Presidential Election of 2024

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      Could a Prominent Democrat Really Challenge Biden? It’s Unlikely.

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      Forty-four years ago tomorrow, the last serious primary opponent to a sitting Democratic president announced his campaign before 5,000 supporters in Boston.But that challenge by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who ran against President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 nomination, offers little precedent for the legion of Democrats fretting about President Biden’s standing ahead of a likely 2024 rematch with former President Donald J. Trump.On panicked text threads and during late-night bar sessions, Democrats in the political world have thrown out the names of ambitious rising stars in the party as possible primary challengers: Gretchen Whitmer. Gavin Newsom. J.B. Pritzker. Raphael Warnock.But it’s highly unlikely, given how much time, planning and money a presidential campaign requires, that any of them would run against Mr. Biden at this point. Challenging an incumbent president is widely seen as a career killer in politics, and virtually all of the Democrats talked about as possible Biden alternatives have thrown their support behind him.Modern Democratic politics have also de-emphasized the traditional early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where Senator Kennedy traveled after announcing his campaign, in favor of a diverse group of states where Mr. Biden was strong in the 2020 primary season. Mr. Biden, and before him Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, won the nomination largely because of their strength with Black voters in Democratic primaries.There’s also the matter of qualifying for primary ballots. Deadlines have already passed in Nevada and New Hampshire. Others are approaching on Friday in Alabama, Michigan and South Carolina. Deadlines in delegate-rich California and Florida will come by the end of the month.A theoretical primary challenger would also have to raise tens of millions of dollars to compete with the $90.5 million Mr. Biden’s campaign committees and the allied Democratic National Committee reported having at the end of September. The party’s major donors are effectively in lock step behind Mr. Biden; a primary challenger would need to either peel off a significant proportion of them in short order or be rich enough to finance a large portion of any campaign.Mr. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, is helping to plan and fund next year’s Democratic National Convention. Mr. Newsom, the governor of California, has offered himself up to debate second-tier Republican candidates on Mr. Biden’s behalf. Figures like Ms. Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia, have shown little indication they’re at cross purposes with the White House.And yet Mr. Biden will turn 81 this month. If anything is durable about his polling numbers, it is how weak his standing is among the party’s core constituencies. But as the old saying goes in politics, you can’t beat something with nothing. More

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      Times/Siena College Polls: Methodology and How We Conducted Them

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      The Times/Siena College battleground polls released on Sunday and Monday were conducted over the past week in six swing states that are likely to decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Five of the states were won by Donald J. Trump in 2016 and then flipped by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. Nevada, which has always been a close state, came down to less than one percentage point in the 2022 U.S. Senate election.These states also contain some of the coalitions that will be crucial next fall: younger, more diverse voters in states like Arizona, Georgia and Nevada; and white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who helped swing the election to Trump in 2016, and were central to Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory. They also provide some geographic diversity.We interviewed 600 respondents in each state to ensure we had a large enough sample to speak to specific subgroups of voters within these states, including age, race and ethnicity, income, education level, and party affiliation. Taken together, these 3,600 respondents represent our largest sample size of swing state voters to date. This also includes more than 700 undecided voters, a group that will be even more consequential within these crucial states.This is not the first time we have focused on swing states this early in an election cycle. In 2019, the poll explored a similar set of states, reflecting the battleground at the time. The political moment was slightly different, with Democrats in the thick of a nominating contest that split the party between liberals like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and a moderate in Mr. Biden — and Mr. Trump was the incumbent president to beat.However, the goals of that poll were similar to this one. As Americans in key states across the political spectrum weigh their options, these polls shed light on the issues driving the election and voters’ appetites for the leading candidates. More

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      Trump May Not Need a Coup This Time

