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    McCarthy’s Exit May Create Even More Headaches for the Tiny G.O.P. Majority

    The former speaker’s decision to leave his seat a year early could affect control of the House, the legislative agenda and his party’s efforts to keep its majority in the 2024 election.Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that he would leave Congress came as little surprise to his closest colleagues, but his decision to do so a year before the end of his term poses challenges for his party. It will shrink Republicans’ already razor-thin majority in the House as they face a number of issues in the coming months that will require near-unanimous party support.The departure of Mr. McCarthy, who was his party’s strongest fund-raiser in the House and spent two election cycles helping to build the Republican majority, also could put a dent in the G.O.P.’s ability to rake in campaign cash, although he has said he wants to continue to play a role in politics.Here’s how Mr. McCarthy’s departure could affect the House and his party.A slim majority will get even slimmer.Republicans started the year acknowledging that one of their biggest challenges would be keeping their party unified as their midterm victories delivered a tiny majority. They had 222 members while Democrats had 213, leaving little room for defectors and making it easier for a small number of disgruntled Republicans to influence policy and vote outcomes.They could afford to lose no more than four votes on any bill if all Democrats showed up and voted against them. Any more than that would doom G.O.P. legislation.With the expulsion last week of former Representative George Santos of New York, Republicans now have only 221 members, meaning their four-vote margin has shrunk to three. Any more defections than that would result in a 217-to-217 tie or give the Democratic side more votes than the Republican one.With Mr. McCarthy gone, Republicans will enter the new year with 220 votes, leaving the same margin since they could still lose three votes and be ahead of Democrats, 217 to 216.A special election for Mr. Santos’s seat is set for Feb. 13, and Democrats hope to recapture the politically competitive district, which President Biden won in 2020. That would further erode the Republicans’ edge.A winter shutdown showdown could become even more unmanageable.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California will have 14 days after Mr. McCarthy’s final day to call a special election, which must take place about four months later. The Bakersfield-anchored district is solidly Republican, meaning that a G.O.P. candidate is likely to win the race to serve out the remainder of his term. But that won’t happen before mid-January, when lawmakers face the first of two deadlines for funding the government.Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, has struggled to push critical legislation through the House, and a slimmer majority would probably empower the rebellious hard-right wing of his party to double down on its policy demands ahead of the deadlines, the second of which is in early February.The smaller majority could also affect the fight over an emergency national security spending bill to fund the war in Ukraine, along with help for Israel in its war against Hamas and border security funding.On Wednesday, Republicans blocked the measure in the Senate. The bill would face an uphill battle in the House, where Republican support for Ukraine’s war effort is dwindling.Republicans will lose their best House fund-raiser.For years, Mr. McCarthy has traveled to hundreds of districts across the country, bringing in millions of dollars in campaign cash for candidates and helping Republicans win control of the House in 2022. He has said he planned to remain engaged in Republican politics.“I will continue to recruit our country’s best and brightest to run for elected office,” Mr. McCarthy said in announcing his plans to leave the House in The Wall Street Journal. “The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders.”During his time as speaker, Mr. McCarthy brought in $78 million for his colleagues’ re-election efforts, more than 100 times the amount of money Mr. Johnson had collected before becoming speaker.His support of new candidates will be aided by a campaign account with more than $10 million at his disposal. Even after leaving office, Mr. McCarthy can use the campaign funds to establish a political action committee or directly support other campaigns. He has signaled that he would like to play a substantial role, and many lawmakers and aides believe he may intervene in party primaries to target the far-right Republicans who led the push to oust him from the speakership.Republicans are holding their breath for more exits.More than three dozen incumbents from both parties in both chambers have said they will not seek re-election. If even a handful more House Republicans leave in the coming months, it could wipe away their majority before a single vote is cast in the 2024 election. Another Republican, Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, has announced that he will leave Congress in several months to become the president of Youngstown State University, though he has not said precisely when.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and one of Mr. McCarthy’s strongest allies, expressed her frustration over the eroding majority in a post on social media, saying, “Hopefully no one dies.” More

