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      How Abortion Could Define the 2024 Presidential Race

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      With two election cycles after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization under our belts, it cannot be denied: Abortion rights are the dominant issue in American politics. And when supporters of abortion rights — a clear majority of Americans — see a connection between their votes and protecting what was once guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, they are more likely to vote.With a second Trump term possibly hanging in the balance in next November’s election, these are lessons Democrats must seize.Abortion rights won big on Tuesday night. In Ohio, a constitutional amendment enshrining protections for abortion rights was on the ballot, and in Virginia, control of both chambers of the state legislature was considered a tossup, and both parties made abortion rights the central issue of their campaigns. The pro-abortion-rights measure in Ohio passed by a wide margin. In Virginia, the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, made his proposal for a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy the central argument for electing Republicans in the state legislature. Republicans failed to win back control in the Senate and lost their narrow majority in the House of Delegates as turnout surged to historically high levels in key swing districts.Before this week’s elections, most of the attention of the political class and the public was focused on national polls showing Donald Trump holding a lead over President Biden in the 2024 presidential contest. But it is now clearer than ever that the backlash against the Dobbs decision — and voters’ general distaste for strictly limiting abortion access — could play a crucial role in winning Mr. Biden a second term. Certainly, there will be many other major issues at play in this election, including war and voters’ perceptions of the economy. But abortion could plausibly be the deciding factor next November.Mr. Trump’s narrow lead in recent polls is largely due to Mr. Biden’s underperforming with younger voters and voters of color relative to his support levels in 2020. While there is evidence that these polls overstate the risk to the president’s coalition, perhaps more important, these voters have proved over the course of the past year that they are highly mobilized by abortion rights and will provide strong support to candidates who share their position on the issue. By analyzing the individual-level turnout data from post-Dobbs elections, we know that women and younger voters are most likely to be inspired to vote when they see an opportunity to defend abortion rights and that this coalition is broad and diverse, including a large segment of voters of color.To date, the post-Dobbs political battles have been fought almost exclusively at the state level. Republicans in Congress, with control of the House of Representatives, have shown little appetite for passing a federal ban, saying the issue is best left to the states to decide. The implausible path for such legislation through a Democratic majority in the Senate, not to mention a certain veto from Mr. Biden, has spared the Republican majority in the House from any substantial pressure to advance such legislation. That said, in the immediate aftermath of seeing his state overwhelmingly support abortion rights this week, the Republican senator J.D. Vance of Ohio is urging a national Republican position on abortion in the form of a 15-week ban.The base of the Republican Party clearly expects its candidates to prioritize abortion bans. To ignore these calls is to risk a demoralized base on Election Day next year, making the path to victory that much narrower for a party that has won the national popular vote for the presidency only once in the past 35 years. Yet at the same time, the 2022 and 2023 elections have proved that standing firm in support of abortion bans energizes progressive voters and swings independents toward Democratic candidates. Given that Mr. Trump faces the challenge of expanding his coalition beyond that of his 2020 shortfall, such a development could doom his hopes of returning to the White House.Mr. Biden and his team have no doubt grasped this dynamic and will presumably force Mr. Trump to pick one of the two daunting paths before him. Before the Virginia elections, national Republicans clearly hoped that Mr. Youngkin had found the consensus choice, with what they emphasized as limits on abortion, not bans. These hopes were dashed in polling places across Virginia on Tuesday, something that surely did not go unnoticed in the White House.Abortion rights have had the biggest impact on elections over the past year and a half where voters believe abortion rights to be threatened and when they plausibly see their votes as a means to protect or reinstate abortion rights, it is good news for Democrats and for expanding or protecting abortion access. States with abortion on the ballot in the form of ballot measures have seen the biggest effect, but similar effects have been felt in states like Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, where the issue was at the forefront of campaign messaging.While Republicans find themselves boxed into a corner on the issue of abortion, in many ways Mr. Biden is the ideal messenger to connect the dots for moderates on this issue. His personal journey on abortion rights has been well documented and mirrors that of many Americans. This year Mr. Biden said: “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion. But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.” Polling shows a sizable portion of moderates and even conservatives more or less agree with him: They may not consider themselves activists on the issue of abortion rights, but at the same time, they are deeply uncomfortable with the Dobbs decision and how it stripped so many Americans of individual freedoms.This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Mr. Biden in 2024: Republicans are on the defensive when it comes to abortion rights, and are losing ground every day. Mr. Trump, in calling bans on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” has shown he is aware of the liability the issue represents for his presidential campaign. Yet he is left without a solution that will mollify his supporters while not alienating moderates or mobilizing progressives.Democrats exceeded expectations and precedent in key races in 2022 and 2023 by putting abortion rights and Republican extremism front and center. In 2024 all voters must understand that their votes will decide the future of abortion rights, everywhere.Tom Bonier is a Democratic political strategist and the senior adviser to TargetSmart, a data and polling firm.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Who Won the Third Republican Debate?

