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      Biden’s Approval Hits 33 Percent; Democrats Want 2024 Options, Poll Shows

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      President Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33 percent job-approval rating.Widespread concerns about the economy and inflation have helped turn the national mood decidedly dark, both on Mr. Biden and the trajectory of the nation. More than three-quarters of registered voters see the United States moving in the wrong direction, a pervasive sense of pessimism that spans every corner of the country, every age range and racial group, cities, suburbs and rural areas, as well as both political parties.Only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point in Times polling since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago.Voters on the Direction of the CountryDo you think the United States is on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction?

      Note: Polls prior to 2020 are Times/CBS surveys of U.S. adults, with the wording “Do you feel things in this country are generally going in the right direction or do you feel things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?”

      Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 849 registered voters in the United States from July 5-7, 2022.By Marco HernandezFor Mr. Biden, that bleak national outlook has pushed his job approval rating to a perilously low point. Republican opposition is predictably overwhelming, but more than two-thirds of independents also now disapprove of the president’s performance, and nearly half disapprove strongly. Among fellow Democrats his approval rating stands at 70 percent, a relatively low figure for a president, especially heading into the 2022 midterms when Mr. Biden needs to rally Democrats to the polls to maintain control of Congress.In a sign of deep vulnerability and of unease among what is supposed to be his political base, only 26 percent of Democratic voters said the party should renominate him in 2024.Mr. Biden has said repeatedly that he intends to run for re-election in 2024. At 79, he is already the oldest president in American history, and concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list for Democratic voters who want the party to find an alternative.The backlash against Mr. Biden and desire to move in a new direction were particularly acute among younger voters. In the survey, 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 said they would prefer a different presidential nominee.Nicole Farrier, a 38-year-old preschool teacher in Michigan, is frustrated by the rising cost of living.Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“I’m just going to come out and say it: I want younger blood,” said Nicole Farrier, a 38-year-old preschool teacher in East Tawas, a small town in northern Michigan. “I am so tired of all old people running our country. I don’t want someone knocking on death’s door.”The Biden PresidencyWith midterm elections looming, here’s where President Biden stands.Struggling to Inspire: At a time of political tumult and economic distress, President Biden has appeared less engaged than Democrats had hoped.Low Approval Rating: For Mr. Biden, a pervasive sense of pessimism among voters has pushed his approval rating to a perilously low point.Questions About 2024: Mr. Biden has said he plans to run for a second term, but at 79, his age has become an uncomfortable issue.Rallying Allies: Faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has set out to bolster the West and outline a more muscular NATO.Staff Changes: An increasing number of West Wing departures has added to the sense of frustration inside the Biden White House.Ms. Farrier, a Democrat who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, said she had hoped he might have been able to do more to heal the nation’s divisions, but now, as a single mother, she is preoccupied with what she described as crippling increases in her cost of living. “I went from living a comfortable lifestyle to I can’t afford anything anymore,” she said.Democrats’ Reasons for a Different CandidateWhat’s the most important reason you would prefer someone other than Joe Biden to be the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee?

      Asked of 191 respondents who said they planned to vote in the 2024 Democratic primary and who preferred a candidate other than Joe Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll from July 5-7, 2022.By The New York TimesJobs and the economy were the most important problem facing the country according to 20 percent of voters, with inflation and the cost of living (15 percent) close behind as prices are rising at the fastest rate in a generation. One in 10 voters named the state of American democracy and political division as the most pressing issue, about the same share who named gun policies, after several high-profile mass shootings.More than 75 percent of voters in the poll said the economy was “extremely important” to them. And yet only 1 percent rated economic conditions as excellent. Among those who are typically working age — voters 18 to 64 years old — only 6 percent said the economy was good or excellent, while 93 percent rated it poor or only fair.The White House has tried to trumpet strong job growth, including on Friday when Mr. Biden declared that he had overseen “the fastest and strongest jobs recovery in American history.” But the Times/Siena poll showed a vast disconnect between those boasts, and the strength of some economic indicators, and the financial reality that most Americans feel they are confronting.