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      Americans Are Signing Up for Obamacare in Record Numbers

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      The NewsMore than 15 million people have signed up for health insurance plans offered on the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplace, a 33 percent increase compared to the same time last year, according to preliminary data released by the Biden administration on Wednesday.Federal health officials project that more than 19 million people will enroll in 2024 coverage by the end of the current enrollment period next month. That total would include those who gain coverage through state marketplaces, continuing the record-setting pace.“It means more Americans have the peace of mind of knowing that going to the doctor won’t empty their bank account,” Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, said in a statement.An Affordable Care Act sign-up kiosk in a mall in Miami this month.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressWhy It Matters: The Affordable Care Act is expanding its reach.Despite a recent warning from former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” to the Affordable Care Act, the latest surge in marketplace enrollment is a testament to the law’s enduring power.Legislation passed earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic increased federal subsidies for people buying plans, lowering the costs for many Americans. The Biden administration also lengthened the sign-up period and increased advertising for the program and funding for so-called navigators who help people enroll.“More and more people are realizing they can come onto the marketplace,” said Cynthia Cox, the director of the Program on the Affordable Care Act at KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group.She added: “Just because the A.C.A. has been around for a while doesn’t mean people who need to sign up for it know how to do that.”One Eye-Popping Statistic: 750,000 sign-ups in a single day.On Dec. 15 — the deadline to sign up for coverage that begins on Jan. 1 — nearly 750,000 people opted for a marketplace plan on HealthCare.gov. It was the largest single-day total yet.Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a health economist at Harvard who served in the Biden administration, said that improved outreach helped explain the record sign-ups. “I’m pleasantly surprised,” he said.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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      Ukraine Faces Critical Tests as It Duels With Russia for Stamina

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      With Western support for Kyiv softening and Congress holding up urgently needed aid, Vladimir Putin’s bet on outlasting Ukraine and its allies is looking stronger.Ukraine faces dwindling reserves of ammunition, personnel and Western support. The counteroffensive it launched six months ago has failed. Moscow, once awash in recriminations over a disastrous invasion, is celebrating its capacity to sustain a drawn-out war.The war in Ukraine has reached a critical moment, as months of brutal fighting have left Moscow more confident and Kyiv unsure of its prospects.The dynamic was palpable last week, as Vladimir V. Putin casually announced plans to run for six more years as president of Russia, swilling champagne and bragging about the increasing competence of Russia’s military. He declared that Ukraine had no future, given its reliance on external help.That air of self-assurance contrasted with the sense of urgency in this week’s trip to Washington by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who pressed Congress to pass a stalled spending bill that includes $50 billion more in security aid for Ukraine.Speaking at the White House alongside Mr. Zelensky, President Biden said lawmakers’ failure to approve the package would “give Putin the greatest Christmas gift they could possibly give him.”But Mr. Zelensky’s pleas fell flat, at least for now, with congressional Republicans, who are insisting that additional aid to Ukraine can come only with a clampdown on migration at the United States’ southern border. After meeting with Mr. Zelensky, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, said his skepticism had not changed.The messages from Moscow and Washington illustrated the growing pressure on Ukraine as it shifts to a defensive posture and braces for a harsh winter of Russian strikes and energy shortages. Kyiv is struggling to maintain support from its most important backer, the United States, a nation now preoccupied with a different war, in Gaza, and the 2024 presidential campaign.Looming over Kyiv’s prospects is the possible return to office in 2025 of former President Donald J. Trump, a longstanding Ukraine detractor and praiser of Mr. Putin who was impeached in 2019 for withholding military aid and pressuring Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and other Democrats.Almost 22 months into the war, polls broadly have found waning United States support for continued funding of Ukraine, particularly among Republicans. A recent Pew Research Center survey found just under half of Americans believe the United States was providing the right amount of support to Ukraine or should be providing more.Ukrainian soldiers firing at Russian positions in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine last month.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesMr. Johnson said money for Ukraine required more oversight of spending, and “a transformative change” in security at the U.S. border with Mexico. “Thus far, we’ve gotten neither,” he said.But the White House still has time to try to work out an agreement that includes border security, and Mr. Zelensky said he remained optimistic about bipartisan support for Ukraine, adding, “It’s very important that by the end of this year we can send a very strong signal of our unity to the aggressor.”A rupture in U.S. funding would risk proving Mr. Putin correct in his longstanding conviction that he can exhaust Western resolve in global politics and conflicts. Though his government bungled the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has regrouped, in part because Mr. Putin was willing to accept enormous casualties.