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      Nikki Haley stood out, absorbing attacks and doling out many of her own. But political observers wondered how any of the candidates onstage cut into former President Donald J. Trump’s dominance.The third Republican presidential debate this year, held on Wednesday in Miami, was packed with heated exchanges over abortion policy, immigration and China as the candidates tried to shine as the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, once again declined to join them onstage.This time around, the hopefuls dialed up the battle for second place and delivered digs at President Biden, but directed only glancing criticism at Mr. Trump. There were also plenty of parries between the candidates. At times, they moved beyond policy and became personal, such as when Nikki Haley called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” after he referred to her daughter.While Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida also delivered a nimble performance and made more of an effort to show empathy with voters, commentators tended to agree that Mr. Trump’s strategy of staying away from the debate fray was still paying dividends.“That debate pretty much seals it for Trump,” Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who specializes in American elections, said on the social media platform X. “The Munchkins on the stage were too afraid to take him head on.”Nikki HaleyMs. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, had been rising in the polls after two strong debate performances. On Wednesday, despite expectations that she would take some hits, she delivered another steady debate, demonstrating her foreign policy chops in an extended discussion about the war between Israel and Hamas and clapping back at her opponents.She exchanged barbs with Mr. DeSantis over who was more accommodating of Beijing, despite both taking a firm anti-China stance.But it was Ms. Haley’s exchange with Mr. Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who had an early surge in the polls, that will perhaps be the most memorable of the evening. After Mr. Ramaswamy mocked Ms. Haley for pledging to ban TikTok while her adult daughter was a user of the app, Ms. Haley snapped back.“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” she said. “You’re just scum.”Ms. Haley also won plaudits for pragmatism on abortion a day after Democrats won big victories in elections across the country because of their strength on the issue. She said that she opposes it but argued that a federal ban was unrealistic given the makeup of Congress. She added that people who support abortion rights should not be criticized.“Nikki Haley, to her credit, has had nuance and led on the issue from abortion from the outset of her campaign,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former director of strategic communications in the Trump administration, said on CNN after the debate.Ron DeSantisAfter two somewhat stilted performances, Mr. DeSantis gave sharp answers on how he would take on China and offer unwavering support for Israel in its fight to dismantle Hamas. He continued to use forceful language about how he would combat the flow of drugs across the southern border and said he would punish universities for allowing antisemitic protests.Mr. DeSantis also showed a more nuanced side at times, treading carefully when the debate turned to the topic of a federal ban on abortion, defending his opposition to drilling in the Everglades and pledging to make sure people who are eligible receive their full Social Security benefits.“Tonight was a really strong night for DeSantis, punctuated by a pitch-perfect closing statement,” said Brian Bartlett, a strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. “He not only spoke directly to the issues G.O.P. voters care about, but in a personal and empathetic way that distinguished him from the rest of the pack.”Tim ScottFollowing an impassioned second debate, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tried to keep the conservative energy flowing with an aggressive approach toward Iran and a staunch position against abortion.At one point, Mr. Scott even seemed to suggest that the United States should attack Iran.“You actually have to cut off the head of the snake, and the head of the snake is Iran and not simply the proxies,” he said.On abortion, Mr. Scott pushed his rivals to support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The position could play into the hands of Democrats, who have been winning on the issue in elections across the country.“Voters are practically shouting that what they want is control over their own bodies and not MAGA extremism,” said Alexandra LaManna, a former White House spokeswoman in the Biden administration who focused on reproductive rights.Chris ChristieA former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie has been the fiercest critic of Mr. Trump, even referring to him as “Donald Duck” for skipping the debates.On Wednesday, however, Mr. Christie mostly laid off Mr. Trump. Instead, he offered moderate views on abortion, expressed support for raising the retirement age and offered unwavering support for Israel and Ukraine.In his final statement, Mr. Christie said he was tired of division, anger and petty politics but did not mention Mr. Trump by name.To some observers, the less pugnacious approach was lacking.“Christie has entirely faded into the background in this debate,” said James Richardson, a former spokesman and adviser for Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Jon M. Huntsman, a U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Trump administration. “Highly out of character.”Vivek RamaswamyThe debate stage has been less hospitable to Mr. Ramaswamy after he made an early splash on the campaign trail this year. On Wednesday night, he was clearly making every effort to stand out.Mr. Ramaswamy opened the night by blasting the news media and the NBC debate hosts, and proceeding to lob rapid-fire criticism of all his opponents, except for Mr. Trump.The attack on Ms. Haley’s daughter succeeded in getting under her skin, but most likely backfired with viewers and voters.“Nikki expressed what many of us in the audience and at home think of your desperate attempt to create ‘a moment,’” Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman, said on the X platform. More

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      Love Can Win Trump the Nomination. It Will Take Hate to Win Back the White House.

