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      With Joe Biden Turning 81, the White House Is Focused Elsewhere

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      President Biden has no plans for a lavish public celebration when he turns 81 on Monday, even as Democrats search for a strategy to assuage voters’ concerns about his age by next year’s election.For many of a certain age, there comes a point when marking yet another birthday, taking note of yet another passage of the calendar, is not greeted with the same enthusiasm it once was. And that’s for people who are not even running for president.For President Biden, who turns 81 on Monday, another birthday may bring more liability than revelry, offering one more reminder of his age to an already skeptical electorate. Unlike other presidents who have celebrated birthdays with lavish political events, Mr. Biden plans to observe his milestone privately with family in Nantucket later this week.The best birthday gift the oldest president in American history could hope for would be a strategy for assuaging voters’ concerns, but that has been hard to come by. Mr. Biden and his team have taken the approach that his record of domestic legislation and international leadership should belie any worries about his capacity, even though polls have shown consistently that that line of argument has not been persuasive, at least not yet.Some Democrats argue that Mr. Biden needs to do more to draw the contrast with his likeliest Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, who at 77 has himself exhibited confusion in public lately. Mr. Trump has warned that the country is on the verge of World War II, mixed up the leaders of Hungary and Turkey, and boasted of beating former President Barack Obama in the polls when of course Mr. Obama is not running. If Mr. Trump wins next year and serves out four years, he would take over the status as the country’s oldest president.Others, including some current and former administration officials, said Mr. Biden’s staff members should stop treating him like an old man they do not trust and let him interact with the public and reporters more. Some said the president needed to start getting out on the campaign trail more to show his vigor, deploy more humor to defuse the matter and even boast about his age rather than ignore it.Others, however, said he needed to be protected even more, allowed more time to rest and not sent on so many draining international trips — what some cheekily call the “Bubble Wrap” strategy, as in encasing him in Bubble Wrap for the next 12 months to make sure he does not trip and fall.If some of this is contradictory, it may be because there is no easy answer, much as Democrats have been obsessing about Mr. Biden’s age. One thing the White House cannot do is make him younger. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states, 71 percent said Mr. Biden was “too old” to be president, including 54 percent of his own supporters. By contrast, 39 percent said that about Mr. Trump.“He doesn’t look and speak the part,” said John B. Judis, the longtime political analyst and author with Ruy Teixeira of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” published earlier this month. “He’s not a commanding or charming presence on a presidential or presidential election stage.”Mr. Judis said he thought Mr. Biden had demonstrated “astonishing success” in passing major legislation building infrastructure, lowering the cost of medicine and combating climate change, and added that he planned to vote for the president himself. But he noted that presidents were expected to be both the head of government and the head of state — a prime minister and a king, if you will — and that the public performance part had eluded Mr. Biden.“I think a lot of voters, and young people in particular, who are not at all put off by his political positions or accomplishments, are put off by his utter failure as a regal persona,” Mr. Judis said. “And I don’t know how that can be fixed. Not by bicycling. Biden’s best hope in that regard is the voters’ perception of Trump as a bad or even evil father who wants to wreck the family.”Nothing irritates White House officials more than discussion of Mr. Biden’s age, which they view as an obsession of the news media that does not correspond with the energetic and mentally sharp president they describe inside the Oval Office. While Mr. Biden shuffles when he walks, talks in a low tone that can be hard to hear and sometimes confuses names and details in public, they note that he maintains a crushing schedule that would tire a younger president.In the past few weeks alone, he has devoted countless hours to managing the Israel war with Hamas while also hosting separate summit meetings with leaders from Asia, Europe and the Western Hemisphere. He made a one-day trip to Israel, flying across the world and back without stopping in a hotel room, and they said he has worked the phone endlessly to deal with high-stakes foreign crises.Asked about his forthcoming birthday, the White House did not directly address the age issue on Sunday but chose to focus on the president’s accomplishments, making the point that his long experience in Washington has paid off.“Because of President Biden’s decades of experience in public service and deep relationships with leaders in Congress, he passed legislation that has helped to create more than 14 million jobs, lower prescription drug costs, invest in America’s infrastructure and technology and led to the strongest economic recovery in the developed world,” Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said in a statement.“He has revitalized alliances on the world stage — cultivated over many years — to promote America’s interests and respond forcefully when global crises arise,” Mr. LaBolt added.Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic strategist, said the White House should lean even more into the benefits of Mr. Biden’s age rather than be defensive.“He’s been successful because of his age, not in spite of it,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “We’re all going to have to make that case because it’s true. We can’t run away from the age issue. It’s going to be a major part of the conversation, but we would be making a political mistake if we don’t contest it more aggressively.”Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, said there were naturally limits to what the White House could do. “Nothing anyone, even a president, can do to avoid having a birthday,” she said. “President Biden should continue to do what he’s been doing: connecting personally with people, making jokes about the coverage and highlighting his administration’s accomplishments.”Some party strategists argued that age had dominated the discussion about Mr. Biden lately in part because the president had not yet fully engaged in the contest against Mr. Trump. At the end of the day, they said, Democrats and independents who may be leery of a president who would be 86 at the end of a second term will conclude that it is better to support an octogenarian they agree with than another soon-to-be octogenarian they consider a threat to democracy, abortion rights and other issues that matter to them.“This issue, like many others, will fade once the campaign moves into the general election phase,” said Brian Fallon, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Once the race gets reframed as a choice, it will be impossible for Republicans to try to weaponize the issue of age when their own nominee would also be over 80 in his next term.”If that were to work, it would be the best birthday gift Mr. Biden could hope for when he turns 82 next year. It is, of course, a big if. More

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      The Bush-Obama Blueprint That Gives Biden Hope for ’24

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      President Biden isn’t the first incumbent to face grim polling a year out from Election Day.Well before Election Day in 2004, President George W. Bush was warned by strategists that he would face a tough campaign battle because of voter distress over the war in Iraq and over the economy — two issues he had once hoped to ride to a second term.Mr. Bush’s aides moved quickly to retool the campaign. They turned attention away from the president and his record and set out to portray his likely Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam War veteran, as a flip-flopper, unreliable on national security and unfit to lead a nation still reeling from the terror attacks of Sept. 11.“We saw a weakness we knew we could exploit to our advantage in what was going to be a close election,” said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime senior political adviser.Eight years later, aides to another sitting president, Barack Obama, reviewing public and private polls, concluded that concern among voters about the lingering effects of the Great Recession and the direction of the nation could derail his hopes for a second term.Taking a lesson from Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama recast his campaign away from his first-term record and set out to discredit his opponent, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, as a wealthy businessman unsympathetic to working-class Americans.President Biden is hardly the first president during this era of division and polarization to be confronted with polling data suggesting his re-election was at risk. But the re-election campaigns rolled out by Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, who both returned to second terms in the White House, stand today as reminders that polls this early are not predictions of what will happen on Election Day. In the hands of a nimble candidate, they can even be a road map for turning around a struggling campaign.Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama were different candidates facing different obstacles: a quagmire of a war for Mr. Bush, a domestic economy shaken by the global financial crisis of 2008 for Mr. Obama. But both moved to transform their re-election campaigns from a referendum on the incumbent into a contrast with an opponent they defined, with slashing television advertisements, months before either Mr. Romney or Mr. Kerry were nominated at their party conventions.By contrast, a modern-day Republican president who lost a bid for a second term, George H.W. Bush in 1992, failed to heed polls showing voters distressed about the economy and ready for a change after 12 years of Republicans in the White House.The elder Mr. Bush, his aides said in recent interviews, was lulled by the accolades for leading the coalition that repelled Saddam Hussein and Iraq out of Kuwait, and contempt for his opponent, a young Democratic governor who had avoided the draft and had a history of extramarital liaisons.Former President Barack Obama recast his campaign to discredit his opponent, Mitt Romney, as a wealthy businessman unsympathetic to working-class Americans.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Biden has a very high degree of difficulty but I think the race is winnable,” said David Plouffe, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. “Listen, I have sympathy for an incumbent president or governor who says, ‘people need to know more about my accomplishments.’ That is true, but at the end of the day this is a comparative exercise. That’s the one thing we learned.”The Biden White House has dismissed polls — including a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week — as meaningless this far before Election Day. The president’s advisers pointed to Democratic gains in this month’s elections as evidence that the party and its standard-bearer are in fine shape.Yet, after months of trying to run on his economic record with little sign of success, Mr. Biden has begun turning his attention more to Donald J. Trump, the Republican former president and his likely opponent, particularly his policies on immigration and abortion rights. That includes an advertisement that shows Mr. Trump plodding through a golf course as the announcer said that Mr. Trump pushed through tax cuts “for his rich friends” while U.S. automakers shut down plants.“We are absolutely looking at ways that we can help drive the conversation around Trump and MAGA as much as we can,” said Kevin Munoz, the Biden campaign spokesman. But, Mr. Munoz added, “We are in a different position than Obama and Bush. We had very strong midterms. We have had very strong special elections. Our theory of the case was proved again last Tuesday.”Upending the race dynamics might prove more daunting for Mr. Biden than for his predecessors. Mr. Obama and George W. Bush were able to discredit Mr. Romney and Mr. Kerry because voters, at this early stage of the general election campaign, did not know much about them.But there is not much the Biden campaign can tell voters about Mr. Trump that they don’t already know. (Or for that matter, not much Mr. Biden can tell voters about Mr. Biden that they don’t already know.) And Mr. Trump has, so far at least, not paid a political cost for the kind of statements — such as when he described his critics as “vermin” — that might have previously derailed a more conventional candidate. Being indicted on 91 criminal counts in four cases has, so far, only solidified his support.When Mr. Bush’s campaign began planning for his re-election, they confronted polling numbers that — while not as unnerving for the president as some that have come out in recent weeks about Mr. Biden — were cause for concern. A poll by the Pew Research Group found that 46 percent of respondents said Mr. Bush’s economic policies had made the economy worse and 39 percent said American troops should be brought back from Iraq as soon as possible; up from 32 percent the month before.