“We used to spend $200 a week just going out to have fun, or going and buying extra groceries if we needed it, and now we can’t even do that,” said Kelly King, a former factory worker in Greensburg, Ind., who is currently sidelined because of a back injury. “We’re barely able to buy what we need.”Ms. King, 38, said she didn’t know if Mr. Biden was necessarily to blame for the spiking prices of gas and groceries but felt he should be doing more to help. “I feel like he hasn’t really spoken much about it,” Ms. King said. “He hasn’t done what I think he’s capable of doing as president to help the American people. As a Democrat, I figured he would really be on our side and put us back on the right track. And I just feel like he’s not.”Now, she said, she is hoping Republicans take over Congress in November to course-correct.One glimmer of good news for Mr. Biden is that the survey showed him with a narrow edge in a hypothetical rematch in 2024 with former President Donald J. Trump: 44 percent to 41 percent.The result is a reminder of one of Mr. Biden’s favorite aphorisms: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” The poll showed that Democratic misgivings about Mr. Biden seemed to mostly melt away when presented with a choice between him and Mr. Trump: 92 percent of Democrats said they would stick with Mr. Biden.Randain Wright, a truck driver, says he talks frequently with friends about Mr. Biden’s shortcomings.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesRandain Wright, a 41-year-old truck driver in Ocean Township, N.J., is typical of these voters. He said he talked frequently with friends about Mr. Biden’s shortcomings. “He’s just not aggressive enough in getting his agenda done,” Mr. Wright lamented. In contrast, he said, “Trump wasn’t afraid to get his people in line.”But while he would prefer a different nominee in 2024, Mr. Wright said he still wouldn’t consider voting Republican in 2024 if faced with a Biden-Trump rematch.On the whole, voters appeared to like Mr. Biden more than they like his performance as president, with 39 percent saying they have a favorable impression of him — six percentage points higher than his job approval.In saying they wanted a different nominee in 2024, Democrats cited a variety of reasons, with the most in an open-ended question citing his age (33 percent), followed closely by unhappiness with how he is doing the job. About one in eight Democrats just said that they wanted someone new, and one in 10 said he was not progressive enough. Smaller fractions expressed doubts about his ability to win and his mental acuity.The Times/Siena survey of 849 registered voters nationwide was conducted from July 5 to 7, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s June 24 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, which had been protected for half a century. The ruling sent Democrats into the streets and unleashed an outpouring of political contributions.Typically, voters aligned with the party in power — Democrats now hold the House, the Senate and the White House — are more upbeat about the nation’s direction. But only 27 percent of Democrats saw the country as on the right track. And with the fall of Roe, there was a notable gender gap among Democrats: Only 20 percent of Democratic women said the country was moving in the right direction, compared with 39 percent of Democratic men.Overall, abortion rated as the most important issue for 5 percent of voters: 1 percent of men, 9 percent of women.Gun policies, following mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tex., and elsewhere, and the Supreme Court’s June 23 ruling striking down a New York law that placed strict limits on carrying guns outside the home, were ranked as the top issue by 10 percent of voters — far higher than has been typical of nationwide polls in recent years. The issue was of even greater importance to Black and Hispanic voters, ranking roughly the same as inflation and the cost of living, the survey found.The coronavirus pandemic, which so thoroughly disrupted life at the end of the Trump administration and over the first year of Mr. Biden’s presidency, has largely receded from voters’ minds, the survey found. In an open-ended question, fewer than one percent of voters named the virus as the nation’s most important problem.When Mr. Biden won in 2020, he made a point of trying to make inroads among working-class white voters who had abandoned the Democratic Party in droves in the Trump era. But whatever crossover appeal Mr. Biden once had appears diminished. His job approval rating among white voters without college degrees was a stark 20 percent.John Waldron, a registered Republican in Schenectady, N.Y., regrets voting for Mr. Biden.Richard Beaven for The New York TimesJohn Waldron, a 69-year-old registered Republican and retired machinist in Schenectady, N.Y., voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. Today, he said, he regrets it and plans to vote Republican in 2024. “I thought he was going to do something for this country, but now he’s doing nothing,” Mr. Waldron said.Like others, he expressed worries about Mr. Biden’s age and verbal flubs. On Friday, a clip of Mr. Biden at an event announcing an executive order on abortion went viral when he stumbled into saying “terminate the presidency” instead of “pregnancy,” for instance.“You ever see him on TV?” Mr. Waldron said, comparing the president to zombies. “That’s what he looks like.”Mr. Biden’s base, in 2020 and now, remains Black voters. They delivered the president a 62 percent job-approval rating — higher marks than any other race or ethnicity, age group or education level. But even among that constituency, there are serious signs of weakening. On the question of renominating Mr. Biden in 2024, slightly more Black Democratic voters said they wanted a different candidate than said they preferred Mr. Biden.“Anybody could be doing a better job than what they’re doing right now,” said Clifton Heard, a 44-year-old maintenance specialist in Foley, Ala.An independent, he said he voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but is disillusioned over the state of the economy and the spiraling price of gas, and is now reconsidering Mr. Trump.“I understand that they’ve got a tough job,” he said of Mr. Biden’s administration. “He wasn’t prepared to do the job.”The Times/Siena nationwide survey was conducted by telephone using live operators. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. Cross-tabs and methodology are available here.Alyce McFadden contributed reporting. More