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      Gail Collins: Bret, I know you’re busy writing about your reporting trip to Israel, and I am looking forward to reading all your thoughts. But, gee, can we talk about the Times-Siena poll on the presidential race that came out on Sunday? Donald Trump is ahead in almost all the critical states.Yow. Pardon me while I pour myself a drink.Bret Stephens: Nice to be home. Please pour me one while you’re at it.For readers who don’t know the gory details of the poll, here they are: Across six battleground states, Trump leads President Biden 48 percent to 44 percent among registered voters. In the crucial swing states that Biden won last time, Trump is ahead in five — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — while Biden leads only in Wisconsin. Biden is losing support from young voters, Hispanic voters, Black voters — constituencies Democrats have depended on for decades to overcome the longstanding Republican advantage among whites.Women voters favor Biden by eight percentage points, 50 percent to 42 percent, but men favor Trump by a far wider 18-point spread: 55 percent to 37 percent. (I guess that’s another definition for the term “manspreading.”) On the economy, voters prefer Trump over Biden by a 22-point margin. And a whopping 71 percent think Biden is too old to be president, as opposed to just 39 percent for Trump.Gail: Whimper, whimper.Bret: Basically, this poll is to Biden’s second-term ambitions what sunlight is to morning fog. Isn’t it time for him to bow out gracefully and focus his remaining energies on the crises of the moment, particularly Ukraine and the Middle East, instead of gearing up for a punishing campaign while setting the country up for Trump’s catastrophic comeback?Gail: Well, you and I both hoped he wouldn’t run for re-election. But he did, and he is — and as I’ve said nine million times, he’s only three years older than Donald Trump and appears to be in much better physical condition.Bret: For all we know, Biden may be physically fitter than Alex Honnold and mentally sharper than Garry Kasparov, even if he’s hiding it well. But this poll is pretty much voters yelling, “We don’t think so.” Ignore it at your peril.How about putting in a good word for Dean Phillips, the Minnesota representative challenging Biden? Or at least urging the Biden team to lose Kamala Harris in favor of a veep pick more Americans would feel confident about as a potential president, like Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary?Gail: I’m not gonna argue about perfect-world scenarios. Harris might not be your ideal potential president — or mine — but dumping her from the ticket would suggest some historic degree of bad performance. And she really hasn’t done anything wrong.Bret: Harris could well be the best vice president ever, though she’s also hiding it well. But the point here is that voters are underwhelmed, and her presence on the ticket compounds Biden’s already abysmal numbers.Gail: I’m tormented by this whole national vision of Biden as an aging dolt while Trump plays the energetic orator. As our colleagues Michael Bender and Michael Gold pointed out recently, Trump’s had “a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness” in his speeches lately.Bret: Trump has always been the Tsar Bomba of idiocy. But too many people seem more impressed by his rhetorical force than appalled by his moral and ideological destructiveness.Gail: Why does Biden have this terrible image while Trump’s his old, fun-under-multiple-indictments self?Bret: That’s a great question. As a matter of law, I think Trump belongs in jail. The political problem is that the indictments help him, because they play to his outlaw appeal. He wants to cast himself as the Josey Wales of American politics. His entire argument is that “the system” — particularly the Justice Department — is broken, biased and corrupt, so anything the system does against him is proof of its corruption rather than of his. And tens of millions of people agree with him.Gail: This is the world that grew up around us when The Riddler was more fun than Batman.Bret: Perfectly said. The good news in the Times-Siena poll is that Trump’s negatives are also very high. They’re just not as high as Biden’s. Which means Democrats could easily hold the White House with another candidate. But you seem reluctant to push the idea.Gail: Yeah, since Biden is very, very definitely running, I don’t see any point in whining about the fact that I wish he wasn’t. He’d still be 10 times a better president than Trump.Bret: I just refuse to believe Biden’s candidacy is inevitable. Democrats seem to have talked themselves into thinking that any primary challenge to Biden just guarantees an eventual Republican victory, since that’s what tends to happen to incumbent presidents, like George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. But the alternative is to watch Biden risk his single greatest accomplishment — defeating an incumbent Trump in the first place — by heedlessly running in the face of overwhelming public skepticism.Gail: What’s so frustrating is — Biden has a really fine record. The economy has picked up. He’s gotten a huge program passed for infrastructure projects like better roads and bridges. He’s always got the fight against global warming on his agenda. He stands up firmly for social issues most Americans support, like abortion rights.Bret: All the more reason for him to rest on his laurels and pass the baton to a younger generation. I can think of a half-dozen Democrats, particularly governors, who would trounce Trump in a general election just by showing up to the debate with a pulse and a brain. Let me just start with four: Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Jared Polis, Wes Moore ….Gail: I know Trump appears more energetic, but he’s really only a whole lot louder. Either way his multitudinous defects in character and policy really should make the difference.Bret: Hope you’re right. Fear you’re not.Gail: Sigh. Let’s change the subject. You’re in charge of Republicans — what’s your party going to do about the dreaded Senator Tommy Tuberville?Bret: For the record, I quit the G.O.P. more than five years ago.As for Tuberville, who is holding some 370 senior military promotions hostage because he objects to Pentagon policies on abortion, I suggest he should have a look at what just happened in Israel. The country just paid a dreadful price in lives in part because far-right politicians ignored the degradation of the country’s military readiness while they pursued their ideological fixations. I hope defense hawks like Lindsey Graham join forces with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to change Senate rules and move the nominations to a vote.Speaking of Congress, your thoughts on the effort to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib over some of her rhetoric?Gail: Well, Representative Tlaib accused Israel of committing genocide. She’s also said that President Biden “supported” genocide of the Palestinians, a comment that was offensive to Biden while also, I think, hurting the Palestinian cause. But I wouldn’t want to see members of Congress distracted from the deeply serious issues at hand with a squabble about censorship, particularly one championed by folks like the dreaded Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.Bret: Readers won’t be surprised to know that I find Tlaib’s views wrong and repellent. Like Taylor Greene, she’s an embarrassment to her party and the House. But that’s exactly the reason I oppose efforts to censure her. One of the things that distinguishes free societies like America and Israel from dictatorships like Hamas’s in Gaza is that we stand for freedom of speech as a matter of course, while they suppress it. The right censure for Tlaib would be to get voted out of office, not muzzled by her colleagues.Gail: But let’s get back to that poll for a minute. I was fascinated by the fact that only 6 percent of the respondents identified themselves as union members. I think the unions have done great things for the working class and middle class in this country and I’m very much saddened by their dwindling influence.Bret: I’ve always been pro-union. They’re a powerful force for greater automation and an argument for free trade.Gail: Hissss …Bret: OK, that was my inner Alex P. Keaton speaking. But union leaders should at least stop to ask themselves why, if they’re so terrific, so many American workers are reluctant to join them. I feel that way about certain other self-regarding institutions, including much of the news media, that are so full of their own wonderfulness that they can’t figure out why people keep fleeing in droves.Gail: Bret, we’ve entered the November holiday season — really did enjoy the trick-or-treaters last week and was pleased to notice that the popular costumes in our neighborhood seemed to go more toward skeletons and ghosts than celebrities and pop culture heroes. On to Thanksgiving and then I’m gonna challenge you to come up with a list of things in the public world you’re thankful for.Bret: Pumpkin-spice lattes. Just kidding.Gail: Meanwhile, this is Republican debate week, featuring several people nobody’s really heard of and an absent Donald Trump. I guess your fave Nikki Haley is near the head of the pack, such as it is. Think she still has a whisper of a chance?Bret: Not sure. But you’ve somehow reminded me of a lovely poem by Adrienne Rich, which seems to capture both Haley’s candidacy and my daily struggles with coherent prose.You see a mantrying to think.You want to sayto everything:Keep off! Give him room!But you only watch,terrifiedthe old consolationswill get him at lastlike a fishhalf-dead from floppingand almost crawlingacross the shingle,almost breathingthe raw, agonizingairtill a wavepulls it back blind into the triumphantsea.It’s called “Ghost of a Chance.” Here’s me hoping Haley’s got more than that.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What Can Biden Do?