“Putin, soon after the initial offensive didn’t produce the results that Russia had hoped, settled in for a long war and estimated that Russia at the end of the day would have the biggest stamina, the longest staying power, in this fight,” said Hanna Notte, an expert on Russian foreign and security policy at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.Russia has adapted, pumping up its domestic production of ammunition and weaponry, and importing critical matériel from Iran and North Korea, all with the goal of sustaining a long war, Ms. Notte said.“I think there was sort of a dismissiveness, ‘Let the Russians get together with these pariahs, with these global outcasts, and good luck to them,’” Ms. Notte said.But that support has been meaningful for Moscow on the battlefield, she said, particularly with Iran helping Russia enhance its domestic drone production. Ukraine, meanwhile, is struggling to obtain a sufficient flow of ammunition and weaponry from the West, where nations aren’t operating on a wartime footing and face significant production bottlenecks.Ukrainian troops gathered to test-fire their German-made Leopard tanks before moving toward the front line in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine last week.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesDespite his advantages in numbers and weaponry, Mr. Putin also faces limitations, and military analysts say Russia is in no position to make another run at the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, or other major cities.Russia lost huge numbers of personnel in its offensive maneuvers in the past year, and won little territory apart from the city of Bakhmut. With Mr. Zelensky ordering his troops to build defensive fortifications along the front, Russia may continue to suffer heavy losses without gaining much in return.Facing continued signs of displeasure with last year’s mobilization, the Kremlin appears loath to do another forced call-up before the Russian presidential election in March, if at all.“What we have seen in this war is the defense usually has significant advantages,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.Still, Ukraine, reliant on the West for weaponry and funding, faces short-term pressures that Russia does not. Kyiv’s allies don’t have the ammunition and equipment to arm another counteroffensive, making a major new campaign unlikely for most of 2024, according to analysts and former U.S. officials.The United States is by far Ukraine’s most important backer, accounting for about half of its donated weaponry and a quarter of its foreign aid funding. The congressional fight, bogged down in a partisan dispute about border security, has unnerved many Ukrainians.“Today, Ukrainians are beginning to suspect that the U.S. wants to force us to lay down our arms and conclude a shameful truce,” Yuriy Makarov, a political commentator for Ukrainsky Tyzhden, a Ukrainian magazine, said in an interview. “That the Ukrainians practically destroyed the professional army of Russia, which until recently was the main enemy of the United States, does not seem to be taken into account.”Hanna Yarotska, second from left, and her husband, Vasyl, left, mourn at the coffin of their son Yaroslav Yarotskyi, 25, a fallen Ukrainian soldier, at the cemetery in Boryspil, Ukraine, last month.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe failure of this year’s counteroffensive has exacerbated political friction in Ukraine, most notably between Mr. Zelensky and the military chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. A month after Mr. Zelensky publicly chastised the commander for saying the war had reached an impasse, the two have yet to appear together in public.There are signs Russia intends to be more aggressive through the winter. After weeks of focusing attacks on the city of Avdiivka, Russia over the weekend began a general offensive along the eastern front, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, told Ukrainian news media.The fighting favors Russia’s greater access to artillery ammunition. Earlier this year, the NATO general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, estimated that Ukraine fired 4,000 to 7,000 artillery shells a day, while Russia fired 20,000.The United States has provided more than two million 155-millimeter artillery shells and brokered deliveries from other nations. But stocks in Western militaries, which had not anticipated fighting a major artillery war, are dwindling.Ukraine also needs ammunition for air defenses, lest Russia’s volleys of exploding drones and cruise and ballistic missiles break through the air-defense blanket over the capital and key infrastructure.Ukrainian soldiers grabbing their rifles after firing an artillery shell at a Russian position near Borova-Svatove in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region last week.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesThe United States and its allies have provided a dozen or so types of air defenses, sophisticated NATO systems that have allowed businesses to open and cities to resume mostly normal rhythms of work and sleep. But as Russia fires thousands of cheap, Iranian-made Shahed drones, Ukraine’s air-defense ammunition is being exhausted.A tipping point looms if Russian missiles can reliably penetrate gaps, hitting military targets like airfields and blowing up electrical and heating infrastructure to dampen economic activity with blackouts, deepening Ukraine’s reliance on Western aid.“They can keep doing it as long as needed,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former Ukrainian minister of economy, said of the Russian assaults. Over time, diminishing political backing for Ukraine in the West provides an incentive to keep whittling away at Kyiv’s arsenal, he said. “If they feel Ukraine will lose support, they will try harder.”Ukraine also faces challenges from the attrition of its personnel.Kyiv does not announce mobilization targets or casualties, but a former battalion commander, Yevhen Dykyi, has estimated that Ukraine will need to enlist 20,000 soldiers a month through next year to sustain its army, both replacing the dead and wounded, and allowing rotations.“Unfortunately,” he said, “with all the military tricks and technologies, some things cannot be compensated for by anything but sheer numbers.”A memorial for Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv last month.Mauricio Lima for The New York Times More

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      This Economy Has Bigger Problems Than ‘Bad Vibes’