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      We Are Political Hostages

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      One of our greatest errors as a country has been our nonstop campaign to convince generations of voters that elections are about freedom of choice.This may be true if you are of a class not historically oppressed by the state. Many white people, particularly white men, fall into this category. They have the ability — the power — to be swing voters, knowing that their basic civil rights are not on the line. And many of them have invented new dangers — like threats to the Second Amendment — while pretending to defend their rights against those threats.In November of 2019, Nate Cohn in The Times analyzed a number of surveys of swing-state voters and looked specifically at the “persuadable pool,” the 15 percent of voters in the battleground states who were undecided and still thinking of voting for Donald Trump or a Democrat.He found, “As a group they are 57 percent male and 72 percent white.”For most other people, “freedom of choice” in elections is an illusion. We are captives of the two-party system. We are political hostages.Voters subject to oppression have only two choices: the benevolent captors (Democrats) or the cruel captors (Republicans).Democrats will work for your freedom, but not to the extent that it endangers their power. They have to work against Republicans, who, now more than at any other time in recent memory, seem hellbent on establishing a new age of severe restrictions under the banner of states’ rights.The choice between the two is not a choice at all. Voting for Democrats is the only option, not because they have been fully responsive to your pleading, but because they are the only bulwark against disaster.This is not a lesser-of-two-evils view but a light-switch view: the choice is light — no matter how dim — or darkness.There was some waffling about Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that gave us Donald Trump, who gave us a radical, theocratic Supreme Court, which has given us dozens of deeply regressive decisions: overturning Roe v. Wade, restricting the ability to enforce Miranda rights, tying the country’s hands in its fight against climate change.Now, we live in a kind of captivity, and captivity, of any sort, is unconscionable to some. So, they fly against it. Over the past year, progressives have demanded action from Democrats, demanded that promises be kept, demanded that more of a fight be waged. But, in the end, this is futile. What’s worse, it often provides ammunition to cruel captors who are waiting for a chance to replace benevolent ones.There are periods on the electoral calendar in which Democratic voters can more forcefully challenge Democratic politicians to stay true to their ideals while doing the least amount of damage to their electoral chances: the primary season when Democrats are choosing among possible Democratic candidates, and in the early days of a presidential term.But once those windows close, the time for complaining ends. One must enter the defense phase.This is all incredibly unsatisfying, and yet it is the reality that voters must accept. We have to dispense with the mythology of elections and come around to the reality of them.That often means swallowing a bitter pill, coming to terms with the fact that our priorities are not always aligned with those of the politicians we chose to represent us.Politicians in a hyper-politicized, two-party system understand that winning and holding their seats is the first order of business. With a position in power or a vote in Congress, they can get things done, even if their accomplishments are limited in scope. But if they lose seats, nothing gets done. In fact, it is very likely that something deeply harmful could happen.In that equation, simply trying to make progress — even if the effort is weak — has to be sufficient. It is the “has to be” in that sentence that grates against those of us on the quest for full freedom, political and otherwise.This is maddening, I know. It drives me mad. When I see broken promises, when I see existential issues shunted to the back burner, when I see political tiptoeing when there should be stomping, I am enraged by it. It is supremely disappointing. I know that politics are once again winning over the will of the people.But I try to remind myself of what every voter must: This is the system in which we are trapped. We can try to reform that system or at minimum force our leaders to consider radically altering it. Both are noble endeavors, but they are also incredibly hard and, at the very least, not close at hand. In the meantime, we have to work within the current system.Maybe one day there will be a third party or even multiple parties, but that won’t be the case by the next presidential election.This brings me to President Biden: Whatever you think of him and his performance — whether you champion his accomplishment or focus on the areas where he has fallen short — if he chooses to run for re-election, as the White House insists he will, he will be the only option. In that scenario, he becomes a last line of defense. His shortcomings become secondary. Helping to ensure his re-election becomes an act of self preservation.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      For Boris Johnson, a Chaotic Reign Ends With a Chaotic Exit

