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    Want to Understand 2024? Look at 1948.

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    Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.President Truman and his wife, Bess, during his 1948 whistle-stop campaign.Associated PressIn the era of modern consumer confidence data, there has never been an economy quite like this recent one — with prices rising so high and unemployment staying so low.But just a few years before the consumer sentiment survey index became widely available in 1952, there was a period of economic unrest that bears a striking resemblance to today: the aftermath of World War II, when Americans were near great prosperity yet found themselves frustrated by the economy and their president.If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.The source of postwar inflation was fundamentally similar to post-pandemic inflation. The end of wartime rationing unleashed years of pent-up consumer demand in an economy that hadn’t fully transitioned back to producing butter instead of guns. A year after the war, wartime price controls ended and inflation skyrocketed. A great housing crisis gripped the nation’s cities as millions of troops returned from overseas after 15 years of limited housing construction. Labor unrest roiled the nation and exacerbated production shortages. The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.According to the historian James T. Patterson, “no domestic issue of these years did Truman more damage than the highly contentious question of what to do about wartime restraints on prices.”Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis and later a vice president and Democratic presidential nominee, spoke before a Senate committee on anti-inflation controls in 1948.Associated PressIn retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.Yet Americans were plainly dissatisfied. Incomes in 1948 were twice what they were in 1941, but statistically their dissatisfaction is probably best explained by the decline in real incomes in 1947, just as real incomes declined in 2021-22. The polling in the run-up to the 1948 election — archived at the Roper Center — bears the hallmarks of voter dissatisfaction:Despite the extraordinarily positive developments of the last decade, voters were pessimistic about the future. They believed a depression was likely in the next few years. As late as summer 1948, they were likelier to think things in America would get worse in the years ahead than to get better. They expected prices to keep rising.In November 1947, Gallup found that more than two-thirds of Americans said they were finding it harder to make ends meet than the year before, while almost no one said it was easier.In polling throughout 1947 and 1948, a majority supported reinstating wartime rationing and price controls.In December 1947, more than 70 percent of adults said they would want their own wages to decline in order to bring prices down.Prices seemed to weigh heavily on Americans heading into the election. Voters said that if they got a chance to talk with Mr. Truman about anything, it would be the cost of living and getting the economy back to normal. Ahead of the conventions, voters said a plan to address high prices was the No. 1 priority they wanted in a party platform. More voters said they wanted prices to be addressed over the next four years than any other issue.A rally for equal rights outside the 1948 Democratic convention in Philadelphia.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dixiecrats, a breakaway segregationist party, held a convention of their own in Birmingham, Ala.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe importance of the economic issue faced stiff competition from the rising Cold War, the enactment of the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the formation of Israel and the subsequent First Arab-Israeli War, Mr. Truman’s decision to desegregate the military and the rise of the Dixiecrats.The Cold War, civil rights, Israel and other domestic issues combined to put extraordinary political pressure on an increasingly fractured Democratic coalition. On the left, the former vice president Henry Wallace ran against Mr. Truman as a Progressive; he also ran as someone who was unequivocally pro-Israel, threatening to deny Mr. Truman the support of Jewish voters who had voted all but unanimously for Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the right, the segregationist South defected from the Democrats at the convention over the party’s civil rights plank, again threatening to deny him the support of an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.Truman and the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, in August 1948. Dewey led in the polls.Nat Fein/The New York TimesHe won, actually.Frank Cancellare/United Press InternationalIn the end, Mr. Truman won in perhaps the most celebrated comeback in American electoral history, including the iconic “Dewey Beats Truman” headline and photograph. He had barnstormed the country with an economically populist campaign that argued Democrats were on the side of working people while reminding voters of the Great Depression. You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous “Do Nothing Congress” for not enacting his agenda.What you might not have learned in history class is that Mr. Truman attacked the “Do Nothing Congress“ first and foremost for failing to do anything about prices. The text of his speech at the Democratic convention does not quite do