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      The economy is growing. Wages are up. Unemployment is low. Income inequality is narrowing. The fearmongering about inflation proved to be, well, wrong. According to many economy-watchers, Americans should be sending the Biden administration a gift basket full of positive vibes — and votes.Instead, consumer confidence polling paints a different picture. A recent Times/Siena poll found that only 2 percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” and only a further 16 percent said they were “good.” While economic indicators suggest that the economy is healthy and growing, the American public doesn’t feel that way. Why the perception gap?One popular theory is that media narratives have duped Americans into believing that they’re having a rough time, when, in fact, they’re doing fine. Kyla Scanlon coined “vibe-cession” last year to describe this gap between perception and economic indicators. Since then, a story has emerged about consumer confidence: that poor perception and political polarization are mostly to blame. Brian Beutler, who writes the newsletter “Off Message,” calls out social media and misinformation for reinforcing the “bad economy” belief. Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy leads to consumer pessimism.The Biden administration’s messaging about the strength of the economy will shape President Biden’s presidential campaign. If Americans’ negative vibes about the economy persist, Donald Trump will surely bludgeon Biden with a line of attack that he relishes delivering. One of Trump’s favorite claims is that he is a successful businessman who ran a strong economy as president. Too few people believe that Trump, the G.O.P.’s favored candidate, will go to jail between now and the 2024 election. And so it should worry Biden that, according to that Times/Siena poll, a majority of likely voters trust Trump more than Biden on the economy.Why aren’t more voters giving President Biden credit for his strong economy?The bad vibes explanation is sound on the indicators, but that story doesn’t think too highly of Americans. It does not acknowledge voters’ dissatisfaction. It also does not offer a way forward. What do you do about bad vibes, exactly? Hire an exorcist?Looking at the economy through more than macroeconomic indicators could tell us a more compelling, empowering story. What if people are not being manipulated by the media, confused about the fundamentals or biased against Democrats? What we know about historical changes to how the economy works and for whom it works might tell a different story with more potential for the future.One such story considers what we consume and how much harder (and expensive) it is to procure it. A lot of our consumption is about meeting our basic needs. Housing, food, and energy come to mind. The economic fundamentals on these may be trending positively, but the bad vibes narrative undersells how miserable that part of the economy can feel.People are struggling with mortgage interest rates, housing shortages and pricey grocery bills. They’re also consuming to make their lives work: on expensive, hard-to-manage child care, health care and convenience spending — things like restaurants, travel, delivery services, and on-demand help — which are necessary for balancing work and life demands. Even when those services are affordable, they are full of friction. That is a nice way of saying the consumer experience sucks. It is hard to schedule things, hard to get customer service, hard to judge the quality of what you are buying, and hard to get amends when an experience goes bad. There is a reason industry analysts have reported that customer brand loyalty is low and customer rage is high.In 2021, the American Rescue Plan created a temporary social safety net for millions of Americans that may have changed how they feel about their spending. For younger Americans, massive stimulus was a taste of the Great Society investment that benefited their grandparents and great-grandparents. Child care subsidies, direct cash transfers, food supplements, eviction moratoriums, and flexible work from home arrangements temporarily lifted many low-income people out of poverty. Those provisions also exposed many working and middle class workers to the difference that economic policy could make — for the better — in their lives.Then, fearing inflationary pressures on the economy, Congress let the American Rescue Plan’s most powerful investments, and therefore the most substantial government support for social reproduction in a generation, end. But social reproduction — the caretaking of people, relationships and systems that make our society work — still had to be done. Reallocating your spending from child care to student loan payments, for example, might be feasible, but it is not particularly enjoyable. That assumes one can find accessible child care or an in-network doctor or apartment. When stimulus funding ended, a lot of services people rely on became harder to find and afford.When people talk about the work that makes the economy possible, they often think first and most about child care. There is a good reason for that. Child care is necessary work. It is often unpaid work (when done by mothers) or underpaid work (when done by child care workers). The American Rescue Plan sent $39 billion to states, with the aim of stabilizing child care centers. After some of that funding expired in September, the problems typical of our country’s child care shortage re-emerged. Depending on where one lives, child care centers’ capacity may not have returned to prepandemic levels, producing a lot of anxiety and wait-lists for families. As one of my colleagues recently put it, anyone who thinks he just has bad vibes hasn’t tried to find summer day care for young children.Then there is the rest of the hidden labor that has to happen so people can go to work, that is so often invisible and has historically been the domain of women: caring for a household and aging relatives, receiving the plumber or delivery truck and, of course, having the time (and money) to make meals, manage doctors appointments, chauffeur kids to after-school activities and clean the house.For the most part, the industries that support that kind of invisible labor are more difficult to find, harder to obtain and more expensive to buy than they were four years ago. Those industries also gained a lot of not-so-enjoyable friction. Industry surveys suggest that customer service has gotten worse and consumers are angry about it. That coarsening of consumerism affects millions, but women, in particular, pay a price due to the outsize role they play in managing hidden labor.Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, calls the way our society relies on families to independently support social reproduction a “D.I.Y. society.” Research demonstrates repeatedly that women, especially, are sacrificing to balance paid work with all that D.I.Y. labor. Healthy economic indicators, like low unemployment, also put the squeeze on women by raising the price and increasing the difficulty of hiring a little help.The bad vibes story emphasizes that lower-income workers have benefited the most from the growing economy. It is true. Over the past four years, at the macro level, workers at the bottom of the income distribution made greater gains than those at the top. That wage compression means some good things, for example: People without college degrees are benefiting from a strong labor market. The female-dominated child care field is a good example. Acknowledging that child care is skilled labor empowers the workers to demand better working conditions.However, those positives also present a challenge. Using child care workers as an example again, as their wages stagnated and their skills upgraded, many of them left for better paying jobs. That is the case for a lot of the jobs that do the vital social reproduction work in our economy. There are now fewer people to do the low-paid, low status work than there was before the Covid-19 pandemic. Illness pushed some workers out. Others left for better economic opportunities. The social reproduction work needs to be done but there are fewer workers able or willing to do it.Low unemployment means more Americans are working. It also means more people are experiencing our social reproduction crisis firsthand. This has long been a reality for female workers. Our crisis of who is supposed to do all the undervalued labor that underpins economic life has pushed many women out of the work force, reduced their participation, and generally made work more stressful. Men now take on moderately more responsibility for household tasks. With that shift, the problem of balancing care work and paid work has become urgent for both men and women. Even as millions of Americans are earning more, they face stiff competition from high-income earners for a smaller pool of services — including schools, health care, home maintenance and retail services — to make it all work.In short, people may have more money. But it has become harder to buy the services they need and more expensive to buy the goods that they want. The very wealthy can spend their way out of that bind, simply by paying more for housekeeping and grocery delivery and nannies. But everyone else needs some sort of partnership with the government to make the act of working not just affordable, but accessible. The Biden administration has not solved that bigger crisis (neither did the Trump administration). Whether Americans are blaming the right administration for their woes, their economic lives legitimately feel tougher even as they work more and earn more money.Bad economic storytelling tells millions of Americans in an election year that they only think that they are struggling financially. Good economic storytelling would figure out how to account for their experiences and imagine a better future. People need child care, and dentists, and affordable housing, and safe transportation, and accessible education. Telling them that to instead enjoy the fact that they can buy a Tesla is a fundamental misunderstanding of what economic policy is supposed to do, which is to make people’s lives better.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.Source images by Ivan Bajic and kutaytanir/Getty ImagesThe 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

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      Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans

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      Over the last few months, the incredulous question — How can Donald Trump possibly be leading the polls; there must be some mistake — has given way to the clear reality: Something in American life would need to change for Joe Biden to be favored for re-election in November 2024.The good news for Biden is that it’s easy to imagine developments that would help his re-election bid. Notwithstanding a fashionable liberal despair about how bad vibes are deceiving Americans about the state of the economy, there’s plenty of room for improvements — in inflation-adjusted wages, interest rates, the stock market — that could sweeten the country’s economic mood. (Just sustaining the economic trajectory of the last few months through next summer would almost certainly boost Biden’s approval ratings.)The looming Trump trials, meanwhile, promise to refocus the country’s persuadable voters on what they dislike about the former president; that, too, has to be worth something in the swing states where Biden is currently struggling.In both those cases, though, the president doesn’t have much control over events. No major economic package is likely to pass Congress, and whatever influence you think his White House did or didn’t exert over Trump’s indictments, Biden staffers won’t be supervising jury selection.There is an issue that’s hurting Biden, however, where the Republican Party is (officially, at least) quite open to working with the president, provided that he’s willing to break with his own party’s interest groups: the security of the southern border, where Border Patrol apprehensions remain stubbornly high even as the president’s approval ratings on immigration sit about 30 points underwater.There is a commonplace interpretation of the immigration debate that treats the unpopularity of an uncontrolled border primarily as an optics problem: People are happy enough to have immigrants in their own communities, but they see border disorder on their television screens and it makes them fearful about government incompetence. Sometimes this interpretation comes packaged with the suggestion that the people who worry most about immigration are rural voters who rarely see a migrant in real life, as opposed to liberal urbanites who both