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      The risk-taking bravado of Britain’s colorful prime minister was not enough to compensate for his shortcomings, or overcome a catastrophic loss of party support.LONDON — The end, when it finally came, was just as chaotic, messy and jaw-dropping as every other chapter of Boris Johnson’s political career.Holed up in Downing Street on Wednesday night, the prime minister faced an open rebellion of his cabinet, a catastrophic loss of support in his Conservative Party and a wholesale exodus of ministers, which threatened to leave significant parts of the British government without functioning leadership.Yet far from surrendering, Mr. Johnson’s aides put out word that he would continue to fight. It looked like a last roll of the dice by one of the great gamblers in British politics. His brazen refusal to bow to reality invited comparisons to Donald J. Trump’s defiance in the chaotic days after he lost the 2020 presidential election.The British prime minister stepped down as Conservative Party leader after recent scandals prompted a wave of resignations from his top officials. He plans to stay on as prime minister until a successor is in place.Henry Nicholls/ReutersBy Thursday morning, however, political gravity had finally reasserted itself. For one of the few times in his career, Mr. Johnson was unable to bend the narrative to his advantage through the sheer force of his personality.At midday, the prime minister went to a lectern in front of 10 Downing Street to announce he was relinquishing the leadership of a party that no longer supported him, and giving up a job he had pursued for much of his adult life.“I want to tell you how sorry I am to be giving up the best job in the world,” Mr. Johnson said. Then, defusing the solemnity of the moment with a wry line from the pool halls of America, he added, “Them’s the breaks.”A crowd gathered outside Downing Street on Thursday morning to hear Mr. Johnson’s statement.Henry Nicholls/ReutersAs the political post-mortems on Mr. Johnson are written, the tumultuous events of the last week may come to encapsulate his career — one defined by a gleeful disregard for the rules, a shrewd instinct for public opinion, an elastic approach to ethics and a Falstaffian appetite for the cut-and-thrust of politics.“Most prime ministers would have gotten the message sooner,” said Andrew Gimson, one of Mr. Johnson’s biographers. “The element of exaggeration, of turning up the volume, is very characteristic of his style.”Mr. Gimson once likened Mr. Johnson to Admiral Nelson, the 18th-century naval hero who vanquished Napoleon in the Battle of Trafalgar. “Nelson said the boldest measures are the safest,” he said.In the end, however, Mr. Johnson’s risk-taking bravado was not enough to compensate for his shortcomings. He engaged in behavior that critics said revealed a sense of entitlement and a belief that the rules did not apply to him, his staff or his loyalists. Critics accused him of being disorganized, ideologically and administratively.After leading Britain out of the European Union in 2020, the prime minister did not have much of a plan for what to do next. He quickly became hostage to events, lurching from crisis to crisis as the coronavirus pandemic engulfed Britain. A pattern of scandals, which followed him throughout his career, soon overtook Downing Street.Mr. Johnson had long thrived by thumbing his nose at political convention. His disheveled crop of blonde hair seemed a metaphor for a messy personal and professional life, which some British voters savored while others merely tolerated it.Mr. Johnson preparing to appear on television in 2019. A journalist-turned-politician, he was able to fuse the forces of celebrity culture with an opportunistic, ideologically flexible approach to the issues.Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated PressBut Mr. Johnson’s lack of truthfulness finally caught up with him. His constantly shifting accounts of his conduct — whether in attending illicit parties at Downing Street during lockdowns, attempting to use a Tory Party donor to finance the costly refurbishment of his apartment, or promoting a Conservative lawmaker with a history of sexual misconduct allegations against him — finally exhausted the patience of his party and many voters.Mr. Johnson’s role in campaigning to leave the European Union, then carrying out Brexit and then seeing Britain through the pandemic, will guarantee him a place in the ranks of significant British prime ministers. Beyond that, he leaves behind a checkered policy legacy, and he never escaped suspicions that his agenda was driven not by ideological conviction but by the cynical calculation of what political advantages he could extract from it.In the end he may be most remembered for his confounding mix of strengths and weaknesses.From the start, Mr. Johnson represented something new in British politics. A journalist-turned-politician, he was able to fuse the forces of celebrity culture with an opportunistic, ideologically flexible approach to the issues. To most Britons, he was simply “Boris,” a first-name familiarity enjoyed by no other British politician.With his rumpled suits and untucked shirts, Mr. Johnson affected a louche, upper-class insouciance that somehow also connected with working-class voters. His antics as the mayor of London — he once famously dangled from a zip line above photographers, waving a pair of Union Jacks — turned him into a clown prince.But all the tomfoolery — aside from drawing attention to himself — also helped make him a serious electoral contender. With Britain caught up in an anguished debate over its future in the European Union, Mr. Johnson latched on to an issue that would propel him to the top of the Conservative Party. First, of course, he famously dithered about which side of the Brexit debate to embrace — leave or remain — drafting newspaper columns that made the case for both.With his rumpled suits and untucked shirts, Mr. Johnson affected a louche, upper-class insouciance that somehow also connected with working-class voters.Pool photo by Clemens BilanOnce he had thrown in his lot with “Vote Leave,” Mr. Johnson became an energetic campaigner. He helped win the 2016 referendum against European Union membership, used the issue to drive out the woman who became prime minister in its aftermath, Theresa May, and rode a promise to “Get Brexit Done” to a thrashing of the Labour Party in the 2019 general election.That victory, which awarded the Conservative Party its largest majority since 1987, emboldened Mr. Johnson when his standing collapsed under the weight of serial ethical scandals. He invoked his “colossal mandate” as a response to those who said he should step down, saying he owed it to his 14 million voters to go on.Unlike in the United States, however, Mr. Johnson governs in a parliamentary, not a presidential, system. Those 14 million people voted for the Conservative Party, not for Mr. Johnson, who merely served as the party’s leader, at the pleasure of its lawmakers. When they withdraw that support, the leader is replaced.At a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson pointedly declined to rule out trying to call an early general election — in effect, bypassing the Conservative Party to throw his fate back to the voters.That evening, a delegation of cabinet ministers and party officials traveled to Downing Street to appeal to Mr. Johnson to step down. He rejected their entreaties and instead fired one of his most senior ministers and allies, Michael Gove, who had been among those warning him that his time was up.The palace intrigue, combined with Mr. Johnson’s initial refusal to accept his situation, drew comparisons to Mr. Trump.“We have this habit in Britain of following American politics, a couple of years later,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. “We have ended up with a poor man’s Trump, in the form of Johnson.”The United States, Mr. Powell said, was still living with the aftereffects of Mr. Trump’s presidency. “In Britain, because our system is different, we should be in a position to heal more quickly,” he said. More

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      Will the Abortion Debate Keep Moderate Women in the Democrats’ Camp?

