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      Florida Sex Scandal Shakes Moms for Liberty, as Group’s Influence Wanes

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      The conservative group led the charge on the Covid-era education battles. But scandals and losses are threatening its power.Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing advocacy group, was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.“Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, told Ms. Ziegler during a tense school board meeting this week. Ms. Ziegler, whose husband has denied wrongdoing, said little and did not resign.Ms. Sells was one of dozens of speakers who criticized Ms. Ziegler — and Moms for Liberty — at the meeting, an outcry that underscored the group’s prominence in the most contentious debates of the pandemic era.Perhaps no group gained so much influence so quickly, transforming education issues from a sleepy political backwater to a rallying cry for Republican politicians. The organization quickly became a conservative powerhouse, a coveted endorsement and a mandatory stop on the G.O.P. presidential primary campaign trail.Yet, as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner for the party’s nomination, makes only passing reference in his stump speeches to preserving “parental rights” — the catchphrase of the group’s cause. Issues like school curriculums, transgender students’ rights and teaching about race were far less prominent in the three Republican primary debates than abortion rights, foreign policy and the economy. And the most prominent champion of conservative views on education — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has yet to unite conservatives behind his struggling presidential bid.John Fredericks, a Trump ally in Virginia, said the causes that Moms for Liberty became most known for supporting — policies banning books it deemed pornographic, curtailing the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and policing how race is taught in schools — had fallen far from many voters’ top concerns.“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours.”He added: “It’s nonsense, all of it.”The two other founders of Moms for Liberty, Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, have distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler, saying she has not been an officer in the national organization since early 2021. Ms. Ziegler did not respond to a request for comment.In a statement, Ms. Descovich and Ms. Justice dismissed criticism that the group was hypocritical. They argue that it is not opposed to racial justice or L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but that it wants to restore control to parents over their children’s education.“To our opponents who have spewed hateful vitriol over the last several days: We reject your attacks,” Ms. Descovich and Ms. Justice said. “We are laser-focused on fundamental parental rights, and that mission is and always will be bigger than one person.”Ms. Justice declined to answer questions about the continued influence of their organization or their electoral losses.Tina Descovich, left, and Tiffany Justice, the two other founders of Moms for Liberty, distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler.Matt Rourke/Associated PressNearly 60 percent of the 198 school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty in contested races across 10 states were defeated in 2023, according to an analysis by the website Ballotpedia, which tracks elections.The organization claims to operate 300 chapters in 48 states and to have about 130,000 members.Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank, found in a recent study that the group had an outsize presence in battleground and liberal counties. Yet in those areas, the policies championed by Moms For Liberty are broadly unpopular.“The politics have flipped on the Moms for Liberty, and they’re turning more people to vote against them than for them,” Mr. Valant said.In November, the group announced that it had removed the chairwomen of two Kentucky chapters after they had posed in photos with members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence. That came several months after a chapter of Moms for Liberty in Indiana quoted Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. The year before, Ms. Ziegler publicly denied links to the Proud Boys after she had posed for a photo with a member of the group at her election night victory party.The episodes have transformed the group’s image and alienated it from the voters it once claimed to represent. The group was at one time particularly strong in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where education issues helped spur Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, to victory in the 2021 governor’s race. (This year, Mr. Youngkin failed in his high-profile attempt at a Republican takeover of the Virginia Statehouse.)Anne Pogue Donohue, who ran for a school board seat in Loudoun County, Va., against a candidate endorsed by the group, said she saw a disconnect between the cause of Moms for Liberty and the current concerns of voters.On social media, Ms. Donohue, a former government lawyer and mother of two young children, faced a barrage of personal insults, death threats and accusations that she was trying to “groom” children to become transgender, she said. But during her in-person interactions with voters, she added, a vast majority of parents seemed more concerned with practical issues like math and reading scores, support for special education and expanding vocational and technical programs.Ms. Donohue won her seat by nearly seven percentage points.