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      The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election

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      The Book That Predicted the 2024 ElectionThe G.O.P. pollster Patrick Ruffini’s book “Party of the People” outlined the realignments reflected in this year’s election results.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now. At the very least, you should be if they didn’t tell you before the election.But Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster who is a founding partner at Echelon Insights, did tell you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”What he argued in that book is really two things: First, the educational divide reshaping American politics would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results, weird as they seemed to many, weren’t a fluke.Donald Trump performed a lot better in 2020 than the polls said he would. A major reason he performed so much better is that he did better among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. That was, to put it very mildly, not what Democrats expected. Trump was the xenophobe in chief. Democrats were appalled by the way he talked about immigrants, about Muslims, about China, about Black communities. The theory was that Trump was using racism and nationalism to drive up his margins among white voters.And then what actually happens after four years of his presidency is that Biden in 2020 does a bit better than Clinton did among white voters. And Trump in 2020 improves quite a bit among nonwhite voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Powell, Fed Chair, Will Likely Face Heavy Pressure From Trump

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      The chair of the Federal Reserve made clear he would not resign, even under pressure. But pressure from the White House is likely, market watchers say.Jay Powell, the Fed chair, with President Trump during more tranquil times in 2017.Carlos Barria/ReutersPowell pushes back Jay Powell and the Fed may have pulled off the improbable soft landing in taming inflation while not crashing the economy into recession, proving many a Wall Street naysayer wrong.But an even bigger wildcard looms in another Donald Trump presidency — what Trump 2.0 might mean for interest rates, Fed independence and the Fed chair’s own job.That tension burst into the open at the Fed’s news conference on Thursday. The usually dry event had moments of high drama that nearly overshadowed the decision to cut the benchmark lending rate by a quarter percentage point. Powell delivered a forceful “no” when asked by Victoria Guida of Politico if he would consider resigning if Trump asked.He delivered a more emphatic response when pressed by another reporter on whether the president had the legal authority to fire him. “Not permitted under the law,” Powell said.Trump has made waves by saying that a president should have a say in rates policy. And suggestions have circulated from inside the president-elect’s camp that he would sideline Powell if re-elected — something Trump flirted with during his first term after appointing Powell in 2017.The S&P 500 advanced as the news conference wore on, closing at another record, and Treasury bonds also rallied.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Things to Know About Trump’s Tariff Threats

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      The president-elect says that tariff is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” You may be hearing it a lot.President-elect Donald J. Trump has professed a belief in the power of tariffs for decades. Now, as he prepares to take office, they are a central part of his economic plan.Mr. Trump argues that steep tariffs on foreign goods will help benefit U.S. manufacturing and create jobs. His proposals would raise tariffs to a level not seen in generations. Many economists have warned of potentially harmful consequences from such a move, including higher costs for American households and businesses, and globally destabilizing trade wars.Here are five crucial things to know about Mr. Trump’s sweeping trade plans.Mr. Trump has floated several hefty tariff plans.While campaigning for the White House, Mr. Trump offered up a running list of tariffs. He talked about a “universal” tariff of 10 to 20 percent on most foreign products. He has proposed tariffs of 60 percent or more on Chinese goods. And he has suggested removing permanent normal trading relations with China, which would result in an immediate increase in tariffs on Chinese imports.Mr. Trump has also promoted the idea of a “reciprocal” tariff, in which the United States would match the tariff rates that other countries put on American goods. He has suggested using tariff revenue to replace income taxes. And he has threatened tariffs of 100, 200 or even 1,000 percent on Mexico, saying the country should do more to stop flows of migrants and shipments of Chinese cars.The Biden administration has also raised tariffs on goods from China, but Mr. Trump’s plans are much larger — affecting trillions of dollars of products, rather than tens of billions.Mr. Trump says foreign companies pay the tariffs. That’s usually wrong.A tariff is a tax that is put on a product when it crosses a border. For instance, a company that brings its product into the United States — the importer — actually pays the tariff to the U.S. government.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Got the Recovery They Wanted. It Wasn’t Enough.

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      America’s economic growth is the envy of its global counterparts. But voters wanted more from the Biden administration — specifically, lower prices.Every major U.S. ally is uncomfortably familiar with one of President Biden’s favorite charts. It is a graph of economic recoveries in the wealthy world since the end of the pandemic recession. It shows growth flatlining for the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan over the past two years — while in the United States, growth keeps rocketing up.That chart helps explain why voters have punished ruling parties in election after post-Covid election around the world. Sluggish growth, coupled with a surge in consumer prices, proved toxic for the Conservative Party in Britain. It helped hobble President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition in France and contributed to Japan’s longtime leaders, the Liberal Democrats, losing their majority this fall.Germany’s governing coalition has been so weakened by recession and so flustered by disagreements over how to revive growth that it teetered this week on the brink of collapse.Advisers to Mr. Biden and to Vice President Kamala Harris, his successor candidate in the presidential election, had hoped that America’s outlier economy would rescue them from a similar fate.It did not.Ms. Harris lost to former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats will spend at least months parsing data for conclusions on what drove the defeat. Certainly, economic factors were only one contributor.But as Europe’s stumbling economies woke on Wednesday to the news of Ms. Harris’s defeat, one thing was immediately clear: America’s growth engine may be the envy of the world, but it is not the envy of the American public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Farmers Brace for New Trump Trade Wars Amid Tariff Threats

