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      Murkowski Says She Will Rank Peltola First on Her Ballot in Alaska

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      ANCHORAGE — Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a centrist Republican facing a tough re-election campaign, plans on ranking Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, first on her ballot this November, crossing party lines to back the incumbent in her race to serve a full term in the House.Sitting in a quiet backstage corner behind exhibitions and vendors at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention this weekend, Ms. Murkowski confirmed to The New York Times on Saturday her support for Ms. Peltola, who earlier this year overcame a chaotic field of four dozen candidates to finish the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term after he died in March.Ms. Murkowski declined to say whether or how she would rank Ms. Peltola’s challengers: Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor and vice-presidential candidate, or Nicholas Begich III, a conservative member of an Alaskan liberal dynasty, both registered Republican candidates, or Chris Bye, a libertarian. Under Alaska’s new ranked-choice system, voters can rank their preferred candidates, which are counted until at least one candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote.Ms. Murkowski brushed off the significance of her comment, describing it as “Lisa being honest” and adding that she was primarily focused on her own race, where she is fending off Kelly Tshibaka, a right-wing challenger endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump and the state’s Republican Party. Ms. Murkowski has also retained broad support from Alaska Native voters in the state, and they proved crucial to her write-in campaign in 2010. (Ms. Peltola told The Washington Post she also planned on voting for Ms. Murkowski, and they posed together for a photo at the convention.)“Alaskans are going to go through the same process that I am, which is evaluating people, looking at their values and whether they represent them, and they will make that determination going forward,” Ms. Murkowski said.But the comment underscored the broad coalition Ms. Peltola is assembling in her bid to remain the sole representative for the state’s 734,000 people, after being sworn in last month as the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. At the convention, Ms. Peltola was feted with raucous cheers and emotional prayer songs and tributes, as attendees rang cowbells and waved cutouts of her face at the very mention of her name.“We are in Mary’s house, and I know this,” Ms. Palin proclaimed at a candidate forum at the convention. “Doggone it, I never have anything, like, to gripe about — I just wish she’d convert on over to the other party.”Ms. Palin, while quick to lavish Ms. Peltola, her longtime friend, with praise, made no mention of Mr. Begich, who also appeared and who siphoned away some conservative voters in the primary. More

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      Frustrated With Polling? Pollsters Are, Too

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      Mr. Bui is the deputy graphics director for Opinion. From 2015 to 2022, he was a graphics editor for the Upshot. Pollsters are holding their breath. Their time-tested method of randomly dialing up people isn’t working like it used to. Voter turnout in the last two national elections was a blowout compared to years past. […] More

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      This Wasn’t the Vibe Shift Democrats Had in Mind

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      Gail Collins: Bret, as you know, I always try to avoid discussing foreign affairs — never been my specialty — but I do want to ask you about the British, um, situation.Bret Stephens: You mean the country that seems to have switched places with Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, politically speaking, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s Argentina, economically speaking, and Groucho Marx’s Freedonia, comically speaking? Go on.Gail: The Tory prime minister, Liz Truss, set a record for failure before she slunk out of office last week. She came into 10 Downing Street promising to cut taxes on the rich, and she did, and she … nose-dived.Any message there for the rest of us?Bret: When Margaret Thatcher was pressed on whether she would switch course on her free-market policies, she famously said, “The lady’s not for turning.” She went on to be one of the longest-serving prime ministers in British history. Truss turned against her own policies almost immediately and wound up being turned out of office almost immediately.So the first lesson is that if you announce a policy, have the guts to stick to it or face political destruction.Gail: Well, in this case I think we’d have seen political destruction either way. The tax cut idea was disastrous.Bret: I’d say it was the execution, not the idea: Tax cuts usually stimulate a sluggish economy. The second lesson is that Britain’s economic mess isn’t the result of a month and a half of Truss but 12 years of big-government Toryism under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Britain just isn’t an attractive country to live or invest in anymore, particularly after it made the foolish decision to leave the European Union.Bottom line: Have the courage of your convictions and the wit to defend them. Your take?Gail: That cutting taxes on the rich isn’t the magic answer to economic problems. I believe in a lot of what you’d call big government, but sooner or later, you’ve gotta pay for stuff.Bret: Gail Collins, fiscal conservative …Gail: Speaking of debt, President Biden’s plan to start his program of canceling student loans to poor and middle-class borrowers is facing a slew of Republican court challenges.I’m rooting