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      Plans in Congress on China and TikTok Face Hurdles After Spy Balloon Furor

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      With budgets tight and political knives drawn, lawmakers seeking to capitalize on a bipartisan urgency to confront China are setting their sights on narrower measures.WASHINGTON — Republicans and Democrats are pressing for major legislation to counter rising threats from China, but mere weeks into the new Congress, a bipartisan consensus is at risk of dissipating amid disputes about what steps to take and a desire among many Republicans to wield the issue as a weapon against President Biden.In the House and Senate, leading lawmakers in both parties have managed in an otherwise bitterly divided Congress to stay unified about the need to confront the dangers posed by China’s militarization, its deepening ties with Russia and its ever-expanding economic footprint.But a rising chorus of Republican vitriol directed at Mr. Biden after a Chinese spy balloon flew over the United States this month upended that spirit — giving way to G.O.P. accusations that the president was “weak on China” — and suggested that the path ahead for any bipartisan action is exceedingly narrow.“When the balloon story popped, so to speak, it felt like certain people used that as an opportunity to bash President Biden,” said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the top Democrat on the select panel the House created to focus on competition with China.“And it felt like no matter what he did, they wanted to basically call him soft on the C.C.P., and unable to protect America,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “That’s where I think we can go wayward politically,”For now, only a few, mostly narrow ventures have drawn enough bipartisan interest to have a chance at advancing amid the political tide. They include legislation to ban TikTok, the Beijing-based social media platform lawmakers have warned for years is an intelligence-gathering gold mine for the Chinese government; bills that would ban Chinese purchases of farmland and other agricultural real estate, especially in areas near sensitive military sites; and measures to limit U.S. exports and outbound investments to China.Such initiatives are limited in scope, predominantly defensive and relatively cheap — which lawmakers say are important factors in getting legislation over the hurdles posed by this split Congress. And, experts point out, none are issues that would be felt keenly by voters, or translate particularly well into political pitches on the 2024 campaign trail.A Divided CongressThe 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate.Jan. 6 Video: Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to grant the Fox News host Tucker Carlson access to thousands of hours of Jan. 6 Capitol security footage has effectively outsourced a bid to reinvestigate the attack.John Fetterman: The Democratic senator from Pennsylvania is the latest public figure to disclose his mental health struggles, an indication of growing acceptance, though some stigma remains.Entitlement Cuts: Under bipartisan pressure, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, exempted Social Security and Medicare from his proposal to regularly review all federal programs.G.O.P. Legislative Agenda: Weeks into their chaotic House majority, Republican leaders have found themselves paralyzed on some of the biggest issues they promised to address.“There would be nervousness among Republicans about giving the administration a clear win, but I’m just not sure that the kind of legislation they’ll be looking at would be doing that,” said Zack Cooper, who researches U.S.-China competition at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s more things that would penalize China than be focused on investing in the U.S. in the next couple of years.”At the start of the year, the momentum behind bipartisan efforts to confront China seemed strong, with Republicans and Democrats banding together to pass the bill setting up the select panel and legislation to deny China crude oil exports from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A resolution condemning Beijing for sending the spy balloon over the United States passed unanimously after Republican leaders decided not to take the opportunity to rebuke Mr. Biden, as many on the right had clamored for.But with partisan divisions beginning to intensify and a presidential election looming, it appears exceedingly unlikely that Congress will be able to muster an agreement as large or significant as the major legislation last year to subsidize microchip manufacturing and scientific research — a measure that members of both parties described as only one of many policy changes that would be needed to counter China. Only a few, mostly narrow ventures have drawn enough bipartisan interest to have a chance at advancing amid the political tide.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“The biggest challenge is just the overall politicized environment that we’re in right now and the lack of trust between the parties,” said Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the chairman of the new select panel, who has committed to make his committee an “incubator and accelerator” on China legislation. “Everyone has their guard up.”Still, there are some areas of potential compromise. Many lawmakers are eyeing 2023 as the year Congress can close any peepholes China may have into the smartphones of more than 100 million TikTok American users, but they have yet to agree on how to try to do so.Some Republicans have proposed imposing sanctions to ice TikTok out of the United States, while Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, wants to allow the president to block the platform by lifting statutory prohibitions on banning foreign information sources.Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Angus King, independent of Maine and a member of the panel, want to prevent social media companies under Chinese or Russian influence from operating in the United States unless they divest from foreign ownership.But none have yet earned a seal of approval from Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democrat who is chairman of the committee and whose support is considered critical to any bill’s success. He was the chief architect of last year’s sweeping China competition bill, known as the CHIPS and Science Act, and he wants to tackle foreign data collection more broadly.“We’ve had a whack-a-mole approach on foreign technology that poses a national security risk,” Mr. Warner said in an interview, bemoaning that TikTok was only the latest in a long line of foreign data firms, like the Chinese telecom giant Huawei and the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, to be targeted by Congress. “We need an approach that is constitutionally defensible.”There is a similar flurry of activity among Republican and Democratic lawmakers proposing bans on Chinese purchases of farmland  in sensitive areas. But lawmakers remain split over how broad such a ban should be, whether agents of other adversary nations ought also to be subject to the prohibition, and whether Congress ought to update the whole process of reviewing foreign investment transactions, by including the Agriculture Department in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency group.“It’s actually kind of a more fraught issue than you would imagine,” Mr. Gallagher said.Lawmakers in both parties who want to put forth legislation to limit U.S. goods and capital from reaching Chinese markets are also facing challenges. The Biden administration has already started to take unilateral action on the issue, and further steps could box lawmakers out. Even if Congress can stake out a role for itself, it is not entirely clear which committee would take the lead on a matter that straddles a number of areas of jurisdiction.  Even before the balloon incident, existential policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, particularly around spending, made for slim odds that Congress could achieve sweeping legislative breakthroughs regarding China. Architects of last year’s law were dour about the prospect of the current Congress attempting anything on a similar scale.“The chances of us passing another major, comprehensive bill are not high,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the lead Republican on the CHIPS effort, who noted that with the slim G.O.P. majority in the House, it would be difficult to pass a costly investment bill.G.O.P. lawmakers have been demanding cuts to the federal budget, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, has indicated that even military spending might be on the chopping block. Though no one has specifically advocated cutting programs related to countering China, that has some lawmakers nervous, particularly since certain recent ventures Congress created to beef up security assistance to Taiwan have already failed to secure funding at their intended levels.That backdrop could complicate even bipartisan ventures seeking to authorize new programs to counter China diplomatically and militarily, such as a proposal in the works from Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator James Risch of Idaho, the top Republican, to step up foreign aid and military assistance to American allies in Beijing’s sphere of influence.That likely means that action on any comprehensive China bill would need to be attached to another must-pass bill, such as the annual defense authorization bill, to break through the political logjams of this Congress, said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security. “China has risen as a political matter and things are possible that weren’t before, but it has not risen so high as to make the hardest things politically possible,” Mr. Fontaine said. 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      The Wisdom and Prophecy of Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise’ Speech