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      Worried about inflation and dissatisfied with President Biden, many moderate women have been drifting away from Democrats. Now the party hopes the fight for abortion rights will drive them back.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer prepared to kick off a round-table discussion about abortion rights at a brewery recently, Alisha Meneely sat at one corner of the table, feeling politically abandoned.Ms. Meneely voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before supporting President Biden in 2020, she said. Now, she is struggling with both parties, gravely disappointed in Mr. Biden’s leadership but anguished by what she sees as a Republican lurch toward extremism, with little room for disagreement — especially on abortion rights.“This scares me a lot,” said Ms. Meneely, 43, who described herself as a “pro-choice Republican” in an interview shortly before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.A few days later, as many Republican officials embraced the far-reaching implications of the decision, she was unequivocal. “This,” Ms. Meneely said, “is not my party.”After struggling for months against daunting political challenges, Democrats have a new opening to engage moderate women like Ms. Meneely, who have been critical to the party’s recent victories but are often seen as swing voters this year, according to interviews with more than two dozen voters, elected officials and party strategists across the country.From the suburbs of Philadelphia and Grand Rapids to more conservative territory in Nebraska, there are early signs that some voters who disapprove of Mr. Biden also increasingly believe that Republicans have gone too far to the right on a range of issues, particularly abortion.Democrats see a new opportunity to engage dissatisfied voters in the fight over abortion rights. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIt’s a dynamic with the potential to shape statewide races and some House contests, and one that crystallizes a central tension of the midterm elections as Democrats test whether efforts to define today’s Republicans as extremist can mitigate the political headwinds they confront.High inflation remains the overriding concern for many voters, and Republicans are betting that most Americans will vent about pocketbook frustrations above all else. Mr. Biden has long struggled with anemic approval ratings. Americans also overwhelmingly believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, another troubling sign for the party in power. And some Democrats doubt that even something as significant as the overturning of Roe will dramatically alter the political environment.For many Americans, economic struggles outweigh abortion rights as the top issue.Sarah Silbiger for The New York Times“Does it have an effect? Absolutely,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist. “Does it fundamentally change the landscape? No. Not in an off-year election, when your president’s approval rating is below 40 percent and gas is $5 a gallon.”Those crosscurrents all converged last week at a few shopping centers in Warrington, Pa., in Bucks County outside Philadelphia. It’s a swing township within a swing county in the nation’s ultimate swing state. The next governor and a Republican-controlled legislature will most likely determine access to abortion, after the Supreme Court’s recent decision handed control over abortion rights back to the states.Sophia Carroll, 22, said that growing up, some of her friends were engaged in anti-abortion activism. Citing her Catholic upbringing, Ms. Carroll, a registered Republican, said she felt mixed emotions when Roe was overturned. But she intended to vote for Democrats this fall, “just because of this issue” of protecting abortion rights.From Opinion: The End of Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end ​​the constitutional right to abortion.David N. Hackney, maternal-fetal medicine specialist: The end of Roe “is a tragedy for our patients, many of whom will suffer and some of whom could very well die.”Mara Gay: “Sex is fun. For the puritanical tyrants seeking to control our bodies, that’s a problem.”Elizabeth Spiers: “The notion that rich women will be fine, regardless of what the law says, is probably comforting to some. But it is simply not true.”Katherine Stewart, writer: “​​Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.”“As someone who knows other women who have had to make the decision to choose, it’s a very personal and very intimate decision,” she said in an interview at an outdoor shopping center.Ms. Carroll pointed out Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, which suggested that the court should revisit its cases establishing rights to same-sex marriage, same-sex consensual relations and contraception.“Are they going to ban birth control next?” she said.There is limited polling that captures attitudes after the Supreme Court decision, and none of it predicts how voters will feel in November. A recent survey from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist found that 56 percent of adults surveyed opposed the decision and 40 percent supported it. Among people in suburbs, which in recent years have been home to many moderates and swing voters, 57 percent said they mostly support abortion rights; only a third said they mostly oppose abortion rights. Among women in the suburbs and small cities, support for abortion rights jumped to 61 percent.Another survey from Morning Consult and Politico found that among suburban voters, around 60 percent said it was very or somewhat important to support a candidate in the midterm elections who backs abortion access; roughly 40 percent said it was very or somewhat important to support a candidate who opposes that access.But polls have also consistently shown that the economy and inflation remain top issues for many Americans. And many voters are inclined to take their frustration about cost-of-living concerns out on the Democrats.“The economy is always going to be the biggest thing for me,” Diane Jacobs, 57, said in an interview outside a Wegmans grocery store in Warrington. Ms. Jacobs, who said that she typically votes for Republicans, identifies as “pro-life” but does not believe abortion should be illegal. She also voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, she said, as an antidote to divisiveness. But Ms. Jacobs said she would not do so again and planned on supporting Republicans this year.“Just look at inflation,” she said.Some voters are not yet aware of the implications of overturning Roe, which are unfolding day-by-day and state-by-state. Democrats may have room to expand their support on the issue as voters learn more. Republicans, however, may ultimately benefit if many voters who disagree with the decision don’t dive in on the details. Ms. Jacobs said she had not heard of Republicans in the area who wanted to outlaw the procedure.“If there was a presidential candidate who said they wanted to outlaw it in every single case, I don’t know that I’d vote for that person,” she said. “That’s pretty extreme.”Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, has promised to veto “any bill that would restrict abortion rights.”Hannah Beier/ReutersAbortion is now banned in at least eight states, with few exceptions allowed. Some legal challenges are underway, and more bans are expected to take effect soon. Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has sponsored a roughly six-week abortion ban and has indicated interest in further restrictions, saying life begins at conception. Asked whether he believes in exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother, he replied at a debate, “I don’t give a way for exceptions.”Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, has promised to veto “any bill that would restrict abortion rights.”The Pennsylvania governor’s race is one of several, including governor’s contests in Michigan and Wisconsin, that could directly affect abortion rights in battleground states.Barrie Holstein, 58, said she felt a new sense of political urgency. Ms. Holstein, who lives in Dresher, Pa., declined to say how she voted in 2020. She said she does not always vote in midterm elections and was often open to candidates of both parties. But this year, she said, she intended to vote for candidates who backed abortion rights and gun control.“I’m not political,” she said. “But it’s enough. I’m pissed. I’m pissed about gun control and I’m pissed about abortion. I really am.”Strategists in both parties are still trying to quantify how many voters like Ms. Holstein are out there.In a small private focus group of suburban swing voters last week sponsored by progressive organizations, a clear majority of participants said the Roe decision would hold either a lot or a medium amount of weight when considering how to vote in upcoming elections.But in one warning sign for Democrats, at least one participant said she felt it was “too late” — the party in power had already failed to protect abortion rights, so she would be weighing a broader set of issues.While some Republicans see openings to paint Democrats as radical on the issue of abortion rights late into pregnancy, many officials have largely sought to keep their focus on cost-of-living matters and on Mr. Biden.“I would be surprised if an energized Democratic electorate overcame the dead-weight anchor of a 40 percent job approval for a Democratic president,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist. “But it might make some races closer than they would otherwise have been.”That may have been the case in a recent Nebraska special election, when a Democratic candidate did better than expected in a heavily Republican-leaning district. Turnout was just under 30 percent of registered voters.Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chairwoman, conducting party business remotely at the Lancaster County Democrats headquarters in Lincoln, Neb., in 2020.Walker Pickering for The New York Times“This is real and resonating and you feel it on the ground,” said Jane Kleeb, the chairwoman of the Nebraska Democratic Party. “Folks, I think, in the Midwest, really respect people’s privacy. Ranchers always say, ‘If it doesn’t bother the cattle, it doesn’t bother me.’ That mentality is very much alive, I think, in voters’ minds.”Last week, Ms. Meneely of Michigan — who has a background in government work and engages in efforts to combat human trafficking and online exploitation of children — said that she had decided to vote for Ms. Whitmer, the Democratic governor.She also said she would support Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican who applauded the Roe decision, in his primary. Ms. Meneely noted his willingness to challenge Mr. Trump. (He was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment after the Capitol riot.)But she sounded open to persuasion in general election contests.“Right now,” she said, “I am so ticked at the Republican Party.” More