“We decided early on that we wanted to make the election about national security even though the economy was the No. 1 issue,” said Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign. “We were at a disadvantage to Dems on the economy. And as part of that strategy, we desired to define Kerry negatively on national security early on, and as a weak flip-flopping leader so we could position Bush as a strong leader and strong on national security.”Before long, the Bush campaign was on the air with advertisements assailing Mr. Kerry for pledging to roll back the Patriot Act, giving the federal government expanded powers to go after terrorists. The Patriot Act was passed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks with overwhelming support in Congress — including Mr. Kerry.“John Kerry. Playing politics with national security,” an announcer said.Former President George W. Bush confronted polling numbers that — while not as unnerving for the president as some that have come out in recent weeks about Mr. Biden — were cause for concern.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEight years later, as Mr. Obama mounted his re-election campaign, many Americans were telling pollsters that the country was heading in the wrong direction and that they were worse off financially than they had been before Mr. Obama took office. For instance, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found three-quarters of Americans saying the country was heading in the wrong direction.Mr. Obama’s advisers studied the re-election campaigns of other embattled sitting presidents. “We knew that most re-elect campaigns were a referendum,” said Joel Benenson, who was the pollster for Mr. Obama’s team. “We also knew we had this massive economic crisis which absolutely was not all of Obama’s making. But we also knew you are the incumbent president, and you can’t blame it on your predecessor. We couldn’t convince them that the economy was getting better.”But Mr. Romney, he said, “was not fully formed with voters,” which was an opportunity to spotlight his wealth and portray him as someone whose policies would favor the rich.By contrast, George H.W. Bush, aides said, disregarded the warnings, confident the near 90 percent voter approval rating he registered after the war in Kuwait made his re-election all but certain. “The adulation from the war somehow muted the normal political instincts of a lot of people around the president,” said Ron Kaufman, who was a senior adviser to that campaign.Mr. Rove said Mr. Biden was in worse shape today than the elder Mr. Bush had been in 1992. “Bush seemed bereft of ideas for the future, but people saw him as an admirable human being,” Mr. Rove said. “The problem for Biden is that people have concluded he’s not up to the job — too old and lacking the necessary stamina and mental acuity.”In recent polls conducted in five battleground states by The New York Times and Siena College, 71 percent of respondents said Mr. Biden was “too old” to be an effective president.Mr. Plouffe said the Biden campaign should embrace the lesson the Obama campaign learned studying the losing campaign of the elder Mr. Bush. “The Bush people tried to convince people that the economy was better than they thought it was,” he said. “One thing I’ve learned is you can’t tell people what they think about the economy. They’ll tell you what they think about the economy.”“I’d start every speech saying, ‘America is faced with a choice, we are both old white men,’” Mr. Plouffe said. “‘But that’s where the similarities end.’” More

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      An Interview With Kamala Harris on What’s at Stake in the 2024 Election

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicKenny Holston for The New York TimesVice President Kamala Harris is crucial to the Biden campaign’s strategy for winning over a skeptical Democratic base.Her central role — combined with President Joe Biden’s advanced age — means that certain questions have taken on renewed importance.Specifically: What does Ms. Harris believe, and what kind of president would she be?These are questions that “Run-Up” host Astead W. Herndon has heard from voters, Democratic operatives and even fans of Ms. Harris ever since he began covering her in 2019, as she was preparing to run for president.The question of what Ms. Harris believes is one Astead returned to in August. That’s when he sat with the vice president for a wide-ranging interview in Chicago, conducted as part of the reporting for a New York Times Magazine cover story on Ms. Harris.In the interview, the vice president recounts how she grew up and how her community instilled in her the possibly “radical notion” that she belongs anywhere she chose to go. She discusses her approach to criminal justice and why creating change from the inside is what drew her to become a prosecutor. And she reflects on being chosen as Mr. Biden’s running mate in the summer of 2020.Looking ahead to 2024, she previews the administration’s message to voters in 2024 — it might be “soul of America, Part 2,” but they haven’t made that official. She also directly addresses concerns about lagging enthusiasm among groups — especially Black voters and young people — that the Democratic Party can’t afford to lose.Ultimately, she says she isn’t worried about lack of engagement. When democracy is on the line, she believes Democrats will show up to vote.About ‘The Run-Up’The 2024 presidential election will be one for the record books. If President Biden succeeds in his re-election bid, he will be the oldest person to occupy the office. On the Republican side, Mr. Trump is dominating the crowded primary field — despite indictments in four criminal cases. To make sense of it all, and to understand how voters around the country are feeling, “The Run-Up” and its host, Astead W. Herndon, will be with you every step of the way.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Love Can Win Trump the Nomination. It Will Take Hate to Win Back the White House.

