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      How Insularity Defined the Last Stages of Biden’s Career

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      Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s aides did not want him to speak with me.For months, as I worked on a book about the 2024 presidential election, I made multiple requests for an interview with Mr. Biden. One of my co-authors had sat down with President-elect Donald J. Trump, and we felt it was critical to talk to Mr. Biden. But the former president’s aides said he was working on a memoir, and that would conflict with my book.Yet when I reached Mr. Biden on his cellphone in late March, he answered and agreed to talk. He broke his silence on his successor to criticize the early weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. “I don’t see anything he’s done that’s been productive,” the former president said.When I asked if he had any regrets about dropping out of the presidential race, Mr. Biden said, in a detached tone, “No, not now. I don’t spend a lot of time on regrets.” Then he hung up because he was boarding an Amtrak train.My brief conversation with Mr. Biden prompted a cascade of concern among his top aides. One screamed at me for calling the former president directly. Others texted furiously, trying to figure out how I had obtained Mr. Biden’s phone number.Mr. Biden had seemed open to continuing the conversation, but my subsequent calls went straight to voice mail. His automated greeting simply said, “Joe.”Two days later, that greeting was replaced by a message from Verizon Wireless: “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected or is no longer in service.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dan Osborn to Seek Pete Ricketts’s Nebraska Senate Seat, Stressing Class Issues

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      A steamfitter and former union leader, running as an independent but with Democratic support, will take on the Republican incumbent, a billionaire’s son.Dan Osborn, a steamfitter and former labor leader from Nebraska who ran a surprisingly close campaign for a Senate seat as an independent last year, announced Tuesday that he would run for the Senate again in 2026.Mr. Osborn said in an interview that he would aim to draw a sharp contrast between his working-class background and the profile of Senator Pete Ricketts, the Republican incumbent, who is an heir to billions his father made in the financial services industry.“It’s the C.E.O. from Omaha versus the guy from the shop floor from Omaha, so that’s going be the fundamental difference,” Mr. Osborn said.Mr. Osborn, 50, faces a steep climb against Mr. Ricketts. Republicans have won every House and Senate seat in Nebraska since 2014, when Brad Ashford, a Democrat who had previously been a Republican, won a single term in the House.Mr. Ricketts, 60, who has spent tens of millions of dollars on Nebraska campaigns for himself and other Republicans, is not likely to be surprised by Mr. Osborn, as was Senator Deb Fischer last year, when Mr. Osborn, running a populist campaign, outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in the state by 13 percentage points. Ms. Fisher defeated Mr. Osborn by 6.6 percentage points.In a campaign announcement video, Mr. Osborn disparages Mr. Ricketts as someone who inherited billions from his father, calls him Wall Street Pete and accuses him of turning his back on Nebraska’s working people. “Bye, Pete,” Mr. Osborn says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Gender Gap That Ate the Democrats

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      Much of the analysis of the 2024 election focused on Democratic losses among working-class minorities, especially Hispanic and Black voters. But the dominant theme of the contest was, in fact, the broader shift of men of all races and ethnicities to the Republican Party.If men had supported Kamala Harris at the same level as women did, Harris would have won the popular vote and possibly the Electoral College. Donald Trump beat her by 2.28 million votes, in an election that saw the male vote for the Democratic presidential nominee fall by 3.54 million from 2020 to 2024 and the female vote fall by just over 844,000.The Democratic Party lost ground in the 2024 election among almost all demographic groups — white people, Black people, Latinos, the young, rural and exurban voters — but all the defections had one thing in common: Democratic losses were significantly greater among men than among women.These developments are well documented in two extensive election analyses by organizations that offer some of the best demographic studies of voting patterns: “What Happened in 2024” by Catalist, a liberal voter-study firm, and “Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition” by Pew Research.Catalist found that in 2024 Harris, the second woman to run for president as the Democratic nominee, received just 1 percent less support than Joe Biden did in 2020 from white women, while Harris’s backing from white men fell by four percentage points. Among Black voters, Harris saw a one-point drop among women and an eight-point decline among Black men; among Latinos, Harris lost seven points among women, 12 points among men.Catalist summarized its findings on the differences between the partisan shifts of men and women:The partisan gender gap remains high and grew in 2024. Women have long been more likely to support Democrats than men do. The gender gap in partisan preferences increased in 2024: women continued to support Harris (55 percent support) at roughly the same levels that they supported Biden in 2020 (56 percent). But men moved toward Trump in 2024, from 48 percent support for Biden in 2020 to 42 percent support for Harris in 2024.The most severe declines in Democratic voting, according to Catalist, “were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support for Democrats from 2020 to 2024 among young Black men dropped from 85 percent to 75 percent and support among young Latino men dropped from 63 percent to 47 percent.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Grip That Race and Identity Have on My Students