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      A few weeks ago, I was talking to a local pastor here in Tennessee, and he started the conversation by asking a question I hear all the time: “Can anybody beat Trump?” He was desperate for someone else, anyone else, to claim the Republican nomination. He ticked through the names — DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Pence (he was still in the race then) — and they were all better. Why can’t they gain traction? “It’s not a binary choice anymore,” he said. “It’s not Trump or Biden.”“But,” he quickly added, “if it is Trump or Biden, then I’m voting Trump. It’s just who I am.”It’s just who I am. I thought of that conversation when I saw last weekend’s headlines. Donald Trump is now leading President Biden in five swing states, and if the race goes the way the poll suggests, Trump could win the presidency with more than 300 electoral votes. At the same time, we know from previous Times/Siena College polling that the hard-core MAGA base is 37 percent of the Republican Party. Another 37 percent can be persuaded to oppose Trump, while 25 percent are completely opposed to his nomination.How is it possible that a person whose true base is only 37 percent of his party, who faces four separate criminal indictments and who already lost once to Biden might sit in the electoral driver’s seat?I’ve written quite a bit on the enduring bond between Trump and his base. There’s the strange combination of rage and joy that marks the MAGA community. They’re somehow both furious about the direction of the country and having the time of their lives supporting Trump. There’s also the power of prophecy. Millions of Christians are influenced by claims that Trump is divinely ordained to save the United States. But the MAGA millions aren’t enough to put him back in the White House.To understand his general election prospects, we have to go beyond Trump’s MAGA core. He needs millions more votes — including from my pastor friend, a man who’s desperate to see Trump leave American politics.Trump’s viability in the Republican Party depends on the loyalty of his base, but his viability in the general election depends on a dark combination of negative partisanship and civic ignorance. “Negative partisanship” is the term political scientists use to describe partisan loyalty that exists not because a voter loves his party or its ideas but because he loathes the opposing party and the people in it. And why do voters loathe the opposition so darn much? That’s where civic ignorance plays its diabolical role. Partisan Americans are wrong about each other in a particularly dangerous way: Each side thinks the other is more extreme than it really is.This hostility is what permits Trump to convert his primary plurality into a potential electoral majority. This hostility both predated Trump and powered his election. In previous American political generations, nominating a person perceived to be an extremist or a crank was the kiss of electoral death. You wouldn’t merely expect to lose. You would expect to lose in a landslide.When Republicans nominated far-right Barry Goldwater in 1964, for example, he won six states and lost the popular vote by 23 points. Eight years later, when Democrats nominated far-left George McGovern, they won one state and also lost the popular vote by 23 points. There was enough partisan mobility in the electorate to decisively reject two different candidates, from opposing edges of the political spectrum.But now? It is unthinkable for many millions of partisans — or even for those independents who lean right or left and maybe secretly don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re truly partisan — to either vote third party or cross the aisle and vote for a candidate of the opposing party. They simply hate the other side too much. The result is that virtually any Republican or Democratic nominee begins the race with both a high floor and a low ceiling and no one has much margin for error. Every nominee is going to be fragile, and every national presidential race is going to be close. The margin in the last two races has been agonizingly slim. A few thousand votes cast differently in key swing states, and Hillary Clinton wins, or Joe Biden loses.To understand the power of negative partisanship, it’s important to understand the sheer scale of the mutual partisan hatred. Dating back to June 2014 — a full year before Trump came down that escalator — the Pew Research Center reported an extraordinary increase in polarization. Between 1994 and 2014, the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who expressed “very unfavorable” views of their opponents more than doubled, to 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans. Overall, 82 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats had either unfavorable or very unfavorable views of their political opponents.During the Trump era, this mutual contempt and loathing only grew. A June 2019 report by More in Common found that 86 percent of Republicans believed Democrats were brainwashed, 84 percent believed Democrats were hateful and 71 percent believed Democrats were racist. Democrats also expressed withering disgust for Republicans: 88 percent believed Republicans were brainwashed, 87 percent believed Republicans were hateful and 89 percent believed Republicans were racist.There is an interesting additional wrinkle to the More in Common report. Yes, it found that the two sides hated each other, but it also discovered that both sides were wrong about their political opponents. Both Democrats and Republicans believed their opponents were more politically extreme than they really were. The findings are startling: “Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents … hold views they consider ‘extreme’ ” than is actually the case.The media compounds the problem. More in Common found that consuming news media (with the exception of broadcast news on ABC, NBC and CBS) actually increased the perception gap. As a practical matter, this means that parties are almost always defined by their ideological extremes and each party uses the existence of those extremes to generate fear and increase turnout. Even if a party does try to moderate to appeal to the middle, partisan media still highlights the radicals that remain, and the perception gap persists. The fear persists.We can start to see why Trump is viable beyond his base. When you ask right-leaning voters to abandon Trump, you’re asking them to empower a political party they view as brainwashed, hateful and racist. You’re asking them to empower a political party they view as extreme. That’s the source of Trump’s strength in a general election. He’s surfing on top of a huge wave of fear and