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      A few weeks ago, I was talking to a local pastor here in Tennessee, and he started the conversation by asking a question I hear all the time: “Can anybody beat Trump?” He was desperate for someone else, anyone else, to claim the Republican nomination. He ticked through the names — DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Pence (he was still in the race then) — and they were all better. Why can’t they gain traction? “It’s not a binary choice anymore,” he said. “It’s not Trump or Biden.”“But,” he quickly added, “if it is Trump or Biden, then I’m voting Trump. It’s just who I am.”It’s just who I am. I thought of that conversation when I saw last weekend’s headlines. Donald Trump is now leading President Biden in five swing states, and if the race goes the way the poll suggests, Trump could win the presidency with more than 300 electoral votes. At the same time, we know from previous Times/Siena College polling that the hard-core MAGA base is 37 percent of the Republican Party. Another 37 percent can be persuaded to oppose Trump, while 25 percent are completely opposed to his nomination.How is it possible that a person whose true base is only 37 percent of his party, who faces four separate criminal indictments and who already lost once to Biden might sit in the electoral driver’s seat?I’ve written quite a bit on the enduring bond between Trump and his base. There’s the strange combination of rage and joy that marks the MAGA community. They’re somehow both furious about the direction of the country and having the time of their lives supporting Trump. There’s also the power of prophecy. Millions of Christians are influenced by claims that Trump is divinely ordained to save the United States. But the MAGA millions aren’t enough to put him back in the White House.To understand his general election prospects, we have to go beyond Trump’s MAGA core. He needs millions more votes — including from my pastor friend, a man who’s desperate to see Trump leave American politics.Trump’s viability in the Republican Party depends on the loyalty of his base, but his viability in the general election depends on a dark combination of negative partisanship and civic ignorance. “Negative partisanship” is the term political scientists use to describe partisan loyalty that exists not because a voter loves his party or its ideas but because he loathes the opposing party and the people in it. And why do voters loathe the opposition so darn much? That’s where civic ignorance plays its diabolical role. Partisan Americans are wrong about each other in a particularly dangerous way: Each side thinks the other is more extreme than it really is.This hostility is what permits Trump to convert his primary plurality into a potential electoral majority. This hostility both predated Trump and powered his election. In previous American political generations, nominating a person perceived to be an extremist or a crank was the kiss of electoral death. You wouldn’t merely expect to lose. You would expect to lose in a landslide.When Republicans nominated far-right Barry Goldwater in 1964, for example, he won six states and lost the popular vote by 23 points. Eight years later, when Democrats nominated far-left George McGovern, they won one state and also lost the popular vote by 23 points. There was enough partisan mobility in the electorate to decisively reject two different candidates, from opposing edges of the political spectrum.But now? It is unthinkable for many millions of partisans — or even for those independents who lean right or left and maybe secretly don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re truly partisan — to either vote third party or cross the aisle and vote for a candidate of the opposing party. They simply hate the other side too much. The result is that virtually any Republican or Democratic nominee begins the race with both a high floor and a low ceiling and no one has much margin for error. Every nominee is going to be fragile, and every national presidential race is going to be close. The margin in the last two races has been agonizingly slim. A few thousand votes cast differently in key swing states, and Hillary Clinton wins, or Joe Biden loses.To understand the power of negative partisanship, it’s important to understand the sheer scale of the mutual partisan hatred. Dating back to June 2014 — a full year before Trump came down that escalator — the Pew Research Center reported an extraordinary increase in polarization. Between 1994 and 2014, the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who expressed “very unfavorable” views of their opponents more than doubled, to 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans. Overall, 82 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats had either unfavorable or very unfavorable views of their political opponents.During the Trump era, this mutual contempt and loathing only grew. A June 2019 report by More in Common found that 86 percent of Republicans believed Democrats were brainwashed, 84 percent believed Democrats were hateful and 71 percent believed Democrats were racist. Democrats also expressed withering disgust for Republicans: 88 percent believed Republicans were brainwashed, 87 percent believed Republicans were hateful and 89 percent believed Republicans were racist.There is an interesting additional wrinkle to the More in Common report. Yes, it found that the two sides hated each other, but it also discovered that both sides were wrong about their political opponents. Both Democrats and Republicans believed their opponents were more politically extreme than they really were. The findings are startling: “Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents … hold views they consider ‘extreme’ ” than is actually the case.The media compounds the problem. More in Common found that consuming news media (with the exception of broadcast news on ABC, NBC and CBS) actually increased the perception gap. As a practical matter, this means that parties are almost always defined by their ideological extremes and each party uses the existence of those extremes to generate fear and increase turnout. Even if a party does try to moderate to appeal to the middle, partisan media still highlights the radicals that remain, and the perception gap persists. The fear persists.We can start to see why Trump is viable beyond his base. When you ask right-leaning voters to abandon Trump, you’re asking them to empower a political party they view as brainwashed, hateful and racist. You’re asking them to empower a