justice to his impassioned attack on Republicans for failing to extend price controls in 1946, and for their platform on prices. Finally, he called for a special session of Congress to act on prices and housing shortages (the links correspond to the YouTube video of those parts of his convention speech, for those interested). In short, congressional failure to act on prices was central to his critique of Republicans.In this respect, Mr. Truman was probably in a stronger position than Mr. Biden. Mr. Truman could blame Republicans for inflation; he could argue he had a solution for inflation; and he could link his position on inflation to his broader message about the Democrats as a party for working people. Polling at the time suggested that voters supported price controls, supported his special session, and did not necessarily blame Mr. Truman for inflation. In fact, more voters blamed Congress, business and labor than the president himself.Where Mr. Biden can still hope to match Mr. Truman is in economic reality, as inflation today is falling just as it was in the run-up to the 1948 election.In January 1948, inflation was 10 percent; by the end of October, it had fallen by half, and would reach one percent by January 1949. At election time, only 18 percent of voters expected prices would be higher in six months; just a few months earlier in June, a majority did so. It seems reasonable to wonder whether Mr. Truman might have lost the election had it been held a few months earlier.Despite those excellent conditions for a comeback, Mr. Truman’s electoral weakness was still stark. He had a powerful message and an improving economy, but he won by just 4.5 percentage points. The third-party candidates Mr. Wallace and Strom Thurmond succeeded in denying Mr. Truman key elements of the Democratic base that the party might have imagined it could take for granted just a few years earlier. He lost much of the Deep South without the support of the Dixiecrats and even lost New York, thanks to considerable defections on the left and among Jewish voters. No Democratic presidential would ever again reassemble the so-called New Deal coalition.But if 1948 is a mixed precedent for Mr. Biden, it’s a good precedent for today’s sour economic mood. It might betray a simple fact about public opinion: Voters hate inflation so much that they won’t ever like the economy if prices go up. There is no precedent in the era of consumer sentiment data for voters to have an above-average view of the economy once inflation cracks 5 percent — the recent high was 9 percent in June 2022 — even when unemployment is extremely low. It may just be that simple; indeed, consumer sentiment has begun to tick up over the last year, as inflation has declined to 3 percent.Alternately, 1948 and this era may suggest a more complex lesson about public opinion in the wake of pandemic or war, as high postwar and post-pandemic expectations quickly get dashed by the reality that the world isn’t returning to “normal” quite so quickly. Not only are high hopes dashed, but they also yield many kinds of economic dysfunction beyond high prices, from supply chain problems and housing shortages to “help wanted” signs and rising interest rates.Indeed, the famous “return to normalcy” election in 1920 — the largest popular vote landslide in American history — followed World War I and the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, which brought a recession and even higher inflation than in the 1940s.Normalcy did not come fast enough to save the party in power in 1920, the Democrats, but in retrospect it wasn’t too far off. The Roaring Twenties were just around the corner. And normalcy was just beginning to arrive in 1948, when Mr. Truman won re-election. The country was at the dawn of the prosperous, idealized 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” era that still lingers in the public imagination.If something similar is almost at hand, it can’t come soon enough for Mr. Biden. More

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      We Were Wrong About President Biden

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      When I saw President George W. Bush aboard Air Force One during his first year in office, I finally fully got it — why an erstwhile cutup and goofball so strangely suited to the ordeal of a presidential campaign had put himself through one, losing sleep, tempting heartache, risking humiliation. On this airborne ego trip, he had a bed, and I don’t mean a seat that flattened into one. He had an office, with a desk bigger than those of some earthbound executives. Aides carried papers to him. Aides ferried papers away. They called him “Mr. President.” He’d upgraded from his old surname, as illustrious as it was, to a kind of divinity.There was no doubt that he’d seek a second term of that, though he chafed at certain obligations of the presidency and palpably yearned for his Crawford, Tex., ranch.I never flew with President Barack Obama. But I visited him in the White House several times. I went once with more than a dozen other well-known journalists, including the MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow; I went another time with a half dozen fellow columnists, including my Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague Maureen Dowd. Our stature didn’t change the quickness with which we snapped to attention when he walked into the Roosevelt Room, the raptness with which we hung on his every syllable. His every syllable mattered: He was the leader of the free world, with more