animosity, a wave he did not create but one that he’s making bigger through his malignant, destructive influence.That’s not to say that we face a political stalemate. After all, we’ve seen MAGA candidates perform poorly in multiple swing state elections, but many of those elections — even against plainly incompetent or corrupt candidates — have been extraordinarily close. Trump’s loss in 2020 was extraordinarily close. In a narrowly divided country, it becomes difficult for one party to deliver the kind of decisive blows that Republicans suffered in 1964 or Democrats suffered in 1972.When the Trump Republican Party is forced to take three steps back, it often consoles itself with two steps forward. It lost the House in 2018, but it gained seats in the Senate. It lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, but it gained seats in the House. It lost ground in the Senate in 2022, but it did (barely) win back control of the House. There weren’t many bright spots for Republicans in the 2023 elections, either, but there weren’t many races, and MAGA will still believe that Biden is weak even if other Democrats have proved stronger than expected.Already Trump and his allies are blaming electoral setbacks on the Republican establishment. The radio host Mark Levin claimed that the Republican nominee for governor in Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, lost to the Democrat, Andy Beshear, because Cameron is a “Mitch McConnell protégé.” Trump echoed the same theme, declaring on Truth Social that Cameron “couldn’t alleviate the stench of Mitch McConnell.” MAGA’s solution to electoral setbacks is always the same: more MAGA.There are two potential paths past this Republican dynamic. One is slow, difficult and dangerous. That’s the path of the Democratic Party defeating Trump and other MAGA candidates, race by race, year by year, with the full knowledge that the margin of victory can be razor thin and that there’s always the risk of a close loss that brings catastrophic consequences for our Republic. One negative news cycle — like Anthony Weiner’s laptop surfacing in the closing days of the 2016 election — can be the difference between victory and defeat.The other path — the better path — requires the Republican Party to reform itself, to reject Trump now. A two-party nation needs two healthy parties. Any republic that depends on one party defeating the other to preserve democracy and the rule of law is a republic that teeters on the edge of destruction. A Nikki Haley nomination, for example, might make Biden’s defeat more likely, but farsighted Democrats should welcome a potential return to normalcy in the Republican Party. It would mean that politics will perhaps return to a world of manageable differences, rather than a series of existential threats to democracy itself.As of now, however, internal Republican reform is a pipe dream. Ron DeSantis is falling, and while Haley is rising, she hasn’t even hit 10 percent support in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump leads by a staggering spread of 43.7 points. Perhaps a criminal conviction could reverse Trump’s primary momentum, but after watching Trump’s Republican approval rating survive every single scandal of his presidency and political career, the idea that anything will shake his Republican support is far more of a hope than an expectation.Until that unlikely moment, we’re stuck with the current dynamic. Love for Trump fuels his support in the Republican primary contest. Hatred of Democrats makes him viable in the general election. American animosity gave Trump the White House once, and as long as that animosity remains, it threatens to give him the White House once again. More

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      In School Board Elections, Parental Rights Movement Is Dealt Setbacks

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      Culture battles on gender and race did not seem to move many voters.Conservative activists for parental rights in education were dealt several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.The results suggest limits to what Republicans have hoped would be a potent issue for them leading into the 2024 presidential race — how public schools address gender, sexuality and race.The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said on Wednesday that 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia had won.The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union and a key Democratic power player, said that in 250 races it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates won.On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parental-rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.The modest results for conservatives show that after several years in which the right tried to leverage anger over how schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents like being back to some sense of normalcy,” said Jeanne Allen, chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a right-leaning group in Washington.She suggested Republicans might have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choice, such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic achievement remains depressed.In the suburbs of Philadelphia, an important swing region, Democrats won new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.In the Pennridge School District, Democrats swept five school board seats. The previous Republican majority had asked teachers to consult a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative, Christian institution. The board also restricted access to library books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and banned transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That district had been convulsed by debates over Republican policies restricting books and banning pride flags.The region was a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, when many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divides to resist the influence of teachers’ unions.But that era of education politics is, increasingly, in the rearview mirror.Beyond Pennsylvania, the unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board wins in Iowa, Connecticut and Virginia, as well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting how race is discussed in classrooms.Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that a Republican sweep in the state would allow for progress on that issue.For the parental rights movement, there were some scattered bright spots. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, said she was not deterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives to back away from talking about divisive gender and race issues in education.Progressive ideology on those issues, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said culture battles had distracted from post-pandemic recovery efforts on literacy and mental health.Notably, both the A.F.T. and Moms for Liberty have argued for more effective early reading instruction, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children. More