political party they view as extreme. That’s the source of Trump’s strength in a general election. He’s surfing on top of a huge wave of fear and animosity, a wave he did not create but one that he’s making bigger through his malignant, destructive influence.That’s not to say that we face a political stalemate. After all, we’ve seen MAGA candidates perform poorly in multiple swing state elections, but many of those elections — even against plainly incompetent or corrupt candidates — have been extraordinarily close. Trump’s loss in 2020 was extraordinarily close. In a narrowly divided country, it becomes difficult for one party to deliver the kind of decisive blows that Republicans suffered in 1964 or Democrats suffered in 1972.When the Trump Republican Party is forced to take three steps back, it often consoles itself with two steps forward. It lost the House in 2018, but it gained seats in the Senate. It lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, but it gained seats in the House. It lost ground in the Senate in 2022, but it did (barely) win back control of the House. There weren’t many bright spots for Republicans in the 2023 elections, either, but there weren’t many races, and MAGA will still believe that Biden is weak even if other Democrats have proved stronger than expected.Already Trump and his allies are blaming electoral setbacks on the Republican establishment. The radio host Mark Levin claimed that the Republican nominee for governor in Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, lost to the Democrat, Andy Beshear, because Cameron is a “Mitch McConnell protégé.” Trump echoed the same theme, declaring on Truth Social that Cameron “couldn’t alleviate the stench of Mitch McConnell.” MAGA’s solution to electoral setbacks is always the same: more MAGA.There are two potential paths past this Republican dynamic. One is slow, difficult and dangerous. That’s the path of the Democratic Party defeating Trump and other MAGA candidates, race by race, year by year, with the full knowledge that the margin of victory can be razor thin and that there’s always the risk of a close loss that brings catastrophic consequences for our Republic. One negative news cycle — like Anthony Weiner’s laptop surfacing in the closing days of the 2016 election — can be the difference between victory and defeat.The other path — the better path — requires the Republican Party to reform itself, to reject Trump now. A two-party nation needs two healthy parties. Any republic that depends on one party defeating the other to preserve democracy and the rule of law is a republic that teeters on the edge of destruction. A Nikki Haley nomination, for example, might make Biden’s defeat more likely, but farsighted Democrats should welcome a potential return to normalcy in the Republican Party. It would mean that politics will perhaps return to a world of manageable differences, rather than a series of existential threats to democracy itself.As of now, however, internal Republican reform is a pipe dream. Ron DeSantis is falling, and while Haley is rising, she hasn’t even hit 10 percent support in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump leads by a staggering spread of 43.7 points. Perhaps a criminal conviction could reverse Trump’s primary momentum, but after watching Trump’s Republican approval rating survive every single scandal of his presidency and political career, the idea that anything will shake his Republican support is far more of a hope than an expectation.Until that unlikely moment, we’re stuck with the current dynamic. Love for Trump fuels his support in the Republican primary contest. Hatred of Democrats makes him viable in the general election. American animosity gave Trump the White House once, and as long as that animosity remains, it threatens to give him the White House once again. More

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      With Poll Results Favoring Trump, Should Biden Step Aside?

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      More from our inbox:Reducing I.R.S. FundingHealth Insurance, SimplifiedPoll results show President Biden losing to Donald J. Trump by margins of four to 10 percentage points in key battleground states.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Voters in 5 Battlegrounds Favor Trump Over Biden” (front page, Nov. 6):When will the Democratic Party stop sitting on its hands and do something about the dire reality of the coming presidential election?The most recent New York Times/Siena College poll has President Biden behind Donald Trump in five of six swing states while his approval ratings among youth and minorities — two essential demographics for the party — continue to plummet.There comes a time when we have to say, “Dad, you’ve been a wonderful father and we love you dearly, but we are taking away the car keys.”We can all see it: the shuffle, the drifting focus, the mental confusion during a news conference in Vietnam. Mr. Biden’s handlers keep him under close wraps now, but the gasps among the electorate are going to be frequent when he gets out on the campaign trail debate circuit.This is no time to nominate an octogenarian who refuses to acknowledge his visibly dwindling abilities. The fact that Mr. Trump is only three years younger is irrelevant. Facts, logic and even multiple criminal proceedings are nonfactors when your opponent is a cult figure whose worshipers are willing to follow him blindly into authoritarianism.What the Democrats need to win is vigor, freshness and the hope of positive change. This is no time to cling to gentlemanly traditions of incumbency.Mr. Biden should go down in history as the president who led us out of our darkest hours, but if he refuses to pass the torch to a younger generation, he will be remembered as just another aging politician who refused to let go.If the Democratic Party sits back idly, pleading helplessness in our moment of need, it will prove that this country has not one but two dysfunctional parties.Bill IbelleProvidence, R.I.To the Editor:I read this headline, “Voters in 5 Battlegrounds Favor Trump Over Biden,” and was shocked; then I looked at the charts and graphs in the paper, and was depressed, and turned to my application for Canadian citizenship. Then finally, on Page A13 (they will have to pry the print paper out of my dying hands), I see in large print: “Polls have often failed to predict results of elections this far out.”I really hate polls, but believe they have the power to sway people significantly. So, why publish them this far out if they are lousy predictors at this stage?Betsy