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      Trump, the Man Most Responsible for Ending Roe, Worries It Could Hurt His Party

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      The end of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling was the culmination of decades of work by Republicans and social conservatives — one that came to pass only after a former Democrat from New York who had once supported abortion rights helped muscle through three Supreme Court justices.Publicly, former President Donald J. Trump heralded the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday ending federal abortion protections as a victory. Yet, as he faces possible prosecution over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election and prepares for a likely 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has privately told friends and advisers the ruling will be “bad for Republicans.”When a draft copy of the decision leaked in May, Mr. Trump began telling friends and advisers that it would anger suburban women, a group who helped tilt the 2020 race to President Biden, and would lead to a backlash against Republicans in the November midterm elections.In other conversations, Mr. Trump has told people that measures like the Texas state law banning most abortions after six weeks and allowing citizens to file lawsuits against people who enable abortions are “so stupid,” according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions. The Supreme Court let the measure stand in December 2021.For the first hours after the decision was made public on Friday, Mr. Trump was muted in response, a striking contrast to the conservatives who worked in his administration, including former Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Pence issued a statement saying, “Life won,” as he called for abortion opponents to keep fighting “in every state in the land.”Former Vice President Mike Pence called for abortion opponents to keep fighting “in every state in the land.”Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesFor weeks in advance of the ruling, Mr. Trump had been just as muted. In an interview with The New York Times in May, Mr. Trump uttered an eyebrow-raising demurral in response to a question about the central role he had played in paving the way for the reversal of Roe v. Wade.“I never like to take credit for anything,” said Mr. Trump, who has spent his career affixing his name to almost anything he could.Pressed to describe his feelings about having helped assemble a court that was on the verge of erasing the 1973 ruling, Mr. Trump refused to engage the question and instead focused on the leak of the draft opinion.“I don’t know what the decision is,” he said. “We’ve been reading about something that was drawn months ago. Nobody knows what that decision is. A draft is a draft.”By early afternoon on Friday, Mr. Trump put out a statement taking a victory lap, including applauding himself for sticking by his choice of nominees. All three of Mr. Trump’s appointees to the court — whom he pushed through with help from Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader — were in the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling. He left unspoken the fact that he repeatedly attacked the court for not interceding on his behalf after he lost the 2020 election.Mr. Trump with the newest of his three Supreme Court nominees, Amy Coney Barrett, at the White House in 2020.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“Today’s decision, which is the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation, along with other decisions that have been announced recently, were only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court,” Mr. Trump said.The former president also told Fox News, in an interview published after the decision on Friday, that the court was “following the Constitution, and giving rights back when they should have been given long ago.” He added, “I think, in the end, this is something that will work out for everybody.”Republicans are bracing for a fight: A memo in May from the National Republican Senate Committee, first reported by Axios, suggested that G.O.P. candidates deal with criticism from Democrats by highlighting “extreme and radical views” in support of late-term abortions and government funding for abortions, and suggesting that their own views are based “in compassion and reason.”While Mr. Trump had stayed quiet on the issue in recent weeks, people close to him anticipate he will become more vocal as he watches how clearly his right-wing base responds and how easily he can point to it as something that he made happen. His advisers believe he can highlight the issue as he faces potential Republican challengers and sees signs that his own political base has moved further to the right on vaccines and other issues.Other potential candidates have been far more vocal. Mr. Pence has spent months talking about his desire to see Roe v. Wade end and visiting pregnancy centers. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, another evangelical Christian considering a presidential campaign, wrote on Twitter after the draft opinion emerged: “I pray for the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Every human being, born and unborn, has a fundamental right to life, and it is our calling to guard and secure it.”Most significantly from Mr. Trump’s perspective, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the Republican whom a number of Mr. Trump’s former supporters have expressed interest in seeing as a 2024 candidate, signed a bill this spring banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader, a socially conservative political group based in Iowa, praised Mr. Trump before the ruling came down. “What he did as president is, he followed through on what he said he was going to do and appoint Supreme Court justices that were faithful to the Constitution,” Mr. Vander Plaats said.Asked about Mr. Trump’s private remarks that the ruling would hurt Republicans, Mr. Vander Plaats responded, “I would just vehemently disagree with that.”Indeed, while Republicans in competitive states and congressional districts have expressed some anxiousness about the sort of blowback Mr. Trump has told people he fears, many pollsters say it is too soon to tell how the issue will play out in the midterm elections.A Gallup survey this month found that the share of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” had jumped to 55 percent after hovering between 45 percent and 50 percent for a decade. That sentiment was “the highest Gallup has measured since 1995,” while the 39 percent who identified as “pro-life” was “the lowest since 1996,” the polling firm said.Advocates for and against abortion rights outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Friday after Roe v. Wade was overturned.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesA May survey conducted for CNN found that 66 percent of the people questioned said they believed Roe v. Wade should not be overturned.But anti-abortion activists who supported Mr. Trump as president insist the ruling will be a political boon to Republicans, and maintained that surveys in which voters are asked specific questions about the measure indicate that.“When pro-life Republicans go on offense to expose the abortion extremism of their opponents, life is a proven winning issue for the G.O.P.,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates.Voluble as he is, Mr. Trump has long seemed to have a special difficulty in grappling with the subject of abortion, which he supported for years as a right but said he personally abhorred. In 2011, as he considered a presidential campaign as a Republican, he announced he did not support abortion rights, but struggled to discuss the issue as a candidate four years later.“I know you’re opposed to abortion,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said to him in a June 2015 interview.“Right,” Trump replied. “I’m pro-choice.”Mr. Tapper furrowed a brow. “You’re pro-choice or pro-life?”“I’m pro-life,” Mr. Trump quickly corrected himself. “I’m sorry.”In March 2016, Mr. Trump said in an MSNBC town hall event that if the nation outlawed abortion — a change he supported — there would have to be “some form of punishment” for a woman seeking abortion. The remark set off a firestorm, which Mr. Trump tried to quell by issuing two statements that only added to the confusion.Two days later, on CBS, Mr. Trump said that he wished abortion were left up to the states, but that the federal laws were “set, and I think we have to leave it that way.”Officials with the Susan B. Anthony List said at the time that Mr. Trump had disqualified himself for the presidency. His campaign again issued a cleanup statement, saying he only meant that the laws must remain in place “until he is president.”Yet in his third and final debate against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, Mr. Trump laid out his belief that he would have two and as many as three Supreme Court seats to fill. And he explicitly promised, in a way other candidates never had, that when he chose jurists who shared his stated beliefs, Roe v. Wade would be overturned.As president, however, Mr. Trump often wanted little to do with the issue.Mr. Trump seemed to swing between fascination with and repulsion from the subject, remarking upon the thorniness of it and how divided the country was on abortion, and wringing his hands when it came time to make decisions.Participants in the March for Life in Washington in 2020 attended an address by Mr. Trump.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAnd he often preferred to defer to Mr. Pence, even at one point expressing hope that Mr. Pence would cancel a trip to Rome, including an audience with the pope, and instead represent the administration at the March for Life in Washington.One of Mr. Trump’s supporters, Robert Jeffress, a Texas pastor, recalled having discussions with the former president about the “political complexities” of the issue, describing Mr. Trump as an opponent of abortion but also a “realist.”“I’ve heard him point out in the Oval Office that 60-plus percent of Americans are against a repeal of Roe, and that makes this a politically complex issue,” Mr. Jeffress said. More