“There is a pushback now,” she said. “Moms for Liberty focuses heavily on culture-war-type issues, and I think most voters see that, to the extent that we have problems in our educational system that we have to fix, the focus on culture-war issues isn’t doing that.”One place where Moms for Liberty maintains a stronger hold is the state where the group has had perhaps the most influence: Florida.Since forming in 2020, the group has aligned itself with Mr. DeSantis, backing his parental-rights-in-education law that critics nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay.” The law prohibits classroom instruction on L.G.B.T.Q. topics.Mr. DeSantis then campaigned for conservative candidates for local school boards, turning nonpartisan races into ones heavily influenced by politics. Several school boards with newly conservative majorities ousted their superintendents.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been aligned with Moms for Liberty, with the group backing his controversial parental-rights-in-education law.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn Brevard County, the school board is now entirely conservative except for Jennifer Jenkins, whom Mr. DeSantis has already listed as someone he would like to help defeat in 2024.Ms. Jenkins, an outspoken Moms for Liberty critic who wrested Ms. Descovich’s school board seat from her in 2020, said the organization, while small, had remained a vocal fixture in school board meetings, with about 10 regulars who sometimes bring along people from Indian River and other nearby counties.“Their members are definitely more extreme than they ever were before,” said Ms. Jenkins, who has been a frequent target of the group. They have picketed outside her house, sent her threatening mail and, she said, taken photos of her in the grocery store as recently as a couple of weeks ago.On Tuesday, some Moms for Liberty members from Brevard and Indian River Counties attended a Brevard County School Board meeting to protest books that they say should be pulled from schools. Most of the books they named had already been formally challenged.Still, one by one, group members stood behind the lectern and read explicit scenes from the books until the board’s chairwoman — whom Moms for Liberty and Mr. DeSantis endorsed last year — warned them to stop.It was what the speakers wanted: Under a Florida law enacted this year, if a school board denies a parent the right to read passages deemed “pornographic,” then the school district “shall discontinue the use of the material.” In other words, cutting off the reading would effectively result in pulling the book from schools, board members said.“I highly encourage all of you to look at this statute,” Julie Bywater, a member of the Brevard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, told the school board.Such tactics have become typical for Moms for Liberty members. In response, opponents have started showing up to school board meetings in force, trying to counter the group’s message — including in Sarasota, where Ms. Ziegler’s critics turned out to try to push her out.The school board, which includes several conservatives who have aligned with Ms. Ziegler before, voted 4 to 1 on Tuesday for a nonbinding resolution urging her to resign; Ms. Ziegler was the only one on the board to vote against it. More

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      DeSantis Says Trump Will Declare Iowa Caucuses Stolen if He Loses

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      The former president “will try to delegitimize the results,” Mr. DeSantis said while campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Friday that he expected Donald J. Trump to claim that the Iowa caucuses had been “stolen” if the former president, who currently leads Mr. DeSantis by roughly 30 points in that state, is defeated there next month.“If Trump loses, he will say it’s stolen no matter what, absolutely,” Mr. DeSantis said, responding to a reporter in New Hampshire who had asked whether Mr. Trump would accept the results of the first contest in the Republican presidential primary on Jan. 15, or of the New Hampshire primary roughly a week later. “He will try to delegitimize the results. He did that against Ted Cruz in 2016.”Mr. DeSantis added that Mr. Trump had protested “even when ‘The Apprentice’ didn’t get an Emmy,” referring to the former president’s onetime television show.Throughout the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump and his allies have continued to insist that he defeated President Biden in 2020. The constant chorus of falsehoods seems to have seeped into the consciousness of many Republicans. Nearly 60 percent of G.O.P. voters believe Mr. Biden’s election was illegitimate, a survey by The Associated Press found earlier this year.For