authority than anyone else in the richest and most powerful nation of them all. He could see awe in almost every face that turned toward him, as almost every face did.There was no question that he’d try to hold on to that for eight years, despite signs and chatter that he and Michelle Obama disliked much about the gilded goldfish bowl of White House life.And there should never have been much mystery about what President Joe Biden, who released a video announcing his re-election campaign early Tuesday, would decide. A person doesn’t just saunter away from adulation and affirmation on a scale this monumental — at least not the kind of person who wanted them enough to pursue the presidency in the first place.Over the past six months, many of us commentators have weighed in on whether Biden, who, at 80, is older than anyone at the Resolute Desk before him, should seek the Democratic presidential nomination again. We weren’t so much putting odds on his course of action as we were assessing his energy, his acuity, Democratic voters’ preference for an alternative and the party’s smartest strategy for keeping Donald Trump and the MAGA conspiracists at the gate.But that discussion made sense only if there were an actual possibility that Biden would step aside, so we were implying as much. And we were fools.Maybe that’s too harsh: By dint of his age, we had reason to wonder if he’d be battling health-related challenges that would make his circumstances and calculations fundamentally different from Bush’s, Obama’s or those of many of his other predecessors over the past half-century.But the idea that he’d coolly examine his favorability ratings (“Dammit, Jill, I just can’t seem to crack 50 percent!”), despair of Republicans’ ceaseless torture of him and his kin (“It’s malarkey!”), glance around at younger Democratic politicians itching for their day and decide to call it quits: That’s laughable. That’s malarkey. It contradicts the very appeal of the job. It disregards the nature of those who find it so very appealing.The people willing to accept the invasive scrutiny and exhausting odyssey en route to the White House believe at some level that they belong there or keenly crave reassurance of that. They’re not sated by the next best thing. They’re after peak recognition, the apex job and the view of the world from that summit — a world now at their feet.“Most of them had this ambition from grade school,” Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian, told me. “Others have appetites that grew with the eating. Regardless, there is something extraordinary — not normal — about desiring this much power.”I’d bet a great deal that the rush of that power — more than safety from criminal prosecution, more than the opportunity to use the White House as a profit center — is Donald Trump’s greatest motivator as he makes another run at the office. There’s no magnitude of personal wealth, no amplitude of fame, that confers the sort of bragging rights that the presidency does.The only presidents over the past century who could have run for re-election and chose not to — Calvin Coolidge in 1928, Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 — had served more than one term already, because they’d begun their presidencies by finishing out the terms of predecessors who had died in office. There’s a reason for that, and it’s a precedent that every modern president is aware of.“History is such that it would be taken as an admission of failure if you didn’t run again,” Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser on presidential campaigns for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, told me. “Either you think you succeeded in the first term and you deserve a second one or you think you failed in the first term and you want to do better.”In which category does Biden belong? “I think he thinks he’s been a great success,” Stevens said. “I agree.” Regardless, Stevens said, the presidency is difficult to surrender. “Being able to change history is intoxicating.”Bush was proving the doubters, including his own parents, wrong. Obama was living the kind of dream that was out of reach for his father. Bill Clinton was a glutton for approval, forever supping at the nearest and largest buffet. Trump was — is — Trump, who judges every day, every hour, by some cosmic analogue to Nielsen ratings. The presidency is always the most watched program.And Biden? The unlacquered oratory, “Scranton Joe” moniker and daily Amtrak schlep to the Capitol that he made during his decades in the Senate give him the unpretentious aspect of a journeyman toiling humbly in our service, unattached to and unimpressed by all the pomp of the office.But we lose track: He announced his first campaign for the presidency in 1987, when he was just 44, apparently confident even then that he could lead the United States of America as well as anyone else. While that bid ended early and disastrously, amid allegations and then an admission of plagiarism, he ran for the presidency again two decades later, when Obama ended up prevailing and choosing him as a wingman.We forget about the sting of rejection that Biden must have felt when, after serving loyally as Obama’s vice president, Obama essentially tagged Hillary Clinton to succeed him. We forget about how Biden pressed on after humiliating finishes in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in early 2020. That determination suggests a robust self-regard and potent yearning.And when we dwell on his age, we focus on what it may or may not mean for the vigor he brings to the job and for the degree of confidence in him that voters will feel. But there’s another facet of it: He waited for the presidency longer than anyone else. That must make his time in office all the sweeter.Biden is also propelled by his obvious — and correct — conviction that the moral corruption of the Republican Party makes the stakes of continued Democratic control of the White House as high as can be. He surely sees himself as the party’s best hope for that. A part of him is indeed doing this for us.But he’s doing this for himself, too — for a validation without rival, an exhilaration without peer. There are people to whom those feelings wouldn’t matter. They’re not the people who go around pleading for votes.