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    Your Iowa Caucus Questions, Answered

    The state with the first balloting for 2024 is overflowing with candidates and reporters ahead of the Republican caucuses on Jan. 15. Here’s what to know.It’s the December before a presidential election, which means that Iowa is overflowing with candidates and reporters for its quadrennial caucuses.This year looks different, though — because Democrats have moved their first votes to other states, and because a single candidate so dominates the Republican field.Here’s what to know.What are the Iowa caucuses and how do they work?Though “primaries and caucuses” are often lumped together, they are not the same. Primaries operate the way most elections do: Voters cast ballots privately through early-voting or mail-in options, or at a polling site on Election Day. Caucuses, by contrast, require voters to attend at a specific hour and discuss their preferences publicly.At each local caucus in Iowa — in school gymnasiums, community centers and even churches — Republicans will make speeches in favor of their preferred candidates. Then caucusgoers will take a vote, and candidates’ delegates to the county convention will be nominated based on that vote. No remote participation, such as by mail or phone, will be allowed.You may have heard terms like “viability” and “realignment” in relation to the Iowa caucuses. Those refer to the Democrats’ traditional process, in which caucusgoers sorted themselves physically according to which candidate they supported. Candidates whose support was below a viability threshold were eliminated, and their supporters were able to realign with a viable candidate. Republicans do not have those procedures, and Democrats have dropped them.Caucuses have many critics because they are less accessible than primaries. There is no flexibility — people have to arrive on time and stay until the end — which means those who have to work or are otherwise unavailable at that hour are out of luck. People with disabilities often struggle to participate. So do people who feel unsafe, or simply uncomfortable, disclosing their political preferences.Most states that once held caucuses have switched to primaries, but Iowa is an exception.When are the caucuses?The Republican caucuses will be held on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. local time.The Democratic caucuses will be held by mail. The first ballots — technically “preference cards” — will be mailed out on Jan. 12, and voters can request one until Feb. 19. Though Iowa Democrats can attend in-person gatherings on Jan. 15 to conduct other party business, they will not choose a presidential candidate then.Why are the Republican and Democratic caucuses different?The Iowa Republican Party and the Iowa Democratic Party control their own caucus procedures, and they have long chosen different ones. But the procedures are especially different this cycle because the Democratic National Committee changed its primary calendar at President Biden’s urging, while the Republican National Committee stuck to its old one.The Democrats’ rationale was to prioritize states more racially diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, which are overwhelmingly white. Their first two states are now South Carolina, on Feb. 3, and Nevada, on Feb. 6, and Iowa is out of the early lineup. (By the D.N.C.’s schedule, New Hampshire would have voted on the same day as Nevada. But it refused to cede its first-in-the-nation primary status, which is enshrined in state law, and scheduled an unsanctioned primary for Jan. 23.)Why does Iowa go first (for Republicans)?Today, the answer is, “Because it always has.” A common argument is that, since Iowans have spent decades shouldering the responsibility of being first, they are uniquely well informed and engaged. They know how much power they hold to winnow presidential fields, this argument goes, and they take that responsibility more seriously than voters elsewhere would.Initially, though, Iowa got its spot by historical accident.After the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, Democrats changed their nominating process to give voters more say than party insiders. Until 1968, the party held popular votes in just a handful of states, while the rest chose a candidate at conventions; after 1968, the balance shifted strongly to popular votes in the form of primaries or caucuses.Iowa Democrats happened to schedule the earliest vote in 1972. Iowa Republicans, realizing the timing could work to the state’s benefit, followed suit in 1976 — and, on the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter took advantage of the Iowa caucuses that year to propel himself from