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      Despite their concerns, some farm operators still support the former president and prefer his overall economic plan.To former President Donald J. Trump, “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.But to farmers in rural America, the blanket import duties that Mr. Trump wants to enact if elected are a nightmare that they would rather not live through again.As president, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs in 2018 and 2019 on $300 billion of Chinese imports, a punishment he wielded in order to get China to negotiate a trade deal with the United States. His action triggered a trade war between Washington and Beijing, with China slapping retaliatory tariffs on American products. It also shifted more of its soybean purchases to Brazil and Argentina, hurting U.S. soybean farmers who had long relied on the Chinese market.When Mr. Trump finally announced a limited trade deal in 2019, American farmers were frazzled and subsisting on subsidies that the Trump administration had handed out to keep them afloat.Now it could happen all over again.“The prospect of additional tariffs doesn’t sound good,” said Leslie Bowman, a corn and soybean farmer from Chambersburg, Pa. “The idea of tariffs is to protect U.S. industries, but for the agricultural industry, it’s going to hurt.”The support of farmers in swing states such as Pennsylvania could be pivotal in determining the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Mr. Trump remains popular in rural America, and voters such as Mr. Bowman say they are weighing a variety of factors as they consider whom to vote for.Mr. Trump has said that if he wins the election he will put tariffs as high as 50 percent on imports from around the world. Tariffs on Chinese imports could be even higher, and some foreign products would face levies upward of 200 percent. Economists have warned that such tariffs could reignite inflation, slow economic growth and harm the industries that Mr. Trump says he wants to help.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      They Barter and Trade in Rural America. How Will They Vote?

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      Many rural Americans engage in cashless barter systems to get food and firewood for heating and cooking. They value self-sufficiency, making them wary of government intervention.When Miki Shiverick needs firewood to heat her home, or help clearing the rusted appliances and vehicles from her property, she doesn’t go to a store or pay for services. Instead, she trades for it.For instance, preparing her land in Bergholz, Ohio for livestock over the last four years required hauling away piles of salvage, old tools and antiques from the rundown property she bought from the family of an old tinker. The place, with its barn house and five outbuildings, resembled a 12-acre junkyard.Ms. Shiverick, 56, found local scrappers willing to keep the profits from selling the rusted cars, campers, tractor parts, buried gas tanks and aluminum ingots at the local scrap yard. She also found woodsmen willing to clear trees for her in exchange for most of the wood.On this newly blank canvas, she dreams of creating a clean, natural retreat for her family with gardens that support wildlife and livestock, which she raises to promote food self-sufficiency and land stewardship.Bergholz is a rural town with a population of fewer than 600. For centuries, rural communities like Bergholz have operated in cashless barter systems built on mutual trust and neighborly relationships — a culture of self-sufficiency that has also shaped political views toward a kind of bootstrap conservatism.“People around here don’t do welfare, it’s not who we are,” Ms. Shiverick said.Ms. Shiverick bartered a bolt of linen with an Amish neighbor for a chicken coop.Rebecca Kiger for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Flirts With the Ultimate Tax Cut: No Taxes at All

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      The former president has repeatedly praised a period in American history when there was no income tax, and the country relied on tariffs to fund the government.Former President Donald J. Trump has spent much of the presidential campaign brainstorming new, and sometimes untested, ways to cut taxes. In the election’s final stretch, he raised the possibility of going even further: eliminating income taxes entirely.During a Fox News segment on Monday, Mr. Trump took questions at a barbershop in the Bronx. When asked if the United States could potentially end all federal taxation, Mr. Trump said the country could return to the economic policies in the late 19th century, when there was no federal income tax.“It had all tariffs — it didn’t have an income tax,” Mr. Trump said. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”In June, Mr. Trump floated the idea of replacing federal revenue from income taxes with money received from tariffs. Mr. Trump has not provided specific details of how that would work, and it is unclear if he wants to eliminate all federal taxes, including corporate income taxes and payroll taxes, or only end the individual income tax.Either way, both liberal and conservative experts have dismissed his idea as mathematically impossible and economically destructive. Even if Republicans control Congress, lawmakers are unlikely to dismantle the income tax system. Yet Mr. Trump’s combination of tax cuts and tariff increases has been central to his political pitch.“There is a way, if what I’m planning comes out,” Mr. Trump said of ending income taxes.Replacing income taxes with tariffs would reverse the progressivity of the tax system in the United States. In general, income taxes are progressive, meaning that Americans with more income pay a higher tax rate. Tariffs, which impose a tax on products imported into the United States, are regressive. They raise the prices on imported items like clothing and groceries, placing a larger burden on lower-income Americans who spend a bigger percentage of their income on those goods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      G7 Finalizes $50 Billion Ukraine Loan Backed by Russian Assets

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      The economic lifeline is expected to be disbursed by the end of the year.The Group of 7 nations will announce on Wednesday that it has finalized plans to give Ukraine a $50 billion loan using Russia’s frozen central bank assets, according to a White House official.The loan represents an extraordinary maneuver by Western nations to essentially force Russia to pay for the damage it is inflicting on Ukraine through a war that shows no sign of ending.“Never before has a multilateral coalition frozen the assets of an aggressor country and then harnessed the value of those assets to fund the defense of the aggrieved party,” Daleep Singh, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for international economics, said on Wednesday.The announcement comes after months of debate and negotiation among policymakers in the United States and Europe over how they could use $300 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to support Ukraine.The United States and the European Union enacted sanctions to freeze Russia’s central bank assets, most of which are held in Europe, after its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. As the war dragged on, officials in the United States pushed for the funds to be seized and given directly to Ukraine to aid in its economic recovery.European officials had concerns about the lawfulness of such a move, however, and both sides eventually agreed over the summer that they would use the interest that the assets were earning to back a $50 billion loan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More