several years, Mr. DeSantis appeared to play both sides of the manufactured controversy over the 2020 election. As governor, he set up a new police unit to monitor the integrity of Florida elections. Before last year’s midterms, he campaigned with Republicans who had vociferously denied the results. But he never explicitly endorsed the theory that the election had been stolen, and he repeatedly dodged questions about whether he accepted Mr. Biden’s victory.During his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis has courted voters from the Trump wing of the Republican Party, making it difficult for him to say that the former president was wrong.Only in August, after being repeatedly pressed during an interview with NBC News, did Mr. DeSantis acknowledge the truth, saying of Mr. Trump: “Of course he lost. Joe Biden’s the president.”In 2016, Mr. Trump claimed to have defeated Mr. Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, in that year’s Iowa caucuses, although in reality he suffered a narrow defeat.Those repeated claims of election fraud, Mr. DeSantis argued during Friday’s appearance in New Hampshire, have led voters to take Mr. Trump less seriously.“I don’t think people are going to buy it,” he said.In response to Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, accused the Florida governor of “reciting Democrat talking points.”“When Ron’s political career is finished in a few weeks, he can start moonlighting as a Democrat surrogate because he’s showing everyone his true colors,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement on Friday.The Trump campaign has already accused Mr. DeSantis’s team of trying to “rig” the caucuses because of comments made by his wife, Casey DeSantis. Last week, Ms. DeSantis encouraged out-of-state supporters to participate in the caucuses. But only Iowa residents are allowed to vote in state elections, and Ms. DeSantis later clarified that she had been asking people to volunteer for her husband.Whether Mr. Trump ends up claiming fraud in Iowa may well remain a hypothetical. Polls show that the former president’s support in Iowa would have to collapse in order for him to lose. And he leads his primary challengers in New Hampshire by an average of more than 25 points.So far in the campaign, Mr. DeSantis has spent more time battling for second place against Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, than taking on Mr. Trump. More

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      Chris Christie Rebukes Rivals Not Named Trump in First TV Ad

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      Mr. Christie, attacking higher-polling opponents Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, accused them of spending too much time attacking each other.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey turned his fire on Friday from former President Donald J. Trump, his usual subject of attack, to his higher-polling Republican rivals for the nomination.Mr. Christie’s campaign released its first television advertisement of the campaign cycle, which blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, for targeting each other instead of the former president, whom they all trail by a wide margin.“Chris Christie is the only one who can beat Trump because he’s the only one trying to beat Trump,” the narrator in Mr. Christie’s 30-second spot says.The six-figure ad buy, first reported by Axios, is airing in New Hampshire on local broadcasts and on national outlets including CNN, CNBC and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”It comes as Mr. Christie tries to boost himself before the Jan. 23 primary in New Hampshire, where he is in third place behind Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley. He has bet that a strong showing in the Granite State, forgoing Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, will keep his campaign afloat in future contests.The ad cited polls that showed Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis behind Mr. Trump by double digits.“Nikki Haley, down by 26 in her home state to Trump, attacks DeSantis,” a voice-over says, citing an ad from the super PAC supporting Ms. Haley that called him “too lame to lead, too weak to win.” The ad then pivots to Mr. DeSantis: “DeSantis, down 32 to Trump in Iowa, attacks Nikki Haley,” the narrator says, airing a clip from Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC that said “you can’t trust Tricky Nikki.”“There’s only one candidate trying to stop Trump,” the ad says, before airing footage of Mr. Christie bashing Mr. Trump on the debate stage.The Times reported last month that Ms. Haley’s super PAC had spent $3.5 million on ads attacking Mr. DeSantis but none specifically attacking Mr. Trump. (On Friday, Ms. Haley called on the former president to participate in the Iowa debate, saying, “It’s getting harder for Donald Trump to hide.”)While Mr. DeSantis has attacked Mr. Trump’s record more in recent weeks, his super PAC, Never Back Down, spent 10 times more on efforts to criticize Ms. Haley than Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie trails Mr. Trump by more than 50 points in national polls, with his support hovering in the low single digits.He has spent the fewest days campaigning of the remaining Republican Party candidates, an analysis from The New York Times showed. The campaigns and super PACs supporting Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump have far outspent him. More

