruanos votan este domingo en un momento que muchos consideran uno de los peores en su joven democracia. En la boleta hay 18 candidatos, pero se calcula que el 15 por ciento de los electores anularán su voto, según diversas encuestas recientes; además, ningún candidato ha logrado reunir un apoyo de más del 10 por ciento. Los dos candidatos con más votos pasarán a una segunda vuelta si ninguno obtiene más de la mitad de los votos.Las elecciones se dan tras cinco años tumultuosos en los que el país pasó por cuatro presidentes y dos congresos, y en medio de una frustración creciente debido a la corrupción, la pandemia y un sistema político que muchos afirman que ha estado al servicio de los funcionarios y las corporaciones, pero no del pueblo.Es probable que cualquiera que asuma el cargo este año tenga el mandato más débil que ningún otro presidente electo en la historia reciente, y tendrá que lidiar con crisis en materia de salud y economía que muy probablemente afectarán al país en los años venideros.Perú tiene una de las tasas de muerte por coronavirus más altas del mundo, y las muertes diarias alcanzaron nuevos máximos este mes a medida que la variante brasileña del virus se extendía por el país. Muchos pacientes de COVID-19 han muerto por falta de acceso a oxígeno o respiradores, las familias de clase trabajadora luchan por conseguir alimentos y el cierre de escuelas ha provocado que los niños tengan que trabajar.El año pasado la economía se contrajo un 12 por ciento en la peor recesión del país en tres décadas, la segunda peor contracción en América Latina después de la de Venezuela.Los votantes a los que se entrevistó este mes en Lima, la capital del país, parecían coincidir en su frustración con el sistema.“Antes confiábamos algo en nuestros líderes, pero ya nadie confía en nadie”, expresó Teresa Vásquez, de 49 años, un ama de casa.Vásquez había apoyado a uno de los últimos presidentes, a Martín Vizcarra, incluso cuando los legisladores emprendían un juicio político contra él bajo cargos de corrupción.Pero se enteró de que el entonces presidente se había vacunado en secreto el año pasado con dosis extras de un ensayo clínico realizado en Perú, las cuales los investigadores distribuyeron entre las élites políticas.Este año, ya redujo sus opciones a dos candidatos que parecen impolutos, pero seguía teniendo dificultades para decidirse a menos de una semana de las elecciones.“Toda la familia está igual”, continuó. “Nadie sabe a quién creer”.Las encuestas de opinión publicadas antes de la votación del domingo mostraban que había seis candidatos con posibilidad de pasar a una probable segunda vuelta en junio.Entre los candidatos que obtienen alrededor del 10 por ciento de los votos en los últimos sondeos se encuentran Pedro Castillo, un activista sindical socialmente conservador que ha repuntado en la última semana gracias a sus promesas de invertir grandes cantidades de dinero en sanidad y educación, y Keiko Fujimori, una líder de la oposición de derecha e hija del antiguo líder autoritario Alberto Fujimori, la cual ha dicho que pondría fin a los confinamientos por la COVID-19 y reprimiría la delincuencia con “mano dura”.Vecinos de Villa el Salvador, un barrio de Lima, observaban un mitin electoral la semana pasada. Sebastián Castañeda/ReutersLa votación de este año cae en el 200.º aniversario de la independencia de Perú. Pero, en lugar de celebrar, muchos peruanos están cuestionando la validez de su democracia y su modelo económico de libre mercado.Incluso antes de que la pandemia sumiera al país en el caos, el apoyo a la democracia en Perú había caído a uno de los niveles más bajos de la región, según una encuesta de 2018-2019 realizada por el Proyecto de Opinión Pública de América Latina; los militares se consideraban la institución más confiable.Desde que la última elección general hace cinco años produjo un gobierno dividido, Perú ha tenido enfrentamientos constantes entre la rama legislativa y el poder ejecutivo, pues los legisladores de la oposición han intentado someter a juicio político a dos presidentes; asimismo, Vizcarra disolvió el Congreso y convocó nuevas elecciones legislativas para llevar a cabo reformas.Tres expresidentes han estado en la cárcel debido a investigaciones de cohecho en su contra, incluido uno que postula para las elecciones de este año; un cuarto se suicidó para evitar ser detenido; un quinto, Vizcarra, uno de los líderes más populares de los últimos años, fue destituido en noviembre.Su remplazo, que estuvo menos de una semana en el cargo, se encuentra bajo investigación debido a la muerte de dos jóvenes durante unas protestas, por lo cual tuvo que dimitir.Una de las razones que explica la corrupción endémica del país es que los partidos políticos suelen alquilar su apoyo a los candidatos presidenciales en acuerdos a puerta cerrada, y a menudo son presa de intereses particulares.Un soldado resguardaba las casetas de votación en Lima, la capital peruana el sábado.Sebastián Castañeda/Reuters“Los partidos políticos han dejado de ser un vehículo de representación ciudadana”, sostuvo Adriana Urrutia, politóloga que está a cargo de la organización prodemocrática Transparencia.“Hay partidos en el actual parlamento que representan intereses de las universidades privadas que están siendo sancionadas por no cumplir con los requisitos mínimos”, añadió. También “hay partidos que representan los intereses de las economías ilegales, como la tala ilegal o minería ilegal”.Algunos candidatos están apelando con sus mensajes al creciente escepticismo hacia la democracia.Castillo, el activista sindical, ha prometido remplazar el Tribunal Constitucional por un tribunal elegido “por mandato popular”, y ha dicho que disolverá el Congreso si este bloquea una propuesta para cambiar de Constitución. Rafael López Aliaga, empresario y miembro del grupo católico ultraconservador Opus Dei, ha dicho que Perú debe impedir que una “dictadura” de izquierda se consolide en el poder y ha prometido encarcelar de por vida a los funcionarios corruptos.Fujimori ha dejado de lado todo esfuerzo por moderar su plataforma en su tercera candidatura presidencial y ha prometido indultar a su padre, que cumple una condena por violaciones de los derechos humanos y corrupción.La turbulencia política incesante tiene a los analistas preocupados por el futuro del país.“El escenario que se nos viene es de verdad de terror”, dijo Patricia Zárate, investigadora principal de la organización de encuestas Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. “El Congreso sabe que puede vacar al presidente y es muy fácil y también es muy fácil cerrar el Congreso. Entonces ya vieron que se puede hacer y no hay problema”, añadió. “Es desesperanzador”.Julie Turkewitz More