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      ‘He’s 80 Years Old, and That Colors Every Impression Voters Have’: Three Writers Dish on Biden and the G.O.P. Debate

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      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason magazine, and Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, to discuss their expectations for the third Republican debate on Wednesday night. They also dug into and sorted through a blizzard of political news — particularly the new New York Times/Siena battleground-state polling with dreadful news for President Biden that has Democrats freaked out (again).Frank Bruni: Thank you both for joining me. While we’ll pivot in short order to the debate, I can’t shake that poll, whose scariness ranks somewhere between “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Exorcist.” I know my own head is spinning. I mean: Donald Trump ahead of President Biden in five of six crucial battleground states?How loud an alarm is this? Should Biden at this late stage consider not pursuing re-election? Would that likely help or hurt the Democrats in winning the White House? And if not Biden, who would give the party the best chance? Nate, let’s start with you.Nate Silver: Thanks for having me, Frank! It’s nice to be back in the (digital) pages of The Times! I think whether Democrats would be better off if Biden dropped out is very much an open question — which is kind of a remarkable thing to be saying at this late stage. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to trying to figure out why Biden doesn’t get more credit on the economy, for instance. And the answer might just be that he’s 80 years old, and that colors every impression voters have of him.Katherine Mangu-Ward: The voters in these polls just seem to be screaming, ‘He’s too old, and I feel poor!’ The most shocking finding was that only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent. Two percent! Less than 1 percent of voters under 30 said the economy was excellent. In Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, exactly zero polled respondents under 30 said the economy was excellent.Bruni: Nate, I take your point about “open question” — I have no crystal ball, and my God, I’ve never so badly wanted one, because the Democrats getting this right and blocking Trump is, well, incalculably vital to this democracy’s future. But if you were the party’s chief adviser and you had to make the call: Yes to Biden or no to Biden and an invitation to someone else?Silver: Well, I’m the probabilities guy — so I’ll usually avoid answering a question definitively unless you force me to. Really, the best option would have been if Biden decided in March he wouldn’t run, and then you could have a vigorous primary. If you actually invested me with all this power, I’d want access to private information. I’d like to do some polling. I’d want to canvas people like Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock about how prepared they are. I’d like to know how energetic Biden is from day to day.Bruni: And you, Katherine? Biden thumbs-up or thumbs-down? And if thumbs-down, tell me your favorite alternative.Mangu-Ward: If we’re picking up magical artifacts, a time machine would be more useful than a crystal ball. And you’d need to go back before the selection of Kamala Harris as vice president. A viable vice president would have been a moderate threat to Biden, but a weak one is a major threat to the party. If we’re scrounging around for an alternative, I don’t completely hate Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.Bruni: I’d settle at this point for a Magic 8 Ball. And Katherine, “don’t completely hate” in 2023 politics equals “want to marry and live with forever” in the politics of decades past. We’re a cynical lot!In any case, Nate mentioned age. How do you two explain that the same poll we’ve been talking about revealed that while 62 percent of Americans feel that Biden, 80, doesn’t have the mental sharpness to be effective, only 44 percent feel that way about Trump, 77. Only 39 percent said that Trump is too old to be president, while 71 percent said that Biden is. Do those numbers make any sense at all to you?Silver: There are at least three things going on here. First, the three-and-a-half-year difference between Trump and Biden is not nothing. It’s certainly something you start to notice if you have older friends, parents, relatives entering their late 70s or early 80s. Second, Biden’s manner of speaking and presentation just reads as being more old-fashioned than Trump’s, and that perception is reinforced by media coverage. Third, I wonder if younger voters feel like Biden’s a bit of a forced choice — there wasn’t really a competitive primary — so “old” serves as a euphemism for “stale.”Mangu-Ward: Because this election cycle has been largely bereft of serious policy debate, I also think age is one thing people can grab on to to justify their unease about a Biden second term.Bruni: I wrote a few months back about this: Trump is so deliberately and flamboyantly outrageous — such a purposeful cyclone of noise and distraction — that the normal metrics don’t apply to him. He transcends mundane realities like age. He’s Trump! He’s a horror-movie villain, a Saturday-morning cartoon, a parade float. Those things don’t have ages (or four indictments encompassing 91 counts).Silver: I like that theory. There’s a sense in which some voters feel like they’re in on the joke with Trump. Although I also don’t think that voters have quite shifted into general-election mode, and maybe the media hasn’t, either. Trump as candidate is a very different ball of wax than Trump as president, and that’s what Democrats will spend the next year reminding voters about.Bruni: Katherine, let’s say Biden stays in the race. Certainly looks that way. Can you envision a scenario in which Democrats grow so doubtful, so uncomfortable, that he’s seriously challenged for the nomination and maybe doesn’t get it? If so, sketch that for me.Mangu-Ward: As a libertarian (but not a Libertarian), I’m always cautiously interested in third-party challenges, and that seems more likely to me than a direct challenge for the Democratic nomination. After each election cycle, there’s a moment when pundits decide whether to blame a Green or a Libertarian or an independent for the fact that