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      High Housing Prices May Pose a Problem for Biden

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      Buying a home is a less attainable goal for many young people, and rents are expensive. Could that dog Democrats in the 2024 election?Cameron Ambrosy spent the first weekend of December going to 10 open houses — purely for research purposes. The 25-year-old in St. Paul, Minn., has a well-paying job and she and her husband are saving diligently, but she knows that it will be years before they can afford to buy.“It is much more of a long-term goal than for my parents or my grandparents, or even my peers who are slightly older,” said Ms. Ambrosy, adding that for many of her friends, homeownership is even farther away. “There’s a lot of nihilism around long-term goals like home buying.”As many people pay more for rent and some struggle to save for starter homes, political and economic analysts are warning that housing affordability may be adding to economic unhappiness — and is likely to be a more salient issue in the 2024 presidential election than in years past.Many Americans view the economy negatively even though unemployment is low and wage growth has been strong. Younger voters cite housing as a particular source of concern: Among respondents 18 to 34 in a recent Morning Consult survey, it placed second only to inflation overall.Wary of the issue and its political implications, President Biden has directed his economic aides to come up with new and expanded efforts for the federal government to help Americans who are struggling with the costs of buying or renting a home, aides say. The administration is using federal grants to prod local authorities to loosen zoning regulations, for instance, and is considering executive actions that focus on affordability. The White House has also dispatched top officials, including Lael Brainard, who leads the National Economic Council, to give speeches about the administration’s efforts to help people afford homes.“The president is very focused on the affordability of housing because it is the single most important monthly expense for so many families,” Ms. Brainard said in an interview.Housing is “the single most important monthly expense for so many families,” noted Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesHousing has not traditionally been a big factor motivating voters, in part because key market drivers like zoning policies tend to be local. But some political strategists and economists say the rapid run-up in prices since the pandemic could change that.Rents have climbed about 22 percent since late 2019, and a key index of home prices is up by an even heftier 46 percent. Mortgages now hover around 7 percent as the Federal Reserve has raised rates to the highest level in 22 years in a bid to contain inflation. Those factors have combined to make both monthly rent and the dream of first-time homeownership increasingly unattainable for many young families.“This is the singular economic issue of our time, and they need to figure out how to talk about that with voters in a way that resonates,” said Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants, a tenant union in Kansas City, Mo., referring to the White House. The housing affordability crush comes at a time when many consumers are facing higher prices in general. A bout of rapid inflation that started in 2021 has left households paying more for everyday necessities like milk, bread, gas and many services. Even though costs are no longer increasing so quickly, those higher prices continue to weigh on consumer sentiment, eroding Mr. Biden’s approval ratings.While incomes have recently kept up with price increases, that inflationary period has left many young households devoting a bigger chunk of their budgets to rental costs. That is making it more difficult for many to save toward now-heftier down payments. The situation has spurred a bout of viral social media content about the difficulty of buying a home, which has long been a steppingstone into the middle class and a key component of wealth-building in the United States.That’s why some analysts think that housing concerns could morph into an important political issue, particularly for hard-hit demographics like younger people. While about two-thirds of American adults overall are homeowners, that share drops to less than 40 percent for those under 35.“The housing market has been incredibly volatile over the last four years in a way that has made it very salient,” said Igor Popov, the chief economist at Apartment List. “I think housing is going to be a big topic in the 2024 election.”Yet there are reasons that presidential candidates have rarely emphasized housing as an election issue: It is both a long-term problem and a tough one for the White House to tackle on its own.