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      We Don’t Know What Will Happen on Election Day, but We Do Know How We’ll Feel About It

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      Gail Collins: OK, Bret — it’s elections week! Tell me the one outcome you’re most hoping to see and the one you’re most dreading.Bret Stephens: The idea of Herschel Walker being elected a United States senator is the political equivalent of E.L. James, the author of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature: the preposterous elevation of the former equals the total debasement of the latter.On the other hand, and despite my reservations about him, I’m rooting for Lee Zeldin for New York governor. Our state is overtaxed, underpoliced and chronically misgoverned, and I’d like to see it the other way around. And a Republican victory in New York might finally jolt the Democratic Party into getting serious about crime and urban decay.You?Gail: Zeldin is awful. There are New York Republicans you could imagine running the state well, and there are New York Republicans who will inevitably create a mess of political polarization and stalled services. Mr. Z is definitely in that category.Bret: I would be more inclined to agree with you about the overly Trumpy Zeldin — until I consider his opponent, the uninspired, ethically challenged and insipid Kathy Hochul.Gail: In my rooting-for category, I’m going to bring up Senator Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire — just so I can mention her dreadful opponent, Don Bolduc. He’s long been known as an opponent of legal protections for transgender people. Last week, he claimed schools were giving out litter boxes to support kids who identify as cats. Which is, um … not true.Who’s your most-to-be-avoided?Bret: I’m with you on Hassan, a conscientious and bipartisan legislator. Who — I am amazed to say — might lose on Tuesday. As for my most-to-be-avoided? I’d have to go with Arizona’s Blake Masters. He gives me the sense of being the love child of Ayn Rand and Hans Gruber, the Alan Rickman character in “Die Hard.”Gail: I adore it when you get mean about people like ol’ Blake.Bret: Actually, that’s probably unfair to Gruber, who had a twinkle-in-the-eye panache that made his villainy interesting and often funny. Masters is neither interesting nor funny, and his only talent seems to consist in sucking up to rich guys.Gail: You would be referring to Peter Thiel, billionaire co-founder of PayPal and backer of rancid Republicans.Bret: And Donald Trump — assuming he’s actually rich. Let me ask you a different question: Is there any Republican in this whole election cycle you might see yourself supporting?Gail: This goes back to the question I’ve been wrestling with since the world watched that Fetterman-Oz debate.There are plenty of decent Republicans running for Senate, and some who are smarter than their Democratic opponents. And at least one Republican who can out-debate a Democrat who’s recovering from a stroke. But they all share one thing — they’d immediately vote to put their party in power.Bret: They do tend to do that.Gail: And that’s the crucial question this season — which party will be in charge? Right now the partisan rift is so deep you really have to decide which side you want to run the show and let that be your guide.Does that make sense to you?Bret: Yes and no. I powerfully sympathize with the impulse to oppose everyone who belongs to the party of Trump. But the idea of voting for your own side, no matter how lousy the candidate, also explains how Republicans talk themselves into voting for Trump, Walker, Bolduc, Masters and the rest of the evil clown parade. Parties should not be rewarded by voters when they sink to the lowest common denominator.But … predictions! Any upsets you see coming?Gail: When I worry about election results my thoughts almost always turn to Arizona, land of the you-never-can-tell voter. You’ve got Senator Mark Kelly neck-and-neck with Blake Masters. The only positive thing I can think of to say about Masters is that he hasn’t yet expressed any deep concern about litter boxes in public schools.But the most terrifying Arizona race is for governor, where Kari Lake, a former TV anchor and current election denier, appears to be leading Katie Hobbs, the responsible but sorta boring secretary of state. Do not want to imagine the vote-counting crisis there in 2024 if Lake wins.Bret: I’m going to venture that Lake is going to win handily and that Masters will win by a hair.Gail: Aaauuughhh.Bret: Part of my overall prediction that Democrats will wake up on Wednesday morning with a powerful impulse to move to Canada or Belgium to take advantage of their permissive assisted-suicide programs.Gail: And what would your own reaction be, pray tell? I know you theoretically support the Republican Senate agenda, but I’ve noticed you find a lot of the Republican senators kinda … repulsive.Bret: Again, very mixed feelings. Seeing the Republican Party go from bad to worse is depressing and scary. But as long as Joe Biden is president they won’t be able to do much except embarrass themselves.If there’s one saving grace for me here, it’s the faint hope that a Republican majority in at least one house of Congress will pump the brakes on spending. Our gross national debt is $31 trillion and rising. And it’s going to cost more to service as interest rates rise.Gail: I’m touched to hear you express such confidence that the Republicans we’ve seen on the hustings this year are going to be able to come up with a smart plan to completely redo government spending.Bret: Fair point.Gail: My first response to the idea of sane Republican spending policy is sad giggles.But I do feel obliged to offer at least one suggestion. The best way to tackle debt issues is not to cancel Covid relief or stop fixing the nation’s infrastructure. Tax the folks who can afford it, like those pharmaceutical billionaires who’ve done so very well off the pandemic.Bret: Not sure these billionaires could pay off so many trillions in debt, even if we confiscated every penny they have.Gail: It would be a start, and I suspect that even under a very serious new tax plan they’d be left with enough coins in their pockets to allow them to soldier on.But speaking of good/bad government spending plans, what do you think about recent Republican calls to cut back on Social Security and Medicare entitlements?Bret: The devil is in the details. Regarding Social Security, it was designed in the 1930s, when the typical life expectancy was around 60. It’s now around 76. The program is predicted to be insolvent in about 13 years if we do nothing to change it. My basic view is that we should honor our promises to those now benefiting from Social Security, pare back the promises to younger workers and eliminate them completely for