ShackelfordDecatur, Ga.To the Editor:The media’s coverage of President Biden is the principal reason the latest poll shows him behind Donald Trump in five of six critical states.Mr. Biden inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the gravest public health crisis in a century. He got off to the fastest start of any president since F.D.R., creating over six million jobs in his first year and reaching his goal of the vaccination of over 200 million Americans in fewer than 100 days. Yet the bulk of the reporting for most of his presidency since then has involved inflation and his age.Underreported is the impact of Mr. Biden’s other achievements: the largest investment in green energy in American history; a $1 trillion investment in infrastructure; the first federal gun safety legislation in nearly three decades; and the biggest expansion of veterans’ benefits in over three decades.Michael K. CantwellDelray Beach, Fla.To the Editor:The latest polls showing President Biden losing support from minority and youth voters should prompt leading Democrats to urge him not to seek a second term. It’s time for a high-level delegation, including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, to visit the White House for a reality check.Yes, Joe Biden is a patriotic American and a good president. But the specter of Donald Trump back in the Oval Office demands that he step aside and pass the torch to preserve our democracy.Judith BishopMiami BeachTo the Editor:Your article about the latest poll was frightening but not surprising. How many times and in how many ways does the leadership of the Democratic Party have to be told that President Biden is unpopular?Are they backing him because, according to the book, an incumbent is more electable than a challenger? Are they relying on the fact that Mr. Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020? If so, they need to take another look at that election.I am a lifelong Democrat surrounded by the same, but neither I nor any of my friends voted for Mr. Biden; we all voted against Mr. Trump. That may not be enough in 2024.It’s entirely possible that many of the people I know — and large sections of the electorate — won’t vote at all. And very few of us have the energy and enthusiasm it takes to campaign effectively.Claudia Miriam ReedMcMinnville, Ore.To the Editor:“Why Biden Is Behind, and How He Could Come Back,” by Nate Cohn (The Upshot, nytimes.com, Nov. 5), misses a critical point.It seemingly assumes that any Biden loss of voter support from 2020 will only move to the Donald Trump column. I believe there is an increasing possibility that a significant portion of any Biden losses will instead go to a third party. Not since Ross Perot in the 1992 election have I perceived such support for a viable third-party candidate.The No Labels movement seems to be making genuine progress and gaining increasing public awareness, if not outright support.While the Democrats are panicking that any gain in No Labels support will come from their candidate, I’m not so sure, as there is evidence that Mr. Trump’s numbers may be just as affected, if not more.Mr. Cohn should start digging deeper into the third-party movements and their likely impact on the election outcome.Kenneth GlennLangley, Wash.Reducing I.R.S. Funding Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Holding National Security Hostage to Help Tax Cheats,” by Paul Krugman (column, Nov. 3):As usual, Mr. Krugman provides a valuable perspective on an important initiative with serious policy as well as economic implications. I believe that there is a longer-term goal that the Republicans are serving by a proposed reduction in funding for the I.R.S. in addition to protecting tax cheats and suspect enterprises.Part of the funding for the I.R.S. is also scheduled to be used for major upgrades in equipment and staffing so that the I.R.S. operates more efficiently and effectively, including being available to answer questions and assist ordinary taxpayers.By reducing the funding for the I.R.S., the Republicans are deliberately undermining improved, consumer-helpful government services so that ordinary taxpayers (and voters) become increasingly frustrated with, and resentful or angry at, the I.R.S.Sowing and fertilizing dissatisfaction with government services among the voting populace appear to be a “growth industry” for the Republicans in Congress.David E. JoseIndianapolisHealth Insurance, Simplified Haik AvanianTo the Editor:Re “It’s Just This Easy to Lose Your Health Insurance,” by Danielle Ofri (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 31):Dr. Ofri rightly condemns the “illogical patchwork of plans and regulations” of the American health care system.The solution, as Dr. Ofri suggests, is to make fundamental health insurance automatic for all Americans, allowing them to opt out but not requiring them (as happened to Dr. Ofri) to opt in.Paul SorumJamaica Plain, Mass.The writer is professor emeritus of internal medicine and pediatrics, Albany Medical College. More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Should Have Known Better

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      At a pivotal moment during one of the Watergate hearings in 1973, President Richard Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, asked a question that still resonates: “How in God’s name could so many lawyers get involved in something like this?”In the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, the issue posed by Mr. Dean’s bracing question triggered a revolution in the legal profession. With so many lawyers involved in the Watergate criminal scheme, the American Bar Association started requiring law schools to provide ethics instruction or risk losing their accreditation. Exams began testing law students’ knowledge of intricate ethical rules.It wasn’t enough, if the past few weeks are any guide. In Fulton County, Ga., three of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers — Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — have now pleaded guilty to crimes in service of Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election and stay in the White House. All three have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the sprawling state RICO case against Mr. Trump. Two other Trump lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, still face criminal charges in the Georgia case. They, along with Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, have also been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the related federal prosecution of Mr. Trump, which will probably