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      The president’s strategic options for 2024. With President Biden having fallen behind Donald Trump in the early 2024 polls, Trump’s strategy seems fairly straightforward: more of the same. Trump will portray Biden as old, inflation as high, immigration as out of control and the nation as weak. All these arguments play into the concerns of many voters.But what might Biden do to improve his position over the next year? Today’s newsletter looks at four possibilities.1. The ‘anti-MAGA majority’Since Trump took office in 2017, the Republican Party has struggled nationally. In 2018, it lost control of the House. In 2020, Trump lost his re-election bid. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did better than expected.Michael Podhorzer, a political analyst and a former A.F.L.-C.I.O. official, argues that this pattern stems from the emergence of “an anti-MAGA majority.” Americans under 30, for example, have been voting at higher rates since 2016, partly because of their opposition to Trump, Podhorzer notes. Other analysts have pointed to suburban voters who are turned off by Trump’s attacks on democracy. This pattern helps explain why Trump-endorsed candidates in swing states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania did so poorly in the 2022 midterms.Today, Trump is leading in most swing states, according to the latest Times/Siena College poll. Once the campaign picks up, though, Trump’s behavior will get more attention, partly because some of his criminal trials will likely have begun. In the Times poll, about 6 percent of voters in battleground states — enough to swing the result — said they would abandon their support for Trump if he were convicted on charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and sentenced to prison.2. The Roe factorAnother cause of Democrats’ recent election wins is the unpopularity of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. That ruling has allowed Republicans to nearly ban abortion in many states, and most voters oppose those bans.I do think Democrats sometimes exaggerate the political impact of abortion. In 2022, many Democratic candidates tried to beat Republican incumbents by emphasizing the issue. In red states like Florida and Texas, the strategy generally failed — a sign that most Americans don’t vote based on only one issue.That said, in swing states like Michigan, the Republican Party’s extreme abortion position did apparently influence enough voters to decide some close elections last year. And Biden needs to win states like Michigan, not red states, to be re-elected.Perhaps Biden’s biggest advantage is that he could overtake Trump simply by winning back disaffected voters who normally support Democrats, as my colleague Nate Cohn explained in yesterday’s newsletter. Beyond abortion, a populist campaign — emphasizing the low taxes that many rich people pay — might also help Biden, given that many disaffected Democrats have modest incomes, Nate says.3. Issue weaknessesA pound of bacon costs an average of $7.08 in the U.S., 21 percent more than when Biden took office. The price of coffee beans has risen 33 percent. A gallon of gas is 72 percent more expensive. And because inflation affects everyone, it can damage the public mood more than almost anything else. (Yes, inflation has fallen sharply this year, but most prices have not fallen. Only their rate of increase has.)A president can’t do much to bring down prices in the short term, yet Biden has taken steps to reduce energy prices. He approved an enormous new oil project on federal land in Alaska, while enacting billions of dollars of subsidies for clean energy. He is pursuing the sort of all-of-the-above energy policy that many Americans favor.But he has been strangely unwilling to brag about the Alaska project, as Matthew Yglesias noted in a recent Substack newsletter. Biden seems more focused on avoiding criticism from climate activists than on winning over swing voters who can help re-elect arguably the most climate-friendly president ever.There is a similar dynamic on immigration. Undocumented migration to the U.S. surged after Biden took office, partly in response to his welcoming campaign rhetoric, and many Americans are unhappy about the surge. Although Biden has since taken steps to reduce the surge, he rarely emphasizes these popular steps. Again, he seems more focused on progressive activists than on swing voters.Immigration is indeed a problem for his campaign. In the Times poll, 53 percent of voters in battleground states said they trust Trump to do a better job on the issue, compared with 41 percent who trust Biden. When respondents were asked if they supported building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, 53 percent said yes.4. The age problemAnother major concern among voters is Biden’s age. He can’t make himself younger, but he could spend more time in public, demonstrating his energy and engagement. Instead, his staff has kept him cloistered and fed impressions that he isn’t up for the job, as Maureen Dowd, the Times Opinion columnist, has written: “There’s something poignant about watching a guy who used to delight in his Irish gift of gab be muzzled.”Of course, there is one other potential strategy for Democrats who are panicked about a second Trump presidency. Other Democrats could challenge Biden for the nomination. Time is running out, though. The deadlines for getting on the