for him to win the fight — a matter on which I believe we disagree.Bret: Totally against loan forgiveness. We’ve increased the national debt from $20 trillion to $31 trillion in barely five years and now higher interest rates are going to make it more expensive to service that debt. And we are supposed to write off $400 billion in college loans — including to couples making up to $250,000 — without even giving Congress an opportunity to weigh in? It’s bad policy and worse politics.Gail: Let me quickly point out that many of the folks who are spending their lives paying off big student loans signed up for the deal when they were little more than kids, some not ready for the programs they were recruited into, and some who were assured that their major in medieval history would lead to high-income jobs that would make it easy to pay off the debt. The system did not work.Bret: I probably shouldn’t say this, but anyone who thought, at any age, that a degree in medieval history would lead to a life of riches needs stupidity forgiveness, not loan forgiveness.I guess we’ll find out soon enough if the courts even allow the plan to go through, though I did find it interesting that Amy Coney Barrett effectively sided with the administration on this issue. Nice to see a Trump nominee show some independence.Gail: Agreed. Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting to ask you about the Senate races. The whole world is watching! Or at least the politically obsessed part of America. Anything grabbing your interest?Bret: The most interesting Senate race is in Ohio. I really don’t see Tim Ryan beating J.D. Vance, but the fact that he’s even competitive in a state Trump won in 2020 by eight points suggests he’s found a formula for how Democrats win back white, working-class votes from the Republicans. Mainly that means running as far away as possible from Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the progressive wing of his party.How about you?Gail: Since Cincinnati is my hometown, I’ve been watching Ohio pretty intently. I think Ryan has a chance — he’s in a pretty red state, but one that’s elected Democrats before. Including the state’s other senator, Sherrod Brown, who’s considered liberal.Bret: True. And just by outperforming expectations Ryan is forcing Republicans to pour a ton of money in the race just to hold the seat.Gail: Plus Ryan is running against a truly terrible candidate. Vance seems to have an unending supply of mini-scandals about his financial dealings.Bret: I thought Vance did fine in the debate last week. What bothers me about him aren’t his financial dealings. It’s the crass opportunism it took for him to flip almost overnight from Never Trumper to MAGA Republican. And the fact that he represents the isolationist wing of the conservative movement. Hard to overstate how dangerous that is in the face of the new axis of evil in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing.Gail: Also interested in New Hampshire, where the Democratic incumbent, Maggie Hassan, seemed doomed in a Republican-leaning year, given that she won her last election by only about 1,000 votes.But her opponent, the retired general Don Bolduc, has been another awful candidate — all over the map, trying to be a right-wing stalwart in the primaries and now metamorphosing into a moderate who wants to raise Social Security taxes on the wealthy.Who would you vote for there?Bret: Hassan, no question. She’s a good senator, willing to work across the aisle. I would have supported the Republican governor, Chris Sununu, if he’d decided to run, but apparently the sanity gene runs too strongly in his family so he stayed out of the race. And Bolduc isn’t just an election denier or even an election-denier denier — in that he retracted his denialism after he won the primary. It’s that he subsequently denied that he denied being a denier. Which means he should be denied the election.Gail: Bret, either you are the most fair-minded commentator in the country or this is yet another marker for how far the Republican Party has sunk. Even its defenders can’t defend many of this year’s candidates.I’m inclined to say both are true, by the way.Bret: Thanks! Can we switch to some of the races for governor? In New York the Republican candidate, Lee Zeldin, seems to be zooming up in the polls.Gail: Aauugh. If this was a New York Republican like your old fave George Pataki, I’d be unshocked — Gov. Kathy Hochul hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. But Zeldin is terrible! If you want to get a really good feel for this contest, read our editorial board’s very powerful Hochul endorsement.Bret: Zeldin is doing well because New Yorkers are doing badly. We have the highest overall tax burden in the country if you count income, property, sales and excise taxes, but we are very far from having the best school districts, the best infrastructure or the safest streets. The only area in which we lead the country is in losing people to other states. And one-party rule is bad for governance. There are things I don’t like about Zeldin, starting with his proximity to Donald Trump, but I’ll vote for him next month.Gail: Looking elsewhere — how about Arizona? The race pits Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, against Kari Lake, a Republican TV personality. I certainly think Hobbs would make the better governor. But if Lake wins I could see her turning into a possible vice-presidential candidate on a Trump ticket.Bret: Our news-side colleague Jack Healy wrote a devastating report about Hobbs, whose personal strengths apparently don’t include campaigning. She refuses to debate her opponent on the grounds that Lake is an election denier, which seems to me like an especially good reason to debate. My bet is that the governorship stays in Republican hands — and that it might push Blake Masters to victory in his Senate race against the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly.Gail: It was a great piece, which did note that Lake refuses to answer any questions from the state’s major newspaper.Bret: Bigger picture, Gail, I suspect it’s going to be a pretty good November for Republicans, despite all of the lousy candidates they’ve put forward. Do you see this as just part of a natural cycle in which the incumbent party usually does badly in midterms? Or would you put some blame on the way Biden has handled the presidency so far?Gail: In a world full of war, energy shortages, health crises and political polarization, our president is doing a decent job of keeping things calm. Wish he had a more electric personality, but we’ve certainly learned there are worse things than a chief executive who isn’t great on camera.It is true that the incumbent party usually does poorly during the midterms. Fortunately, the Republicans under Trump have nominated so many terrible candidates that there’s a chance the results won’t be quite as dire for Biden’s side.What do you think? And more important, which side are you rooting for?Bret: I’m rooting for Biden to succeed because we can’t allow Trump to come back, Vladimir Putin to win or the country to come even more unglued and unhinged than it already is.Of course my way of rooting for success is to scold Biden nonstop whenever I think he’s screwing up. It’s a formula my mom has been using with me for nearly 49 years. She’s confident that in a few years more, she might even succeed.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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      Kari Ann Lake’s Hijacking of Martin Luther King

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      Meet Kari Lake. She is the election-denying, antisemite-endorsing former television news anchor who is the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona.She is Donald Trump in lipstick. But she delivers her divisiveness in the calm and measured tones of a person reading the news rather than a man who froths at the mic.She parrots Trump’s disgusting generalizations about immigrants, saying last month: “The media might have a field day with this one, but I’m going to just repeat something President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him in a lot of trouble. They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime, and they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”Like Trump, she refuses to commit to accepting the result of the Arizona election — unless she wins. All she would say last week when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether she would accept the outcome was, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” Well, of course.In the same way that Trump sought to brand Hillary Clinton a racist — calling her in 2016 “a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future” — Lake is telling CNN that her opponent Katie Hobbs is “a twice-convicted racist.”Convicted? If racism were a crime for which one could be convicted, America wouldn’t have enough prisons to hold the guilty, and Lake’s buddy Trump would be the mascot of the cellblock.Now Lake is joining Trump in invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in self-serving ways. On Martin Luther King Day in 2020, Trump tweeted: “It was exactly three years ago today, January 20, 2017, that I was sworn into office. So appropriate that today is also MLK jr DAY. African-American Unemployment is the LOWEST in the history of our Country, by far. Also, best Poverty, Youth, and Employment numbers, ever. Great!” Trump will always find a way to make things about himself.But Lake one-upped Trump in disrespecting King’s legacy, at a campaign event on Tuesday with the failed Democratic presidential hopeful (and now former Democrat) Tulsi Gabbard.Gabbard said during their exchange that she became a Democrat because she was “inspired” by the “party of Dr. Martin Luther King” and John F. Kennedy, “a party that said we respect your individual freedoms and civil liberties and a government of, by and for the people.” But, she added, “unfortunately that party no longer exists today.”Let’s stop here and start to set the record straight. The Democratic Party is not the party of Dr. King. He was devoted to principles and policies, not parties. In fact, he once said: “I don’t think the Republican Party is a party full of the almighty God, nor is the Democratic Party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either.”He was, however, bound to the idea of equality, fairness and truth, things that are anathema to the modern Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, are fighting for voting rights, which King championed, even as Republicans rush to suppress voting.Gabbard is obscene in her obtuseness, but what else can you expect from her?After Gabbard’s distortions about the Democratic Party of her youth disappearing, Lake chimed in, saying, “I’m a true believer that if M.L.K., Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were alive today, if J.F.K. were alive today, if our founding fathers were alive today, they would be America First Republicans.”Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that the founders worried and wrote endlessly about their fear of demagogues like Trump, whom Lake supports and whose lies she propagates.Let’s set aside the fact that Kennedy railed against core Republican policies that remain relatively unchanged, saying in a 1947 speech that the “Republican policies that brought disaster to the country in the late ’20s are good enough for the Republicans of today” and describing their agenda as “stringent labor laws, which strangle labor’s freedom by restraint” and “tax reductions which benefit the prosperous at the expense of the poor, at a time when the buying power in the upper ranges of income is abnormally high, while the buying power in the lower ranges of income is abnormally low.”Let’s instead focus on what has become a standard tactic for Republicans: co-opting King’s legacy, saying that he would have supported people who now stand for exactly what he opposed.It is a brazen act of blaspheming, an attempted theft of moral authority being conducted in broad daylight. And it’s not new. It has been happening for at least a decade, and writers and researchers have long been writing about it. What is striking to me is not that it happened but the consistency and longevity of the fraud.This is not an extemporaneous error but a concerted, coordinated effort to distract and deceive, to claim the antithesis of their political position as their own political avatar.So I say to Lake and all Republicans invoking King while working against his ideals: Keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouths!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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Pelosi and Sanders Press Democrats’ Case, and More News From the Sunday Talk Shows

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      Democratic Party leaders turned toward inflation and the economy after a summer focus on abortion. Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican, said the G.O.P. would seek spending cuts.With less than three weeks to go before Election Day and polls showing Republicans gaining ground, Democrats dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to make their case for control of Congress. They focused on inflation and wages, a notable shift after months in which they leaned on abortion rights.Widespread anger at the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled Democrats through the summer, lifting them in special House races and raising their hopes of defying the historical pattern of midterm elections, in which the party in power usually loses seats. But polls suggest voters are prioritizing other issues.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emphasized Social Security and Medicare on Sunday, pointing to Republicans’ calls for spending cuts, while adding that they still considered abortion an important issue that would motivate many voters.“The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security — health blackmail — to lifting the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have said they would like to review Medicare and Social Security every five years. They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.”Mr. Sanders, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” rejected the argument that Democrats were to blame for inflation, noting that the inflation rate was also very high in Britain and the European Union. He argued that Republicans had put forward no workable plans to combat it.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.” More

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      Republicans’ Persistent 2020 Election Doubts

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      Hundreds of Republicans running for offices this year have questioned the 2020 election.Hundreds of Republicans running for national and statewide offices have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election, in some cases outright denying President Biden’s victory. To understand how thoroughly these views have seeped into American politics, my colleagues Karen Yourish and Danielle Ivory combed through statements from more than 550 Republican candidates. I spoke with them about what they found.Ashley: Why do many Republicans continue to question the 2020 election?Danielle: There are candidates who seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying, and some who probably feel like they have to talk about it. Donald Trump and many of the party’s core supporters have made questioning 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates.Some Republicans have learned that they can’t drop this issue because there’s pressure from Trump or the people around him. One example is Tim Michels, a candidate for governor in Wisconsin. He said he would not prioritize decertification of the 2020 election, which is not legally possible. Then there was an uproar from Trump’s camp. So Michels started promoting “2000 Mules,” a documentary that purports to show election fraud but is based on an erroneous premise.You put the candidates into different categories: those who openly said the election was stolen and those who questioned the election in other ways. Why distinguish between them?Karen: We wanted to help readers understand the range of ways that candidates are promoting misinformation about 2020. We felt it was incorrect to label all candidates who questioned specific aspects of the election — including many who voted to object to the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 — as “election deniers.” There has been a lot of coverage on the most extreme examples, the people who explicitly say that the election was stolen. But many others cast doubt, often frequently, in ways that might seem more reasonable but are possibly more insidious.What are some of those ways?Karen: A great example is Robert Burns, a New Hampshire House candidate. In a local TV news interview in February, he said he didn’t believe that the “stolen election is a winning issue.” He then went on to say that Trump did not get more votes than Biden, but votes were “absolutely” stolen, without actually saying that the whole election was fraudulent.Another is Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who said on C-SPAN that “President Biden is the president of the United States” but then added that the conspiracy film “2000 Mules” raised “significant questions as to what might have happened” in the election and that those allegations should be investigated.Many candidates have recently taken to promoting an unfounded theory that the media, Facebook and the F.B.I. conspired to interfere in the 2020 election by censoring coverage of a negative news