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      In the spring of 2023, in a cramped classroom in the Hudson Valley, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the courage to think about race in unconventional ways. It revolved around reading books by Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson and Albert Murray. These minds had shaped and refined my thinking about the idea of America, the fundamentally mongrel populations that inhabit it, as well as the yet-to-be-perfected flesh-and-blood nation of the future we might one day bring forth in unison.Early in the semester, as I waxed exuberant about the unifying possibilities of the 2008 election, I was met by a conference table ringed with blank stares. For my clever and earnest students, I realized, the earth-shattering political achievements of the beleaguered but still unfolding present were nothing but the vaguest rumor of an abstract history.“Professor,” a diligent young woman from Queens who described herself as Latina and applied a no-nonsense activist lens and corresponding vocabulary to most engagements with the world, voiced what all her classmates must have been thinking. “I was 4 years old in 2008. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”Their experience of this country, and themselves, couldn’t have differed more from my own, or from many of the 19th- and 20th-century authors on our syllabus. I assigned these writers because they had so courageously laid the intellectual and moral framework that a figure like Barack Obama would one day harness.I am old enough now to appreciate that there can be only one politician in your lifetime who can truly move you to dream. I feel lucky to have had that experience through Mr. Obama. My students that semester — white, Latino and Asian teens and 20-somethings whose political views had been forged in relation to the reactionary populism of Donald Trump and through a certain skepticism of the American idea itself — had yet to encounter such an inspirational figure. Race pessimism, even a kind of mass learned helplessness, was instead the weather that enveloped them.When my friend Coleman Hughes guest-lectured on his case for colorblindness, several of them were visibly unnerved, suggesting that the idea itself was a form of anti-Blackness. Most maintained that one could no more “retire” from race, as Adrian Piper — another of the authors we wrestled with — aspired to do, than one could teleport up from the classroom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Democrats Find Their Way on Immigration?

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      The Democrats onstage saw themselves as morally courageous. American voters, it turned out, saw a group of politicians hopelessly out of touch.Standing side by side at a primary debate in June 2019, nine of the party’s candidates for president were asked to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Only one of them held still.Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction.Last year, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration, nearly twice as many as in 2020, and the first time since 2005 that a majority had said so. The embrace of a more punitive approach to illegal immigration includes not only white voters but also working-class Latinos, whose support Democrats had long courted with liberal border policies.“When you have the most Latino district in the country outside of Puerto Rico vote for Trump, that should be a wake-up call for the Democratic Party,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, who saw Mr. Trump win every county in his district along the border with Mexico. “This is a Democratic district that’s been blue for over a century.”The Trump administration is pursuing the harshest crackdown on immigrants since World War II, an effort many Democrats see as a national crisis.Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Road Map for Undoing the Damage of the Big, Awful Bill