relative obscurity to the front of the presidential pack.The power of going first thus clearly demonstrated, the Iowa Legislature passed a law requiring the state to continue scheduling its caucuses before any others.Jimmy Carter campaigning in Des Moines in 1976, the year Iowa catapulted his candidacy.Associated PressHow do the delegates work?Each precinct will be assigned a number of delegates to elect to a county convention based on the results of the caucus vote in that precinct.Over the ensuing months, the county and state conventions will confirm Iowa’s 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention, where the party’s presidential nominee will be officially chosen based on who wins a majority of the more than 2,000 delegates available nationwide.When do we typically have results?The leaders of each local Republican caucus will report results to the state party, which will tabulate and release the statewide results. This usually happens pretty quickly, within a few hours.Since Democrats are voting by mail this year, and Iowa is no longer first for them, their results won’t come until March 5.Why were there so many delays and problems in 2020?The Iowa Democrats’ reporting process collapsed in 2020, preventing them from releasing any significant results on the night of the caucuses and the full results for days.The caucusing itself went fairly smoothly, but a new app through which precincts were supposed to report their results failed and backup phone lines were jammed, so the state party couldn’t obtain the numbers. When the results were finally tabulated, they were full of errors and inconsistencies — products of manual calculations by precinct officials — and the party conducted a partial recanvass followed by a partial recount.A complicating factor was that the Iowa Democratic Party had promised to release multiple sets of results — not only the number of state-convention delegates each candidate had earned, which would determine the caucuses’ winner, but also how many supporters each candidate had in the first and second rounds of voting.That promise stemmed from 2016, when Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the caucuses by the tiniest of margins, and Mr. Sanders fought for an audit and accused the state party of a lack of transparency because it had not released the first- and second-round totals.Producing multiple tallies provided a more comprehensive picture and allowed for errors to be identified, but it worsened the delays when the systems failed.What is Iowa’s importance to the rest of the race?Iowa is all about momentum — the nebulous idea of who is rising and who is dead in the water, which can affect voters’ choices in other states.In terms of actual numbers, Iowa doesn’t matter much. It accounts for a tiny fraction of the delegates awarded nationwide. But its ability to set perceptions is so strong that candidates often drop out after doing poorly there, unless they have reason to believe they will do significantly better in New Hampshire. More

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    Christie to Ramaswamy at Debate: ‘So Shut Up for a Little While’

    Chris Christie had had enough.After standing mostly silent for the first 25 minutes of the Republican presidential debate, Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, stepped into the spotlight — and in front of an attack on Nikki Haley by Vivek Ramaswamy — with the blunt force that has become his political trademark.“Let me tell you something,” Mr. Christie barked at Mr. Ramaswamy, waving his hand after Mr. Ramaswamy suggested Ms. Haley was lacking basic knowledge about the war in Ukraine. “This is the fourth debate that you would be voted in the first 20 minutes as the most obnoxious blowhard in America. So shut up for a little while.”Mr. Ramaswamy managed a quick laugh, and quickly tried to interrupt. But Mr. Christie maintained control of the microphone, yelling at his rival across the stage in Alabama that he wasn’t finished speaking. Mr. Ramaswamy, who has been aggressive with his debate disruptions, stood down.But not for long. Mr. Ramaswamy bided his time, and then it got ugly.“Chris, your version of foreign policy experience was closing a bridge from New Jersey to New York,” Mr. Ramaswamy soon shot back, scowling at Mr. Christie across the stage and wagging his right index finger at him.It was a dig at Mr. Christie’s most devastating political moment, when his administration in New Jersey effectively shut down a busy bridge to New York as political retribution against a small-town mayor who hadn’t endorsed his re-election bid. And Mr. Ramaswamy had another sharp dig in store aimed at Mr. Christie’s weight.“So do everybody a favor,” Mr. Ramaswamy told Mr. Christie. “Just walk yourself off that stage, enjoy a nice meal and get the hell out of this race.” More

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    Christie Lashes Out at Trump as a ‘Dictator’ and a ‘Bully’