story about Hunter Biden, the president’s son.What surprised you about your findings?Danielle: Falsehoods about the election seem to have staying power that I didn’t expect, and that resilience seems increasingly relevant as we head into the midterm elections. So we thought it was important to separate out more recent statements about the election, almost two years after Donald Trump lost, versus those that were made in 2020 or 2021.What do your findings mean for next month’s midterm elections?Danielle: Hundreds of the candidates we identified as questioning the past presidential election are favored to win their races and take office. They represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party and a potential threat to one of the bedrock principles of democracy — that voters decide elections and candidates accept the results. And we will be interested to see how these candidates react if they do not win.Read the investigation here.Karen Yourish joined The Times in 2013 from The Washington Post. She has read all of Donald Trump’s tweets (twice) and watched more than 1,000 episodes of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Danielle Ivory joined The Times in 2013 from Bloomberg News. She has led efforts to collect and analyze data on Covid deaths in nursing homes and Russia’s war strategy in Ukraine.For more“These people are SICK”: Polarizing rhetoric has become entrenched among House Republicans.Some voters have already lost faith in the ability of America’s system of government to represent them.NEWSWar in UkraineMissile damage in Zaporizhzia, Ukraine.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesRussian forces pounded Ukraine’s power plants with some of the heaviest missile strikes in weeks.Russian authorities have resettled thousands of Ukrainian children in Russia, including some whose relatives want them back.InternationalXi Jinping formally secured another term as head of China’s Communist Party. Follow our updates.What Xi doesn’t say is as revealing as what he does. Key omissions from his messages at the Communist Party congress suggested worry about threats ahead.The former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson returned home yesterday from a vacation abroad, feeding expectations that he would seek another term.Liz Truss’s resignation was a result of the fallout from Brexit and the opposing factions it created among British conservatives, experts said.Hurricane Roslyn is expected to bring high winds and heavy rainfall to west-central Mexico as it makes landfall today.Other Big StoriesCases of the flu and other viruses are returning in the U.S. and could collide with an expected winter rise in Covid infections.New York City will increase the presence of police officers on the subway.FROM OPINIONLiberals must confront the demands of the Trumpist right and the illiberal left, not just denounce them, Ross Douthat argues in his inaugural newsletter. Sign up to receive it.Truss turned out to be a stooge for Boris Johnson, Maureen Dowd writes.The politics of Los Angeles’s affordable housing crisis are terrible. The politics of what’s needed to solve it are worse, Ezra Klein says.New York has a long history of moderate Republican governors. Lee Zeldin is not part of that tradition, The Times’s editorial board writes in its endorsement of Gov. Kathy Hochul.The Sunday question: Has Xi Jinping made China stronger?As he begins his third term as China’s leader, Xi has grown its economy, strengthened its military and made himself its most dominant politician since Mao, Bloomberg Opinion’s editorial board argues. But an economic slowdown, Xi’s disruptive zero-Covid strategy and his increasingly dictatorial rule could threaten those successes, says CNN’s Selina Wang.MORNING READSSkiers made their way up Mount Hood this year.Ruth Fremson for The New York TimesShifting snowmelt: What happens when the Pacific Northwest loses its snow?Something navy? Bold colors, beads and big sleeves at New York Bridal Fashion Week.Breaking up: With Peloton.Sunday routine: A 60-year-old D.J. pretends she’s a tourist in New York.Advice from Wirecutter: Bring these essentials trick-or-treating.BOOKSPaul Newman: His autobiography reveals a new side of “a man we imagined we knew,” the novelist Richard Russo writes for The Times.“The Passenger”: Cormac McCarthy’s novel offers two ways of seeing.Times best sellers: “Down and Out in Paradise,” Charles Leerhsen’s book about Anthony Bourdain, debuted as a hardcover nonfiction best seller. See all our lists here.THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINEStephen Voss for The New York Times.On the cover: The rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene.Katricia Dotson: She was killed by the police. Why were her bones in a museum?Recommendation: Use “y’all,” the most inclusive pronoun.Humbled champions: What we lose when athletes retire on top.Eat: This Salisbury steak is no TV dinner.Read the full issue.THE WEEK AHEADWhat to Watch ForBritain’s Conservative Party plans to select a new prime minister this week.Candidates will meet for debates on several nights this week, including in Florida’s governor’s race tomorrow and Pennsylvania’s Senate matchup on Tuesday.The Trump Organization will face trial on Monday in a New York State Court on tax fraud and other charges.Two Minneapolis officers involved in George Floyd’s death go to trial on Monday on state charges.The W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner is due in court on Tuesday in Russia to appeal her drug conviction.The deadline for Elon Musk, Tesla’s C.E.O., to complete an acquisition of Twitter is Friday.The World Series begins on Friday. The National League champion, either the San Diego Padres or the Philadelphia Phillies, will face the American League champion, either the Houston Astros or the New York Yankees.What to Cook This WeekLinda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.Cravings are highly personal, Emily Weinstein writes. She shares a few of her own: stuffed shells, roasted chicken with crispy mushrooms and breakfast burritos.NOW TIME TO PLAYHere’s a clue from the Sunday crossword:74 Across: “Mad” figure of fictionTake the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.Here’s today’s Spelling Bee. Here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      The Three Blunders of Joe Biden