benefit from the guilty pleas in Georgia.The charges in the plea agreements vary, but the underlying story is the same: Fifty years after Watergate, the nation is once again confronted with a president who grossly abused the powers of his office, leading to criminal prosecutions. And once again, that abuse relied heavily on the involvement of lawyers. If Mr. Trump’s 2020 racket was “a coup in search of a legal theory,” as one federal judge put it, these lawyers provided the theory, and the phony facts to back it up. In doing so, they severely tarnished their profession.How in God’s name? The question is no less urgent now than in 1973. Lawyers hold immense power within the American system of government, which depends on their expertise, and their integrity, to function. Those who abuse this power pose an even greater threat to the country than some random Capitol rioter, because we count on them not only to draft and execute the laws but to follow them — to lead by example. Everyone should behave ethically, of course, but despite the “Better-Call-Saul” reputation of so many lawyers, there’s nothing wrong with holding the profession to a higher standard.One can view the guilty pleas by the Trump lawyers as evidence that the system is working as it should. They broke the law, they violated their ethical obligations, and now they are facing the music — not only in the courts, but from their chosen profession. Mr. Giuliani’s New York law license was suspended for his “demonstrably false and misleading statements” on Mr. Trump’s behalf; the District of Columbia’s bar association has recommended he lose his license there for good. Ms. Ellis was censured by Colorado state bar officials for violating the rule against “reckless, knowing, or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys,” and may face more severe consequences in light of her guilty plea.Mr. Eastman, a former law-school dean and one of the key legal architects of Mr. Trump’s bonkers plot to stay in office, is in the final days of his California disbarment trial for ethical violations. Officials there have argued that his conduct was “fundamentally dishonest and intended to obstruct the lawful certification” of President Biden’s victory.All of this is to the good. Careers are rightly ruined over such behavior. It is also the exception to the rule. In the real world, lawyers rarely face any consequences for their legal or ethical transgressions.“It’s a club,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal-ethics expert at New York University School of Law who has studied the profession’s opaque and feckless disciplinary system. “The judges who make the decisions are lawyers in robes. They tend to be sympathetic to the other lawyer.”And it’s hard to gloss over the fact that a disturbing number of experienced attorneys, some of whom once held prestigious posts in government and academia, were willing and eager to tell transparent lies and concoct laughable legal arguments to help a con man stay in the White House against the will of the American people.“Part of the reason Trump had to resort to attorneys to attempt the overthrow of the election was because the military was not available to him,” Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Recalling the notorious Dec. 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting, during which the former president openly contemplated ordering the armed forces to seize voting machines, Mr. Eisen said, “It’s a testament to our military leaders, to our military culture, that that door was closed.”The same cannot be said, alas, for America’s legal culture. It’s easy enough to understand why Mr. Trump, who was mentored by the ruthless mob lawyer Roy Cohn, would seek out lawyers who were willing to do whatever he asked, legality and ethics be damned. The more troubling question is how he was able to find so many takers.The obvious answer is the eternal seduction of money and power. Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars, fell back on that explanation for the choices made by Mr. Chesebro, his former student, referring to him as a “moral chameleon” who was engaged in deeply dishonest lawyering.Related to this is the intense pressure to satisfy the demands of powerful clients, even if it means bringing lawsuits so frivolous that they can result in legal sanctions, as many of Mr. Trump’s lawyers have learned the hard way.There is an important caveat here: Many government and private lawyers in 2020, faced with Mr. Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional demands, resisted the temptation and behaved honorably. From the White House counsel’s office to the Justice Department to top law firms, some key attorneys held the line.“What was one of the determinative factors in Trump’s coup failing?” asked Ian Bassin, executive director of the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Responsible lawyers refused to participate.”That explains why many of the lawyers caught up in Mr. Trump’s outrageous plot were not what you might call the cream of the crop. They were grifters, shysters, hair-dye-leakers, tapped primarily because Mr. Trump had trouble finding more serious people to make his case. And yet there were still those with more respectable backgrounds, like Mr. Chesebro, who chose to sell their honor to a man devoid of it, and who they should have known wasn’t going to pay them anyway. In the end, they were all smeared with the humiliation of having filed meritless, fact-free cases. With one minor exception, federal and state courts rejected every lawsuit brought on behalf of Mr. Trump.To a degree many people didn’t fully realize until the past few years, the functioning of American government depends on honor. “There are no guarantees in a democracy,” Mr. Eisen said. “Our rule of law is a central part of what defines our democratic system. Ultimately it comes down to whether the majority of people will do the right thing.”When it comes to lawyers, the choices of just a few can make all the difference.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      We Need to Talk About Joe Biden

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn 2020, Joe Biden handily beat Donald Trump in a race that was never particularly close. But now that the twice-impeached and four-times-indicted former president may once again be the Republican nominee, polls suggest they might be even, at best. Why isn’t Biden doing better? Has his presidency really gone so poorly?This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss the uphill battle Biden is facing heading into 2024 and debate what kind of leader Americans really want.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Evan Vucci/Associated PressMentioned in this episode:“Reagan Should Not Seek Second Term, Majority Believes,” by Barry Sussman in The Washington PostThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Stephanie Joyce. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