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      On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter emerged from days of isolation to deliver the most important and memorable address of his life. Carter had canceled vacation plans and spent more than a week cloistered at Camp David, where he met with a “steady stream of visitors” who shared their hopes and fears about a nation in distress, most immediately thanks to another in a series of energy crises.Carter, however, discerned a deeper problem. America had a wounded heart. The president believed it suffered from a “crisis of the spirit.” The speech was among the most unusual in presidential history. The word that has clung to it, “malaise,” was a word that didn’t even appear in the text. It was offered by his critics and has since become something close to official history. Everyone above a certain age knows immediately and precisely the meaning of the phrase “the malaise speech.”I believe, by contrast, the best word to describe the speech would have been “pastoral.” A faithful Christian president applied the lessons he’d so plainly learned from years of Bible study and countless hours in church. Don’t look at the surface of a problem. Don’t be afraid to tell hard truths. Be humble, but also call the people to a higher purpose.The resulting address was heartfelt. It was eloquent. Yet it helped sink his presidency.Read the speech now, and you’ll see its truth and its depth. But, ironically, it’s an address better suited to our time than to its own. Jimmy Carter’s greatest speech was delivered four decades too soon.The ostensible purpose of the speech was to address the energy crisis. Anyone who remembers the 1970s remembers gas lines and the helpless feeling that our nation’s prosperity was dependent on foreign oil. Yet that was but one of a seemingly endless parade of American problems.By 1979, this country had experienced a recent string of traumatic political assassinations, urban riots that dwarfed the summer riots of 2020 in scale and intensity, campus unrest that makes the current controversies over “wokeness” look civil and quaint, the defeat in Vietnam, and the deep political corruption of Richard Nixon. At the same time, inflation rates dwarfed what we experience today.When he addressed the nation, Carter took a step back. With his trademark understated warmth, he described his own period of reflection. He’d taken the time to listen to others, he shared what he heard, and then he spoke words that resonate today. “The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us,” he said, and he described symptoms that mirror our current reality.“For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,” Carter said. (Meanwhile, last year a record 58 percent of Americans told NBC News pollsters that our nation’s best years are behind it.)There was more. “As you know,” he told viewers, “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.” He was right, but compared to now, Americans were far more respectful of virtually every major institution, from the government, to the news media, to the private sector. Only the military fares better now in the eyes of the public.Then there was this gut-punch paragraph:We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.When we read these words after the contemporary onslaught of mass shootings, the anguish of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the turmoil of two Trump impeachments, you can again see the parallels today.We’re familiar with political speeches that recite the litany of American challenges, but we’re not familiar with speeches that ask the American people to reflect on their own role in a national crisis. Carter called for his audience to look in the mirror:In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.There is a tremendous amount of truth packed into those words. But there was a problem: Carter correctly described a country of mutual, interlocking responsibilities between the government and the people. Yet he was ultimately unable to deliver the results that matched his pastoral message.For all the scorn heaped on Carter later, the speech was successful, at first. His approval rating shot up a remarkable 11 points. Then came chaos — some of it Carter’s fault, some of it not. Days after the speech, he demanded the resignation of his entire cabinet. (He ultimately fired five.) It was a move that communicated confusion more than conviction.Then the world erupted. In November, Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy and took dozens of Americans hostage. In December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and at least appeared to secure the country quickly and easily. Contrary to popular remembrance, Carter did not respond with weakness. The defense buildup for which Ronald Reagan is remembered actually began under Carter. And in April 1980, he greenlit a daring attempt to fly into the heart of Iran and rescue American hostages by force.It was not to be. Mechanical problems scrubbed the mission far from Tehran, and in the confusion of the withdrawal, two aircraft collided, and eight American servicemembers died. American gloom deepened. The nation seemed to be moving from defeat to defeat.The failed rescue was a hinge moment in history. It’s hard to imagine the morale boost had it succeeded, and we know the crushing disappointment when it failed. Had the Army’s Delta Force paraded down New York’s “Canyon of Heroes” with the liberated hostages, it would have probably transformed the public’s perception of the president. But just as presidents own military victories, they also own defeats. Carter’s fate was sealed. Reagan carried 44 states, and on Inauguration Day — in a final insult by Tehran — the hostages came home.The story of the next 10 years, moreover, cast Carter’s address in a different light. The nation went from defeat to victory: Inflation broke, the economy roared, and in 1991 the same military that was humiliated in the sands of Iran triumphed, with assistance from its allies, over an immense Iraqi Army in a 100-hour land war that astonished the world.The history was written. Carter was wrong. There wasn’t a crisis of confidence. There was no malaise. There was instead a failure of leadership. Better, or at least luckier, leaders revived a broken nation.Yet with every passing year, the deeper truths of Carter’s speech become more apparent. His insights become more salient. A speech that couldn’t precisely diagnose the maladies of 1979 more accurately describes the challenges of 2023. The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.In 1979, Carter spoke of our civil liberties as secure. They’re more secure now. A generation of Supreme Court case law has expanded our rights to free speech and religious liberty beyond the bounds of precedent. In 1979, Carter said that the United States possessed “unmatched economic power and military might.” That assertion may have rung hollow to a nation facing a Soviet Union that seemed to be at the peak of its power. But it’s unquestionably true today.We’re free, prosperous and strong to a degree we couldn’t imagine then. Yet we’re tearing each other apart now. The words that didn’t quite capture the moment in 1979 land quite differently today:We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.With these words, Carter raised the question, what is our freedom for, exactly? While we want to better ourselves and our families, we cannot become self-regarding. We have obligations to each other. We have obligations to our community. The best exercise of freedom is in service to others.Yet one of the stories of our time is the abuse of liberty, including the use of our freedoms — whether it’s to boycott, condemn or shame — to try to narrow the marketplace of ideas, to deprive dissenters of their reputations and their livelihoods. A porn-saturated culture luxuriates in its own decadence and exploitation, and then wonders why hearts break and families fail. And as Carter noted, our huge wealth cannot heal the holes in our hearts, because “consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”At the start of this piece, I used the word “pastoral” to describe Carter’s speech. But there’s another word: prophetic. His words were not the clarion call necessary for his time, but they are words for this time. As Jimmy Carter spends his last days on this earth, we should remember his call for community, and thank a very good man for living his values, serving his neighbors, and reminding us of the true source of strength for the nation he loved. More

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      The Forces Tearing Us Apart Aren’t Quite What They Seem

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      A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the class upheaval in American partisanship, with the Republican Party dominant in working class House districts and the Democratic Party winning a decisive majority of upscale House seats.Studies from across the left-right spectrum reveal these and other patterns: a nation politically divided by levels of diversity; the emergence of an ideologically consistent liberal Democratic Party matching the consistent conservatism of the Republican Party, for the first time in recent history; and a striking discrepancy in the median household income of white majority House districts held by Democrats and Republicans.Four scholars and political analysts have produced these studies: Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, in “The Congressional Class Reversal,” “Socioeconomic Polarization” and “Education Polarization”; Oscar Pocasangre and Lee Drutman, of New America, in “Understanding the Partisan Divide: How Demographics and Policy Views Shape Party Coalitions”; and Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, in “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left.”Podhorzer’s analyses produce provocative conclusions.“Throughout the first half of the 20th century,” he writes in his class reversal essay, “Democrats were solidly the party of the bottom of the income distribution and Republicans were solidly the party of the top half of the income distribution.” In 1958, Podhorzer points out, “more than half of the members of the Democratic caucus represented the two least affluent quintiles of districts. Today, that is nearly the case for members of the Republican caucus.”The result? “In terms of income,” Podhorzer writes. “the respective caucuses have become mirror images of each other and of who they were from Reconstruction into the 1960s.”The shift is especially glaring when looking at majority-white congressional districts:From 1994 through 2008, Democrats did about equally well with each income group. But, beginning with the 2010 election, Democrats began doing much better with the top two quintiles and much worse with the bottom two quintiles. In 2020, the gap between the top two and the bottom two quintiles was 50 points. Since 2016, Democrats have been doing worse than average with the middle quintile as well.The income shift coincided with a deepening of the urban-rural partisan schism.“As recently as 2008,” Podhorzer writes, “40 percent of the Democratic caucus represented either rural or sparse suburban districts, and about a fifth of the Republican caucus represented majority-minority, urban or dense suburban districts. Now, the caucuses are sorted nearly perfectly.”As if that were not enough, divergent economic trends are compounding the urban-rural split.In his socioeconomic polarization essay, Podhorzer shows how median household income in white majority districts has changed.From 1996 to 2008, in majority white districts, there was virtually no difference in household income between districts represented by Republicans and Democrats. Since then, the two have diverged sharply, with median household income rising to $80,725 in 2020 in majority white districts represented by Democrats, well above the $62,163 in districts represented by Republicans.Podhorzer ranks congressional districts on five measures:1) Districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile (the bottom 40 percent) of both income and education; 2) districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile of income but in the middle quintile or better for education; 3) districts that are not in the other four measures; 4) districts that are either in the fourth quintile on both dimensions or are in the fourth for one and the fifth for the other; and 5) districts that are in the fifth quintile for both dimensions.Using this classification system, how have majority white districts changed over the past three decades?