(This article was updated to reflect news events.)I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).Source images by Drew Angerer/Getty Images and Getty Images Europe, via Irish Government, via Getty Images. More

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      To Understand the F.B.I., You Have to Understand J. Edgar Hoover

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      In recent years, as I finished writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I. for nearly half a century, liberal-minded friends often came to me with a confession. They were, they whispered, cheering for the F.B.I. During the Trump era, they began to see the bureau as the last best hope of the Republic, after a lifetime of viewing it as a bastion of political repression.Public opinion polls bear out this shift in opinion. In 2003, Republicans liked the F.B.I. far better than Democrats did, by a margin of 19 points, at 63 percent to 44 percent. Today, nearly 20 years later, that equation has flipped and then some. According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 75 percent of Democrats now have a favorable view of the F.B.I., in contrast to 30 percent of Republicans. Gallup puts the numbers further apart, with 79 percent of Democrats expressing approval and 29 percent of Republicans disapproval.From James Comey’s firing in May 2017 through the Mueller report, the Jan. 6 investigation and the Mar-a-Lago raid, the F.B.I. has not always delivered on Democratic hopes. But its showdowns with Donald Trump have fundamentally changed its public image.To some degree this switch simply reflects our hyperpartisan times. But the F.B.I.’s surge in popularity among Democrats also reflects a forgotten political tradition.Since the 1960s, liberals have tended to associate the bureau with its misdeeds against the left, including its outrageous efforts to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists. Before those activities were exposed, though, liberals often admired and embraced the F.B.I., especially when it seemed to be a hedge against demagogy and abuses of power elsewhere in government.They pointed to the bureau’s role as an objective, nonpartisan investigative force seeking to ferret out the truth amid an often complicated and depressing political morass. And they viewed Hoover as one the greatest embodiments of that ethic: a long-serving and long-suffering federal civil servant who managed to win the respect of both Republicans and Democrats.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leaving the office of J. Edgar Hoover in 1964. The F.B.I. conducted extensive surveillance of Dr. King’s private life.Bettmann/Getty ImagesWe now know that much of that admiration rested on wishful thinking — and today’s liberals would be wise to remember Hoover’s cautionary example. But for all his failings, all his abuses of power, he also promoted a vision of F.B.I. integrity and professionalism that still has resonance.J. Edgar Hoover was a lifelong conservative, outspoken on matters ranging from crime to Communism to the urgent need for all Americans to attend church. He also knew how to get along with liberals. Indeed, he could not have survived in government as long as he did without this essential skill. First appointed bureau director in 1924, Hoover stayed in that job until his death in 1972, an astonishing 48 years. He served under eight presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats.It has often been said that Hoover remained in power for so many decades because politicians feared him — and there is much truth to that view, especially in his later years. But Hoover’s late-in-life strong-arm tactics do not explain much about how he rose so fast through the government ranks, or why so many presidents — including Franklin Roosevelt, the great liberal titan of the 20th century — thought it was a good idea to give him so much power.Hoover spent his first decade as director establishing his good-government bona fides; he championed professionalism, efficiency, high standards and scientific methods. So in the 1930s, Roosevelt saw Hoover not as a far-right reactionary but as an up-and-coming administrator thoroughly steeped in the values of the modern state — a bureaucrat par excellence.Roosevelt did more than any other president to expand the F.B.I.’s power: first, by inviting Hoover to take a more active role in crime fighting, then by licensing him to become the nation’s domestic intelligence chief. Hoover’s agents became known as G-men, or government men, the avenging angels of the New Deal state.Hoover, center, taking aim while giving the Broadway actors flanking him, William Gaxton and Vincent Moore, a tour of F.B.I. headquarters in 1935.Underwood and UnderwoodToday’s F.B.I. still bears the stamp of the decisions Roosevelt made nearly a century ago. A hybrid institution, the F.B.I. remains one part law-enforcement agency, one part domestic-intelligence force — an awkward combination, if one that we now take for granted.It also retains Hoover’s dual political identity, with a conservative internal culture but also a powerful commitment to professional nonpartisan government service. This combination of attributes has helped to produce the F.B.I.’