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      Mayra Flores, a Latina Republican, Sends a Message to Democrats

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      Last week, Mayra Flores, a Republican candidate for Congress who was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States at the age of 6, flipped a congressional seat in a region of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas that had voted Democrat for 150 years. Flores’s victory came with the usual bluster from the G.O.P. and all the head-scratching from the national media that accompanies rightward voting swings in any nonwhite population. “G.O.P. wins big in Rio Grande Valley district. Does it portend shift of Hispanic voters?” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram asked in a headline. The conservative National Review called Flores’s victory “An Earthquake in South Texas” and said that her win “portends a major shift in the major American political landscape.”Before I get into my own portending, let me offer up a bundle of caveats. This was an extremely low-turnout special election for a vacated congressional seat that will once again be up for grabs this November. The lines of the district will be significantly different in a few months — Flores won over an electorate that Joe Biden won by four points back in 2020. In November, Flores will be in the odd position of being a near-five-month incumbent running in a newly drawn district that, had it existed in 2020, Biden would have won by 15.5 points. This is presumably why Monica Robinson, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.), dismissed Flores’s victory as a “rental” seat.So we can and should throw some cold water on the grand claims about what this electoral result means for the future of the Republican Party. Flores’s campaign outraised that of her Democratic opponent Dan Sanchez by a 16-to-1 margin. It also spent more than $1 million on television ads. The imbalance in spending and resources was so extreme that after the results had come in, Sanchez’s campaign manager said in a statement, “The D.C.C.C., D.N.C. and other associated national committees have failed at their single purpose of existence: winning elections.”I think it’s perfectly fair to take Robinson and the D.C.C.C. at their word when they say that they did not think it was worth expending too much effort on a seat that will almost certainly swing back to Democrats at the start of 2023. What seems far more interesting to me is why the G.O.P. put so much effort into securing Flores’s victory. Why did they care?The simple answer is that since the 2020 general election showed surprising gains for the G.O.P. among Latino voters, especially in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley, Republicans have spent a considerable amount of time and money to turn what ultimately might have been an electoral blip into a national reality. They wanted Mayra Flores to win because it’s good for Republicans to show that they can win seats in districts like this one, with an 85 percent Latino population.Chuck Rocha, a political consultant and a former senior adviser for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, told me that even if Flores ultimately only serves for five months, her campaign is “a brilliant marketing strategy by the Republicans.” He believes Flores’s victory will result in a “fund-raising boom” that will allow G.O.P. operatives to go out and solicit funds for other races in places with significant Latino populations. Flores’s victory, then, will allow the G.O.P. to raise money and mobilize public opinion around the narrative that the Latino vote is swinging fast. Any close race with a large Latino population will now seem up for grabs.But a lot of the excitement around Flores has to do with Flores herself. She is a 36-year-old immigrant and a respiratory-care therapist who works with elders. She is married to a Border Patrol agent. In her own words, she is “Pro-Life, Pro-Second Amendment, and Pro-Law Enforcement.” It’s hard to imagine a more perfect face for the future of the G.O.P. — a working Mexican American woman telling the public that everything the Democrats think and say about the people of South Texas is out of touch and wrong. In one television ad put out by the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, which opens with a photo of Joe Biden smiling at a podium, an unidentified voice speaking in a mild Hispanic accent says, “From up there, he’ll never get us down here. Forty years in office and not one visit to the border. He’s left us behind. That is why Mayra Flores is running for Congress. She’s one of us.”“One of us” is the purest expression of identity politics, and while Republicans have long used this tactic to convince white voters to vote for white candidates, it’s rarely, if ever, been used by the party to endorse a Latina and underscore her connection to her working-class community. (The Flores campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.)Much has been made over the past five years about how the Democratic Party can reach the working class. These conversations, which invoke coal miners and factory workers, are almost invariably concerned with the white working class. What’s almost never discussed is whether the Democrats are losing the nonwhite working class as well.“The Democratic Party has walked away from blue-collar messaging, which is really aligned with the new immigrant community, mainly Latinos, and actually in some states A.A.P.I., because they’re working those jobs,” Rocha said.This has opened the door for politicians like Flores to reimagine what the politics of her community should be. This has a special power within immigrant groups — even those who have been in America for a few generations — because their political allegiances aren’t calcified. According to a January Gallup poll, 52 percent of Latinos identify as independent, which is 10 percent higher than the proportion of independents among the American population as a whole. While this is a crude way to measure voter flexibility, it’s also true that over the past 40 years, both major immigrant groups in America — Latinos and Asian Americans — have swung between the two parties at a rate that far outpaced Black and white Americans.So who does Flores imagine is “us”? Her messaging mostly centered around economic hardship, family and opportunity. In a flier titled “Mayra Flores Will Restore the American Dream,” Flores promises to “stop out-of-control spending to end inflation,” “secure the border” and “expand, not limit, access to health care.” In another, she promises to “get the economy back on track” and “stop inflation in its tracks, and keep more money in your pocket.” And in her acceptance speech last week, Flores said, “The policies that are being placed right now are hurting us. We cannot accept the increase of gas, of food, of medication, we cannot accept that. And we have to state the fact that under President Trump, we did not have this mess in this country.” Her messaging is clear: “Us” refers to the struggling, working-class families who grew up with socially conservative values. “Them” is everyone else.Flores, then, can act almost as a proof of concept for future Republican candidates. Her invocation of Trump might have caught the attention of headline writers, but her campaign only occasionally mentioned the former president and stayed on message about economic factors, family and what she said were the real values of the people of South Texas: border security, religion, affordable health care, well-funded police and the Second Amendment.It’s time for Democrats to ask a very simple question: What, exactly, does their party offer working-class immigrants? Note that here I am not talking about the broad, humanitarian ideal of immigration, wherein a government puts aside its nativist tendencies and welcomes people from around the world. I am talking about the millions of first- and second-generation immigrants who still identify strongly with their country of origin but who have mostly come to the United States seeking economic opportunity. They are largely apolitical or independent voters. They get their news from non-English sources far from the reach of things like this newsletter. Like everyone else in America, they tend to vote based on which party better reflects their self-interest.This is a question I’ve been turning over in my head for the past five or so years, since I noticed that many of the communities I was reporting on — mostly Asian American — did not seem all that concerned with the threat of Donald Trump. This wasn’t a surprise to me. I was not born in this country, grew up in an immigrant household and have spent much of my career reporting on immigrant communities. For many first- and second-generation immigrant families, racism and white supremacy are secondary political concerns. (A Pew poll in 2020 showed that “racial and ethnic inequality” was fourth on the list of Hispanic voter priorities. The economy and health care were at the top of the list. Immigration, for what it’s worth, was eighth, below Supreme Court appointments and climate change.)Most immigrant families, mine included, assume that racism will be a part of their lives. But because they still believe in American economic opportunity, economic and health care issues will always be more of a political priority than the squishier and sometimes more abstract competition between which party they think will be more racist than the other. This is especially true of working-class immigrants, many of whom come from the socially conservative, religious backgrounds that Flores defines as “us.”If Flores’s low-turnout, likely temporary victory “portends” anything, it’s that immigrant identity politics rooted in economic talk can work for the right just as well as it has worked in the past for the left. What many in these communities want is a voice that will talk about economic hardships while also invoking a type of identity politics that will allow them to feel like they are part of a community.For the past two years I have been writing about how the Democratic Party has taken immigrant votes for granted with the warning that if this continues, a new politics rooted in “us” will arise, paired with the grievance that liberals do not actually care about “our” issues. This is precisely what Flores did. In one of her many interviews after her victory, she said Democrats had taken South Texas “for granted” and that “they feel entitled to our vote.”“I’m their worst nightmare,” Flores said of the Democrats in an interview with Newsmax. “They claim to be for immigrants. I’m an immigrant. They claim to be for women. I’m a woman. They claim to be for people of color. I’m someone of color. Yet I don’t feel the love.”Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.” More

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      Boris Johnson Risks a Sharp Rebuke in U.K. By-Elections