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      The Idea That Biden Should Just Give Up Political Power Is Preposterous

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      It was clear from an early point that barring some unforeseen circumstance, the 2024 presidential election would be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — the first contest with two presidents on the ballot since 1912’s four-way matchup between William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, the upstart Woodrow Wilson and the long-shot socialist Eugene V. Debs.Most Americans, according to several polls conducted this year, say they do not want this. Most Americans, a recent CBS News survey reports, think a Trump-Biden rematch — which would not be the first presidential rematch in American history — is evidence of a broken political system. But most Americans who plan to vote are nonetheless resigned to casting a ballot for either Biden or Trump next November.This palpable sense of exhaustion is perhaps the reason so many political observers have taken to speculating about a future in which Biden, at least, doesn’t run.David Ignatius wrote last week in The Washington Post that if Biden and Kamala Harris “campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.” Likewise, Eliot Cohen wrote this summer in The Atlantic that Biden “has no business running for president at age 80.”I find this drumbeat, which has been ongoing since at least 2022 (“Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024,” Mark Leibovich wrote last summer, also in The Atlantic. “He is too old”), to be incredibly strange, to say the least. The basic premise of a voluntary one-term presidency rests on a fundamental misconception of the role of re-election in presidential politics and presidential governance.Re-election — or rather the act of running for re-election — isn’t an unexpected treat or something ancillary to the position. It is one of the ways presidents seek to preserve their influence, whether or not they ultimately win another term of office.“Among the many hats the president wears, none is more important to his long-term success than that of party leader,” the political scientist James W. Davis writes in a 1992 book on presidential leadership. “Unless he is skilled in the management of party affairs, especially in dealing with members of the coequal legislative branch, the president will not be able to achieve that esteemed place in history reserved for all of our great presidents.”The reason, Davis explains, is that the institutional separation of the executive and the legislature along with the fragmented nature of political authority in the American system — presidents and lawmakers of the same party, even lawmakers within the same state, do not share the same constituencies — result in large and imposing barriers to presidential ambition. But, Davis writes, “while the president faces numerous constraints in our Madisonian system of checks and balances, he nevertheless can, if he has the inclination and leadership drive, use his party ties to lead the nation to new heights.”Crucial to achieving this is the possibility of future power, which is to say, the prospect of re-election. The promise of a second term, and thus another four years to achieve their political and ideological goals, is a critical incentive that binds lawmakers to the president in the present. This is especially true given the recent trend toward the nationalization of congressional elections, in which public esteem for the incumbent — or lack thereof — shapes the fate of the entire party.Or, as the presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter observed in a 1957 letter addressing a House committee hearing on the potential repeal of what were then recently enacted presidential term limits, “Everything in our history tells us that a president who does not or cannot seek re-election loses much of his grip in his last couple of years.” In other words, no president wants to be a lame duck.Rossiter, it should be said, opposed the 22nd Amendment — which wrote presidential term limits into the Constitution in 1951 — as a nakedly partisan prohibition “based on the sharp anger of the moment rather than the studied wisdom of a generation.” It was, in his view, an “undisguised insult to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”There was a notion during the 2020 presidential race that Biden would be a one-term caretaker. “Biden should do the honorable thing and commit to standing aside after the completion of a successful first term,” a CNN op-ed declared. Some of Biden’s advisers even floated the idea that he would essentially step aside after winning election. “According to four people who regularly talk to Biden,” Politico’s Ryan Lizza wrote in 2019, “all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for re-election in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.”Even Biden himself said that he viewed himself as a “transition candidate.” Perhaps that was true in the months after he won the nomination. For reasons that should now be obvious, however, it was a fantasy. There is no faster way to political and policy irrelevance than for a president to tell the nation he plans to step aside. Biden could be an effective, successful president or he could be a one-term, transitional figure. He cannot not be both. A president who doesn’t intend to run for re-election is essentially a president who can be safely ignored as a nonentity. No one who wanted to achieve something with the office would make that pledge.Let’s also be honest about the individual in question: the kind of person, like Joe Biden, who plans and plots for a lifetime to become president is going to want to serve as long as the law, and the voting public, will allow.Absent an extraordinary turn of events, Biden will be on the ballot next year. He wants it, much of the institutional Democratic Party wants it, and there’s no appetite among the men and women who might want to be the next Democratic president to try to take it away from him. Democrats are committed to Biden and there’s no other option, for them, but to see that choice to its conclusion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More