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      In the 30 years I have been a part of fiscal policymaking I don’t think I have ever seen a legislative push as impressive as the passage of President Trump’s big, dubious tax and policy bill.Don’t get me wrong: The consequences for health insurance, poverty, climate change and macroeconomic stability, in roughly that order of importance, will be horrendous. The Medicaid and other health care changes would undo about three-quarters of the coverage expansion from President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion. The law repeals much of what Joe Biden did for climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act. The tax provisions sustain most of the cuts from Mr. Trump’s first term and add in several others for good measure.But before Democrats — and hopefully some Republicans — even try to fix the damage, they should learn the lessons of how the Republicans got all this done, working against tremendous odds on a much faster timetable than the major legislative accomplishments from Mr. Trump’s three predecessors.The first lesson is that ideas really do matter. This legislation did not happen because the public or lobbyists were clamoring for it. Instead Donald Trump and congressional Republicans wanted it and were willing to overcome public disfavor and opposition from vested interests.Sure, special interests were at play in ways big (preserving workarounds to limits on state and local tax deductions) and small (getting new tax breaks for Alaskan whaling captains). But no major lobbying groups were asking for the broad contours of this legislation. The health care industry, which is expected to lose about half a trillion dollars, and the energy industry, which is losing huge tax breaks and subsidies, put up a fight. Their opposition, like that of other industries, went nowhere. And neither did Elon Musk’s — further evidence that oligarchy is the wrong lens through which to view this political moment.The second lesson is that while ideas matter, expert ideas do not necessarily matter. Past fiscal debates have divided economists and policy wonks. In President Trump’s first term, some economists would write opinion articles or go on TV news programs defending his tax cuts as adding to growth while other economists (including me) would write rebuttals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Trump’s Bill, Democrats See a Path to Win Back Voters

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      Top party officials consider the president’s sweeping domestic policy bill to be cruel and fiscally ruinous — and they’re betting the American public will, too.Demoralized Democrats who have denounced President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill have landed on a silver lining. It is so unpopular with voters, they say, that it could win them back one, if not both, chambers of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.Top officials in the party, who see the bill as cruel, fiscally ruinous and the single biggest wealth transfer in American history, expect that they can blame Republicans who voted for the loss of health care coverage, nursing home care and food security for millions of Americans in order to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favor the wealthy.And they have plenty of quotes from Republicans like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska denouncing their own bill that, Democrats say, will make the argument that much more potent.“There’s going to be some powerful ads,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader, before rattling off potential scripts for advertisements that are set to begin airing as early as next week. “‘My daughter had cancer. She was doing fine. Well, all of a sudden, her health care was blown up.’ ‘I worked at this rural hospital for 30 years. I put my heart into it because I wanted to help people. I was fired.’ Stuff like that is going to really matter.”It may take a while for people to feel the full effects of the bill because Republicans front-loaded some temporary tax cuts for working people, like no taxes on tips, that were engineered to appeal to working-class voters. The cuts to Medicaid are not set to be implemented until after the midterm elections.Still, there were some immediate effects. A clinic in southwest Nebraska announced this week that it was closing, blaming anticipated cuts to Medicaid. And Democrats said they expected millions of people to feel the impact from the bill’s allowing credits from the Affordable Care Act to expire. It will be up to Democrats over the next year to drive home the argument that these policies are the fault of Republican lawmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Zohran Mamdani Won by Listening. Democrats Should Try It.

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      In the doldrums of last November, depressed and paralyzed by Donald Trump’s victory, I stumbled upon a video in my social media feed of an affable young man in a suit and tie, microphone in hand, interviewing voters in immigrant-heavy areas in Queens and the Bronx.“Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?” he asks. And then, “Who did you vote for?”Some didn’t vote at all. But many voted for Trump.What struck me about the video was the young man’s open-ended curiosity. Through it all, he simply listened to the responses to his questions, his friendly face inquisitive.Toward the end of the video he finally makes his pitch to a voter: “You know, we have a mayor’s race coming up next year, and if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality — are those things that you’d support?”“Absolutely,” the man replies.New York Democrats did indeed embrace that message, vaulting that young man, Zohran Mamdani, who was as unknown to most New Yorkers as he was to me, to the top of the heap last month in the very crowded Democratic mayoral primary field. Like many people, I was resigned to an Andrew Cuomo romp, despite his odious past and his lazy campaign. Instead, we got an electrifying rout by a young, charismatic democratic socialist. When the final tally under ranked-choice voting was announced on Tuesday, Mamdani had won 56 percent of the vote, a 12-point margin on Cuomo, the heavy favorite.In the dizzying days since that stunning upset, there has been a great deal of hand-wringing about its meaning. Unsurprisingly, Republicans have had a racist freakout, portraying Mamdani, a Muslim who was born in Uganda to Indian-origin parents, as a dangerous jihadist who will impose Shariah law and invite the slaughter of Jewish New Yorkers. Without a trace of irony, they have also pilloried him as a godless Communist who will destroy the financial capital of the United States by seizing the means of production. Trump mused about arresting him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More