“For the entire period from 1996 through 2008,” Podhorzer writes,none of the white socioeconomic groups was more than 10 points more or less than average, although we can see the highest socioeconomic group trending more Democratic through that period. But everything changed dramatically after 2008, as the two highest socioeconomic groups rapidly became more Democratic while the lowest socioeconomic group became much less Democratic.In 1996, Democrats represented 30 percent of the majority white districts in the most educated and most affluent category; by 2020, they represented 86 percent. At the other end, in 1996, Democrats represented 38 and 42 percent of the districts in the bottom two categories; by 2020, those percentages fell to 12 and 18 percent.In examining these trends, political analysts have cited a growing educational divide, with better educated — and thus more affluent — white voters moving in a liberal Democratic direction, while whites without college have moved toward the right.Podhorzer does not dispute the existence of this trend, but argues strenuously that limiting the analysis to education levels masks the true driving force: racial tolerance and racial resentment. “This factor, racial resentment,” Podhorzer writes in the education polarization essay, “does a much, much better job of explaining our current political divisions than education polarization.”In support of his argument, Podhorzer provides data showing that from 2000 to 2020, the Democratic margin among whites with and without college degrees who score high on racial resentment scales has fallen from minus 26 percent to minus 62 percent for racially resentful non-college whites and from minus 14 percent to minus 53 percent among racially resentful college- educated whites.At the same time, the Democratic margin rose from plus 12 to 70 percent over those twenty years among non-college whites low in racial resentment; and from 50 to 82 percent among college-educated whites low in racial resentment.In other words, in contradiction to the education divide thesis, non-college whites who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated whites who are racially resentful have become more Republican, in contradiction to the education divide thesis.Podhorzer makes the case that “the unequal distribution of recovery after the economy crashed in 2008 has been profoundly overlooked,” interacting with and compounding divisions based on racial attitudes:Educational attainment was among the important characteristics associated with those increasingly prosperous places. Add to that mix, first, the election of a Black president, which sparked a backlash movement of grievance in those places left behind in the recovery, and, second, the election of a racist president, Donald Trump — who stoked those grievances. We are suffering from a polarization which provides an even more comprehensive explanation than the urban-rural divide.Changing racial attitudes are also a crucial element in Abramowitz’s analysis, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left,” in which he argues that “Democrats are now as ideologically cohesive as Republicans, which is a big change from a decade ago, when Republicans were significantly more cohesive than Democrats.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn 1972, on a 1 to 7 scale used by American National Election Studies, Abramowitz writes,Supporters of the two parties were separated by an average of one unit. The mean score for Democratic voters was 3.7, just slightly to the left of center, while the mean score for Republican voters was 4.7, to the right. By 2020, the distance between supporters of the two parties had increased to an average of 2.6 units. The mean score for Democratic voters was 2.8 while the mean score for Republican voters was 5.5.The ideological gulf between Democrats and Republicans reached its highest point in 2020, Abramowitz observes, “since the ANES started asking the ideological identification question.”While the movement to the right among Republican voters has been relatively constant over this period, the Democratic shift in an increasingly liberal direction has been more recent and more rapid.“The divide between supporters of the two parties has increased considerably since 2012 and most of this increase was due to a sharp leftward shift among Democratic voters,” Abramowitz writes. “Between 2012 and 2020, the mean score for Democratic voters went from 3.3 to 2.9 while the mean score for Republican voters went from 5.4 to 5.5.”By far the most important shift to the left among Democrats, according to Abramowitz, was on the question “Should federal spending on aid to Blacks be increased, decreased or kept about the same?” From 2012 to 2020, the percentage of Democrats saying “increased” more than doubled, from 31.3 to 72.2 percent. The surge was higher among white Democrats, at 47.5 points, (from 24.6 to 72.1 percent), than among nonwhite Democrats, at 31.2 points, from 41.1 to 72.3 percent.The growing ideological congruence among Democrats has significant consequences for the strength of the party on Election Day. Abramowitz notes that “For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.”The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers, he continues, “is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections” to the right “among white Democrats”have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations. This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections, including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 2022, according to data from the American National Election Studies Pilot Survey, 96 percent of Democratic identifiers, including leaning independents, voted for Democratic candidates for U.S. House and U.S. Senate.In their paper, “Understanding the Partisan Divide,” Pocasangre and Drutman of New America focus on race and ethnicity from the vantage point of an analysis of voting patterns based on the level of diversity in a district or community.“Republican districts,” they write,are some of the least ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts have diverse policy views, particularly on economic issues. Democratic districts are some of the most ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts are mostly in agreement over their views of both social and economic issues.Pocasangre and Drutman’s study reinforces the widespread finding “That Republican districts are predominantly white and, for the most part, less affluent than the national average. In contrast, Democratic districts are less white than the average but tend to be more affluent than average.”Pocasangre and Drutman find that the household income differences between Democratic and Republican-held seats continues to widen. From 2020 to 2022, the income in Democratic districts rose from $95,000 to $100,000 while in Republican districts it grew from $77,000 to $80,000, so that the Democratic advantage rose from $18,000 to $20,000 in just two years.Republican districts, the two authors continue, are “conservative on both social and economic issues, with very few districts below the national average on either dimension.” Democratic districts, in contrast, areprogressive on both policy domains, but have quite a few districts that fall above the average on either the social or economic dimension. In particular, of the 229 Democratic districts in 2020, 14 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues and 19 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues.On average, competitive districts tilt Republican, according to the authors:Very few competitive districts in 2020 were found on the progressive quadrants of social and economic issues. Instead, of the 27 competitive districts in 2020, 70 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues and 59 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues.These battleground districtslean toward the progressive side when it comes to gun control, but they lean toward the conservative side on all the other social issues. Their views on structural discrimination — an index that captures responses to questions of whether Black people just need to try harder to get ahead and whether discrimination keeps them back — are the most conservative, followed by views toward abortion.In addition, a majority of competitive districts, 57 percent, are in Republican-leaning rural-suburban communities, along with another 13 percent in purely rural areas. Democratic districts, in contrast, are 17 percent in purely urban areas and 52 percent in urban-suburban communities, with 31 percent in rural-suburban or purely rural areas.I asked Pocasangre about this tilt, and he emailed back:For now, most swing districts go for Republicans. The challenge for Democrats right now is that most of these swing districts are in suburbs which demographically and ideologically look more like rural areas where Republicans have their strongholds. So, Democrats do face an uphill battle when trying to make inroads in these districts.But, Pocasangre continued, “majorities in Congress are so slim that control of the House could switch based on idiosyncratic factors, like exceptionally bad candidates on the other side, scandals, changes in turnout, etc. Democrats need to get lucky in the suburbs, but for Republicans, they are theirs to lose.”Pocasangre and Drutman classified districts as Democratic, Republican, or competitive, based on the ratings of the Cook Political Report in the 2020 and 2022 elections: “Competitive districts are those classified as toss ups for each cycle while the partisan districts are those rated as solid, likely, or lean Democratic or Republican.”The Cook Report analysis of 2024 House races lists 20 tossup seats, 11 held by Democrats, 9 by Republicans, one of which is held by the serial fabulist George Santos, whose threatened New York seat is classified as “lean Democratic.” Eight of the 11 Democratic toss-ups are in three states, four in North Carolina and two each in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Four of the nine Republican tossups are in New York, along with two in Arizona.The changing composition of both Democratic and Republican electorates and the demographics of the districts they represent is one of the reasons that governing has become so difficult. One result of the changing composition of the parties has been a shift in focus to social and cultural issues. These are issues that government is often not well equipped to address, but that propel political competition and escalate partisan hostility.Perhaps most important, however, is that there now is no economic cohesion holding either party together. Instead, both have conflicting wings. For the Republicans it’s a pro-business elite combined with a working class, largely white, often racially resentful base; for the Democrats, it’s a party dependent on the support of disproportionately low-income minorities, combined with a largely white, college-educated elite.One might question why all these cultural and social issues have come so much to the fore and what it might take for the dam to give.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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      Here’s What the Other Republican Candidates Should Say to Trump