those who haven’t yet spent decades paying into them.How about you?Gail: I say leave Social Security alone. It was meant to help protect Americans who reach retirement age, give them a reliable cushion to make their old age comfortable or at least bearable. Can’t do much better than that.The fact that it’s seen as a plan for everybody — not just a program to aid the poor — gives it a special survivability. And on the fairness end, wealthy folk who don’t need it will give a good chunk back when it’s taxed as part of their income.Bret: True, but it’s still going broke.Gail: Of course I’m not crazy enough to say the government can never touch Social Security if its finances get truly shaky. I just want to be sure whoever’s doing the fixing is dedicated to protecting the basic concept.And Medicare — oh gosh, Bret, let’s save Medicare for next week. It can be our postelection calming mechanism.Bret: Gail, I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but any thoughts on the news that Trump is very likely to declare his candidacy for president later this month?Gail: Now that was the immediate postelection conversation I was yearning to avoid. Of course we knew it was going to happen, but, gee, don’t you think he could have let us have the holidays off?Bret: I know very little about what goes on in Trump’s mind, but I think we can safely say that giving either of us a break isn’t high on his list of priorities.The silver lining here is that if Democrats take the kind of electoral drubbing I suspect they will on Tuesday, it should help concentrate their minds. Time for President Biden to give up on the idea — or fantasy, really — that he’s going to run for re-election and devote his time to saving Ukrainians, Iranians and Taiwanese from tyranny as the centerpiece of his presidential legacy.Gail: I’m with you in the Joe-Don’t-Run camp.Bret: Time also for party strategists to start thinking a whole lot harder about how they lost the working-class vote and how they can recapture it. Time, finally, for Democratic politicians to focus on middle-class fears about crime, education and inflation, not progressive obsessions with social justice and language policing.Who knows? Maybe that’s just the wake-up call we all need if we’re going to keep Trump in Mar-a-Lago.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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      What’s at Stake in These Elections

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      Midterm elections in the United States are often presented as a referendum on the party in power, and that message appears to be resonating this fall. But voters need to consider the intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, too, and what each vote they cast will mean for the future of this country.Eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election on the basis of spurious allegations of voter fraud and other irregularities. Many of them are likely to win re-election, and they may be joined by new members who also have expressed baseless doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. Their presence in Congress poses a danger to democracy, one that should be on the mind of every voter casting a ballot this Election Day.It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. That test comes alongside the embrace of violent extremism by a small but growing faction of the Republican Party.The greatest danger to election integrity may, in fact, come from the results of state and local races that will determine who actually conducts the election and counts the votes in 2024. In the weeks that followed the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his supporters saw their efforts to deny the election results and prove rampant voter fraud thwarted by two things: first, their inability to produce credible evidence that such fraud had occurred and, second, an election infrastructure that was defended by honorable public servants who refused to accept specious claims of wrongdoing.Over the past two years, Republicans in dozens of states have tried to dismantle that infrastructure piece by piece, particularly by filling key positions with Trump sympathizers. As this board wrote in September, “Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.” Many of those positions are being contested this week.With Mr. Trump said to be readying his bid to return to the White House, this board urges American voters to consider how important each vote cast on Election Day, at every level of government, will be. Even if the member of Congress in your district has refused to accept Mr. Trump’s lies about this election, there are other races on the ballot in many states for offices — including secretary of state, attorney general and governor — that will play crucial roles in overseeing and certifying the 2024 presidential election.Still, with that election two years away, many voters say they are more concerned with the present threats to their livelihoods than with the equally serious but less visible threat to democracy. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that “more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.”Indeed, voters have good reason to look at the current moment and wonder whether the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are doing enough to meet it. High inflation is making it harder for Americans to afford what they need and want. Overall crime has risen, causing people to fear for their safety. The federal government is struggling to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s increasingly tense relations with China are undermining global peace and prosperity.Republicans have presented these midterm elections as a referendum on Democratic leadership, and that message appears to be resonating.But voters need to consider the intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, too.Republicans have offered few specific plans for addressing issues like inflation, immigration and crime — and even if they win control of Congress, they are unlikely to win enough seats to shift federal policy significantly over the next two years.A Republican-controlled Senate would, however, be able to block President Biden from filling vacancies on the federal bench and on the Supreme Court. It would become more difficult to obtain confirmations for executive branch officials, as well.Republican candidates have also pledged to devote significant time and energy to investigating the Biden administration. “I don’t think Joe Biden and his handlers are exactly eager to sign Republican legislation into law, so our hearings are going to be the most important thing that we can have,” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado told a recent rally.In addition to that spectacle, Republicans are threatening to stage another showdown