“Housing is sort of the problem child in economic policy,” said Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and former Obama administration economic and housing adviser. America has a housing supply shortfall that has been years in the making. Builders pulled back on construction after the 2007 housing market meltdown, and years of insufficient building have left too few properties on the market to meet recent strong demand. The shortage has recently been exacerbated as higher interest rates deter home-owning families who locked in low mortgage rates from moving.Some analysts think concerns about housing affordability could morph into an important political issue, particularly for hard-hit demographics like younger people.Mikayla Whitmore for The New York TimesConditions could ease slightly in 2024. The Federal Reserve is expected to begin cutting borrowing costs next year as inflation eases, which could help to make mortgages slightly cheaper. A new supply of apartments are expected to be finished, which could keep a lid on rents.And even voters who feel bad about housing might still support Democrats for other reasons. Ms. Ambrosy, the would-be buyer in St. Paul, said that she had voted for President Biden in 2020 and she planned to vote for the Democratic nominee in this election purely on the basis of social issues, for instance.But housing affordability is enough of a pain point for young voters and renters — who tend to lean heavily Democrat — that it has left the Biden administration scrambling to emphasize possible solutions.After including emergency rental assistance in his 2021 economic stimulus bill, Mr. Biden has devoted less attention to housing than to other inflation-related issues, like reducing the cost of prescription drugs. His most aggressive housing proposals, like an expansion of federal housing vouchers, were dropped from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.Still, his administration has pushed several efforts to liberalize local housing laws and expand affordable housing. It released a “Housing Supply Action” plan that aims to step up the pace of development by using federal grants and other funds to encourage state and local governments to liberalize their zoning and land use rules to make housing faster and easier to build. The plan also gives governments more leeway to use transportation and infrastructure funds to more directly produce housing (such as with a new program that supports the conversion of offices to apartments).The administration has also floated a number of ideas to help renters, such as a blueprint for future renters’ legislation and a new Federal Trade Commission proposal to prohibit “junk fees” for things like roommates, applications and utilities that hide the true cost of rent.Some affordable housing advocates say the administration could do more. One possibility they have raised in the past would be to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which help create a more robust market for mortgages by buying them from financial institutions, invest directly in moderately priced rental housing developments. Ms. Raghuveer, the tenant organizer, has argued that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could unilaterally impose a cap on annual rent increases for landlords whose mortgages are backed by the agencies.But several experts said that White House efforts would only help on the margins. “Without Congress, the administration is really limited in what they can do to reduce supply barriers,” said Emily Hamilton, an economist at the Mercatus Center who studies housing.Republicans control the House and have opposed nearly all of Mr. Biden’s plans to increase government spending, including for housing. But aides say Mr. Biden will press the case and seek new executive actions to help with housing costs.While it could be valuable to start talking about solutions, “nothing is going to solve the problem in one year,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics and a frequent adviser to Democrats.“This problem has been developing for 15 years, since the financial crisis, and it’s going to take another 15 years to get out of it.” More

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      Defeating Trump Is Just a Start

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      The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.But there is another angle you can take on the Republican use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.At the same time, it is hard not to miss the degree to which attempts to nullify popular referendums or redistrict opponents into irrelevance can also work to inculcate a sense of hopelessness in those who might otherwise seek political change. Yes, it is true that many people will push back when faced with a sustained challenge to their right to participate in political life or exercise other fundamental rights. But many people will resign themselves to the new status quo, persuading themselves that nothing has fundamentally changed or concluding that it is not worth the time or effort involved to pick up the fight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Vibes, the Economy and the Election