    For more than 15 minutes, three of the four Republican candidates on the debate stage fended off sharp questions from Megyn Kelly and made a case for their electability. But as they attacked one another’s records, former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the race, was notably absent from the conversation.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Mr. Trump’s fiercest critic among his Republican opponents, took notice.“I look at my watch now. We’re 17 minutes into this debate,” Mr. Christie said to Ms. Kelly. “And except for your little speech in the beginning, we’ve had these three acting as if the race is between the four of us.”Mr. Christie, referring to Mr. Trump as “the fifth guy” and “Voldemort, he who shall not be named,” mocked the former president as a coward who “doesn’t have the guts to show up and stand here” — and denounced the other candidates for fighting among themselves while ignoring their strongest opponent, who skipped Wednesday’s debate to attend a private fund-raiser.Referring to Mr. Trump as a “dictator,” a “bully” and an “angry, bitter man,” Mr. Christie criticized his opponents on the debate stage — Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis — as too timid to criticize the former president. Maybe, he suggested, they were unwilling to do so because “they have future aspirations,” an allusion to succeeding Mr. Trump or becoming a member of his administration.“This is the problem with my three colleagues. They’re afraid to offend,” Mr. Christie said. Referring to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, he added, “And if you’re afraid to offend Donald Trump, then what are you going to do when you sit across from President Xi?”Mr. Christie also pointed to Mr. Trump’s statements about his plans to go after his political enemies if elected to a second term, in an attempt to make the case to Trump supporters that the former president is unfit to return to the White House.“There’s no bigger issue in this race than Donald Trump,” Mr. Christie said, later adding, “This is an angry, bitter man who now wants to be back as president because he wants to exact retribution on anyone who has disagreed with him.”His comments reflected a debate strategy of sharply criticizing Mr. Trump — even if the former president is physically absent, and even if the attacks get Mr. Christie booed by Trump supporters in the audience.Mr. Christie has sought a face-to-face confrontation with Mr. Trump, and he has often expressed his frustration about having to compete against a front-runner who doesn’t want to face his opponents in a debate. More

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    Colorado Supreme Court Takes Up Trump’s Eligibility to Be President

    A district court judge ruled last month that the 14th Amendment barred insurrectionists from every office except the nation’s highest. “How is that not absurd?” one justice asked of that notion.The Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday on the question of whether former President Donald J. Trump is barred from holding office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it.Several of the seven justices appeared skeptical of arguments made by a lawyer for Mr. Trump, including the core one that a district court judge relied on in a ruling last month ordering Mr. Trump to be included on the Colorado primary ballot: that Section 3 did not apply to the presidency. The Colorado Supreme Court is hearing an appeal of that ruling as part of a lawsuit brought by Republican and independent voters in the state who, in seeking to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, have contended the opposite.“How is that not absurd?” Justice Richard L. Gabriel asked of the notion that the lawmakers who wrote Section 3 in the wake of the Civil War had intended to disqualify insurrectionists from every office except the nation’s highest.Section 3 lists a number of positions an insurrectionist is disqualified from holding but not explicitly the presidency, so challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility rely on the argument that the presidency is included in the phrases “officer of the United States” and “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” It also does not specify who gets to decide whether someone is an insurrectionist: election officials and courts, as the petitioners argue, or Congress itself, as Mr. Trump’s team argues.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Scott Gessler, suggested on Wednesday that the lawmakers had trusted the Electoral College to prevent an insurrectionist from becoming president, and that they had known the Northern states held enough electoral power after the Civil War to prevent a Confederate leader from winning a national election anyway.Justice Gabriel did not seem satisfied, and neither did colleagues who jumped in with follow-up questions. Justice Monica M. Márquez asked why lawmakers would have chosen the “indirect” route of blocking someone only through the Electoral College. And Justice Melissa Hart asked whether Mr. Gessler’s interpretation of Section 3 would have allowed Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, to become president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Nevada Charges Republican Party Leaders in 2020 Fake Elector Scheme