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I know you’re keen to handicap — figuratively, but maybe also literally — the emerging field of Republican presidential hopefuls. First Donald Trump, now Nikki Haley, and soon, possibly, her fellow Palmetto State Republican, Senator Tim Scott. That’s on top of probable runs by Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and possibly Brian Kemp of Georgia, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Chris Christie of … New Jersey.Who worries you the most — or repels you the least?Gail Collins: Well gee, Bret. Have to admit I have a tad of sympathy for Mike Pence, and maybe Brian Kemp, since they at least had the backbone to stand up for the idea that, um, this is a democracy where the winners of elections … win.Bret: With you on Kemp, who successfully fended off two election deniers: Trump and Stacey Abrams. Can’t say I feel much sympathy for Pence. You don’t get bonus points for doing the most basic part of your job, much less for standing up for democracy and the rule of law at the last possible minute.Gail: All of them are more or less opposed to abortion and sensible gun regulation, and many of them are in favor of tax cuts for the rich that would cut back on resources for the needy. And given Haley’s first campaign week, I’d predict that as we go along, all of them will be veering off to Crazy Town in order to compete with Trump.Hey, why are we worried about what I think? You’re in charge of Republicans. Tell me — which of these folks would you vote for against Joe Biden?Bret: A lot will depend on who is, or isn’t, willing to bend the knee to Trump. I’m waiting for one of them to say something along the following lines:“Donald, Republicans placed their faith in you when it seemed as if, for all of your flaws, you could still be a gust of fresh air for our party and the country. You turned out to be a Category 5 hurricane, leaving a wake of political destruction everywhere you went ….”Gail: Loving this scenario …Bret: “You destroyed our majority in the House of Representatives in 2018. You destroyed our hold on the White House in 2020. Your reckless, stupid, un-American and transparently false claims about the election helped cost us Georgia’s two Senate seats in 2021. Your garbage taste in primary candidates, based pretty much entirely on their willingness to suck up to you and regurgitate your lies, cost us the Senate again in the midterms along with the governorship of Arizona. You shame us with your dinner invitations to antisemites like Kanye West. And your petulant attacks on fellow Republicans — usually the ones who stand a chance of winning a general election — keep playing into the hands of Democrats.”Gail: Keep going!Bret: “Other than your usual lackeys, not to mention Lindsey Graham, there’s not a single Republican who has worked closely with you who has a good word to say about you in private, though some of them still flatter you in public. If, heaven forbid, you’re the Republican nominee next year, you’ll only be guaranteeing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a second term. You’re a loser, Donald: a sore loser, a serial loser, a selfish loser. You’re the biggest loser — except, of course, when it comes to your waistline. As was once said to Neville Chamberlain after he had put Britain in mortal danger, so I say to you: ‘In the name of God, go.’”I’ll struggle to vote for a candidate who can’t say something along these lines. If they can’t stand up to a bully in their own house, how can we expect them to stand up to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?Gail: I believe I am hearing that you’re going to vote for Joe Biden.Bret: Hmm. Hopefully not. Most of my policy instincts are pretty much in line with people like Haley, Youngkin, Christie and even DeSantis, at least on his good days. I probably just won’t vote if no Republican can pass the decency test.Gail: Also trying to imagine the things that might happen on the Biden front that might reduce your openness to the Democratic option. Privately thinking: presidential health problems and Kamala Harris. But too early to talk about that now.Bret: Is it? OK, go on ….Gail: If we’re going to talk health, let’s go back to Senator John Fetterman, now hospitalized with depression. It seems at this point as if breaking in as a new senator and recovering from a stroke is too much of a to-do list. I remember recently, when we were on this topic, you were way more worried than I was about his condition. Did you have some advance knowledge he was in trouble or just a well-educated guess?Bret: Maybe a little bit of advance knowledge, plus personal experience. My father had a cerebral hemorrhage when he was 53, the same age Fetterman is now. He recovered physically but, like many survivors of brain injuries, suffered a crushing depression that was out of character with his sunny temperament. The book that helped him get through it was William Styron’s memoir of his own depression, “Darkness Visible.” The good news for my dad, who lived for 21 years after the hemorrhage, was that the darkness eventually lifted and he went on to better years, as I sincerely hope will be the case for the senator.Gail: Of course. Also hoping this will publicize the importance of getting professional treatment when depression strikes.Bret: Gail, returning to the Biden presidency again, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just reported that the federal government will take on nearly $19 trillion in new debt over the next decade. Doesn’t that, er, alarm you?Gail: Sure, and I hear it as a clarion call for tax reform — raising rates on the people who can afford to pay more. Don’t see any reason, for instance, that someone making a million dollars a year is only paying Social Security tax on the first $160,200.I suspect you’re hearing a somewhat different trumpet.Bret: Just a tad different!First thing, we need to turbocharge economic growth so that the debt will be a smaller fraction of the overall economy. Top of my list would be immigration reform to ease labor shortages and regulatory reform to make life easier for small businesses, like doing away with needless permitting requirements. Second, spending restraint, particularly when it comes to dumb subsidies like the ones for ethanol or tax credits for buying Teslas. Third, entitlement reform by way of gradually pushing up the retirement age for today’s younger workers.What am I missing — I mean, other than one or two screws?Gail: Bret, I have never accused you of a screw shortage, although there are some issues on which I’ve suggested some tightening might be nice.Bret: My mother says the same.Gail: We’re in agreement on opening the door to more immigration, so let’s move on to the rest, one by one.Reducing permit requirements for new businesses — you’d certainly be able to come up with some examples of overregulation there, but I’ll bet if somebody decides your neighborhood would be a good place to open a distillery in an old warehouse, you’d want to make sure there were some serious controls in place.Bret: Only for quality ingredients, flavor, complexity, age and smoothness.Gail: Tax credits for electric vehicles help move the country away from carbon-emitting gas guzzlers, and that’s great for the environment. Yeah, I wish it didn’t mean more money for Elon Musk, but if we want to eliminate all laws that benefit irritating rich guys, there’d be a lot of better places to start.Bret: On your earlier point, Gail, do you know you are supposed to complete a 250-hour training program to become a licensed manicurist in New York? That’s the kind of enterprise-defeating regulation I had in mind. As for electric vehicles, I can’t wait for someone to start fully tallying the environmental impact of, say, the lithium mines needed to produce their batteries. There’s just no such thing as “clean” energy.Gail: Of course you’re right that nothing is easy and we’re going to have to come back to energy issues a lot. But in the meantime, your suggestion for entitlement reform: It’s basically about raising the age for Social Security eligibility, right? Currently 67 for most workers, although you can qualify for a more modest package at 62. There’s nothing magic about 67, but I can think of a lot of jobs that’d be tough for people that age to keep doing.Bret: True.Gail: Looking out my window right now I see a bunch of guys climbing around the 12th story outside wall of an apartment building, refurbishing the stones and concrete so nothing falls down and bops a pedestrian. I’m sure some people in their late-60s would be great at the job, but I wouldn’t want them forced to take it on.Bret: Agree, and there’s no reason we can’t put together a reform of Social Security that allows people who make their living in physically demanding jobs to retire on the earlier side. It’s those of us who sit at desks most of the day whom I mainly have in mind.By the way, Gail, before we go, I can’t fail to mention the exceptional reporting by our news-side colleagues Jeremy Peters and Katie Robertson. It concerns the lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, and what it has uncovered — namely, that people like Tucker Carlson and other talking heads at the network knew perfectly well that Trump’s claims of a stolen election were bunk, but tried their damnedest to sow doubts about the election anyway. There’s a word for that: vile. There ought to be a circle in hell for it, too.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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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Didn’t Like What She Saw

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      Gail Collins: So Bret, Joe Biden’s been on a roll. Economy good, State of the Union speech good — made even better by those Republican boo birds.Any complaints?Bret Stephens: The economy is a mixed bag, with positive signals, like falling inflation and historically low unemployment, but also some worrying ones, like a labor-force participation rate that’s too low and big layoffs in big tech. I thought the speech was a mixed bag, too, with a feisty performance that will please liberals but not endear him to the majority of Americans, who still disapprove of his job performance by a seven-point margin.But on the subject of Republican hecklers, what a disgrace. Never mind the geriatric president; the real danger is the prepubescent opposition.Gail Collins: Well, if I ever want to make a good impression on a group, I’ll try to recruit Marjorie Taylor Greene to scream at me that I’m a liar.Bret: Being called a liar by Greene is like being accused by Donald Trump of having a low I.Q. I believe that’s what Freudians call projection.Gail: The Republican leaders were certainly better behaved. But they did seem desperate to reject any suggestion that their party wanted to cut back spending on Social Security and Medicare. I thought that was part of the plan all along. Wasn’t it?Bret: Not as far as I’m aware, unless you mean Senator Rick Scott’s nonstarter proposal to sunset all federal legislation every five years.Gail: Well, Scott was head of the Republican Senate re-election effort at the time.Bret: Even Mitch McConnell dismissed Scott’s brainstorms out of hand. But if it means trying to save both programs from looming insolvency, then yes, you could say some Republicans are for that.The other thing I found striking about the speech, Gail, is that it was probably the most unapologetically liberal State of the Union any Democratic president has