ballot in seven early primary states, including California and Florida, arrive this month.More on 2024“We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down”: The Biden campaign shrugged off the results of the Times/Siena College Poll.Some Democrats expressed anxiety about the poll. “No one is going to have a runaway election here,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.Trump’s support has surged among Black men. Overall, about 20 percent of Black voters say they would back him over Biden.Biden is struggling with young voters and those concerned about the economy, Politico writes.Have a question about the Times poll? Ask it here and our reporters will answer.THE LATEST NEWSIsrael-Hamas WarIn Gaza City.Abed Khaled/Associated PressIsrael said its military had encircled Gaza City and was conducting a large attack above and below ground.Gaza is again in a blackout, and it is unclear where Israeli forces are fighting.A BBC journalist reported intense strikes and the main Palestinian news agency said Israel was conducting raids near hospitals.Israel accused Hamas of operating out of more hospitals. The World Health Organization said Gaza’s health care system had been struck more than 100 times.A photographer lost four of his five children in a strike. His surviving son, who is 1, was being treated in a crowded hospital corridor.Benjamin Netanyahu quickly suspended a minister who suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.In the north, at its border with Lebanon, Israel is fighting with Hezbollah. See maps of the escalating clashes.American ResponseAntony Blinken, the secretary of state, made unannounced visits to the West Bank and Iraq. He is working to prevent wider war and to protect U.S. troops in the region.Some American officials are concerned Israeli settlers could use U.S. weapons to force Palestinians from land in the West Bank.PoliticsDonald Trump will take the witness stand today at his civil fraud trial in Manhattan.Brandon Presley, Elvis’s second cousin, is campaigning to become the first Democratic governor of Mississippi in over 20 years.InternationalA Russian strike on Ukrainian soldiers at a military awards ceremony was a war crime, Volodymyr Zelensky said.A top Haitian police official was grocery shopping when he recognized a fugitive linked to the president’s assassination. He summoned armed officers, who arrested the suspect.China is investing in manufacturing instead of real estate.A far-right candidate in Argentina needs the youth vote to win a runoff election. The fans of Taylor Swift and BTS stand in his way.Other Big StoriesJavier OrtizMatthew Callahan for The New York TimesU.S. troops who fought the Islamic State returned with shattering mental and physical problems that the military has struggled to understand.A.I. chatbots invent information at least 3 percent of the time, and some as much as 27 percent of the time, research from a start-up found.Tyson Foods recalled nearly 30,000 pounds of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets after people said they found small metal pieces in them.Some psychiatrists are prescribing weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to counteract weight gain from mental health drugs.OpinionsEric Adams’s hires have brought corruption and scandal to New York City, Mara Gay argues.Here are columns by David French on Speaker Mike Johnson and Nicholas Kristof on the West Bank.MORNING READSIllustration by Daniel Zvereff, Photo by NASASpace: The James Webb telescope has made stunning discoveries, including about the birth of planets like ours.English mysteries: Who killed the innkeeper with a sword in 1315?Climate change preparation: Hoboken, N.J., is building for a rainy day.Metropolitan Diary: Living out a Macy’s fantasy.Lives Lived: Helen Marcus was a late-blooming photographer whose evocative portraits of literary figures and film and television personalities graced book jackets and magazine covers for decades. She died at 97.SPORTSN.F.L.: The Cincinnati Bengals surged past their A.F.C. rivals the Buffalo Bills, 24-18, for their fourth straight win.N.B.A.: James Harden, traded to the L.A. Clippers last week, will make his debut tonight.U.S.C.: The Trojans fired their defensive coordinator, who oversaw a disappointing two-year stretch in Los Angeles.ARTS AND IDEAS At Sotheby’s.via Sotheby’s“Must-See TV”: Ahead of major auctions, teams at Sotheby’s and Christie’s prepare roving cameras and sophisticated lighting to broadcast the bidding to the world. It began as a way to do business during the pandemic lockdowns. Now, millions watch live online, riveted by how the one percent spends its money.“Twenty years ago, people thought you had to be the member of an elite club to walk through an auction house door,” said Adrien Meyer, one of Christie’s chief auctioneers. “Now you can see a sale sitting on your couch in your underpants.’’More on cultureMissy Elliott and Sheryl Crow are among the latest inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …Joe Lingeman for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell.Bake this spiced cake for Election Day tomorrow.Embrace the morning light now that the days are shorter.Find the perfect winter boots. Here’s how.Take our news quiz.GAMESHere is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were goodnight and hotdogging.And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidSign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected]. More