    The six Republicans charged on Wednesday included the state party’s chairman and vice chairman as well as the chairman of the Republican Party in Clark County.A Nevada grand jury indicted top leaders of the state’s Republican Party on charges of forging and submitting fraudulent documents in the fake elector scheme to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, the state’s attorney general announced on Wednesday.The six Republicans charged, who claimed to be electors for Donald J. Trump, included the chairman of the state party, Michael J. McDonald. Also included are Jim Hindle, the state party’s vice chairman; Jim DeGraffenreid, a national committeeman; Jesse Law, the chairman of the Republican Party in Clark County, home to Las Vegas; and Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice, executive board members of the Republican Party in Douglas County.“When the efforts to undermine faith in our democracy began after the 2020 election, I made it clear that I would do everything in my power to defend the institutions of our nation and our state,” Aaron D. Ford, Nevada’s attorney general and a Democrat, said in a statement. “We cannot allow attacks on democracy to go unchallenged. Today’s indictments are the product of a long and thorough investigation, and as we pursue this prosecution, I am confident that our judicial system will see justice done.”The charges are the latest in a nationwide effort by officials to prosecute those who falsely portrayed themselves as state electors in an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020. Michigan’s attorney general charged 16 Republicans in July for a similar effort in the state.The plan involved creating false slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in seven swing states that were won by Mr. Biden in an effort to overturn the election.Kenneth Chesebro, a key player in the fake elector scheme, is listed as a witness in the Nevada indictments. Mr. Chesebro had earlier pleaded guilty in a criminal racketeering indictment in Georgia that accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Chesebro had also agreed to cooperate with state prosecutors in that case.The six Republicans were each charged in similar four-page indictments with one count of forging certificates designating Nevada’s electoral votes for Mr. Trump, even though Mr. Biden won the state in 2020. They were also each charged with one count of knowingly submitting these fake certificates to state and federal officials.If convicted, the false electors face a combined maximum of nine years in prison and $15,000 in fines. More

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    ‘This Is Grim,’ One Democratic Pollster Says

    The predictive power of horse-race polling a year from the presidential election is weak at best. The Biden campaign can take some comfort in that. But what recent surveys do reveal is that the coalition that put Joe Biden in the White House in the first place is nowhere near as strong as it was four years ago.These danger signs include fraying support among core constituencies, including young voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, and the decline, if not the erasure, of traditional Democratic advantages in representing the interests of the middle class and speaking for the average voter.Any of these on their own might not be cause for alarm, but taken together they present a dangerous situation for Biden.From Nov. 5 through Nov. 11, Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, surveyed 2,500 voters in presidential and Senate battleground states as well as competitive House districts.In an email, Greenberg summarized the results: “This is grim.” The study, he said, found that collectively, voters in the Democratic base of “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.”On 32 subjects ranging from abortion to China, the Democracy Corps survey asked voters to choose which would be better, “Biden and the Democrats” or “Trump and the Republicans.”Biden and the Democrats led on six: women’s rights (ahead by 17 points), climate change (15 points), addressing racial inequality (10 points), health care (3 points), the president will not be an autocrat (plus 2) and protecting Democracy (plus 1). There was a tie on making democracy more secure.Donald Trump and the Republicans held leads on the remaining subjects, including being for working people (a 7-point advantage), standing up to elites (8 points), being able to get things done for the American people (12 points), feeling safe (12 points) and keeping wages and salaries up with the cost of living (17 points).In the case of issues that traditionally favor Republicans, Trump and his allies held commanding leads: patriotism (11 points), crime (17 points), immigration (20 points) and border security (22 points).Particularly worrisome for Democrats, who plan to demonize Trump as a threat to democracy, are the advantages Trump and Republicans have on opposing extremism (3 points), getting beyond the chaos (6 points) and protecting