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory reputation, as different groups pick and choose which aspects to embrace and which to condemn.Hoover went on to do outrageous things with the power granted him during the Roosevelt years, emerging as the 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left. But many Washington liberals and civil libertarians did not see those abuses coming, because Hoover continued to reflect some of their values as well. During World War II, he distinguished himself as one of the few federal officials opposed to mass Japanese internment, labeling the policy “extremely unfortunate” and unnecessary for national security.After the war, despite his deep-seated racism, he stepped up the F.B.I.’s campaign against lynching in the South. “The great American crime is toleration of conditions which permit and promote prejudice, bigotry, injustice, terror and hate,” he told a civil rights committee convened by President Harry Truman in 1947. He framed white supremacist violence not only as a moral wrong but also as an acute challenge to federal authority.By contrast, he promoted himself as the embodiment of professional law enforcement, the polar opposite of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantes or the conspiracists of the John Birch Society. Many liberals embraced that message, despite Hoover’s well-known conservatism. “If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking that, ‘My God, Hoover is a real liberal!” William Sullivan, an F.B.I. official, recalled. “If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, ‘I’m convinced that Hoover is a member of the John Birch Society at heart.’ ”The height of Hoover’s popularity came during the Red Scare of the 1950s, when he emerged as both a hero of the anti-Communist right and the thinking man’s alternative to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Today, we tend to view Hoover and McCarthy as interchangeable figures, zealots who ran roughshod over civil liberties. At the time, though, many liberals viewed them as very different men.Truman feared the F.B.I.’s “Gestapo” tendencies, but far preferred Hoover to a partisan brawler and obvious fabricator like McCarthy. President Dwight Eisenhower heaped lavish praise on Hoover as the nation’s responsible, respectable anti-Communist, in contrast to McCarthy the demagogue. Both presidents cast the story in terms that might be familiar to any 21st-century liberal, with Hoover as the protector of truth, objectivity and the law, and McCarthy as those principles’ most potent enemy.One irony of the liberals’ stance is that it was actually Hoover, not McCarthy, who did the most to promote and sustain the Red Scare. Long before McCarthy burst on the scene, Hoover had been collaborating with congressional committees to target Communists and their sympathizers, conducting elaborate campaigns of infiltration and surveillance. And he long outlasted McCarthy, who was censured by his fellow senators in 1954. Hoover’s popularity grew as McCarthy’s fell. A Gallup poll in late 1953, the peak of the Red Scare, noted that a mere 2 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of Hoover, a result “phenomenal in surveys that have dealt with men in public life.”Hoover with President Richard Nixon in 1969.Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesAnd with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.Associated PressThat consensus finally began to crack in the 1960s. Hoover’s current reputation stems largely from this late-career period, when the F.B.I.’s shocking campaigns against the civil rights, antiwar and New Left movements began to erode earlier conceptions of Hoover as a man of restraint.Its most notorious initiative, the bureau’s COINTELPRO (short for Counterintelligence Program), deployed manipulative news coverage, anonymous mailings and police harassment to disrupt these movements. In 1964, in one of the lowest points of Hoover’s regime, the F.B.I. faked a degrading anonymous letter implicitly urging Dr. King to commit suicide. Agents mailed it to him along with recordings of his extramarital sexual activities, captured on F.B.I. microphones planted in his hotel rooms.Even then, though, key liberal figures continued to champion Hoover and the F.B.I. President Lyndon Johnson, a friend and neighbor of Hoover’s, proved second only to Roosevelt in his enthusiasm for the director. And he urged his successor, Richard Nixon, to follow suit. “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar,” he told Nixon in the Oval Office in late 1968. “He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”Despite such official support, by the early 1970s polls were starting to note that Hoover’s reputation among liberals and Democrats seemed to be in swift decline, thanks to his advancing age, aggressive tactics and conservative social views. “Now the case of J. Edgar Hoover has been added to the list of issues — ranging from the war in Vietnam, to race relations, welfare and the plight of the cities — which are the source of deep division across America today,” the pollster Louis Harris wrote in 1971.While conservatives