over federal spending.At some point in the next year, the government is expected to hit the limit of its authorized borrowing capacity, or debt ceiling. To meet the commitments Congress already has authorized, it will need to raise that limit. This ought to be a matter of basic housekeeping, because failing to pay the nation’s bills would risk a global financial crisis. But debt ceiling votes have instead become recurring opportunities for extortion.This board has called for Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling, replacing it with a common-sense law that says the government can borrow whatever is necessary to provide for the spending authorized by Congress. There is no public benefit in requiring what amounts to a second vote on spending decisions. But for now, the ceiling endures, and Republicans have made clear that if they win control of Congress, they intend to use it as a bargaining chip with the White House to advance their party’s fiscal goals.One priority on that list is cutting taxes. Republicans already are preparing to move forward with legislation to extend the 2017 tax cuts for individuals, which mostly benefit wealthy households, while eliminating some of the offsetting increases in corporate taxation — a plan that is not easily reconciled with the party’s stated concerns about inflation or the rising federal debt.Republican proposals would also make it more difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to prevent wealthy Americans from cheating on their taxes. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who is in position to become speaker if Republicans win a majority, has said the “first bill” that would pass under his leadership would reverse an $80 billion funding increase for the I.R.S. Congress approved that funding in August so the I.R.S. can crack down on rampant tax fraud by high-income households.Some senior Republicans have called for repealing another key piece of the August legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act: a measure that limits drug costs for seniors on Medicare, including a $35 monthly cap on payments for insulin.Republicans also have floated plans to roll back more firmly established benefits. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative policy working group whose membership includes more than half of the current crop of House Republicans, published a budget plan in June calling for Congress to gradually increase the retirement age for full Social Security benefits to 70 to check the rising cost of the program. The plan also would increase the age of eligibility for Medicare.Democrats could make it more difficult for Republicans to pursue these goals by raising the debt limit or changing the rules in the weeks between the election and the end of the year.Democrats have largely failed to connect with voters’ concerns about inflation and public safety during this campaign season. They have struggled to communicate their tangible achievements, including a big boost in funding for local law enforcement and bipartisan gun safety legislation, a historic federal investment in developing clean and low-cost sources of energy to confront climate change and the cost of living, and a breakthrough measure to bring down the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients.Undoubtedly, there is more work to be done on these and other issues, including the health of the economy and the broken state of immigration policy. Voters need to decide which party they trust to do that work.But the 2022 elections are also an opportunity for every American to do their part in defending the integrity of American elections. The task of safeguarding our democracy does not end with one election, and it requires all of us to play a role. Our nation’s governance depends on it.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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      John Fetterman and the Fight for White Working-Class Voters

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      Nina Feldman and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor the Democrats to hold on to power in Washington, they have to do what President Biden did in Pennsylvania two years ago: Break the Republican Party’s grip on the white working-class vote, once the core of the Democratic base. In tomorrow’s midterm election, no race better encapsulates that challenge than the Pennsylvania Senate candidacy of John Fetterman.Is the plan working or is this crucial group of voters now a lost cause for the Democrats?On today’s episodeShane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The New York Times.John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate for Pennsylvania, embodies the party’s hope of winning back white working-class voters.Christopher Dolan/The Times-Tribune, via Associated PressBackground readingAmong white working-class voters in places like northeast Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party has both the furthest to fall and the most to gain.In the final days of the Pennsylvania Senate race, Mr. Fetterman has acknowledged that his recovery from a stroke remains a work in progress, leaning into the issue with a mix of humor, sarcasm and notes of empathy. 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.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Biden Faces One More Inflection Point After a Life of Struggle

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      President Biden had hoped to preside over a moment of reconciliation after the turmoil of the Trump years. But the fever of polarizing politics has not broken ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Before heading into a community center for a campaign rally the other day, President Biden stopped to speak to the overflow crowd that could not squeeze into the small facility.As often happens whenever Mr. Biden finds a microphone and a willing audience, his family made a cameo appearance. This time it was his long-dead grandparents. “Every time I’d walk out of my grandpop’s house, he’d yell, ‘Joey, keep the faith,’” the president recounted. “My grandmother would yell, ‘No, Joey, spread it.’ Go spread the faith.”Mr. Biden has been spreading the faith across the country in recent days, undaunted by the polls and prognosticators forecasting a devastating defeat for his party in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Faith has been Mr. Biden’s calling card in his nearly two years in office — faith in the system in which he has been a fixture for more than half a century, faith that he could repair the fissures of a broken society, faith that he and he alone could beat former President Donald J. Trump if they face off again in 2024.It is not a faith shared by everyone, not even among fellow Democrats, not even among his own advisers and allies, some of whom view the coming days with dread. After turning to Mr. Biden for a sense of normalcy two years ago following the turmoil of Mr. Trump, voters now appear poised to register discontent that he has not delivered it the way they expected, regardless of whether it was realistic in the first place.History has rarely favored first-term presidents in midterm elections and Mr. Biden’s party does not even have to lose in a landslide for him to lose the presidency as he has known it. The turnover of just a handful of House seats and a single Senate seat will severely constrain his options going forward and raise questions about whether he should lead the Democrats into the next election.And so these are frustrating, even perplexing times for Mr. Biden, who according to confidants had expected the fever of polarizing politics to have broken by now and was surprised that it had not. The presidency he envisioned, one where he presided over a moment of reconciliation, is not the presidency he has gotten. He thought that if he could simply govern well, everything would work out, which in hindsight strikes some around him as shockingly naïve if somewhat endearing.Mr. Biden speaking during a campaign event at MiraCosta College in San Diego for Representative Mike Levin, Democrat of California. Mr. Levin is running for re-election.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“In the old days, when I was a United States senator, we’d argue like hell with one another, disagree fundamentally, and go down to the Senate dining room and have lunch together,” Mr. Biden reflected to an audience in San Diego last week. “Because we disagreed on the issues, but we agreed on the notion that the institutions matter.”“Well, the institutions are under full-blown attack,” he added. “I’m already being told, if they win back the House and Senate, they’re going to impeach me. I don’t know what the hell they’ll impeach me for.”Like other presidents in stressful moments, he has turned to Abraham Lincoln for inspiration. As he traveled in recent days, he brought with him “And There Was Light,” the new biography of the 16th president by Jon Meacham, the historian who has become a friend and outside adviser to Mr. Biden.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.“One possible lesson for President Biden, who’s engaged in a profound battle to preserve the Constitution and the rule of law, is that moral commitment matters and can prevail, no matter how difficult the struggle,” Mr. Meacham said. “There will be bad days and good days. The key thing is to remember why you’re fighting for what you’re fighting for.”The bad days often seem to outnumber the good days in this challenging autumn, although Mr. Biden, the self-described “wacko Irishman,” would hardly put it that way. “I’m optimistic,” he says regularly, even while outlining all the ways his optimism is taking a beating lately.He does not indulge often in introspection, nor subject himself to much cross-examination about where he believes he has gone wrong, if in fact he does. He avoids interviews with major networks and newspapers, preferring friendlier questioners like the podcaster who told him mid-interview recently that “you’re the coolest guy in the world.”As he approaches his 80th birthday this month, Mr. Biden’s life is less in his control than it has been in years. He starts his day at 8 a.m. with exercises, then heads to the Oval Office, returning to the residence around 7 p.m. for dinner with Jill Biden. Since she teaches in the morning, she goes to bed earlier, around 9:30 p.m., while he tells people that he stays up with his thick briefing book until around 11 p.m. He does not read much for pleasure, and when he watches television, it is mainly the news or sports.He elliptically acknowledges the effects of age. During a conversation with the actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett for their podcast “SmartLess,” Mr. Biden said he cannot skip workouts without penalty. “The thing I learned, the difference in age, if I let it go for a week, I feel it,” he said. “I used to be able to go for a week and nothing would change.”Perhaps sharing more than his wife might prefer, the president confided that Mrs. Biden insists he combat the effects of age in other ways. “She gets very upset if I have not fully shaven, all this excessive amount of hair I have,” he said. “You know what I mean?”His family remains an inseparable element of his life and his politics. Barely a speech on the trail goes by that he does not mention his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015. His dad and mom are quoted with great regularity. He makes a point of texting or calling each of his seven grandchildren every day.And so those around him know the most important voice in his ear as he contemplates what comes next is Jill Biden. While aides make tentative plans for a re-election campaign in case he opts for one, the president has not had extensive conversations about it with some of his closest aides. He insists to them, though, that Mrs. Biden is all-in if he wants to run, a self-justifying contention some view with skepticism.In that sense, the return to the campaign trail this fall after a largely shelter-in-place Covid-19 campaign in 2020 has served as something of a test run of what a 2024 bid might look like.He is not a rip-roaring speaker nor does he have the celebrity factor that electrifies a crowd beyond the trappings of the office. His crowds have been enthusiastic but nowhere near as large as his recent predecessors drew at similar points.At an event in Hallandale Beach, Fla., one of his warm-up speakers had to goad the audience into showing a little more spirit. “Come on, people, let’s wake up!” exhorted Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida. “We got the president of the United States in the house. Come on, now! I know you got a little more energy than I hear.”At a rally in Miami Gardens later that day, he was an hour late and the crowd, which had been there for hours to get through security, had faded by the time he was halfway through his speech, some even slipping out before he was finished.Mr. Biden has adjusted his style lately, abandoning the lectern for a hand-held mic that lets him better project his voice, which is softening with age, and allows him to wander the stage, hand in pocket. But his speeches are peppered with familiar Biden-isms like “I’m serious” and “look folks” and “I really mean it.”Mr. Biden seems to think he comes across as funnier than he does. “Not a joke!” he says again and again, four, eight, 10 times in a single speech. In San Diego last week, he told one audience that his remarks were “not a joke” a full 17 times — and threw in “I’m not joking” four more times. (A Biden speech is like a drinking game for political nerds — “Not a joke!” Drink!)Indeed, Mr. Biden has always connected with audiences not through humor so much as humanity. His speeches are animated by stories of pain — his young wife and daughter killed in a car accident, his own near-death experience with two brain aneurysms, his son Beau’s death. He still summons the name of the nurse who took care of him in the hospital more than three decades ago.