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      Recent positive news may put two theories on economic disenchantment to the test.The New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Stocks have boomed in recent days.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA Federal Reserve announcement about the future of the funds rate is not the sort of news that would typically factor into analysis of public opinion and the economy. Usually, analysts look at numbers like gross domestic product and unemployment, not something as arcane as a federal funds rate.But this isn’t a normal economy, and public opinion about the economy hasn’t been normal, either.For two years, the public has said the economy is doing poorly, even though it appears healthy by many traditional measures. This has prompted a fierce debate over whether the public’s views are mostly driven by concrete economic factors like high prices or something noneconomic — like a bad “vibe” brought on by social media memes or Fox News.The Fed’s projection Wednesday that it will cut rates three times over the next year probably won’t generate TikTok memes, but it’s exactly the kind of event that may ultimately resolve this debate one way or another — with important and potentially decisive consequences for the 2024 presidential election.To cut right to the heart of the problem underlying this debate: High prices do not seem to fully explain why voters are this upset about the economy.Yes, voters are upset about high prices, and prices are indeed high. This easily and even completely explains why voters think this economy is mediocre: In the era of consumer sentiment data, inflation has never risen so high without pushing consumer sentiment below average and usually well below average. This part is not complicated.But it’s harder to argue that voters should believe the economy is outright terrible, even after accounting for inflation. Back in early 2022, I estimated that consumer confidence was running at least 10 to 15 percentage points worse than one would expect historically, after accounting for prices and real disposable income.I could run through the numbers, but just consider this instead: The low point for consumer sentiment in 2022 wasn’t just low; it was a record low for the index dating all the way to 1952. That’s right: Consumer sentiment in 2022 was worse than it was in the 1970s, when higher inflation was sustained for much longer, and worse than it was in the depths of the Great Recession.Now, other gauges of consumer confidence don’t show things quite so bad, but even the rosier measures show Americans about as down on the economy as they were 15 years ago, when mass layoffs drove a doubling of the unemployment rate to 10 percent and when household net worth fell $11.5 trillion. You don’t need fancy math to see there’s something left to be explained.The two sides of this debate disagree about why, exactly, the public is so sour on the economy.The Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, on Wednesday.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe case for vibesOne side argues that public opinion about the economy is now being driven by noneconomic factors, and in particular vibes, or a prevailing mood that colors our perception of reality. In this view, the vibe today is so biting and dour that public opinion is no longer responsive to material economic reality: The “vibe” is bad, so voters can’t see that the economy is good.Strictly speaking, there’s no reason vibes can’t be grounded in tangible economic conditions — like stimulus checks going away — but in practice this winds up being an argument for how noneconomic factors prevent voters from appreciating the economy. Those factors could include conservative media, cynical social media, the mental health crisis, a pandemic hangover, President Biden or really anything else that might dampen the economic spirit of Americans.There might well be something to the vibes argument. There might even be a lot to it. But there’s just not much evidence to support it. This side fundamentally rests its case on a diagnosis of exclusion: If we don’t buy the economic argument, then it must be noneconomic — and if it’s noneconomic, it can really be anything. The power of vibes here is naturally indeterminate, and allowing limitless explanatory power to a theory without evidence should give any serious thinker some pause.If this side of the debate is right, the consequences for Mr. Biden are pretty bleak. In this view, the economy ought to be helping him, but instead it will presumably be a major drag. An 81-year-old white male moderate may be the worst possible Democrat to turn around the vibe on TikTok.The case for the economy explaining allThe other side of the debate argues that the explanation is fundamentally economic, but that the factors dragging down consumers aren’t neatly captured by the usual economic statistics.There are two kinds of adverse economic factors that this side of the debate has in mind. One is economic dysfunction — some basic things have become harder. It’s harder to hire. It’s harder to get a loan. It’s more expensive to buy things. At times it was impossible to buy things because of supply chain shortages. It’s harder to buy a home. It’s harder to sell a home. If you wanted to engage in these kinds of economic activities, you should have done them before the fall of 2021.It’s easy to see how these challenges could affect economic perceptions, and