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      Voters Aren’t Believing in Bidenomics

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      A new Times/Sienna poll shows the president behind in five of six key states. Voters cite his economic track record, indicators notwithstanding.President Biden’s poll numbers are sagging in key states, a new Times/Siena poll shows. Voters are especially dissatisfied with his track record on the economy.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEconomic perceptions are hurting Biden more than everThere was little good news for President Biden in the latest Times/Siena poll of 2024 battlegrounds, which found him trailing Donald Trump in five of six key states one year before voters head to the polls. (That’s despite Trump being nearly as unpopular and fighting multiple legal battles; he is taking the stand on Monday in one of them. And, on PredictIt, which is watched by political experts, Biden holds a six-point lead on Trump.)A glaring weakness for Biden remains the economy, despite signs that it’s doing well and efforts by the White House to promote its accomplishments. Experts say it’s still possible for the president to make a comeback — but when it comes to economic issues, that’s a tough task.Just 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent, the poll found. Worryingly for Biden, that discontent is being reflected in demographics crucial to his re-election: 48 percent of Black voters in the Times/Siena poll rated the economy as poor, as did 59 percent of voters under 30. Zero respondents in that age group in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin rated the economy as excellent.Biden’s struggles are Trump’s gain. Likely voters trust the former president on the economy more than the current one by wide margins: 57 percent of those under 30 prefer Trump, as do 55 percent of Hispanics, 52 percent of women and a majority of people in every income bracket.Voters’ discontent comes despite numerous indicators that the economy is healthy, including a huge gain in third-quarter G.D.P. growth. And while Friday’s jobs data came in below expectations, the latest stats show that employers have been on a nearly three-year hiring spree.But inflation remains a sticking point. While the Fed isn’t likely to raise borrowing costs at its next rate-setting meeting in December, its policymakers haven’t closed the door to future hikes. (Some commentators have written that the studiously apolitical central bank could end up helping Trump get re-elected.)It’s unclear how Biden can turn around his fortunes. Multiple wars and global economic malaise are unlikely to stop weighing on the U.S. economy anytime soon. And voters appear to have soured on Biden himself, with an unnamed generic Democrat beating Trump by eight points.The poll prompted David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, to openly muse about whether Biden should run for re-election. While conceding that it’s late for Democrats to change candidates, he wrote of Biden, “What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”A reminder: The DealBook Summit is on Nov. 29. Guests will include Elon Musk, who this weekend announced the launch of Grok, the first chatbot from his start-up xAI, which will draw on data from the X social network. You can apply to attend here.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Here’s what to watch this week. Corporate earnings return to the fore after last week’s big gains for stocks and bonds. Wednesday will see results from the chip designer Arm and the media giants Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery; SoftBank, the Japanese tech investor, reports Thursday. Meanwhile, on Friday the University of Michigan will publish its latest consumer sentiment report, a key inflation signpost.Striking Hollywood actors weigh a new contract proposal by big studios. The SAG-AFTRA union said it had received a “last, best and final” offer that includes a substantial pay increase and more residual payments from streaming shows, The Times reports. South Korean stocks jump as short-selling is banned again. Stocks on the Kospi, Seoul’s biggest index, gained nearly 6 percent on Monday after the country reimposed a ban on betting against share prices to earn a profit. Critics said the eight-month prohibition, seemingly tied to elections next year, could deter overseas investors from buying Korean stocks.Berkshire Hathaway’s war chest reaches a record. Warren Buffett’s industrial conglomerate revealed in its latest earnings report that its cash balance now stands at $157 billion, giving the company ample financial ammunition for a big deal or more stock buybacks. But Berkshire also reported its first loss in a year as the paper value of stock holdings, including those in Apple, declined.Donors keep up pressure on universities over antisemitism The fight between Wall Street titans and universities over their handling of antisemitism on campus following last month’s Hamas attacks on Israel shows little sign of abating. The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman this weekend ramped up his criticism of Harvard, his alma mater, and donors continued to step back from the University of Pennsylvania.Ackman published an excoriating open letter to Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. “Four weeks after the barbaric terrorist attacks of October 7th, I have lost confidence that you and the university will do what is required,” he wrote. Ackman said he had met with Harvard students and faculty last week, and wrote that “Jewish students are being bullied, physically intimidated, spat on” and assaulted.He called on the university to suspend those behind the abuse, even though the incidents have been referred to the police and the F.B.I.Gay has spoken out against the attacks and the abuse on campus. Last week, she appointed a group of advisers to determine how to counter antisemitism at Harvard. But Ackman sees these actions as insufficient. The university didn’t engage directly with Ackman’s latest criticism, referring instead to previous statements.Harvard’s diversity, equality and inclusion policy is also under scrutiny. Ackman pointed out that