“People understand that I understand loss and I think it’s so important that people understand that from that loss — the pain never goes away but you can do incredible things,” he said last week. “The person you lost never leaves your heart. I don’t know how many times I ask myself what would Beau do?”Even now, his childhood struggles with stuttering define him. To this day, he divides his speech texts with hash marks, a technique he learned to make public speaking earlier. And the insecurities that come from it are never far from the surface. He brought it up last week seemingly at random.“I used to ta- ta- ta- talk — talk like that wh- wh- wh- when I w- wa- was a kid,” he told one audience. “It’s awful hard to ask the girl, ‘Will you go to the p- pr- pr- prom with me?’ And it sounds funny, but guess what? It makes you feel like an idiot.”Anticipating the next few days, Mr. Biden refuses to concede defeat. He was encouraged by the energy of Saturday night’s rally in Pennsylvania with former President Barack Obama and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Senate candidate, as well as positive indicators from Arizona and New Hampshire.His mood, aides said, is one of fighting through the tape. “He’s spent the last weeks pushing us — what else can he do?” said Anita Dunn, his senior adviser.But if he takes a licking on Tuesday, aides said, he will own it and move ahead. In a life of falling and getting back up, it would be one more stumble, not the end. On that at least, he has faith. More

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      Republicans Have Made It Very Clear What They Want to Do if They Win Congress

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      What Republicans are offering, if they win the 2022 election, is not conservatism. It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government’s efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming.That is not to say there aren’t bills House Republicans would like to pass. There are. The closest thing to an agenda that congressional Republicans have released is the House Republican Study Committee’s 122-page budget. The study committee is meant to be something akin to an internal think tank for House Republicans. It counts well over half of House Republicans as members, and includes Representatives Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik and Gary Palmer — all the leaders save for Kevin McCarthy.After spending some time with the document, what I’d say is that it lacks even the pretense of prioritization, preferring instead the comforts of quantity. It lists bill after bill that House Republicans would like to pass. Legislation that would upend the structure and powers of the government, like the bill sponsored by Representative Byron Donalds that seeks to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gets exactly the same treatment as Representative Bob Good’s bill to force schools to release their correspondence with teachers’ unions about when to reopen, or Representative Michael Cloud’s resolution disapproving of vaccinating 11-year-olds in Washington, D.C. There are plans to privatize much of Medicare and repeal much of Obamacare and to raise the Social Security age and no fewer than eight bills attacking Critical Race Theory.But even if Republicans win the House and Senate, they cannot pass this agenda. It would fall to President Biden’s veto. What Republicans could do is trigger crises they hope would give them leverage to force Biden to accept this agenda or perhaps force him out of office. And even where Republican leadership does not actually believe that crisis would win them the day, they may have to trigger it anyway to prove their commitment to the cause or to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump.Start with the debt ceiling. U.S. Treasuries are the bedrock asset of the global financial system. They are the safest of safe investments, the security that countries and funds buy when they must be absolutely sure that their money is safe. Much else in the financial system is priced on this assumption of American reliability: Lenders begin with the “riskless rate of return” — that is, the interest rate on U.S. treasuries — and then add their premiums atop that. If the U.S. government defaults on its own debt, it would trigger financial chaos. (I guess that’s one way to deal with inflation: Crash the global economy!)Republicans have been perfectly clear, though: They see the debt limit as leverage in negotiations with Biden. “We’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior,” Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader and potential Speaker of the House, told Punchbowl News. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?”McCarthy may sound measured, but that he would open the door to this tactic at all either shows his weakness or his recklessness. A hostage is leverage only if you’re willing to shoot. And there will be plenty of voices demanding that Republicans pull the trigger or at least prove their willingness to do so.One of those voices will be Trump’s. “It’s crazy what’s happening with this debt ceiling,” the former president recently told a conservative radio host. “Mitch McConnell keeps allowing it to happen. I mean, they ought to impeach Mitch McConnell if he allows that.”To put it gently, the record of Republican Party leaders resisting the demands of their party’s hard-liners, even when they think those demands are mad, is not inspiring. McConnell and the former Republican Speaker John Boehner didn’t have enough command of their members to reject Ted Cruz’s doomed 2013 shutdown over the Affordable Care Act, which both of them thought to be lunacy. And Cruz’s influence with the Republican base and the G.O.P.’s congressional caucus in 2013 was nothing compared with the power Trump now wields.That’s not the only looming crisis. At this point, much is known about the myriad attempts Trump and his backers made to subvert the result of the 2020 election. The country’s saving grace was that there was little preparation behind that effort, and Republicans in key positions — to say nothing of Democrats — proved hostile to the project. But as The Times reported in October, more than 370 Republicans running for office in 2022 have said they doubt the results of the last election, and “hundreds of these candidates are favored to win their races.”The 2022 election is very likely to sweep into