their pick lost, but an appealing outsider peeling off support from Biden or Trump seems more likely to be a real consideration this time around. We have a lot of noisy characters who don’t fit neatly into partisan boxes on the loose at the moment.Bruni: Veterans of Obama’s 2012 campaign are arguing that Obama was in a similar position to Biden a year out from the election in 2011. Nate, do they have a point? Or do their assurances ring hollow because Biden is not Obama, isn’t as beloved by the base, is indeed old, has been stuck in a low-approval rut for months now going back to 2021, or some combination of those?Silver: Certainly, it’s generally true that polling a year in advance of the election is not very predictive. But Biden’s situation is worse than Obama’s. His approval ratings are notably worse. The Electoral College has shifted against Democrats since 2012 (although it’s now not a given). And there’s the age thing. Remember, a majority of Democrats did not even want Biden to run again. I think the Democratic communications and strategy people have been shrugging off that data more than they maybe should.Mangu-Ward: Biden is definitely not Obama, and it’s definitely not 2012. The concerns about Biden’s age are valid. Though they would apply to Trump just as much in a sane world.Bruni: You’re both so admirably — or is that eerily? — calm. I need to get your diet, exercise or pharmaceutical regimen. Am I nuts to worry/believe that Trump’s return to the presidency isn’t just an unideal election outcome but a historically cataclysmic one? How much does that prospect scare you two?Mangu-Ward: That’s my secret, Frank. I’m always angry. Like the Hulk. I think the current offerings for president are deeply unappealing, to say the least. But that’s nothing new for someone who prefers to maximize freedom and minimize the role of the state in Americans’ personal and economic lives. I am concerned about the peaceful transfer of power, and Trump has shown that he and his supporters are more of a threat to that.Silver: On that, one thing I feel better about is that the reforms that Congress made to the Electoral Count Act made a repeat of Jan. 6 less likely. There’s also perhaps less chance of another Electoral College-popular vote split. If Trump wins the popular vote by three points and there’s no other funny business, I’m not sure what to say exactly other than that in a democracy, you often have to live with outcomes that you yourself would not have chosen.Bruni: Biden, theoretically, isn’t the only bar to Trump’s long red tie dangling over the Resolute Desk anew. I mean — again, theoretically — one of the candidates in this third Republican debate could be the nominee. Yes? Or is it time to admit that, barring a truly extraordinary development, the Republican primary is over?Silver: Prediction markets say there’s a roughly 75 percent chance that Trump is the nominee. That frankly seems too low — no candidate has been this dominant at this stage of the race before. I suppose there’s a path where Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley does relatively well in Iowa, the other drops out, and then — actually, I’m still not sure there’s a path. Maybe Trump’s legal trouble begins to catch up to him? As much as the early states tend to produce surprises, I think if you put all the numbers into a model, it would put the chances at closer to 90 percent than 75.Mangu-Ward: The Times/Siena poll is bad news for Biden, but it’s even worse news for the folks on the G.O.P. debate stage, because it suggests that they simply needn’t bother. Trump is doing just fine holding his own against Biden, so there’s no need to change horses midrace. Unless your horse goes to jail, I guess.The debate will be a primo demonstration of Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”Bruni: If one of the five people on the debate stage were somehow to overtake Trump, who would that be? Has Nikki Haley supplanted Ron DeSantis as the fallback?Silver: The one thing DeSantis originally had going for him was a perception of being more electable. But he’s pretty much squandered that by being an unappealing candidate along many dimensions. And Haley largely performed better than Trump in that new Times/Siena poll. Still, I’m not sure how many Republicans are going to be willing to oust Trump on the basis of a New York Times poll. And it’s not an easy argument to make to Republican voters when Biden looks vulnerable against anyone right now.Mangu-Ward: I appreciated Haley’s early debate appearances, where she put a lot of emphasis on the shared responsibility for budgetary malfeasance between the Democrats and Trump. But now she’s giving me 2012 Mitt Romney flashbacks. She’s a sane and competent Republican who has realized the best way to keep her primary campaign viable is to go hard on immigration restrictionism. She was never an open borders gal, but she did usually offer some warm fuzzies about our nation of immigrants followed by a “get in line.”Bruni: ​​Trump has said he doesn’t want a running mate from any of the people on the debate stage. Do you see anyone — like Haley in particular — who could force his or her way into at least serious consideration? And could possibly help him get elected?Mangu-Ward: The Harris debacle certainly offers lessons for Trump, but I’m not sure whether he’s in the mood to learn them.Silver: The conventional political science view is that V.P. choices do not matter very much unless they seem manifestly unqualified. But they probably ought to matter more for candidates as old as Biden and Trump. I do think Haley would represent some softening of Trump’s image and might appeal to Republicans who worry about a second term being a total clown show. Who would actually staff the cabinet in a second Trump administration, with Trump’s tendency to be disloyal and the legal jeopardy he puts everybody in his orbit in, is one of those things that keeps me up at night.Bruni: Nate, your cabinet question haunts me, too. The quality of Trump’s aides deteriorated steadily across his four years in the White House. And anyone who came near him paid for it in legal fees and the contagion of madness to which they were exposed. So who does serve him if he’s back? Do Ivanka and Jared make peace with him — power again!Silver: I don’t think I have anything reassuring to say on this front! I do think, I guess, that Trump has some incentive to assure voters that he wouldn’t go too crazy in a second term — in 2016, voters actually saw Trump as being more moderate than Clinton.Mangu-Ward: A second-term president will always have a different kind of cabinet than a first-termer, and a Trump-Biden matchup would mean a second-termer no matter who wins. But either way the cabinet will