these problems can be missed by economic statistics. The usual data measures the extent of economic activity, not its ease. That people still have the resources to spend, hire and buy doesn’t change that voters may rationally conclude the economy is bad if it makes it harder for them to undertake economic activity.The other kind of adverse economic factor is the pessimism about future growth. A statistic like unemployment says a lot about the economy today, but little about the economy tomorrow. Expectations of future growth are an important component of consumer confidence indexes, and for good reason: The desire to turn money into more money is foundational to American capitalist culture. Here again, there have been reasons to anticipate limited economic growth or even a recession. Investors have expected it, as evidenced by the yield curve. There was even a reasonable assumption that the Fed would be so focused on slowing inflation by keeping interest rates high that a recession would be all but inevitable.In contrast to the “vibes” theory, there’s a lot of evidence for these various phenomena. They also fit into the framework of consumer confidence as a function of concrete economic conditions.But whether these nontraditional economic problems add up to explain what’s going on is much harder to say. They might explain a lot and might even explain all of it, but it’s impossible to prove empirically without any precedent for today’s economy in the era of modern consumer confidence data. There has simply never been a time when unemployment has stayed so low and prices have gone up so much, let alone with all of these additional twists like supply chain shortages and expectations of recession.What can be said is that the theory of concrete economic problems will be put to the test as soon as economic reality improves, and that time might finally be at hand.Many states now have gas prices below $3 a gallon.Adam Davis/EPA, via ShutterstockThe economy appears to be improvingAfter a few months of stubborn inflation, rising gas prices and interest rates, and a falling stock market, the last month or so has brought excellent economic news. The stock market has gone up nearly 15 percent since New York Times/Siena College polls were in the field in late October. The inflation trajectory looks good. Mortgage rates are falling. Gas prices are down. Once-skeptical economists have declared that a “soft landing” seems at hand. And now the Fed is forecasting rate cuts, which augurs growth, confidence in lower inflation and eventually a return to a more normal economy.Put it together, and the big economic barriers could be poised to fade. If they do and the material economic side of the debate is correct, consumer confidence might quickly begin to recover. And Mr. Biden’s re-election chances would begin to improve, at least to the extent that the economy and not another issue, like his age, is responsible for Donald J. Trump’s lead in the polls.While it’s too early to say, there are certainly signs that consumer confidence could rise. For one, it has already been doing so. Overall, consumer confidence is up nearly 20 points since inflation peaked in the summer of 2022. That rate of improvement is in line with prior, vigorous periods of economic expansion, like during the 1990s. The monthly pattern in consumer confidence even seems to align with the news: Last month’s strong economic data corresponded with a rebound in consumer confidence that erased the declines of the past four months, when the economic news was worse than over the summer.That’s what we would expect if real economic factors were driving consumer confidence, though it’s not enough to disprove the vibe theory. To send the vibe argument away, we would need to start to see the gap closing between expected and actual consumer confidence. If fears of a recession fade and a more normal economic environment returns, there might still be enough time for that gap to close before Mr. Biden stands for re-election. More

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      Trump Is Selling Pieces of His Mug Shot Suit

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      It’s not just a piece of political memorabilia — it’s a strategy.When Donald J. Trump walked into a Georgia courthouse on Aug. 24 to be booked as part of his fourth criminal indictment, becoming the first former president (and only current presidential candidate) to have a mug shot taken, the picture seemed destined to become a symbol of this fraught, unprecedented moment in American history. As has become increasingly clear, however, Mr. Trump and his team have come to see the mug shot in a different way.Specifically, as the source material for a new strain of political pop culture mythmaking and memorabilia.Almost overnight they splashed the image, with Mr. Trump’s signature glower, across mugs, T-shirts and posters in their campaign store, using it and all it represents as a key component of their fund-raising. Then, this week, NFT INT, the official licensee of the Trump name and image for digital trading cards, began selling a special “Mugshot Edition” NFT set that includes, for a certain few willing to buy the whole thing, pieces of the blue suit and red tie Mr. Trump