Harvard’s doesn’t explicitly include Jews, tapping into a growing argument on campuses and beyond. Adam Neufeld, a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League, told The Times last year that D.E.I. policies that don’t recognize Jews as a minority group reinforce the view that “Jews are not vulnerable.”Meanwhile, more donors are expressing their anger at Penn’s handling of antisemitism. They include Neuberger Berman’s Steve Eisman, a longtime benefactor, who told CNBC that he had asked that his family’s name be removed from a scholarship he had established at his alma mater. “I do not want my family’s name associated with the University of Pennsylvania, ever,” he said. The university newspaper reported that dozens more benefactors no longer want to be associated with the school.In related news: The authorities have opened a hate crime investigation after an Arab Muslim student was injured in a reported hit-and-run attack at Stanford; Israeli businesses are feeling the strain of the war.An epic new antitrust fight for GoogleGoogle is waging antitrust fights on many fronts, including a battle against the Justice Department over its dominance of online search.On Monday, the tech giant will square off in a San Francisco courtroom to defend its app store strategy against a familiar face in Silicon Valley antitrust circles: Epic Games, the publisher of Fortnite.Epic argues that Google is unfairly forcing Android users into its Play Store, where it collects a cut from in-app subscriptions and purchases. Most developers generally pay a roughly 15 percent surcharge on such purchases, though big ones like Epic pay the maximum 30 percent.Google “is using its size to do evil upon competitors, innovators, customers and users in a slew of markets it has grown to monopolize,” Epic says in its complaint. (Google counters that “Epic wants all the benefits of Android and Google Play without having to pay for them.”)Witnesses are set to include Sundar Pichai, Google’s C.E.O., and Tim Sweeney, Epic’s chief.It’s a similar case to Epic’s unsuccessful fight with Apple — but with key differences. Google, unlike Apple, allows phone makers to include alternative app stores on their devices and users to download apps directly. And it is testing a program to let developers use other payment systems in their apps for a smaller fee.And unlike the Apple case, which was decided by a judge, the Google lawsuit will be heard by a jury, adding a greater level of unpredictability.Epic is hoping things go better this time. The 2021 trial over its Apple claims ended with the game maker losing on most of its accusations, a decision that a federal appeals court backed this year. Meanwhile, Google has also reached settlements over the app store issue with both a group of state attorneys general and the dating app developer Match Group.“Big Finance is the problem” As climate activists increase pressure on oil majors to halt new fossil-fuel exploration and rein in production, they’re increasingly looking to enlist support from another industry: Big Finance.But it is a thorny problem, writes Vivienne Walt for DealBook, given that large asset managers have roundly rejected resolutions from climate-activist shareholders this year. “Big Oil is not the problem. Big Finance is the problem,” Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This, a shareholder activist group, told DealBook. “They tell oil companies, ‘Please continue with oil and gas as long as possible. We have your back.’”Wall Street has rebuffed climate measures at a record clip. On Monday, Follow This released its annual tally of proxy climate votes. It showed the biggest U.S. asset management firms — including BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity — siding with Big Oil on resolutions by activists that pushed the supermajors to commit to Paris accord emission reduction goals. The only (partial) support came from European investors including UBS and Allianz.It’s a sharp departure from a few years ago. Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, said in 2020 that climate change would be “the defining factor” in his firm’s investment decisions. A year later, BlackRock helped lead a board revolt at Exxon over what critics called a lackluster climate plan. This year, the world’s biggest asset manager rejected climate resolutions targeting the oil majors, including at Exxon. “Our role is not to replace the judgment of management and the board,” it said.The oil boom has been good business. With oil prices surging and a deal frenzy expected in the oil patch, Wall Street looks to reap billions in fees. It’s also backing new projects. Reclaim Finance, a French climate organization, notes that Citigroup and Bank of America funded tens of billions worth of oil exploration after they joined the U.N.-created Net Zero Banking Alliance in 2021. “We want them to stop giving new capital,” said Agathe Masson, the group’s stewardship campaigner in Paris.Lobbying continues behind the scenes. The Rev. Kirsten Spalding, vice president of the investor network for Ceres, a Boston-based climate organization, said financial firms are still being tough on Big Oil. “I’m hearing a lot about capital expenditure: How much are they moving into climate solutions? How are they accounting for emissions?” she said. THE SPEED READ DealsTelecom Italia agreed to sell its landline telephone network to KKR for $23.6 billion, a deal that may draw a legal challenge by the Italian company’s biggest shareholder, Vivendi. (Bloomberg)Saudi Arabia reportedly could buy a $5 billion stake in the Indian Premier League cricket competition at a $30 billion valuation. (Bloomberg)LVMH said it will buy the Los Angeles-based eyewear maker Barton Perreira, reportedly for about $80 million. (WSJ)PolicyWill the Treasury Department’s decision to increase the size of longer-term debt by less than expected prove a turning point for markets? (WSJ)“More Semiconductors, Less Housing: China’s New Economic Plan” (NYT)Best of the rest“The New Headache for Bosses: Employees Aren’t Quitting” (WSJ)How corporate America is adjusting to a world of higher rates after years of piling up on cheap debt. (FT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. More