experience and appreciate diversity.The last year or so of blue-city immigration anxiety has revealed the limits of this interpretation: Place enough stress on New York or Chicago, and you will get demands for immigration control in even the most liberal parts of the country.But really, there’s never been good reason to think that immigration anxiety only manifests itself telescopically, among people whose main exposure to the trend is alarmist Fox News chyrons.Consider a new paper from Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena, respectively a Tufts University economics Ph.D and a Defense Department analyst, which uses Mexican-government ID data to track the flow of Mexican migrants into counties in the United States, and finds that exposure to immigrants increases conservatism among natives. As the migrant flow goes up, so does the vote for Republicans in House elections: “A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican Party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points.” And the inflow also shifts local policy rightward, reducing public spending and shifting money toward law enforcement as opposed to education.This suggests that a pro-immigration liberalism inevitably faces a balancing act: High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative, so a policy that’s too radically open is a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed.You can see this pattern in U.S. politics writ large. The foreign-born population in the United States climbed through the Obama presidency, to 44 million from 38 million, and as a share of the overall population it was nearing the highs of the late 19th and early 20th century — a fact that almost certainly helped Donald Trump ride anti-immigration sentiment to the Republican nomination and the presidency.Then under Trump there was some stabilization — the foreign-born population was about the same just before Covid-19 hit as it had been in 2016 — which probably help defuse the issue for Democrats, increase American sympathy for migrants, and make Biden’s victory possible. But since 2020 the numbers are rising sharply once again, and the estimated foreign-born share of the American population now exceeds the highs of the last great age of immigration. Which, again unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump.Border control in an age of easy global movement is not a simple policy problem, even for conservative governments. But policy does matter, and while the measures that the White House is reportedly floating as potential concessions to Republicans — raising the standard for asylum claims, fast-tracking deportation procedures — aren’t quite a pledge to finish the border wall (maybe that’s next summer’s pivot), they should have some effect on the flow of migrants north.Which makes them a distinctive sort of policy concession: A “sacrifice” that this White House has every political reason to offer, because Biden’s re-election becomes more likely if Republicans accept.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

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      ‘This Is Grim,’ One Democratic Pollster Says

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      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

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      Nikki Haley’s Path From Trump Critic to Defender and Back

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      When Nikki Haley was governor of South Carolina in 2016, she said she was appalled by Donald J. Trump’s threat to ban all Muslims from entering the United States should he become president. Ms. Haley, herself the child of Indian immigrants, called the pledge “absolutely un-American,” and part of a pattern of “unacceptable” comments and acts.Just two days after she joined Mr. Trump’s new administration in January 2017 as ambassador to the United Nations, she had to confront the issue anew. Mr. Trump barred travelers and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days.At a hastily called White House meeting, other senior administration officials objected, saying the prohibition would endanger refugees already en route to the United States and would hurt families of Iraqis who had long worked closely with the American military in that nation.“I don’t remember Nikki Haley saying anything,” said Kristie Kenney, then a top State Department official, who sat in on meeting. Six weeks later, in one of her first interviews as ambassador, Ms. Haley defended the ban, saying it was directed against countries with terrorist activity, not against Muslims.Now, as she tries to persuade Republican voters to cast Mr. Trump aside and hand her the mantle, Ms. Haley is reverting to her role as Trump critic. As her bid for the White House has picked up steam, she has warned voters that “we cannot have four years of chaos, vendettas and drama,” an obvious reference to his White House years. “America needs a captain who will steady the ship, not capsize it,” she added. Unlike Mr. Trump, she has said, she would not praise dictators and would “have the backs of our allies.”But when Ms. Haley had a chance to influence Mr. Trump, she chose her battles carefully. In interviews with more than a dozen former senior administration officials, most said that while Ms. Haley at times expressed her views frankly, they rarely witnessed her going to the mat, as some other senior aides did, to try to head off or moderate what they saw as Mr. Trump’s rash moves.Ms. Haley made herself a reliable defender of the president to the outside world, often trying to soften the edges of his most abrasive decisions. Privately, she carefully guarded what she later called her “amazingly good relationship” with Mr. Trump and avoided some of the internal fights that would have pitted her against him.“I don’t pick up the phone and say, ‘What are you doing?’” she said in an interview in March 2017, acknowledging that she was at times taken back by some of his public statements. “I just know that’s who he is.”Ms. Haley’s former colleagues could not recall her in the forefront of fights to keep Mr. Trump from imposing trade tariffs on American allies, or rushing into an unprecedented summit with North Korea’s dictator, or canceling America’s longstanding military exercises with South Korea, or banning Iraqis from entering the country. It fell mainly to others to defend NATO from Mr. Trump’s attacks, they said. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe internal deliberations.“I think that Haley understood, in an almost visceral way, the importance of maintaining a good relationship with the president,” said Thomas A. Shannon Jr., who served as under secretary of state for political affairs for the first half of Ms. Haley’s tenure. “She did not take on this job to do battle with the president.”Not everyone agrees that she held her fire. “Nikki Haley never pulled any punches with Donald Trump or with anybody,” said H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser from early 2017 to early 2018 and a key ally of Ms. Haley. “Oftentimes, she told him what he didn’t want to hear.”That is the impression Ms. Haley is trying to make with voters, as she casts herself as no-nonsense, no-drama alternative to Mr. Trump, who leads in polls in Iowa by some 30 percentage points. “If he was doing something wrong, I showed up in his office or I picked up the phone and said you cannot do this,” she said last week in Wolfeboro, N.H.Both Mr. McMaster and Ms. Haley point to her stance on Russia as evidence that she stood up to Trump. In her 2019 memoir on her U.N. tenure, Ms. Haley said she phoned the president directly to complain that he was overly deferential to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in a July 2018 meeting, telling him: “The Russians aren’t our friends.”Asked to point to other examples, her campaign did not respond. Nor did her aides answer questions about whether and how she used her influence with the president on a variety of issues that galvanized other senior administration officials.There were clear dividends to keeping Mr. Trump’s favor. The ambassadorship allowed Ms. Haley, who had never held office outside of South Carolina, to gain valuable foreign policy experience and to build the political brand that she now hopes will carry her to the White House.She also achieved a rare graceful exit from the administration, escaping the public insults the president rained on so many of his top aides. Instead, he praised her as “fantastic.”Staying on Trump’s Good SideMs. Haley has looked to cast herself as a no-drama alternative to Mr. Trump.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMs. Haley’s position gave her the luxury of distance from some scorching White House debates. Other senior administration officials recalled sprinting to the Oval Office to try to forestall some of Mr. Trump’s orders. Stationed in New York, answering to a president who cared little about the United Nations, Ms. Haley was to some degree on the periphery.Nonetheless, she had unusually good access to the president. Mr. Trump had granted her wish to be seated on the National Security Council, over the objections of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to whom she ostensibly reported. And he took her calls, which former Trump aides described as frequent.Because the Trump White House operated in an unconventional fashion, often without the customary briefing papers and deliberate discussions, senior administration officials created unusual and shifting alliances in hopes of influencing the president. They tried to rope in like-minded officials, even on issues outside their portfolio.Several former senior administration officials said they did not view Ms. Haley as a useful ally in countering Mr. Trump because they thought she was unlikely to challenge the president directly. That was the case, they said, in the effort to keep Mr. Trump from imposing steel and aluminum tariffs against American allies like Canada. Gary D. Cohn, the White House economic adviser, led that fight, backed by a group that included Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Mr. McMaster, but not Ms. Haley.Nor was she central to the endeavor by other senior foreign policy advisers to take Iraq off the list of seven Muslim-majority nations covered by Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Mr. McMaster, Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Mattis and John F. Kelly, then head of homeland security, argued that the ban would punish Iraqis who for over a decade worked with the U.S. government to fight extremists.In a series of heated White House meetings, ending up in the Oval Office, they faced off against the White House advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, finally swaying the president to their side. While Mr. McMaster said Ms. Haley agreed Iraq should be dropped from the list, others who described those meetings make no mention of her.Guy Snodgrass, Mr. Mattis’s former chief speechwriter, said he knew of conversations in which the defense secretary and other senior officials discussed how best to influence the president. But he was not aware, he said, of any interaction with Ms. Haley or her staff.Ms. Haley was viewed as having shrewd political instincts — and also clear aspirations beyond the United Nations. Mr. Trump was wary of her ambitions, according to people familiar with his views. Some thought she tended carefully to her relationship with the president partly to safeguard them.“I thought she went out of the way not to take Trump on. Her objective, I thought, was to stay on his good side,” said John R. Bolton, who succeeded Mr. McMaster as national security adviser in March 2018.In her memoir, Ms. Haley recounted one instance, apparently in late 2017, when Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Kelly, then White House chief of staff, tried to enlist her support in holding the president in check. While they claimed that they needed to band together for the good of the country, she wrote, she saw them as disloyal.Ms. Haley later told Fox News that she reported the conversation to Mr. Trump and Mr. McMaster. Mr. McMaster said in an interview that she understood the importance of duty.Mr. Tillerson has denied ever trying to undermine the president. Mr. Kelly has said that he gave the president the best advice he could.Dealing With DictatorsMs. Haley called Mr. Trump to criticize his 2018 meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Haley has written that she agreed with most of Mr. Trump’s major policies, including his decisions to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and abandon the Paris climate accord. His posture toward Russia, however, was a steady source of friction.One former senior official said that the only times the president would become angry with Ms. Haley were when she criticized Mr. Putin in public, and that he would order his chief of staff to tell her to stop.Still, she called Mr. Trump to complain about his 2018 summit in Helsinki, where the president had ignited a bipartisan uproar by suggesting he believed Mr. Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections over the assertions of U.S. intelligence agencies. “You made it sound like we were beholden to them,” she said she told him.Later that year, she persuaded the president to toughen up the administration’s talking points after Russian forces seized three Ukrainian naval ships and threatened to turn the Sea of Azov into a Russian lake, according to Mr. Bolton’s memoir.But even as she objected to Mr. Trump’s approach toward Mr. Putin, she has excused it. In her book, she wrote that she understood why he seemed to let Mr. Putin off the hook in Helsinki. “He was trying to keep communication open with Putin, just as he had with Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping,” she wrote, then went on to extol his ability to disarm people.Similarly, Ms. Haley suggested that Mr. Trump meant well when he praised Mr. Kim as a “talented” leader who “loves his people” and that he just didn’t understand how his words would be received.Since starting her campaign, Ms. Haley has said Mr. Trump “was too friendly” with Mr. Kim, “a thug and a tyrant” who has been “terrible to his people.” (One of Ms. Haley’s biggest accomplishments as ambassador was garnering support from Russia and China for a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted a battery of missile tests.)Mr. Trump himself has noticed her frequent oscillations: “Every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,” he told Vanity Fair in late 2021. “I guess she gets the base,” referring to his popularity with Republican voters she is now courting.‘We Shouldn’t Have Followed Him’Ms. Haley had promised in early 2021 not to run against Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesIn trying to explain why she is so much more critical of him now than before, Ms. Haley has said it is Mr. Trump who has changed, not her.As late as December 2020, after Mr. Trump lost the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Haley still took a forgiving stance toward him. She told Politico that although she spoke with Mr. Trump after the election, she did not urge him to concede because he sincerely believed he had won and couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It was a version of the “that’s who he is” argument she had made when she first joined his administration.Then, after his supporters ransacked the Capitol in January 2021, she told Politico there were no excuses for his behavior. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him,” she said.After she announced this February that she would run against him for the presidential nomination — after promising not to in early 2021 — a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign characterized her as an opportunist, “only in it for herself.”Ms. Haley addressed that kind of criticism in an essay in The Wall Street Journal in 2021. She wrote that Mr. Trump had been a good president but had gone astray, and said she could not “defend the indefensible.”“If that means I want to have it ‘both ways,’” she added, “so be it.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Primaries Are Not the Most Democratic Way to Choose a Presidential Nominee

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      Is the Democratic Party making a mistake by renominating President Biden to face the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in 2024? A nontrivial number of voices in and outside the party seem to think so.But it’s already a mostly moot point. The system Americans use to nominate presidential candidates is not well equipped to make swift strategic adjustments. Voters choose candidates in a sequence of state-level primaries and caucuses. Those contests select delegates and instruct them on how to vote at a nominating convention. It’s an ungainly and convoluted process, and politicians begin positioning themselves a year in advance to succeed in it.It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Political parties in most democracies have the power to choose their leaders without going through a monthslong gantlet.The best way for a party to choose its leader is for that party to convene, confer and compromise on a candidate who serves its agenda and appeals to voters. The conventions of the mid-20th century, deeply flawed as they were, were designed for that purpose. If those flaws were fixed, they would be far better than what we use today.Should Mr. Biden run again or step aside? On the one hand, he has stubbornly low approval ratings, and a number of polls show him trailing Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polling a year out is often misleading, and so are job approval ratings in a polarized age. Mr. Biden is old, but so is Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden defeated him last time.Replacing an incumbent president with another nominee is very rare and probably should be. But a convention could do it if necessary. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stepped down at the beginning of the year, and Democrats could realistically expect to find a nominee before Election Day.The system was different then. When Mr. Johnson decided not to run for re-election, he declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”The “and I will not accept” matters. Mr. Johnson was acknowledging that the party might nominate him even if he didn’t run. In 1968, when the decision was made at the national convention, the party could do that. That’s not something it can easily do today.Only a small fraction of states held primaries that year, and most of those didn’t commit delegates. Primaries were a tool to gauge public support, not make the final decision. Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee, won no primaries or caucuses. Instead, he won with support of unpledged delegates selected through state conventions — delegates who represented an older, more establishment part of the party.The apparent injustice of Mr. Humphrey winning the nomination without winning primaries was a big part of how we got to our current system. Many members of the Democratic Party felt that their perspectives weren’t well represented by those establishment delegates; their voices were being heard in the primaries and caucuses.The party set out to create a national convention that was more representative of the party, but what evolved was something else, the system we use today — the one that has all but locked us into a candidate almost a year out from Election Day.Early states winnow the field. The next states largely determine who the nominee is. States that vote late in the process often have little effect. Success depends on the ability to stand up a campaign in state after state in the first few months of the year, which in turn depends on the ability to raise money and attract media attention. It’s a process, not a simple decision.This system could produce a candidate who is battle tested by the primaries and otherwise broadly popular. It might also select a candidate who appeals narrowly to a group of dedicated followers, especially in early states, where a close victory can be leveraged into later success. (Think of Mr. Trump in 2016.)In no way does it let party leaders take stock of an awkward situation, such as what Democrats face now (low approval ratings for an incumbent) or, for that matter, what Republicans face (a front-runner facing multiple indictments).Party leaders are not completely helpless. In “The Party Decides,” the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller and I argued that party activists and leaders could exert a lot of influence on their party’s choice — so much so that they typically get their way. When they can agree on a satisfactory candidate, they can help direct resources to that candidate and help that person stay in the race if he or she stumbles. (Think of Mr. Biden in 2020.)But that takes time. It is, at best, a blunt instrument (hence its failure among Republicans in 2016). The nomination is still won in the primaries, and an incumbent is especially hard to replace.Most democracies give far less power than that to a single political leader, even an incumbent or influential former leader. Healthy parties can limit their leaders.Empowering the Democrats to replace Mr. Biden or the Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump would come with costs. A party that could persuade a sitting president to stand down would also have the power to persuade outsiders, like Bernie Sanders and Mr. Trump, to not run at all.For some, giving party leaders this kind of influence is unsettling. It shouldn’t be. The job of choosing a nominee is complicated. It involves the strategic trade-off between what kind of candidate can win in November and what kind of candidate represents what the party wants in a leader.Letting the party make these decisions is not inherently undemocratic. Just as voters select members of Congress, who then gain expertise, forge compromises and bargain to make policy, so too could voters select party delegates, who would then choose nominees and shape their party’s platform.Polling and even primaries could continue to play a role. In many years, the voice of the party’s voters might speak loudly, and party leaders would simply heed it. In other years, such as for Democrats in 2008, voter preferences might be more mixed. It’s worth noting that in 2008, Democratic superdelegates (those not bound by the results of any primary) switched their support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama after seeing his appeal in the primaries. If all of the delegates had been free to switch, would the outcome have been the same? We don’t know, but in a representative democracy, elected representatives do often listen to voters.In other words, the development of a more active, empowered party convention would not have to be a return to the past. The nomination of Mr. Humphrey in 1968 was a problem, but it wasn’t because the decision was made at a convention. It was because the delegates at that convention didn’t represent the party’s voters.Moving the decision back to the convention would not be a trivial matter. Even if voters and politicians could adjust to the change — a big if — each party would need to select representative and competent delegates. Our experience with representative democracy should tell us that this is possible but far from inevitable.But such a convention would still be superior to the current system, in which a small number of voters in a handful of states choose from a pool of self-selected candidates who have been tested mostly by their ability to raise money and get attention in debates.Both of these systems have a claim to being democratic. But only the first would give the party the kind of agency implied by claims that it is making a mistake by renominating the incumbent.Hans Noel, an associate professor of government at Georgetown, is the author of “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America” and a co-author of “Political Parties” and “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.”Source images by Drew Angerer, Rost-9D, and ajt/Getty ImagesThe 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

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      Republicans Are Finding Out That ‘Pro-Life’ Means a Lot of Things to a Lot of People

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      Electoral results since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision should tell a lot of people in the Republican Party something they absolutely do not want to hear: Even rank-and-file G.O.P. voters are not as pro-life as we might have thought when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.That trend was confirmed last month in Ohio — the latest sign that the Republican Party needs to figure out a new way of addressing abortion.Many conservatives may call themselves pro-life, but in practice, that may be a more aspirational statement than an accurate reflection of hard policy views. Perhaps by figuring out what it now means to be pro-life — and recognizing that pro-life policy is easiest to sell only when it amounts to a ban on abortions later in pregnancy — Republicans can come up with a new approach to the politics of the issue.Before Roe was overturned, the term “pro-life” covered a lot of ground — which was useful over decades in galvanizing a broad coalition willing to use abortion as a political cudgel. As Republicans are finding out today, “pro-life” means many things to many people.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