still expressed widespread admiration for the F.B.I. director, liberals increasingly described him as a danger to the nation. The decline was especially precipitous among coastal elites and university-educated young people. By contrast, working-class white Americans in the Midwest and South expressed support.Today, those sentiments are reversed. According to Rasmussen, the F.B.I. is now most popular among Americans making more than $200,000 per year. Young voters like the F.B.I. better than older voters do. This division is being driven by national politics: When Mr. Trump attacks the F.B.I. as part of an overweening “deep state,” his supporters follow while his critics run the other way.But it also reflects a larger clash of values. Mr. Trump has long scored political points by attacking the administrative state and its legions of career government servants, whether at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the State Department or, improbably, the National Archives. In response, Democrats have been forced to reaffirm what once seemed to be settled notions: that expertise and professionalism matter in government, that the rule of law applies to every American, that it’s worth employing skilled, nonpartisan investigators who can determine the facts.Hoover failed to live up to those principles — often spectacularly so. And today’s F.B.I. has made its own questionable choices, from surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters to mismanagement of delicate political inquiries. But its history of professional federal service, of loyalty to the facts and the law, is still worth championing, especially in an era when suspicion of government, rather than faith in its possibilities, so often dominates our discourse. Whatever else we may think of Hoover’s legacy, that tradition is the best part of the institution he built.Beverly Gage (@beverlygage) is a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”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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      Can Republicans Win by Just Saying No?

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      History suggests that opposing the party in power is often good enough.In the 1946 midterms, Republicans united around a simple but powerful mantra: “Had enough?”The slogan was the brainchild of Karl Frost, an advertising executive in Boston. In two short words, it promised a rejection of both New Deal liberalism and the monopoly of power Democrats had held in Washington since the 1930s.It helped Republicans that the economy was in chaos. World War II had just ended, and supply chains were going haywire as the U.S. emerged from wartime price controls. Thousands of workers went on strike. Meat was scarce and expensive — so much so that Republican candidates patrolled city streets in trucks booming out the message, “Ladies, if you want meat, vote Republican.” They slapped President Harry Truman with the moniker “Horsemeat Harry.”“This is going to be a damned beefsteak election!” Sam Rayburn, the Democratic speaker of the House, privately fumed. By Election Day, Truman’s approval rating was just 33 percent. Republicans picked up 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, taking power for the first time since 1932.“It was so bad for Truman that people were saying he should resign,” said Jeffrey Frank, author of “The Trials of Harry S. Truman.”This was the year that a young Richard Nixon won his first congressional election, defeating a five-term Democratic incumbent in suburban Los Angeles by running against New Deal “socialism” and for what he called the “forgotten man.” His campaign literature asked: “Are you satisfied with present conditions? Can you buy meat, a new car, a refrigerator, clothes you need?”What’s old is new again.Inflation is way up, some goods are hard to find and Democrats are staring at a similar wipeout in November. And Republicans, as our colleague Jonathan Weisman reports today, are debating just how forthcoming to be about their own plans. Senator Rick Scott, the head of the Republican Senate campaign arm, has an 11-point plan to “rescue America.” House Republicans are working on their “Commitment to America,” a political and policy agenda they plan to release in late summer. And today, Mike Pence, the former vice president, unveiled a 28-page “Freedom Agenda” platform.Some Republicans argue that none of it is really necessary. All they need to do to win back power is point to voters’ frustrations with the high prices of gasoline and groceries and say, essentially: Had enough?“This isn’t rocket science,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist. “The midterms are a referendum on one thing and one thing only: Joe Biden and the Democrats’ failed leadership. Period. End of discussion.”‘What’s Mitch for?’Democrats are eager to turn this fall’s elections into a choice between the two parties rather than a referendum on their own performance.At times, President Biden has tried to corral Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, into defining the party’s agenda. “The fundamental question is, what’s Mitch for? What’s he for on immigration? What’s he for? What’s he proposing?” Biden said in late January, adding: “What are they for? So everything’s a choice. A choice.”A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.McConnell never took the bait. He’s said his focus is “100 percent” on “stopping this new administration” and has avoided presenting ideas that Democrats might be able to attack.