delivered since Lyndon Johnson in the ’60s. I know you like a lot of the proposals, but will it win Biden a second term?Gail: Which part do you think an average American voter would have hated? An assault weapons ban? Abortion rights? A tax on the superrich?Bret: Well, abortion rights is a winning issue for Democrats, thanks to the terrible Dobbs decision. On the other hand, the billionaires’ tax is probably unconstitutional and also ineffective, since ultrawealthy people are pretty good at shielding their assets. And, as our own polling guru Nate Cohn pointed out last summer, gun control is one of those issues that always seems to poll well but rarely decides elections.Gail: One thing Biden’s speech demonstrated was how good a liberal agenda sounds to nonliberals when it’s presented by a guy who seems so mellow. People always looked down on Biden as a presidential candidate because he reminded them of somebody’s chatty great-uncle. Turns out that these days, a nice great-uncle who wants to put a cap on drug prices is just what we’re looking for.Bret: Our friend Frank Bruni had the best line on the same point in his newsletter last week. “For Donald Trump,” he wrote, “we needed noise-canceling headphones. For Biden, hearing aids.” It’s particularly sharp because the age question is only going to become more acute for Biden. Some of his fumbles, like calling Chuck Schumer the Senate minority leader, are going to stick in people’s minds.Um, awkward segue here, but we really should talk about Senator John Fetterman.Gail: So sorry to hear he was briefly hospitalized — and to learn, in a story by our newsroom colleague Annie Karni, that his long-term physical problems have made it difficult for him to deal with his work. Lesson No. 1: Joining the United States Senate is not the best possible agenda for a man who’s recovering from a serious stroke.Bret: Obviously we wish him a full recovery ….Gail: Fortunately, the Pennsylvania voters who chose him last year over Mehmet Oz — by nearly five percentage points — weren’t overly focused on Fetterman’s health situation. Lesson No. 2: These days, when it comes to congressional elections, the overriding issue is simply which party will control what.Thanks to Pennsylvania, the answer in the Senate this year is the Democrats, and even if Fetterman can’t perform all his day-to-day duties as well as he’d hoped, as long as he can show up for votes, he’s fulfilling their most important mandate.Bret: OK, total disagreement on this one. Being a senator isn’t just about voting a certain way. There’s also important committee and constituency work. If Fetterman’s doctors think he will eventually recover, then he should stay. But voters also deserve more transparency about his health than they got during the campaign or than they are getting now. If he can’t meet the demands of the office, he owes it to Pennsylvanians to step down and let Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, select his replacement.Gail: Now Bret, on a totally different matter: I’ve always appreciated your willingness to go along with my foreign-affairs avoidance. But China has, I guess you could say, floated into domestic territory. Tell me if you have any new balloon thoughts.Bret: What really gets me about the balloon caper (I am withholding judgment about the three U.F.O.s we shot down over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron until the little green men send me further instructions) isn’t the threat to national security. The Chinese can surely get most of the surveillance they need from orbiting satellites. It’s the nerve. The Chinese government thought it could get away with it on the eve of Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing. If they are that rude, stupid and cocky, what else do they think they can pull off?Gail: Kinda wondering if the Xi government just did it to look tough to their own people.Bret: Well, we probably popped that balloon. My fear is that the Chinese regime, or elements inside it, may be spoiling for war. Have I mentioned that we need to start spending more on defense?Gail: I’m very, very worried this is a prelude to a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan. While we should do everything we can to keep that from happening, there’s no way I would want to go to war over it.Bret: I disagree, but you’re speaking for a lot of Americans, including a growing share of Republicans.Gail: As far as our defense budget goes, I think we could get whatever money is needed by cutting costs someplace else in the Pentagon.But, just between us, if I rooted for higher military spending would you oppose risking the lives of American troops over Taiwan?Bret: I’m with President Biden on this one. The defense of Taiwan is a vital American interest, and not just because it’s the superpower of microchips. If Beijing conquers Taiwan it will just whet its appetite for aggression against our other allies, including Japan and the Philippines. So trying to stay out of it will only make our problems larger, not smaller. I also think our commitment to Taiwan’s freedom is akin to President Harry Truman’s stands for West Berlin and South Korea. Those sacrifices in blood and treasure paid long-term dividends for global freedom and American prosperity.But speaking of long-term threats to the country, Gail, I was shocked but not surprised to read that two-thirds of American fourth-graders are not proficient in reading. What a disaster. Thoughts on fixing?Gail: Nothing more important to worry about than reading skills. But you don’t want to encourage an obsession over tests. There’s way too much of that already — even preschools are drilling their kids in preparation for kindergarten entrance exams.Bret: On this point, Gail, we agree. The endless testing is turning kids into nervous wrecks. And clearly it’s not helping them get any better at reading and math.Gail: Let’s focus on early childhood education — if it’s the right quality, kids will move on to grade school with skills in problem-solving and critical thinking that makes the next level so much easier.That, of course, would require a lot more money. Jill Biden has made it one of her top crusades, and cheers to the first lady for that.Bret: I’m pretty sure the United States spends much more per student than most other countries, only to achieve lackluster results. Different suggestion: Let’s adopt phonics more widely for early reading, give up new math for old math, and urge parents to read to and with their children for at least an hour each night.Gail: Preschool education is one of our biggest fights, so I guess this conversation needs to be continued …Bret: Before we go, Gail, I hope our readers don’t miss Richard Sandomir’s beautiful obituary for Solomon Perel, a.k.a. Josef Perjell, who died in Israel earlier this month at 97. If you remember the film “Europa, Europa,” you’ll know his story — a Jewish boy who pretended to be an ethnic German to escape being murdered by the Nazis and later got inducted into the Hitler Youth, where he had to hide his Jewishness for the rest of the war. The parting piece of advice he got from his father was, “Always remain a Jew,” while his mother told him, “You must live.”It seems like contradictory advice, since he had to pretend to be a Nazi in order to survive. But, from a Jewish perspective, the advice was actually the same. From Deuteronomy: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse — therefore choose life.”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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      Fact-Checking Biden’s State of the Union Address

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      The president’s speech contained no outright falsehoods, but at times omitted crucial context or exaggerated the facts.WASHINGTON — President Biden praised the economy as well as his legislative accomplishments and record on the world stage in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.Mr. Biden’s speech contained no outright falsehoods, but at times omitted crucial context or exaggerated the facts. Here’s a fact check.What WAS Said“I stand here tonight, after we’ve created, with the help of many people in this room, 12 million new jobs — more jobs created in two years than any president has created in four years.”This needs context. The economy added 12.1 million jobs‌ ‌between January 2021, the month‌ when‌ Mr. Biden took office, and this January. By raw numbers, that is indeed a larger increase in new jobs over two years than the number added over other presidents’ full four-year terms since at least 1945. But by percentage, the job growth in Mr. Biden’s first two years still lags behind that of his predecessors’ full terms.Under Mr. Biden, jobs have increased by 8.5 percent since his term began. That jump is less than that in President Barack Obama’s first term (8.6 percent), President Bill Clinton’s first term (10.5 percent), President Ronald Reagan’s second term (11.2 percent) and President Jimmy Carter’s four years in office (12.8 percent).Mr. Biden is, of course, comparing his first two years in office with the entire term or presidencies of his predecessors, so the comparison is not equivalent. Moreover, Mr. Biden’s first two years in office followed historic job losses wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. Most important, presidents are not singularly responsible for the state of the economy. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs. Now, thanks to what you’ve all done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”This is misleading. Mr. Biden’s statement gives the impression that a decades-old trend has reversed, but the data tells a different story. American exports reached a new high in 2022, with exports of goods alone topping $2 trillion. But the United States also imported a record high last year, $3.3 trillion in goods — countering the notion that imports have slowed. As a result, the United States also recorded the highest ever trade deficit since 1970 of $950 billion, and a trade deficit in goods of $1.1 trillion. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“Inflation has been a global problem because the pandemic disrupted our supply chains and Putin’s unfair and brutal war in Ukraine disrupted energy supplies as well as food supplies.”This needs context. It is accurate that inflation has been global, and that supply chain issues tied to the pandemic have been a major driver of price increases. It is also true that food and energy disruptions tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbated it. But those factors did not spur inflation on their own: Supply chains became clogged in the first place partly because American demand for goods was abnormally strong during the pandemic.Biden’s State of the Union AddressChallenging the G.O.P.: In the first State of the Union speech of a new era of divided government, President Biden called on Republicans to work with him to “finish the job” of repairing the unsettled economy.State of Uncertainty: Mr. Biden used his speech to portray the United States as a country in recovery. But what he did not emphasize was that America also faces a lot of uncertainty in 2023.Foreign Policy: Mr. Biden spends his days confronting Russia and China. So it was especially striking that in his address, he chose to spend relatively little time on America’s global role.A Tense Exchange: Before the speech, Senator Mitt Romney admonished Representative George Santos, a fellow Republican, telling him he “shouldn’t have been there.”That surge in demand came as stuck-at-home consumers shifted their spending away from services and toward things like new furniture. Their spending was also fueled partly by stimulus checks and other pandemic aid. Several studies by economists at the Federal Reserve have found that government spending contributed to some, but far from all, of the inflation. — Jeanna SmialekWhat WAS Said“Food inflation is coming down.”True. Food inflation is beginning to slow, though it remains very rapid. Compared with a year ago, food prices are 10.4 percent higher. But monthly food price increases have been slowing steadily in recent months, coming down from a very swift rate in May 2022.Of course, the current situation does not feel great to many consumers: Food prices are still climbing from already-high levels. And some specific food products are much more expensive than last year. Eggs, in particular, have been a pain point for consumers in recent months. — Jeanna SmialekWhat WAS Said“Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up.”This needs context. It is true that inflation has slowed for the past six months: That means that prices are still increasing, but they are doing so more gradually. The Consumer Price Index ticked up by 6.5 percent in the year through December, which is notably slower than the 9 percent peak in June. That pace is still much more rapid than the roughly 2 percent that was typical before the pandemic.It is also true that wages are climbing sharply compared with the pace that would be normal. But for much of 2021 and 2022, wage gains struggled to keep up with rapid price increases. That has recently begun to change: Average hourly earnings increases exceeded consumer price increases on a monthly basis in both November and December 2022. — Jeanna Smialek.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.What WAS Said“We’re finally giving Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices.”This needs context. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Mr. Biden signed into law in August, does fulfill Democrats’ long-held goal of empowering Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical makers. But the law has limits. The negotiation provisions do not kick in until 2026, when the federal government may begin negotiating the price of up to 10 medicines. The number of drugs subject to negotiation will rise over time. — Sheryl Gay StolbergWhat WAS Said“In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history.”This needs context. The federal deficit did decrease by $1.7 trillion, from $3.1 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year to $1.4 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, though Mr. Biden’s fiscal policies are not the sole factor.In fact, much of that decline can be attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era spending, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates lower levels of spending. In February 2021, before the Biden administration enacted any fiscal legislation, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit would have reached $1.1 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, less than what ended up happening.Coronavirus stimulus funding from 2021 added nearly $1.9 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, the budget office estimated. The budget agency also estimated that the infrastructure package added $256 billion to the deficit, though supporters disagreed with the analysis. The Inflation Reduction Act, which was the only significant piece of legislation to reduce the deficit, trimmed it by $238 billion over the next 10 years. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“Nearly 25 percent of the entire national debt that took over 200 years to accumulate was added by just one administration alone, the last one.”This needs context. Mr. Biden is correct that a quarter of the national debt was accumulated over the four years Mr. Trump was in office. But the former president did not unilaterally add to that amount. In fact, two major factors driving that increase were mandatory spending levels set long before Mr. Trump took office and bipartisan spending bills that were passed to address the pandemic.From the 2018 to 2021 fiscal years, the government collected $14.3 trillion in revenue, and spent $21.9 trillion, according to data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office. In that time, mandatory spending on programs such as Social Security and Medicare totaled $14.7 trillion alone. Discretionary spending totaled about $5.8 trillion.The budget estimated that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts — which passed in December 2017 with no Democrats in support — added roughly another $1 trillion to the federal deficit from 2018 to 2021, even after factoring in economic growth spurred by the tax cuts.But other drivers of the deficit include several sweeping measures that had bipartisan approval. The first coronavirus stimulus package, which received near unanimous support in Congress, added $2 trillion to the deficit over the next two fiscal years. Three additional spending measures contending with Covid-19 and its economic ramifications added another $1.4 trillion. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s a majority.”This needs context. President Biden implied that the Republicans who wanted to allow Social Security and Medicare to sunset were tying those demands to the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.It is true that a couple of Republicans have suggested allowing those entitlement programs to sunset as mandatory spending, instead bringing them up for regular renewal. But Republicans have recently distanced themselves from such efforts. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, has said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in talks over raising the debt ceiling, which Congress must vote to do in the coming month or risk a default on the government’s bills. Likewise, President Donald J. Trump has warned Republicans to leave the programs alone in the negotiations. Mr. Biden, nodding to lawmakers responding to his speech, acknowledged that it seemed that cuts to the programs were “off the books now.” — Jeanna SmialekWhat WAS Said“While the virus is not gone, thanks to the resilience of the American people and the ingenuity of medicine, we have broken the Covid grip on us. Covid deaths are down by 90 percent.”This needs context. On average, about 450 people in the United States are dying each day of Covid-19, according to a New York Times database. That number is way down from the roughly 3,200 Americans who were dying each day in early 2021, when the Omicron variant was ripping through the country. But the current daily average of Covid-19 deaths is higher than it was in December 2022, when roughly 250 Americans were losing their lives each day to the virus. — Sheryl Gay StolbergWhat WAS Said“We united NATO. We built a global coalition.”True. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Biden led a huge political, economic and military response that has involved dozens of countries. Surprising many experts who predicted that the United States’ European allies would argue over strategy and lose their resolve, the 30-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization has shown a unity unseen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and, a year after the Russian invasion, continues to supply vast amounts of weapons to Ukraine.That unity has not been perfect: NATO leaders have argued at times, including their recent tussle over whether and how to supply modern tanks to Ukraine. But many analysts believe it has surprised President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who did not anticipate such a strong degree of Western resolve.President Biden also successfully rallied dozens of nations beyond NATO to join in economic sanctions against Moscow, including Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. That coalition excludes major nations like India and China, which are supporting the Kremlin’s war machine through major purchases of Russian oil. But it remains among the broadest coalitions the United States has led against an adversary. — Michael CrowleyWhat WAS Said“But in the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracy has grown weaker, not stronger.”This lacks evidence. Experts say that President Biden took office after years of global gains for autocracy and deep problems for democracies — as illustrated by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. According to the nonprofit group Freedom House, in every region of the world “democracy is under attack by populist leaders and groups that reject pluralism and demand unchecked power.”It is hard to say whether Mr. Biden has changed the situation. He has made the defense of democracies a core theme of his presidency and held a White House democracy summit in December 2021. He has worked to contain two major autocratic powers, building a coalition against Russia in defense of Ukraine — which has weakened its economy and isolated it diplomatically — and rallied allies to contest China’s political influence and technological gains. American voters rejected many election conspiracy theorists in the midterm elections last year.But Russia and, especially, China retain considerable foreign political influence. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, had a far-right riot in the heart of its government last month. Italy elected a prime minister whose party has fascist roots. Huge crowds in Israel are protesting new right-wing government policies that opponents call an assault on democracy itself. Last February, The Economist magazine’s annual democracy index found that “global democracy continued its precipitous decline in 2021.” Mr. Biden’s rosier view is difficult to substantiate. — Michael Crowley More

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      Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less