likely be lower quality and more focused on risk mitigation, which isn’t ideal.Bruni: So is there any reason to watch this debate other than, when the subjects of the Middle East in particular and foreign policy in general come up, to see Haley come at the yapping human jitterbug known as Vivek Ramaswamy like a can of Raid?Silver: TV ratings for the second debate were quite low. But I suspect the main audience here isn’t rank-and-file voters so much as what remains of the anti-Trump Republican establishment. If Haley can convince that crowd that she’s more viable than DeSantis, and more electable than Trump, that could make some difference.Mangu-Ward: Historically, debates have been my favorite part of the campaign season, because I’m in it for the policy. But G.O.P. primary voters have been pretty clear that policy is not a priority. I suppose I’ll also tune in to see Chris Christie scold the audience. This week’s spectacle of him telling a booing crowd “Your anger against the truth is reprehensible” was pretty wild.Bruni: OK, lightning round — fast and dirty. Or clean. But definitely fast. Will Trump ever serve a day in prison?Silver: I’d say no, although prediction markets put the odds at above 50 percent!Bruni: You and your prediction markets, Nate! You could have given me your own hunch. Or wish. My wish is a 10-year sentence. At least. My hunch is zip. Hulk?Mangu-Ward: He will probably serve time. He will certainly exhaust every avenue available to him before doing so. In general, the fact that there are many opportunities for appeal is a good thing about our justice system.Bruni: Which 2024 Senate race do you find most interesting?Silver: Undoubtedly Texas, just because it’s one of the only chances Democrats have to pick up a G.O.P. seat. Ted Cruz won fairly narrowly last time, and Colin Allred is probably a better candidate than Beto O’Rourke.Mangu-Ward: Peter Meijer just joined the Senate Republican primary race in Michigan. I appreciated his performance in the House — he’s quite libertarian and was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.Bruni: America’s medium-term future — are you bullish, bearish or, I don’t know, horse-ish?Silver: Everyone is so bearish now, you can almost seem like a bull by default just by pointing out that liberal democracy usually gets its act together in the long run. But the younger generation of voters takes a different attitude on a lot of issues, such as free speech, which has begun to worry me a bit.Mangu-Ward: Bullish, always. Politics ruins everything it touches, but not everything is politics.Bruni: Finally, should Democrats be brutally victory-minded and just swap out Joe and Kamala for Taylor and Travis?Mangu-Ward: I just said politics ruins everything it touches! Must you take Taylor from us, too?Bruni: Fair point, Hulk. You have me there.Silver: It would be a very popular ticket! Taylor Swift will turn 35 only a month before Inauguration Day in 2024, I’d note.Bruni: You both have my thanks. Great chatting with you.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and author of the forthcoming book “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Growing Republican Battle Over War Funding

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      Rob Szypko, Carlos Prieto, Stella Tan and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIt’s been one month since the attack on Israel, but Washington has yet to deliver an aid package to its closest ally. The reason has to do with a different ally, in a different war: Speaker Mike Johnson has opposed continued funding for Ukraine, and wants the issue separated from aid to Israel, setting up a clash between the House and Senate.Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress for The Times, discusses the battle within the Republican Party over whether to keep funding Ukraine.On today’s episodeCatie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to force a stand-alone vote on aid for Israel has set up a confrontation between the House and Senate over how to fund U.S. allies.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBackground readingThe Republican-led House approved $14.3 billion for Israel’s war with Hamas, but no further funding for Ukraine.Speaker Johnson’s bill put the House on a collision course with the Senate.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Catie Edmondson More

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      Jenna Ellis Could Become a Star Witness Against Trump

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      When Jenna Ellis last week became the most recent lawyer to join in an accelerating series of guilty pleas in the Fulton County, Ga., prosecution of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators, she offered a powerful repudiation of the “Big Lie” that could potentially cut the legs out from under Donald Trump’s defense, make her a star witness for prosecutors and a potent weapon against the former president’s political ambitions.Ms. Ellis admitted that the allegations of election fraud she peddled as an advocate for the effort to overturn the 2020 election were false. Two other plea deals, from Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have been important, but Ms. Ellis is in a unique position to aid prosecutors in the Georgia case and possibly even the parallel federal one — as well as Mr. Trump’s opponents in the court of public opinion.Ms. Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting the false statements made by co-defendants (including Rudy Giuliani) to the Georgia Senate about supposed voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. These included that “10,315 or more dead people voted” in Georgia, “at least 96,000 mail-in ballots were counted” erroneously and “2,506 felons voted illegally.”These lies were at the cutting edge of Mr. Trump’s assault on the election. Both the state and federal criminal prosecutions allege that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators knowingly deployed falsehoods like these in their schemes to overturn the election.Ms. Ellis emerged from her plea hearing as a likely star witness for prosecutors, starting with the one who secured her cooperation, the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis. Unlike Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, in pleading guilty Ms. Ellis spoke in detail about her “responsibilities as a lawyer.” Tearing up, she talked about the due diligence that “I did not do but should have done” and her “deep remorse for those failures of mine.” The judge, a tough former prosecutor, thanked her for sharing that and noted how unusual it was for a defendant to do so.Trials are about the evidence and the law. But they are also theater, and the