“The fundamentals of a midterm election hold: It’s about the party in power,” said Zack Roday, a Republican strategist who is working on several Senate campaigns. “McConnell understands this better than anyone of the last 15 years.”So Democrats have taken to Scott’s plan like a drowning man to a life preserver, highlighting his call for every American to have “skin in the game” by paying taxes and accusing him of wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security. Senate Democrats are running a paid ad on Scott’s plan this week in key swing states, and on Thursday they bought a geo-targeted ad around the Heritage Foundation in Washington, during a speech that Scott gave at the conservative think tank.It’s an article of faith among many on the right that the 1994 “Contract With America” led by Newt Gingrich was responsible for that year’s Republican takeover of Congress. But Republicans in the Senate, led by Bob Dole of Kansas, never embraced it, while polls at the time showed that only a minority of voters had ever heard of the idea. Democrats would later exploit Gingrich’s unpopularity to gain seats in the 1998 midterms, a rare victory for the president’s party.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who hopes to become speaker of the House, shares Scott’s view that a plan is necessary, though they may differ on the details. At the recent policy retreat for House Republicans, McCarthy explained his hope of presenting Biden with legislation “so strong it could overcome all the politics that other people play.”To which Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a key McCarthy ally, added: “I think it’s real simple: You can’t do what you said if you haven’t said what you’ll do.”President Harry Truman and his daughter, Margaret, voting in Independence, Mo., in 1946. That year, Republicans picked up 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate.William J. Smith/Associated Press‘Just criticize rather than be specific’As a political strategy, though, no plan probably beats a plan.“If I were the Republicans, I would just criticize rather than be specific about my remedies, unfortunately,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of the Republican Party.Michael Barone, the founding editor of the Almanac of American Politics, said he expected Republicans to win back the House and “probably” the Senate, regardless of how specific their plans were. A policy agenda, he said, is more important for determining “how you want to govern” once in power.For Republican leaders today, being in power poses a dilemma of its own. If they do win one or both branches of Congress, Democrats will be able to draw on a playbook made famous by the same president who was so humbled by the slogan “Had enough?” in 1946.Two years after his midterm drubbing, Truman mounted a comeback often hailed as the greatest in American political history, using the “do-nothing Congress” as his political foil.Never mind that Congress had been extraordinarily productive, passing more than 900 bills that included landmark legislation such as the Marshall Plan and the Taft-Hartley Act. Four months before Election Day, with his job approval rating stuck in the 30s, Truman went on offense.“He had just one strategy — attack, attack, attack,” writes David McCullough, another Truman biographer.At campaign stops, Truman called Republicans names like “bloodsuckers” and a “bunch of old mossbacks still living back in 1890.” At one appearance in Roseville, Calif., he said the “do-nothing Congress tried to choke you to death in this valley.” In Fresno, Calif., he said: “You have got a terrible congressman here in this district. He is one of the worst.” And in Iowa, he said the Republican Congress had “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.”The rest, as they say, is history.What to read tonightBiden announced he would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve once again, Clifford Krauss and Michael D. Shear report, in a move intended to lower gasoline prices for American consumers.A federal judge in Florida said that sections of the state’s election law were unconstitutional, the first federal court ruling striking down key parts of a major Republican voting law since the 2020 election, Reid J. Epstein and Patricia Mazzei report.According to Alan Feuer, Katie Benner and Maggie Haberman, the Justice Department has widened its investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to encompass possible involvement of other government officials.Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, announced he would vote against the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Annie Karni reports.Some voters in North Carolina think Representative Madison Cawthorn has finally gone too far, Trip Gabriel reports from Cawthorn’s district.FrameworkGov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, a Democrat who is up for re-election, released an ad that struck an upbeat tone.Jessica Hill for The New York TimesDemocrats’ two paths There’s a lot of doom and gloom across America, something Republican campaigns have leveraged to try to persuade voters to change the status quo and oust Democrats from Congress.It leaves Democrats with a tough decision: empathize with voters’ hardships or put forward a different narrative entirely?In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, seems to be taking the second approach. In his first ad of the cycle, he paints a sunny picture, smiling as he strolls through suburban neighborhoods and talks with constituents. He boasts that he turned the state’s deficit into a surplus, while lowering taxes and investing in schools.