the Constitution (8 points).There is some evidence in both the Democracy Corp survey and in other polls that concerns specific to Biden — including his age and the surge in prices during his presidency — are driving the perception of Democratic weakness rather than discontent with the party itself.The survey found, for example, that Democratic candidates in House battleground districts are running even with their Republican opponents among all voters, and two points ahead among voters who say they are likely to cast ballots on Election Day.Along similar lines, a November 2023 NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden by two points, 46-44, but when voters were asked to choose between Trump and an unnamed Democratic candidate, the generic Democrat won 46-40.In a reflection of both Biden’s and Trump’s high unfavorability ratings, NBC reported that when voters were asked to choose between Biden and an unnamed generic Republican, the “Republican candidate” led Biden 48-37.Other nonpartisan polls describe similar Democratic weaknesses. A September Morning Consult survey found, for example, that “voters are now more likely to see the Republican Party as capable of governing, tackling big issues and keeping the country safe compared with the Democratic Party” and that “by a 9-point margin, voters also see the Democratic Party as more ideologically extreme than the G.O.P.”In the main, according to Morning Consult, these weaknesses result from declining confidence within Democratic ranks in their own party, rather than strong support for Trump and the Republican Party: “The trends against the Democratic Party are largely driven by worsening perceptions among its own voter base, which suggests that the party will have to rely more than ever on negative partisanship to keep control of the White House.”Morning Consult posed the same set of questions to voters about the political parties in 2020 and again this year in order to track shifting voter attitudes.Asked, for example which party is more “capable of governing,” 48 percent of voters in 2020 said the Democrats and 42 percent said the Republicans. This year, 47 percent said the Republicans and 44 percent said the Democrats.Similar shifts occurred on the question of which party will “keep the nation safe” and which party can “tackle the big issues.”In what amounts to a body blow to Biden and his Democratic allies, Republicans are now virtually tied with Democrats on a matter that has been a mainstay of Democratic support since the formation of the New Deal coalition during the Great Depression. A September 2023 NBC News survey “found that 34 percent of voters believe Republicans are better at looking out for the middle class, while 36 percent say the same of Democrats. The 2-point margin in favor of Democrats is the lowest it has been in the history of the poll.”“Democrats have held over 30 years as high as a 29-point advantage as being the party better able to deal with and handle issues of concern to the middle class, ” Bill McInturff, a partner in the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which joined with the Democratic firm Hart Research to conduct the NBC poll, told me.Neil Newhouse, who is also a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, emailed me to say that the opinion trends among Black and Hispanic voters “are figures G.O.P.’ers could only dream about a few years ago.”Although many of those with whom I discussed the data voiced deep concern over Biden’s prospects, let me cite a couple of experts who are more optimistic.Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic operative and former president of the New Democratic Network, emailed me a series of bullet points:The last four presidential elections have gone 51 percent-46 percent Democratic, best run for Dems since F.D.R.’s elections. Only 1 R — George W. Bush 2004 — has broken 48 percent since the 1992 election, and Dems have won more votes in seven of last eight presidential elections. If there is a party with a coalition problem, it is them, not us.Our performance since Dobbs remains remarkable, and important. In 2022 we gained in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA over 2020, getting to 59 percent in CO, 57 percent in PA, 55 percent in MI, 54 percent in NH in that “red wave” year. This year we’ve won and outperformed across the country in every kind of election, essentially leaving this a blue wave year.We got to 56 percent in the WI SCOTUS race, 57 percent in Ohio, flipped Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, flipped the VA House, Kentucky Governor Andrew Beshear grew his margin, we won mayoralties and school board races across the United States. Elections are about winning and losing, and we keep winning and they keep losing.In a recent post on his Substack, “Why I Am Optimistic About 2024,” Rosenberg elaborated:Opposition and fear of MAGA is the dominant force in U.S. politics today, and that is a big problem for super-MAGA Trump in 2024. Fear and opposition to MAGA has been propelling our electoral wins since 2018, and will almost certainly do so again