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      Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might

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      For Donald J. Trump, a new set of New York Times/Siena College polls captures a stunning, seemingly contradictory picture.His 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions have not significantly hurt him among voters in battleground states. Yet he remains weaker than at least one of his Republican rivals, and if he’s convicted and sentenced in any of his cases, some voters appear ready to turn on him — to the point where he could lose the 2024 election.Mr. Trump leads President Biden in five key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to the Times/Siena polls. He has eaten significantly into Mr. Biden’s advantages among younger, Black and Hispanic voters, many of whom retain positive views of the policies Mr. Trump enacted as president. And Mr. Trump appears to have room to grow, as more voters say they are open to supporting the former president than they are to backing Mr. Biden, with large shares of voters saying they trust Mr. Trump on the economy and national security. More

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      Swing State Voters Are Souring on Biden

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      Mooj Zadie and Marc Georges and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn a major new campaign poll from The New York Times and Siena College, former President Donald J. Trump leads President Biden in five of the six battleground states likeliest to decide the 2024 presidential race. Widespread discontent with the state of the country and growing doubts about Biden’s ability to perform his job as president threaten to unravel the diverse coalition that elected him in 2020.Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the results are less a reflection of Trump’s growing strength than they are of Biden’s growing weaknesses.On today’s episodeNate Cohn, The New York Times’s chief political analyst.In contrast with four years ago, the poll finds a disengaged, disaffected and dissatisfied electorate, setting the stage for a potentially volatile campaign.Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesBackground readingIn the Times/Siena poll, voters in battleground states said they trusted Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration.Here are detailed tables from the poll.Less engaged voters are Biden’s biggest problem.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Nate Cohn More

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      Donald Trump Has Closed the Republican Mind