“A balanced budget, lower taxes — our state is strong and getting stronger,” Lamont declares to the camera.It’s a sharp departure from a Democratic ad we highlighted last month from Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, in which the sun was noticeably absent. Or from another Democratic ad that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona began running in late February that acknowledged “families are working hard to get by right now.”Governors might have a little more room to highlight state and local achievements than members of Congress. Still, by trying to prove that they’ve improved conditions since the coronavirus pandemic began, Democrats may run the risk of seeming out of touch with their constituents’ day-to-day struggles.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Why Democrats May Have a Long Wait if They Lose Their Grip on Washington

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      Voters’ reflexive instinct to check the party in power makes it hard for any party to retain a hold on both the White House and Congress for long.Usually, it’s the party out of power that frets about whether it will ever win again. This time, it’s the party in control of government that’s staring into the political wilderness.Democrats now have a Washington trifecta — command of the White House and both chambers of Congress. If the results of last week’s elections in Virginia and elsewhere are any indication, they may not retain it after next November’s midterm elections. And a decade or longer may pass before they win a trifecta again.The unusual structure of American government, combined with the electorate’s reflexive instinct to check the party in power, makes it hard for any party to retain a hold on both the White House and Congress for long.Since World War II, political parties have waited an average of 14 years to regain full control of government after losing it. Only one president — Harry Truman — has lost Congress and retaken it later. In every other case, the president’s party regained a trifecta only after losing the White House.It would be foolish to predict the next decade of election results. Still, today’s Democrats will have a hard time defying this long history. Not only do the Democrats have especially slim majorities, but they face a series of structural disadvantages in the House and the Senate that make it difficult to translate popular vote majorities into governing majorities.The specter of divided government is a bitter one for Democrats.The party has won the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections but has nonetheless struggled to amass enough power to enact its agenda. That has added to the high stakes in the ongoing negotiations over the large Democratic spending package, which increasingly looks like a last chance for progressives to push an ambitious agenda.And it has helped spur the kind of acrimonious internal Democratic debate over the party’s message and strategy that would usually follow an electoral defeat, with moderates and progressives clashing over whether the party’s highly educated activist base needs to take a back seat for the party to cling to its majority. The strong Republican showing in Virginia and New Jersey last week has prompted yet another round of recriminations.But with such a long history of the president’s party struggling to hold on to power, one wonders whether any policy, tactic or message might help Democrats escape divided government.Some Democrats worry that they could be reduced to just 43 Senate seats by the end of the 2024 election.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe political winds seem to blow against the president’s party almost as soon as a new party seizes the White House. For decades, political scientists have observed a so-called thermostatic backlash in public opinion, in which voters instinctively move to turn down the temperature when government runs too hot in either party’s favor. The pattern dates back as long as survey research and helps explain why the election of Barack Obama led to the Tea Party, or how Donald Trump’s election led to record support for immigration.The president’s party faces additional burdens at the ballot box. A sliver of voters prefers gridlock and divided government and votes for a check and balance against the president. And the party out of power tends to enjoy a turnout advantage, whether because the president’s opponents are resolved to stop his agenda or because of complacency by the president’s supporters..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}While Democrats can still hope to avoid losing control of Congress in 2022, Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings make it seem increasingly unlikely that they will. Historically, only presidents with strong approval ratings have managed to avoid the midterm curse. And with Democrats holding only the most tenuous majorities in the House and the Senate, any losses at all would be enough to break the trifecta.If the Democrats are going to get a trifecta again, 2024 would seem to be their best chance. The president’s party usually bounces back when the president seeks re-election, perhaps because presidential elections offer a clear choice between two sides, not merely a referendum on the party in power. And in the House, a Democratic rebound in 2024 is very easy to imagine, even if far from assured.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More