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      If the Democrats end up losing both the House and the Senate, an outcome that looks more likely than it did a month ago, there will be nothing particularly shocking about the result. The incumbent president’s party almost always suffers losses in the midterms, the Democrats entered 2022 with thin majorities and a not-that-favorable Senate map, and the Western world is dealing with a war-driven energy crunch that’s generally rough on incumbent parties, both liberal and conservative. (Just ask poor Liz Truss.)But as an exculpating narrative for the Biden administration, this goes only so far. Some races will inevitably be settled on the margins, control of the Senate may be as well, and on the margins there’s always something a president could have done differently to yield a better political result.President Biden’s case is no exception: The burdens of the midterms have been heavier for Democrats than they needed to be because of three notable failures, three specific courses that his White House set.The first fateful course began, as Matthew Continetti noted recently in The Washington Free Beacon, in the initial days of the administration, when Biden made critical decisions on energy and immigration that his party’s activists demanded: for environmentalists, a moratorium on new oil-and-gas leases on public lands and, for immigration advocates, a partial rollback of key Trump administration border policies.What followed, in both arenas, was a crisis: first a surge of migration to the southern border, then the surge in gas prices driven by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.There is endless debate about how much the initial Biden policy shifts contributed to the twin crises; a reasonable bet is that his immigration moves did help inspire the migration surge, while his oil-lease policy will affect the price of gas in 2024 but didn’t change much in the current crunch.But crucially, both policy shifts framed these crises, however unintentionally, as things the Biden administration sought — more illegal immigration and higher gas prices, just what liberals always want! And then instead of a dramatic attempt at reframing, prioritizing domestic energy and border enforcement, the Biden White House fiddled with optics and looked for temporary fixes: handing Kamala Harris the border portfolio, turning the dials on the strategic petroleum reserve and generally confirming the public’s existing bias that if you want a party to take immigration enforcement and oil production seriously, you should vote Republican.The second key failure also belongs to the administration’s early days. In February 2021, when congressional Democrats were preparing a $1.9 trillion stimulus, a group of Republican senators counteroffered with a roughly $600 billion proposal. Flush with overconfidence, the White House spurned the offer and pushed three times as much money into the economy on a party-line vote.What followed was what a few dissenting center-left economists, led by Larry Summers, had predicted: the worst acceleration of inflation in decades, almost certainly exacerbated by the sheer scale of the relief bill. Whereas had Biden taken the Republicans up on their proposal or even simply counteroffered and begun negotiations, he could have started his administration off on the bipartisan footing his campaign had promised while‌ hedging against the inflationary dangers that ultimately arrived.The third failure is likewise a failure to hedge and triangulate, but this time on culture rather than economic policy. Part of Biden’s appeal as a candidate was his longstanding record as a social moderate — an old-school, center-left Catholic rather than a zealous progressive.His presidency has offered multiple opportunities to actually inhabit the moderate persona. On transgender issues, for instance, the increasing qualms of European countries about puberty blockers offered potential cover for Biden to call for greater caution around the use of medical interventions for gender-dysphoric teenagers. Instead, his White House has chosen to effectively deny that any real debate exists, positioning the administration to the left of Sweden.Then there is the Dobbs decision, whose unpopularity turned abortion into a likely political winner for Democrats — provided, that is, that they could cast themselves as moderates and Republicans as zealots.Biden could have led that effort, presenting positions he himself held in the past — support for Roe v. Wade but also for late-term restrictions and the Hyde Amendment — as the natural national consensus, against the pro-life absolutism of first-trimester bans. Instead, he’s receded and left Democratic candidates carrying the activist line that absolutely no restrictions are permissible, an unpopular position perfectly designed to squander the party’s post-Roe advantage.The question in the last case, and to some extent with all these issues, is whether a more moderate or triangulating Biden could have held his coalition together.But this question too often becomes an excuse for taking polarization and 50-50 politics for granted. A strong president, by definition, should be able to pull his party toward the center when politics demands it. So if Biden feels he can’t do that, it suggests that he’s internalized his own weakness and accepted in advance what probably awaits the Democrats next month: defeat.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