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      Over the past half-century, one of the books that most electrified conservatives was Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom, a political philosopher, warned of the dangers posed by moral relativism and nihilism, of “accepting everything and denying reason’s power.”The book, published in 1987, sold more than a million copies and spent 10 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. It argued that the denial of truth and the suppression of reason was leading to a civilizational crisis — and the fault for this lay at the feet of the New Left.At the time, I worked in the Reagan administration. I was a young speechwriter for William Bennett at the Department of Education, deeply interested in political ideas and the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtue. The state of higher education, which was the focal point of Mr. Bloom’s concerns, was of great interest to me. But so was his broader warning about the “relativity of truth,” the loss of moral order, the lack of critical thinking and “spiritual entropy.”Mr. Bloom believed a truly liberal education would help people resist the “worship of vulgar success.” He lamented the failure of universities to put “the permanent questions” of human life and human meaning front and center.Taken together, those were currents of thought that I and other conservatives believed were threats to flourishing lives and a decent, just society. The poet Frederick Turner described “The Closing of the American Mind” as “the most thoughtful conservative analysis of the nation’s cultural sickness.”Yet today it is the American right that most fully embodies the attitudes that so alarmed Mr. Bloom. We see that most clearly in the right’s embrace of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he represents. Mr. Trump is cruel and remorseless, compulsive and vindictive, an accomplished conspiracy theorist. He delights in inflaming hatreds and shattering moral codes.No other president has been as disdainful of knowledge or as untroubled by his benightedness. No other has been as intentional not just to lie but to annihilate truth. And no other president has explicitly attempted to overturn an election and encouraged an angry mob to march on the Capitol.With every passing week, the former president’s statements are getting more deranged, more menacing and more authoritarian. Mr. Trump has taken to verbally attacking judges and prosecutors in his various criminal trials; mocked last year’s brutal hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House at the time, which left him with a skull fracture; and suggested that the conduct of Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was deserving of execution. While doing this, Mr. Trump has expanded his lead over his nearest rival in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination to more than 40 points.In other words, no matter how much wrongdoing Mr. Trump engages in, however outrageous and brutish his conduct, he remains wildly popular. His indecency and sulfuric rhetoric are a plus; his most loyal supporters are galvanized by the criminal charges against him, which they consider political persecution. He is their beau ideal, and he has spawned hundreds of imitators — in the presidential campaign that he is dominating, in Congress, among governors, in state legislatures and in the right-wing ecosystem. The haunting question raised by Mr. Bloom is more relevant now than it was when he first posed it: “When there are no shared goals or a vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?”So how did a party and a political movement that once saw itself as a vanguard of objective truth end up on the side that gets to make up its own facts, its own scripts, its own realities?Rich Tafel, the chief executive of Public Squared, developed a training called Cultural Translation, which teaches participants how to find shared values to build bridges across different worldviews. He told me the narrative he’s heard from people on the right is that they tried fighting the left for years, nominating admirable people like John McCain and Mitt Romney, but these leaders failed to understand how the game had changed. “Those on the right argue that claiming that there are objective truths and hard realities didn’t work against the identity politics of the postmodern left,” according to Mr. Tafel. “Now, they’d say, they are playing by the same rules.” In fact, he said, “MAGA has weaponized postmodernism in a way the left never did.”Mr. Tafel added that MAGA world “likes the trolling nature of the postmodern right and the vicious attacks” against those they oppose. “The right likes the snark, irony and sarcasm of it all.”Those who once celebrated the three transcendentals — the true, the good and the beautiful — now delight in deceit, coarseness and squalor. Jonathan Rauch, a friend and sometime collaborator, calls this a “degenerate postmodernism.”Mr. Rauch’s book “The Constitution of Knowledge” examined the collapse of shared standards of truth. He suggested that the incentive structure on the right has played an indispensable role in its epistemic crisis. Right-wing media discovered that spreading lies, inflaming resentments and stoking nihilism were extremely profitable because there was an enormous audience for it. Republican politicians similarly found they could energize their base by doing the same. Initially, the media and politicians cynically exploited these tactics; soon they became dependent on them. “They got high on their own supply and couldn’t stop using without infuriating the base,” as Mr. Rauch put it. There was nothing they would not defend, no exit ramp they would take.Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”The original left-wing version of postmodernism that Mr. Bloom complained about was corrosive for the reasons he discussed, and it still is, but the right-wing version is several orders of magnitude more cynical, irrational and destructive. Nihilism is a choice — it is forced on no one — and conservatives must somehow find a way to turn back toward their original ideals.The core concern expressed by Mr. Bloom more than 35 years ago was that relativism and nihilism would lead to impoverished souls, especially among the young, the decomposition of America’s social contract and its political culture, and a “chaos of the instincts or passions.” His worst fears have been realized. What Mr. Bloom could not have imagined is that it would be the right that would be the author of this catastrophe.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) — a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More