next year.Alex Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, expressed similar optimism concerning Biden’s chances: “Once Democrats come to terms with the fact that Biden will be the nominee (and, more importantly, that Trump will in all likelihood be the G.O.P. nominee), a lot of the internal malaise expressed in current polls should dissipate.”When Biden begins campaigning in earnest, Theodoridis wrote,He will likely still come across as relatively competent and steady. And, while Trump always looms over G.O.P. politics, we will certainly see more coverage of him as G.O.P. nominee to remind less engaged Democrats and the few true independents that he is a deeply flawed figure who has and would again pose a real threat to our Republic.When voters finally make up their minds, Theodoridis predicted, “The anti-MAGA, pro-democracy, pro-reproductive-rights message that has boosted turnout and served Democratic candidates well the last two Novembers will likely do so again.”Jim Kessler, a senior vice president of Third Way, a Democratic think tank, is nowhere near as confident in Democratic prospects as Rosenberg and Theodoridis are. In an email, Kessler observed that polls at this time need to be taken with a grain of salt — remarking that in 1991, George H.W. Bush appeared to be the prohibitive favorite to win a second term and that in 2011, Mitt Romney was well ahead of President Barack Obama.In addition, Kessler wrote, in the past month,The price of gasoline has fallen 20 cents to a national average of $3.24 a gallon. Headline and core inflation have begun their final descent toward benign, historic levels. Interest rates have fallen about 40 basis points in the past several months. The so-called “misery index” (inflation + unemployment rate) could very well be at a level that is incumbent friendly.That said, Kessler continued, there are clear danger signs:Biden won in 2020 because he was perceived as having a more positive brand than the Democratic Party. That brand advantage over the Democratic Party is now gone. Exhibits A and B are crime and immigration. In 2020, Biden was perceived as tougher on crime and the border than the typical Democrat.In one primary debate, Kessler pointed out,Biden was the only candidate onstage not to raise his hand on a question that essentially could be interpreted as wanting open borders. He also loudly and repeatedly voiced his opposition to “defund the police” and never ran away from the 1994 crime bill that he authored in the Senate.That, in Kessler’s view, “is not the Joe Biden voters are hearing today. Voters actually hear almost nothing from the administration on crime or the border, and this allows the opposition to define them on an issue of great salience.”Biden, Kessler argued, has a credible record on tougher border enforcement and cracking down on crime, but he and other members of the administration don’t promote itbecause these are issues on which our active, progressive base is split. But if you are silent on these issues, it is like an admission of guilt to voters. They believe you do not care or are dismissive of their very real concerns. That means Biden must accept some griping from the left to get this story out to the vast middle.Will Marshall, president and founder of the center-left Public Policy Institute think tank, responded to my query with an emailed question: “Trump is Kryptonite for American democracy, so why isn’t President Biden leading him by 15 points?”Marshall’s answer:Biden’s basic problem is that the Democratic Party keeps shrinking, leaving it with a drastically slender margin of error. It’s losing working class voters — whites — by enormous, 30-point margins — but nonwhites without college degrees are slipping away too.The ascendance of largely white, college-educated liberals within party ranks, in Marshall’s view, haspushed Democrats far to the dogmatic left, even as their base grows smaller. Young progressives have identified the party with stances on immigration, crime, gender, climate change and Palestinian resistance that are so far from mainstream sentiment that they can even eclipse MAGA extremism.“Democrats,” Marshall wrote, in a line of argument similar to Kessler’s,have been aiming at the wrong target and have less than a year to adjust their sights. That means putting high prices and living costs front and center, embracing cultural pragmatism, confronting left-wing radicalism on the border, public safety and Israel and embracing a post-populist economics that speaks to working Americans’ aspirations for growth and upward mobility rather than their presumed sense of economic victimhood.Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, contended that the view of Biden and the Democratic Party as elitist and weak on the very values that were Democratic strengths in the past lacks foundation in practice. Instead, the adverse portrait of the Democrats represents a major success on the part of right-wing media — and a complicit mainstream media — in creating a false picture of the party.In a forthcoming paper, “Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats’ New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution,” Hacker said he and three colleagues found thatDemocrats have not changed their orientation nearly as much as critics of the party argue. In particular, the party has not shifted its emphasis from economic to social/identity issues, nor has it moderated its economic positions overall. Instead, it has placed a high priority on an ambitious economic program that involves a wider range of policy aims and instruments than in the past (including industrial policy and pro-labor initiatives as well as social and health policies and public investments) as well as levels of public spending that dwarf those contemplated by party elites in at least a half century.Why then, Hacker asked, is “the Democratic Party widely perceived to have abandoned pocketbook politics in favor of identity politics?”His answer:Conservative media have relentlessly focused on this critique and there’s strong evidence that media framing shapes how voters view the parties. Indeed, the role of the media in shaping the negative current climate — including more mainstream sources — should not be neglected. The obsessions of right-wing media with the “wokeness” of the Democratic Party seeps into the broader media coverage, and mainstream sources focus on criticisms of the Democrats, in part to uphold their nonpartisan ideal.Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, warned that there are major consequences that could result from the weakness of Biden’s support. In an email, Enos wrote:There is no doubt that Democrats and — given that the likely Republican nominee is a would-be authoritarian — Americans more generally should be alarmed by Biden’s poll numbers. He is saddled with the need to dig economic perceptions out of a deep inflationary hole, an unsteady international world and the view that his party went too far to the left on social issues.If the election were held today, Enos argued, “Biden would likely lose.”During the campaign, “Biden’s numbers will improve,” Enos wrote, but Biden faces a large number of idealistic young voters who maynever come back to him because they believe that he has abandoned the core values that animated their support in the first place. Faced with the reality of surging immigration across the southern border, Biden has largely failed to liberalize his administration’s approach to immigration — in fact, he has left much of the Trump era policies in place. To many young voters, who were first attracted to Biden’s social progressivism, such moves may feel like a betrayal. Additionally, Biden has seemed to greenlight Israel’s campaign of violence against civilians in Gaza. Especially for young voters of color, this seems like a betrayal and could cost Biden crucial states such as Michigan.Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, stands somewhere between Rosenberg and Marshall.“There’s no gainsaying Biden’s poor polling numbers at the present,” Weiler wrote by email:However unhinged Trump appears increasingly to be, for now that’s an abstraction for many voters. In the meantime, what they see in ways that feel up close and personal are signs of an unsettled and unsettling world impinging on their day to day lives, including inflation, higher crime and a big increase in migrants across our southern border and into cities around the United States.On the plus side for Biden, Weiler wrote, “the data show clearly that inflation is trending substantially downward.” In addition,Violent crime has returned to prepandemic levels. Americans always think crime is going up, no matter what the data say. But if the actual drop in crime results in people thinking about it less, that could also lessen people’s sense of a chaotic and unsettled reality.Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, made the case that Biden’s age and his visible infirmities interfere with his ability to reassure the electorate:The biggest factor that is neglected in many polls is the widespread belief that Biden is simply too old and insufficiently vigorous to remain president for four more years. This belief is reinforced by the reality that Biden does not inspire confidence in his vigor or energy in most of his public presentations. The problem is particularly acute among young voters but goes throughout the electorate, Democrats and Republicans alike. It means that voters don’t give much weight to Biden’s arguments on the issues.Democrats are trapped, Smith maintained:None will challenge Biden; he must choose to step aside. If he did so, he would feel compelled to support Kamala Harris. But most Democrats, and probably Biden himself, rightly believe that she would do even worse than he is doing.The one ace in the hole for Democrats is Donald Trump himself. As the center of attention in the elections of 2018, 2020 and even 2022, Trump was the key to Democratic victory. Trump is doing all he can to become the focus in 2024, but the question remains whether the Democrats, with Biden at the top of the ticket, can successfully demonize him again.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More