power hundreds of Republicans committed to making sure that the 2024 election goes their way, no matter how the vote tally turns out. Hardly anything has been done to fortify the system against chicanery since Jan. 6. What if congressional Republicans refuse to certify the results in key states, as a majority of House Republicans did in 2020? What if, when Trump calls Republican Secretaries of State or governors or board of elections supervisors in 2024, demanding they find the votes he wishes he had or disqualify the votes his opponent does have, they try harder to comply? The possibilities for crisis abound.Here, too, Republican officeholders who don’t fully buy into Trumpist conspiracy theories may find themselves rationalizing compliance. This is a movie we have already watched. Most of the House Republicans who voted against certification of the 2020 election knew Trump’s claims were absurd. But they chose to hide behind Representative Mike Johnson’s bizarre, evasive rationale for voting as Trump demanded they vote without needing to embrace the things he said. Johnson’s solution was to suggest that pandemic-era changes to voting procedures were unconstitutional, thus rendering the results uncertifiable. It was nonsense, and worse than that, it was cowardice. But it’s a reminder that the problem is not merely the Republican officeholders who would force an electoral crisis. The enabling threat is the much larger mass of their colleagues who have already proven they will do nothing to object.Not all crises begin with a political showdown. Some could come from a virus mutating toward greater lethality. Some could come from a planet warming outsides the narrow band that has fostered human civilization. Some could come from the expansionary ambitions of dictators and autocrats. The past few years have brought vivid examples of all three. But particularly over the past year, the Republican Party has shown itself to be somewhere between dismissive of — and hostile toward — the preparations and responses these possible crises demand.Last week, I criticized the Biden administration for failing to find a party-line path to financing pandemic preparedness. But such a path was only necessary because the Republican Party has swung so hard against efforts to prepare for the next pandemic. The Republican Study Committee’s budget is a vivid example of where the party has gone on Covid. It is not that Republicans are pro-Covid. But the party’s energy is very much anti-anti-Covid. It includes policy after policy attacking vaccine mandates, emergency powers and vaccinations for children. But in its 100-plus pages I could find nothing proposing ways to make sure we are better prepared for the next viral threat.It is easy to imagine what such policies might be: The government was slow to authorize certain new treatments and tests, cumbersome in its efforts to dole out money for research, and not nearly as innovative as it could have been in deploying technology to monitor new and emerging diseases. This is a libertarian, not a liberal, critique of government. But the study committee’s budget offers no discussion of how deregulation might foster a better response next time.And it’s not just Covid. Republicans have long been skeptical of efforts to prepare for climate change. The study committee’s budget is thick with plans to goose fossil fuel extraction and bar federal dollars from supporting the Paris Climate Accords. Republicans have been, shall we say, divided in their affections for Vladimir Putin, but at least in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many backed efforts to support Ukraine. But McCarthy has suggested that Republicans will cut aid to Ukraine if they win in November, and he’s far from alone in wanting to see the United States back off from the conflict.I’ll say this for Republicans. They have not hidden their intentions, nor their tactics. They have made clear what they intend to do if they win. Biden ran — and won — in 2020 promising a return to normalcy. Republicans are running in 2022 promising a return to calamity.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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      Democrats, Don’t Despair. There Are Bright Spots for Our Party.

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      The Democratic Party and Senator Mitch McConnell rarely see eye to eye on anything. But if Democrats hold the line in the elections on Tuesday and keep control of the Senate — and we still have a shot — it will come down to candidate quality.That’s the phrase that Mr. McConnell used this past summer alluding to his Republican Senate nominees.Going into Tuesday’s vote, Democrats face fierce headwinds like inflation and the typical pattern of losses in midterm elections for the party in power. But unlike some Republican candidates — a real-life island of misfit toys — many Democratic Senate candidates have been a source of comfort: the likable, pragmatic, low-drama Mark Kelly in Arizona and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, the heterodox populists John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Tim Ryan (Ohio). If the party can defy the odds and hold the Senate, there will be valuable lessons to take away.For many election analysts, the hopes of the summer —  that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe could help Democrats buck historical trends — look increasingly like a blue mirage, and Republicans seem likely to surf their way to a majority in the House.Yet the battle for the Senate is still raging, and largely on the strength of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman. Their races also offer insights that can help Democrats mitigate losses in the future and even undo some of the reputational damage that has rendered the party’s candidates unelectable in far too many places across the country.In a normal midterm year, Mr. Warnock and Mr. Kelly would be the low-hanging fruit of vulnerable Democrats, given that they eked out victories in 2020 and 2021 in purple states.But they bring to the table compelling biographies that resist caricature. Mr. Kelly is a former Navy combat pilot and astronaut whose parents were both cops. Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, quotes Scripture on the campaign trail and compares the act of voting to prayer.They’ve rejected the hair-on-fire, hyperpartisan campaign ads that endangered incumbents often rely on. Mr. Kelly’s ads highlight his bipartisanship and willingness to break with the Democratic Party on issues like border security — he supports, for example, filling in gaps in the wall on the border with Mexico.Mr. Warnock, too, has focused on local issues: His campaign has highlighted his efforts to secure funding for the Port of Savannah and his bipartisan work with Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to help Georgia’s peanut farmers. These ads will probably not go viral on Twitter, but they signal that Mr. Kelly and Mr. Warnock will fight harder for the folks at home than they will for the national Democratic agenda.In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman have showed up in every county, red or blue, in their states. Democrats can’t just depend on driving up the margins in Democratic strongholds — they also need to drive down Republicans’ margins in their strongholds.Mr. Fetterman is holding to a slim lead in polls. Most analysts doubt Mr. Ryan can prevail in what is a tougher electoral environment for a Democrat, but even if he loses, he helped his peers by keeping his race competitive, and he did it without a dollar of help from the national party. He forced national Republicans to spend about $30 million in Ohio that could otherwise have gone to Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.Anything could happen on Tuesday. Politics, like football, is a game of inches. It’s still possible that Democrats could pick up a seat or two. It’s also plausible that Republicans could take seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and even New Hampshire.But when the dust settles on the election, Democrats need to do some real soul-searching about the future of our party. We look likely to lose in some places where Joe Biden won in 2020. And what’s worse, we could lose to candidates who have embraced bans on abortion and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, views shared by a minority of the American people. This outcome tells us as much about the Democratic brand as it does the Republican Party.Fair or not, Democrats have been painted as the party of out-of-touch, coastal elites — the party that tells voters worried about crime that it’s all in their heads and that, by the way, crime was higher in the 1990s; the party that sneers at voters disillusioned with bad trade deals and globalization and that labels their “economic anxiety” a convenient excuse for racism; the party that discounts shifts of Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party as either outliers or a sign of internalized white supremacy.If Democrats are smart, they’ll take away an important lesson from this election: There is no one way, no right way to be a Democrat. To win or be competitive in tough years in places as varied as Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, we need to recruit and give support to the candidates who might not check the box of every national progressive litmus test but who do connect with the voters in their state.Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Ryan offer good examples. Both have been competitive in part because they broke with progressive orthodoxy on issues like fracking (in Pennsylvania, Mr. Fetterman was called the “enemy” by an environmentalist infuriated by his enthusiastic support for fracking and the jobs it creates) and trade deals (in Ohio, Mr. Ryan has bragged about how he “voted with Trump on trade”).It also means lifting up more candidates with nontraditional résumés who defy political stereotypes and can’t be ridiculed as down-the-line partisans: veterans, nurses, law enforcement officers and entrepreneurs and executives from the private sector.In some states, the best candidates will be economic populists who play down social issues. In others, it will be economic moderates who play up their progressive social views. And in a lot of swing states, it will be candidates who just play it down the middle all around.It might also mean engaging with unfriendly media outlets. Most Democrats have turned up their noses at Fox News even though it is the highest-rated cable news channel, but Mr. Ryan has made appearances and even put on air a highlight reel of conservative hosts like Tucker Carlson praising him as a voice of moderation and reason in the Democratic Party. In the frenzied final days of the campaign, Mr. Fetterman wrote an opinion essay for FoxNews.com.This year we still might avoid losing the Senate. And Democrats can avoid catastrophe in future elections. It all comes down to two words: “candidate quality.”Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith), a Democratic communications strategist, was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”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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      Walker and Warnock Spend Big on TV Ads as Georgia Football Wins

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      Nothing quite holds an audience captive like a clash of undefeated college football behemoths. Senator Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker didn’t need reminding of that on Saturday.Neither candidate in Georgia’s pivotal Senate race blinked at the $50,000 cost of a 30-second campaign ad during Saturday’s game between the top-ranked University of Tennessee and the third-ranked University of Georgia, according filings with the Federal Communications Commission.Each of them booked two ads on Atlanta’s CBS affiliate, with the National Republican Senatorial Committee listed as sharing some of the cost of one of the ads supporting Mr. Walker.On CBS in Atlanta, a 30-second ad during the pregame show or on Friday night prime time cost $5,000; it was a thrifty $75 during the station’s “Wake Up Atlanta” show in the 5 to 5:30 a.m. time slot on weekdays.Mr. Walker won the Heisman Trophy in the 1980s when he starred for the Georgia Bulldogs, which are the defending national champions in college football. Georgia beat Tennessee, 27-13.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.In one ad for Mr. Warnock that he highlighted on Twitter during the game, three Georgia graduates conveyed their reverence for Mr. Walker’s accomplishments as a college football star, but said that was where the praise ended. One was wearing a jersey with Mr. Walker’s No. 34 and another displayed a football autographed by him.“I’ve always thought Herschel Walker looked perfect up there,” said a man identified in the ad as Clay Bryant, a 1967 graduate, pointing to photos of Mr. Walker on a wall in his home.“I think he looks good here,” another graduate said, gesturing to her jersey.“I think he looks great there,” the third one said, sitting next to the football and a copy of Sports Illustrated with Mr. Walker on the cover.“But Herschel Walker in the U.S. Senate?” the three asked critically in unison.On social media, college football fans groused about being bombarded with attack ads run by the candidates and groups aligned with them, including dueling commercials that lobbed domestic abuse allegations at Mr. Walker and Mr. Warnock.Senator Lindsey Graham, left, campaigned with Herschel Walker in Cumming, Ga., in October.