wore in the photo.Or, as the NFT INT website calls the garment, “The most historically significant artifact in American history.”The 47 cards on offer were created by the artist Clark Mitchell and depict Mr. Trump as, for example, Captain America, and sitting in for Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Cards can be bought individually for $99 or as a full set that runs for $4,653 and includes a physical trading card (some of which will be signed by Mr. Trump) with a swatch of suit fabric and an invitation to a special dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Those who buy 100 of the NFT cards receive a swatch of the jacket or pants, plus a swatch of the tie and the dinner at Mar-a-Lago.According to the NFT INT website, the suit is “priceless.” There are enough tiny suit pieces for 2,024 buyers (because, you know, election year), and enough tie pieces for 225.In other words, it’s not just a suit. It’s a font of potential relics — one that positions the mug shot suit as the most important suit of Mr. Trump’s career so far, rather than, say, Mr. Trump’s inauguration suit.The mug shot edition is just the latest in a series of NFT cards released on the site portraying former President Donald J. Trump.NFT INTThe mug shot edition is the third set of NFT cards released, with the first two drops selling out in “a little more than 24 hours,” according to Kevin Mercuri, a spokesman for NFT INT and the chief executive of Propheta Communications. The new offering comes complete with a video of Mr. Trump endorsing the drop — and the suit — at the top of the web page. Mr. Mercuri said the idea for selling the suit swatches came from NFT INT and was inspired by the way sports figures sell pieces of their jerseys to fans. Mr. Trump was “aware of the trend and receptive” to the proposal, he said, and “generously gave the suit to NFT INT. He felt that members of the public would want to have a piece of history.”The suit was then authenticated by MEARS, a company that specializes in validating sports memorabilia. Troy R. Kinunen, the chief executive of the company, said that “the team at CollectTrumpCards provided the suit directly from the President” and that MEARS then verified certain design elements of the garment against photos and video, including pocket placement, buttons, and the collar of the suit jacket, which Mr. Trump had sewn down in the back to keep it in place. (Though given the number of blue suits Mr. Trump appears to own, it is hard to know how anyone could tell them apart.)Selling the mug shot suit tracks, to a certain extent, with other examples of fan culture. Paige Rubin, an assistant vice president and the head of sale for handbags at Christie’s, said there was an almost insatiable public appetite for souvenirs of the famous and infamous, and often the most valuable pieces of memorabilia at auction are determined by provenance: “Does the object you are selling resonate with the fan base? Does it connect to an iconic moment in a career?”Similarly, there is a long tradition of auctioning memorabilia from public figures, including many presidents, as Summer Anne Lee, a historian of presidential dress at the Fashion Institute of Technology, noted. Scraps of Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained bedsheets regularly come up for auction, and a pair of Richard Nixon’s eyeglasses from around the time of his resignation were sold in 2005 for $1,955. In 2019, a pair of underpants believed to have belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, were gaveled at almost $5,000.However, despite the fact that Melania Trump likewise sold one of her most notable White House outfits — the white hat she wore during the French state visit in 2018 — as part of her own NFT drop, and despite Mr. Trump’s own history of monetizing his own brand in a way other political candidates might not dare, it is almost unheard-of for a living president to hawk his own memorabilia for his own profits, Ms. Lee said. Though NFT INT is not related to the Trump organization and Mr. Trump is not a part of the company, as a licenser Mr. Trump would probably receive a percentage of sales.Which makes it in his interest to divide the suit into as many pieces as possible — both financially and, even more pointedly, conceptually.After all, if a garment is considered “historic,” keeping it whole would seem the more desirable choice. That would allow it to be exhibited in a museum, or a presidential library (or, in the case of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum).On the other hand, most tiny scraps of clothing that exist in collections are religious curios, fragments of martyrs’ gowns. Treating the mug shot suit in the same way “suggests Trump believes the suit he wore for his mug shot will be even more motivational to his fans than any other,” Ms. Lee said. “They are offering it like pieces of religious clothing, which implies Mr. Trump is a saint who has been through trials and tribulations for the country.”Indeed, said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, the sale suggests a “quasi-religious element, as if the suit Trump wore in court has special charismatic qualities.”Well, one of the cards in the set does depict Mr. Trump as a golden god. More