jury is the audience. In this case, the jury is not the only audience — the Georgia trials will be televised, so many Americans will also be tuned in. Ms. Ellis is poised to be a potent weapon against Mr. Trump in the courtroom and on TVs.That is bad news for her former co-defendants — above all, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump. Ms. Ellis was most closely associated with Mr. Giuliani, appearing by his side in Georgia and across the country. If her court appearance last week is any indication, she will be a compelling guide to his alleged misconduct. She will also add to what is known about it; she and Mr. Giuliani undoubtedly had many conversations that are not yet public and that will inform the jury. And because Mr. Giuliani was the senior lawyer on the case, her pointed statement that she was misled by attorneys “with many more years of experience” hits him directly.Ms. Ellis’s likely trial testimony will also hit Mr. Trump hard. She has now effectively repudiated his claims that he won the election — an argument that is expected to be a centerpiece of his trial defense. Coming from a formerly outspoken MAGA champion, her disagreement has the potential to resonate with jurors.It also builds on substantial other evidence against the former president, which includes voluminous witness testimony collected by the House Jan. 6 committee indicating that many advisers told him the election was not stolen — and that in private he repeatedly admitted as much.Ms. Ellis’s testimony may also compromise one of Mr. Trump’s main defenses. He has made clear he intends to claim he relied on advice of counsel. But that defense is available only if the lawyers are not part of the alleged crimes. Ms. Ellis’s plea puts her squarely within the conspiracy, as do those of Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell. That will hamper Mr. Trump’s effort to present a reliance-on-counsel defense.In comparing Ms. Ellis to the two other lawyers who pleaded guilty, it is also critical to note that she is promising full cooperation with Ms. Willis. Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell have important contributions to make to the prosecution, but they merely agreed to provide documents, preview their testimony and testify truthfully if called.Ms. Ellis took the additional step of also agreeing “to fully cooperate with prosecutors,” which could include doing interviews with prosecutors, “appearing for evidentiary hearings, and assisting in pretrial matters.”To our knowledge, Ms. Ellis is not yet cooperating with prosecutors in the federal case led by the special counsel Jack Smith, but if she does, she would have a comparative advantage for the prosecution over Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell: They are identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case and would be more problematic for Mr. Smith to deal with. He may not, for example, be willing to immunize them should they assert their privilege against self-incrimination, since that would hamper prosecuting them. But because he has not named Ms. Ellis among Mr. Trump’s alleged federal co-conspirators, he may feel more free to extend immunity to secure her valuable testimony. (He has reportedly done just that with Mark Meadows, a former Trump White House chief of staff.)Ms. Ellis’s guilty plea may also have political reverberations. It is riveting to see a MAGA champion who helped lead the election assault tearfully admitting she and that effort misled the American people. Her court appearance was live-streamed and repeated in a loop on television and social media.Looking ahead in the Georgia case, the judge just got back the five months that he had set aside for the Chesebro and Powell trial. Even if Mr. Trump manages to postpone appearing before a Georgia jury during that window, the trial of other defendants could begin within it — and certainly during 2024. That means Ms. Ellis and other existing and potential witnesses against Mr. Trump will likely be critical not only in the legal arena, but the political one.With Mr. Trump showing no signs of backing down from his claims of 2020 election fraud and a new election upon us, Ms. Ellis’s plea — like the televised Jan. 6 committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, another Trump insider who turned on him with powerful effect — could be a potential turning point in the court of public opinion. When Mr. Trump’s lies are repeated in the future, in whatever venue, expect to see Ms. Ellis often.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor, is a criminal defense and appellate lawyer in Savannah, Ga.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Conflicted Legacy of Mitt Romney

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      After factional infighting dominated the G.O.P.’s struggle to elect a House speaker, it feels weirdly quaint to revisit Mitt Romney’s career. He’s served as governor, U.S. senator and presidential nominee for a Republican Party now nearly unrecognizable from what it was when he started out. At the end of his time in public office, Romney has found a new clarity in his identity as the consummate institutionalist in an increasingly anti-constitutionalist party. But as a newly published biography of him shows, that wasn’t always the case.McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, interviewed Romney dozens of times over the past several years and had access to his private journals, emails, and text messages. In this resulting biography “Romney: A Reckoning,” Coppins pushes Romney to wrestle with his own role — even complicity — in what his party has become.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, guest host Carlos Lozada and Coppins examine Romney’s legacy at a time when it may seem increasingly out of place with the mainstream G.O.P. They dive deep into the key decisions and events in Romney’s life; discuss the looming influence Mitt Romney’s father, George, also a Republican presidential candidate, had over his life; how Romney rationalized appeasing figures on the campaign trail he found disdainful, including Tea Party populists and an early 2010s Donald Trump; how he failed to articulate just why he wanted to be president; the many grudges he has against members of his own party who acquiesced or embraced Trump; how Romney will be remembered by history; and much more.This episode was hosted by Carlos Lozada, a columnist for The New York Times Opinion, and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” Lozada is also a host on “Matter of Opinion,” a weekly podcast from New York Times Opinion.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Jessie PierceThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero. More