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Walker has been roiled by accusations that he urged two women to have abortions, despite campaigning as a conservative who opposes the procedure.On the CBS affiliate in Savannah, Ga., Mr. Walker booked a 30-second ad during the game for $35,000, while Mr. Warnock reserved a 30-second block for $15,000. Advertising rates are typically higher for coordinated efforts between parties and candidates than for candidates on their own.On the CBS affiliate in Augusta, Ga., Mr. Walker reserved a pair of 30-second ads during the game for $25,890, with the N.R.S.C. listed as helping to pay for one, according to federal filings. Mr. Warnock bought ads on the same station, but not during the game.Mr. Warnock and Mr. Walker, who is backed by former President Donald J. Trump, were not the only bitter rivals in a close Senate race who invested heavily this week advertising around sporting events.In Pennsylvania’s open-seat contest, the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican, and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate, spent six figures to run campaign ads during the World Series featuring the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros.Both candidates booked multiple ads on Fox’s Philadelphia affiliate at a rate of $95,000 for 30 seconds, according to federal filings. Mr. Fetterman also reserved 30 seconds of airtime during Thursday night’s National Football League game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Houston Texans. More

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      Why Aren’t the Democrats Trouncing the Republicans?

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      My big takeaway from this election season would be this: We’re about where we were. We entered this election season with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Democrats had a slight advantage. We’ll probably leave it with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Republicans have a slight advantage. But we’re about where we were.Nothing the parties or candidates have done has really changed this underlying balance. The Republicans nominated a pathetically incompetent Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, in Georgia, but polls show that race is basically tied. The Democrats nominated a guy in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke and has trouble communicating, but polls show that that Senate race is basically tied.After all the campaigning and the money and the shouting, the electoral balance is still on a razor’s edge. What accounts for this? It’s the underlying structure of society. Americans are sorting themselves out by education into two roughly equal camps. As people without a college degree have flocked to the G.O.P., people with one have flocked to the Democrats.“Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon,” Eric Levitz writes in New York Magazine, “it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every Western democracy.”Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward. Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is largely about this: infrastructure jobs, expanded child tax credit, raising taxes on corporations. This year the Democrats nominated candidates designed to appeal to working-class voters, like the sweatshirt-wearing Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan in Ohio.It doesn’t seem to be working. As Ruy Teixeira, Karlyn Bowman and Nate Moore noted in a survey of polling data for the American Enterprise Institute last month, “The gap between non-college and college whites continues to grow.” Democrats have reason to worry about losing working-class Hispanic voters in places like Nevada. “If Democrats can’t win in Nevada,” one Democratic pollster told Politico, “we can complain about the white working class all you want, but we’re really confronting a much broader working-class problem.” Even Black voters without a college degree seem to be shifting away from the Democrats, to some degree.Forests have been sacrificed so that Democratic strategists can write reports on why they are losing the working class. Some believe racial resentment is driving the white working class away. Some believe Democrats spend too much time on progressive cultural issues and need to focus more on bread-and-butter economics.I’d say these analyses don’t begin to address the scale of the problem. America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.As I’ve shuttled between red and blue America over decades of reporting on American politics, I’ve seen social, cultural, moral and ideological rifts widen from cracks to chasms.Politics has become a religion for a lot of people. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education no longer just have different ideas about, say, the role of government, they have created rival ways of life. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education have different relationships to patriotism and faith, they dress differently, enjoy different foods and have different ideas about corporal punishment, gender and, of course, race.You can’t isolate the differences between the classes down to one factor or another. It’s everything.But even that is not the real problem. America has always had vast cultural differences. Back in 2001, I wrote a long piece for The Atlantic comparing the deeply blue area of Montgomery County, Md., with the red area of Franklin County in south-central Pennsylvania.I noted the vast socio-economic and cultural differences that were evident, even back then. But in my interviews, I found there was a difference without a ton of animosity.For example, Ted Hale was a Presbyterian minister there. “There’s nowhere near as much resentment as you would expect,” he told me. “People have come to understand that they will struggle financially. It’s part of their identity. But the economy is not their god. That’s the thing some others don’t understand. People value a sense of community far more than they do their portfolio.”Back in those days I didn’t find a lot of class-war consciousness in my trips through red America. I compared the country to a high school cafeteria. Jocks over here, nerds over there, punks somewhere else. Live and let live.Now people don’t just see difference, they see menace. People have put up barricades and perceive the other class as a threat to what is beautiful, true and good. I don’t completely understand why this animosity has risen over the past couple of decades, but it makes it very hard to shift the ever more entrenched socio-economic-cultural-political coalitions.Historians used to believe that while European societies were burdened by ferocious class antagonisms, Americans had relatively little class consciousness. That has changed.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