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      Affective polarization — “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — has prompted an explosion of research as the threat to democratic norms and procedures mount.Intensely felt divisions over race, ethnicity and culture have become more deeply entrenched in the American political system, reflected in part in the election denialism found in roughly a third of the electorate and in state legislative initiatives giving politicians the power to overturn election results.Many researchers have begun to focus on this question: Is there a causal relationship between the intensification of hostility between Democrats and Republicans and the deterioration of support for democratic standards?“Growing affective polarization and negative partisanship,” Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, political scientists at Georgia State University and Koç University-Istanbul, write in a 2019 essay, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies,”contribute to a perception among citizens that the opposing party and their policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power.What is affective polarization? In 2016, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote that when a voter’s “partisan social identity” merges with his or her racial, religious, sexual and cultural identities, “these various identities work together to drive an emotional type of polarization that cannot be explained by parties or issues alone.”Mason argues that “threats to a party’s status tend to drive anger, while reassurances drive enthusiasm” so thata party loss generates very negative, particularly angry, emotional reactions. This anger is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.One optimistic proposal to reduce partisan animosity is to focus public attention on the commonality of Democratic and Republican voters in their shared identity as Americans. Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on this subject, including in his 2018 paper “Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?” and in his soon-to-be-published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide.”“I show,” Levendusky contends in his 2018 paper, “that when subjects’ sense of American national identity is heightened, they come to see members of the opposing party as fellow Americans rather than rival partisans. As a result, they like the opposing party more, thereby reducing affective polarization.”There are serious problems, however, with a depolarization strategy based on American identity, problems that go to the heart of the relentless power of issues of race, ethnicity and immigration­ to splinter the electorate.In their December 2022 paper, “ ‘American’ Is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans,” Ryan Dawkins and Abigail Hanson write thatWhite Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump era, largely because of Democrats adopting a more racially inclusive conception of American identity. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party matches their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.Dawkins and Hanson acknowledge that “national identity is perhaps the only superordinate identity that holds the promise of uniting partisans and closing the social distance between White Democrats and White Republicans,” but, they continue,If conceptions of national identity itself become the subject of the very sorting process that is driving affective polarization, then it can no longer serve as a unifying identity that binds the entire country together. In fact, frames that highlight the association of American identity to historic norms of whiteness can ultimately divide the country further, especially as the United States transitions into a majority-minority country. Indeed, continued demographic change will likely make the schism between White Democrats and White Republicans wider before things have any hope to improve.I asked Levendusky about the Dawkins-Hanson paper. He replied by email that he was now “convinced that there is no simple path from animosity (or affective polarization) to far downstream outcomes (albeit important ones)” — adding that “there’s a long way from ‘I dislike members of the other party’ to ‘I will vote for a candidate who broke democratic norms rather than a candidate from the other party’ and the process is likely complex and subtle.”In an August 2022 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” David E. Broockman, a political scientist at Berkeley, Joshua L. Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, and Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, pointedly reject the claim made by a number of scholars “that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions. A large, influential literature speculates as such.”Instead, Broockman, Kalla and Westwood contend, their own studies “find no evidence that these changes in affective polarization influence a broad range of political behaviors — only interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about the widespread assumption that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.”Broockman and his co-authors measured the effect of reducing affective polarization on five domains: “electoral accountability, adopting one’s party’s policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perceptions of objective conditions.”“Our results,” they write, “run contrary to the literature’s widespread speculation: in these political domains, our estimates of the causal effects of reducing affective polarization are consistently null.”In an email, Westwood argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”Westwood’s point is well-taken. In a country marked by battles over sex, race, religion, gender, regional disparities in economic growth, traditionalist-vs-postmaterialist values and, broadly, inequality, it is difficult to see how relatively short, survey based experiments could produce a significant, long-term dent in partisan hostility.Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight of his colleagues, report similar results in their October 2022 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Anti-democratic Attitudes.” “Scholars and practitioners alike,” they write, “have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments toward outpartisans.”Why?Because much prior work has focused on treating affective polarization itself, and assumed that these interventions would in turn improve downstream outcomes that pose consequential threats to democracy. Although this assumption may seem reasonable, there is little evidence evaluating its implications for the benefits of depolarization interventions.In “Megastudy Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes,” a separate analysis of 32,059 American voters “testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” however, Voelkel and many of his co-authors, Michael N. Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph S. Mernyk, Chrystal Redekopp, Matthew Cashman, James N. Druckman, David G. Rand and Robb Willer significantly amended their earlier findings.In an email, Willer explained what was going on:One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions, such as not acknowledging the results of a lost election or removing polling stations from areas that benefit the rival party.Voelkel and his co-authors found that two interventions were the most effective.The first is known as the “Braley intervention” for Alia Braley, a political scientist at Berkeley and the lead author of “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” In the Braley intervention, participants are “asked what people from the other party believe when it comes to actions that undermine how democracy works (e.g., using violence to block laws, reducing the number of polling stations to help the other party, or not accepting the results of elections if they lose).” They are then given “the correct answer” and “the answers make clear the other party does not support actions that undermine democracy.”The second “top-performing intervention” was to give participants “a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”“To our knowledge,” Willer wrote in his email, “this is the first evidence that the same stimuli could both reduce affective polarization and improve some aspect of Americans’ democratic attitudes, and it suggests these two factors may be causally linked, more than prior work — including our own — would suggest.”Kalla disputed the conclusions Willer drew from the megastudy:The most successful interventions in the megastudy for reducing anti-democratic views were interventions that directly targeted those anti-democratic views. For example, Braley et al.’s successful intervention was able to reduce anti-democratic views by correcting misperceptions about the other party’s willingness to subvert democracy.This intervention, Kalla continued,was not about affective polarization. What this suggests is that for practitioners interested in reducing anti-democratic attitudes, they should use interventions that directly speak to and target those anti-democratic views. As our work finds and Voelkel et al. replicates, obliquely attempting to reduce anti-democratic views through the causal pathway of affective polarization does not appear to be a successful strategy.I sent Kalla’s critique to Willer, who replied:I agree with Josh’s point that the most effective interventions for reducing support for undemocratic practices and candidates were interventions that were pretty clearly crafted with the primary goal in mind of targeting democratic attitudes. And while we find some relationships here that suggest there is a path to reducing support for undemocratic candidates via reducing affective polarization, the larger point that most interventions reducing affective polarization do not affect anti-democratic attitudes still stands, and our evidence continues to contradict the widespread popular assumption that affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes are closely linked. We continue to find evidence in this newest study against that idea.One scholar, Herbert P. Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended that too much of the debate over affective polarization and democratic backsliding has been restricted to the analysis of competing psychological pressures, when in fact the scope in much larger. “The United States,” Kitschelt wrote in an email,has experienced a “black swan” confluence, interaction and mutual reinforcement of general factors that affect all advanced knowledge societies with specific historical and institutional factors unique to the U.S. that have created a poisonous concoction threatening U.S. democracy more so than that of any other Western society. Taken together, these conditions have created the scenario in which affective polarization thrives.Like most of the developed world, the United States is undergoing three disruptive transformations compounded by three additional historical factors specific to the United States, Kitschelt suggests. These transformations, he wrote, are:“The postindustrial change of the occupational structure expanding higher education and the income and status educational dividend, together with a transformation of gender and family relations, dismantling the paternalist family and improving the bargaining power of women, making less educated people — and especially males — the more likely socio-economic and cultural losers of the process.”“The expansion of education goes together with a secularization of society that has undercut the ideological foundations of paternalism, but created fierce resistance in certain quarters.”“The sociocultural and economic divisions furthermore correlate with residential patterns in which the growing higher educated, younger, secular and more gender-egalitarian share of the population lives in metropolitan and suburban areas, while the declining, less educated, older, more religious and more paternalists share of the population lives in exurbia or the countryside.”The three factors unique to this country, in his view, are:“The legacy of enslavement and racial oppression in the United States in which — following W.E.B. DuBois — the white lower class of less skilled laborers derived a ‘quasi-wage’ satisfaction from racist subordination of the minority, the satisfaction of enjoying a higher rank in society than African Americans.”“The vibrancy of evangelical ‘born again’ Christianity, sharply separated from the old European moderate, cerebral mainline Protestantism. The former attracts support over-proportionally among less educated people, and strictly segregates churches by race, thereby making it possible to convert white Evangelical churches into platforms of white racism. They have become political transmission belts of right-wing populism in the United States, with 80 percent of those whites who consider themselves ‘born again’ voting for the Trump presidential candidacy.”“The institutional particularities of the U.S. voting system that tends to divide populations into two rival parties, the first-past-the-post electoral system for the U.S. legislature and the directly elected presidency. While received wisdom has claimed that it moderates divisions, under conditions of mutually reinforcing economic, social, and cultural divides, it is likely to have the opposite effect. The most important additional upshot of this system is the overrepresentation of the countryside (i.e. the areas where the social, economic, and cultural losers of knowledge society tend to be located) in the legislative process and presidential elections/Electoral College.”Kitschelt argues that in order to understand affective polarization it is necessary to go “beyond the myopic and US-centric narrow vision field of American political psychologists.” The incentives “for politicians to prime this polarization and stoke the divides, including fanning the flames of affective polarization, can be understood only against the backdrop of these underlying socio-economic and cultural legacies and processes.”Kitschelt is not alone in this view. He pointed to a 2020 book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” by Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, political scientists at Harvard, the University of California-Davis and Georgia State University, in which they make a case thatAmericans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly than in most other Western publics. We show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high, when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions.Writing just before the 2020 election, Gidron, Adams and Horne point out that theissue of cultural disagreements appears highly pertinent in light of the ongoing nationwide protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement which has sparked a wider cultural debate over questions relating to race, police funding and broader questions over interpretations of America’s history. In a July 4th speech delivered at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump starkly framed these types of “culture war” debates as a defining political and social divide in America, asserting “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”The study of affective polarization sheds light on how vicious American politics has become, and on how this viciousness has enabled Trump and those Republicans who have followed his lead, while hurting Democrats whose policy and legislative initiatives have been obstructed as much as they have succeeded.Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., addressed this point when he delivered the following remarks from his paper “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West” in 2021 at a legal colloquium in New York:There is little question that recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of government, whether measured in the number of important bills Congress is able to enact, the proportion of all issues people identity as most important that Congress manages to address, or the number of enacted bills that update old policies enacted many decades earlier. Social scientists now write books with titles like Can America Govern Itself? Longitudinal data confirm the obvious, which is the more polarized Congress is, the less it enacts significant legislation; in the ten most polarized congressional terms, a bit more than 10.6 significant laws were enacted, while in the ten least polarized terms, that number goes up 60 percent, to around 16 significant enactments per term. The inability of democratic governments to deliver on the issues their populations care most about poses serious risks.What are the chances of reversing this trend?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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      Biden Weighs State of the Union Focus on His Unfinished Agenda

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      As the president prepares for his national address, his aides debate an emphasis on his still-unrealized plans for child care, prekindergarten and more.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top economic aides have battled for weeks over a key decision for his State of the Union address on Tuesday: how much to talk about child care, prekindergarten, paid leave and other new spending proposals that the president failed to secure in the flurry of economic legislation he signed in his first two years in office.Some advisers have pushed for Mr. Biden to spend relatively little time on those efforts, even though he is set to again propose them in detail in the budget blueprint he will release in March. They want the president to continue championing the spending he did sign into law, like investments in infrastructure like roads and water pipes, and advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductors, while positioning him as a bipartisan bridge-builder on critical issues for the middle class.Other aides want Mr. Biden to spend significant time in the speech on an issue set that could form the core of his likely re-election pitch to key swing voters, particularly women. Polls by liberal groups suggest such a focus, on helping working families afford care for their children and aging parents, could prove a winning campaign message.The debate is one of many taking place inside the administration as Mr. Biden tries to determine which issues to focus on in a speech that carries extra importance this year. It will be Mr. Biden’s first address to the new Republican majority in the House, which has effectively slammed the brakes on his legislative agenda for the next two years. And it could be a preview for the themes Mr. Biden would stress on the 2024 campaign trail should he run for a second term.Administration officials caution that Mr. Biden has not finalized his strategy. A White House official said Friday that the president was preparing to tout his economic record and his full vision for the economy.The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands as the third year of his term begins.State of the Union: President Biden will deliver his second State of the Union speech on Feb. 7, at a time when he faces an aggressive House controlled by Republicans and a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.Chief of Staff: Mr. Biden named Jeffrey D. Zients, his former coronavirus response coordinator, as his next chief of staff. Mr. Zients replaces Ron Klain, who has run the White House since the president took office.Economic Aide Steps Down: Brian Deese, who played a pivotal role in negotiating economic legislation Mr. Biden signed in his first two years in office, is leaving his position as the president’s top economic adviser.Eyeing 2024: Mr. Biden has been assailing House Republicans over their tax and spending plans, including potential changes to Social Security and Medicare, as he ramps up for what is likely to be a run for re-election.Few of Mr. Biden’s advisers expect Congress to act in the next two years on paid leave, an enhanced tax credit for parents, expanded support for caregivers for disabled and older Americans or expanded access to affordable child care. All were centerpieces of the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan Mr. Biden announced in the first months of his administration. Mr. Biden proposes to offset those and other proposals with tax increases on high earners and corporations.Earlier this week, Mr. Biden hinted that he may be preparing to pour more attention on those so-called “care economy” proposals, which he and his economic team say would help alleviate problems that crimp family budgets and block would-be workers from looking for jobs.At a White House event celebrating the 30th anniversary of a law that mandated certain workers be allowed to take unpaid medical leave, Mr. Biden ticked through his administration’s efforts to invest in a variety of care programs in the last two years, while acknowledging failure to pass federally mandated paid leave and other larger programs.Mr. Biden said he remained committed to “passing a national program of paid leave and medical leave.”“And, by the way, American workers deserve paid sick days as well,” he said. “Paid sick days. Look, I’ve called on Congress to act, and I’ll continue fighting.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.For Mr. Biden, continuing to call for new spending initiatives aimed at lower- and middle-income workers would draw a clear contrast with the still-nascent field of Republicans seeking the White House in 2024. It would cheer some outside advocacy groups that have pushed him to renew his focus on programs that would particularly aid women and children.The State of the Union speech “presents the president with a rare opportunity to take a victory lap and, simultaneously, advance his agenda,” the advocacy group First Focus on Children said in a news release this week. “All to the benefit of children.”The efforts could also address what Mr. Biden’s advisers have identified as a lingering source of weakness in the recovery from the pandemic recession: high costs of caregiving, which are blocking Americans from looking for work. The nonprofit group ReadyNation estimates in a new report that child care challenges cost American families $78 billion a year and employers another $23 billion.“Among prime-age people not working in the United States, roughly half of them list care responsibilities as the main reason for not participating in the labor force,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters this week. She noted that the jobs rebound has lagged in care industries like nursing homes and day care centers.“These remain economic challenges and addressing them could go a long ways towards supporting our nation’s labor supply,” she said.But focusing on that unfinished economic work could conflict with Mr. Biden’s repeated efforts this year to portray the economy as strong and position him as a president who reached across the aisle to secure big new investments that are lifting growth and job creation. On Friday, the president celebrated news that the economy created 517,000 jobs in January, in a brief speech that did not mention the challenges facing caregivers.Calling for vast new spending programs also risks further antagonizing House conservatives, who have made government spending their first large fight with the president. Republicans have threatened to allow the United States to fall into an economically catastrophic default on government debt by not raising the federal borrowing limit, unless Mr. Biden agrees to sharp cuts in existing spending.“Revenue into the government has never been higher,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Thursday, a day after he met with Mr. Biden at the White House to discuss fiscal issues and the debt limit. “It’s the highest revenue we’ve ever seen in. So it’s not a revenue problem. It’s a spending problem.”Catie Edmondson More