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      Scandals, economic pain and an uproar over lockdown parties have left Britain’s Conservatives at risk of losing both recent advances and old strongholds.WAKEFIELD, England — Prime Minister Boris Johnson has yet to campaign in the stately but faded city of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, even though his Conservative Party is at risk of losing a highly symbolic seat in a parliamentary election there on Thursday. But that doesn’t mean he’s not on people’s minds — or tongues.“Boris Johnson has been convicted of breaking the law. He held parties in the place where they make the laws. It’s massive hypocrisy,” said Jordan Rendle, 31, who was getting his hair cut by a local barber, Andrew Prust.“We’re all human — 99.9 percent of the country didn’t stick to the rules,” Mr. Prust replied, his shrug reflected in the mirror.“OK, stop the haircut now!” Mr. Rendle spluttered in mock outrage, as he realized his barber backed the prime minister.“Boris Johnson has been convicted of breaking the law,” said Jordan Rendle, getting his hair cut, adding: “It’s massive hypocrisy.”Andrew Testa for The New York TimesEven in races where Mr. Johnson is not on the ballot, he manages to be an all-consuming, often polarizing figure. While this election, along with one in southwestern England, is to fill seats vacated by two lawmakers whose careers were ruined by their own scandals, the races are also a referendum of sorts on the scandal-scarred prime minister.How badly has he been damaged by the uproar over illicit parties held in Downing Street during the pandemic?Were the Conservatives to lose both seats, which is conceivable, it would do fresh damage to the record of electoral success that has helped Mr. Johnson survive the kind of turmoil — including a no-confidence vote by his own party — that would have sunk most politicians. A double defeat could trigger another mutiny among the 148 rebel Tory members of Parliament who voted to oust him only two weeks ago.“If those elections were to be lost quite badly, I can’t see why a good proportion of those M.P.s wouldn’t be demanding another no-confidence vote,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “By-elections have a nasty habit of making a generalized problem acute.”For all the high stakes, campaigning in Wakefield has been muted.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesPolls suggest the Conservatives are on track to lose Wakefield to the main opposition Labour Party, less than three years after they won it in Mr. Johnson’s 2019 election landslide. That would give Labour back a seat it held for nearly 90 years and restore a brick to the party’s “red wall” — areas in England’s equivalent of the rust belt, former industrial cities and towns that were once Labour strongholds.The election in Tiverton and Honiton, in the rural Tory heartlands to the south, is more of a tossup. There, the centrist Liberal Democrats are hoping to evict the Conservatives from a seat they held since the district was created in 1997, and won with a hefty margin in 2019.The incumbent, Neil Parish, resigned in April after he admitted watching pornography on his phone while sitting in the House of Commons. In Wakefield, the Conservative, Imran Ahmad Khan, was jailed after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy.Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain speaking in 2019 during his Conservative Party’s final election campaign rally in London.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressThe lurid circumstances that required these off-year elections make the Conservative Party especially vulnerable. It adds to the perception of what critics call “Tory sleaze.” But there is deeper disillusionment with politics in Wakefield, where a strike at one of the bus companies has depressed business at shops and restaurants.“Politicians always make promises and then they always break them,” said Christine Lee, 82, a retired dress designer, as she browsed in one of Wakefield’s mostly deserted outdoor shopping malls. She said she did not plan to vote on Thursday because neither the Labour nor the Conservative candidate would make a difference.Given its high stakes, the campaign has been surprisingly muted. The Labour candidate, Simon Lightwood, who is comfortably ahead in the polls, has avoided making waves. His Tory opponent, Nadeem Ahmed, has gone quiet since he gave an ill-fated interview to The Daily Telegraph last week, in which he described his predecessor, Mr. Khan, as a “one bad apple,” who should not cause voters to turn against all Conservatives.A Labour stronghold in Wakefield. The party lost the seat in 2019, but has been ahead in polls there.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesDavid Herdson, who is running for the independent Yorkshire Party, left the Conservatives because of Mr. Johnson’s “reckless strategy” on Brexit.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMr. Ahmed likened the case to that of Harold Shipman, a notorious English doctor and serial killer who is believed to have murdered 250 of his patients as a general practitioner before killing himself in prison in Wakefield in 2004. “Have we stopped trusting G.P.s?” Mr. Ahmed said to the Telegraph. “No, we still trust G.P.s and we know that he was one bad apple in there.”Mr. Johnson has so far kept his distance. On Friday, he skipped a conference of northern Conservative lawmakers in the nearby city of Doncaster, instead making a repeat visit to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where he met President Volodymyr Zelensky.To some local politicians, that was a telling sign.“Conservatives don’t think it’s worth fighting for,” said David Herdson, who is running for the seat as the candidate of the independent Yorkshire Party. “Labour thinks the election is in the bag, and they don’t want to make any mistakes.”Mr. Herdson, 48, who left the Conservative Party because of what he called Mr. Johnson’s “reckless strategy” in leaving the European Union, is emphasizing local concerns like affordable housing and better public transportation. He hopes for a respectable finish in the top five of a 15-candidate field. But in knocking on doors, he says he has encountered a “massive cynicism toward the political class in general.”A Labour Party spokeswoman, Phoebe Plomer, said Mr. Lightwood would spend the final days of the campaign telling voters that by defeating the Tories in Wakefield, they had a chance to force Mr. Johnson out of power. Under the rules of the Conservative Party, Mr. Johnson is not subject to another no-confidence vote for at least a year, though the rules can always be changed.A discount store in Wakefield, where a bus strike has emptied the town center.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesEither way, a loss in Wakefield would carry great symbolism. In 2019, the Conservatives pierced the red wall on the strength of Mr. Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done.” That message appealed to disillusioned Labour voters, many of whom voted to leave the European Union in 2016. It was hailed as one of the most significant political realignments in British politics since the free-market revolution engineered by one of his Conservative predecessors, Margaret Thatcher.But instead of being revolutionary, Mr. Johnson’s leadership has been chaotic. In the wake of the no-confidence vote, his ethics adviser quit in despair last week, and Parliament is still scrutinizing whether the prime minister lied to lawmakers. On top of all that is a cost-of-living squeeze and a potential recession in the coming months.“There is this conventional thinking that Boris is this Heineken politician who can appeal to Labour voters,” Mr. Bale said, alluding to British ads in which a lager brand promised that it “refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.”“But his appeal is actually kind of limited,” Mr. Bale said, “and he has become more of a liability then an asset.”Shoppers at an outdoor food market in Wakefield.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesGeoff Hayes, 72, who once worked in the now-defunct coal mines that ring Wakefield, said Mr. Johnson had sold many Labour voters on the promise that Brexit would liberate Britain from the regulatory shackles of the European Union. Now, however, they were realizing that the reality was trucks lined up for miles at ports on the English Channel, where they faced delays because of bureaucratic customs paperwork.“A lot of people thought Brexit was going to change everything,” said Mr. Hayes, as he gazed at peregrine falcons nesting in the steeple of Wakefield’s cathedral. “But in the end,” he said, “the Tories only care about the mega rich.” More

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      In Two Elections, North and South, Boris Johnson Risks a Sharp Rebuke

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      Scandals, economic pain and an uproar over lockdown parties have left Britain’s Conservatives at risk of losing both recent advances and old strongholds.WAKEFIELD, England — Prime Minister Boris Johnson has yet to campaign in the stately but faded city of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, even though his Conservative Party is at risk of losing a highly symbolic seat in a parliamentary election there on Thursday. But that doesn’t mean he’s not on people’s minds — or tongues.“Boris Johnson has been convicted of breaking the law. He held parties in the place where they make the laws. It’s massive hypocrisy,” said Jordan Rendle, 31, who was getting his hair cut by a local barber, Andrew Prust.“We’re all human — 99.9 percent of the country didn’t stick to the rules,” Mr. Prust replied, his shrug reflected in the mirror.“OK, stop the haircut now!” Mr. Rendle spluttered in mock outrage, as he realized his barber backed the prime minister.“Boris Johnson has been convicted of breaking the law,” said Jordan Rendle, getting his hair cut, adding: “It’s massive hypocrisy.”Andrew Testa for The New York TimesEven in races where Mr. Johnson is not on the ballot, he manages to be an all-consuming, often polarizing figure. While this election, along with one in southwestern England, is to fill seats vacated by two lawmakers whose careers were ruined by their own scandals, the races are also a referendum of sorts on the scandal-scarred prime minister.How badly has he been damaged by the uproar over illicit parties held in Downing Street during the pandemic?Were the Conservatives to lose both seats, which is conceivable, it would do fresh damage to the record of electoral success that has helped Mr. Johnson survive the kind of turmoil — including a no-confidence vote by his own party — that would have sunk most politicians. A double defeat could trigger another mutiny among the 148 rebel Tory members of Parliament who voted to oust him only two weeks ago.“If those elections were to be lost quite badly, I can’t see why a good proportion of those M.P.s wouldn’t be demanding another no-confidence vote,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “By-elections have a nasty habit of making a generalized problem acute.”For all the high stakes, campaigning in Wakefield has been muted.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesPolls suggest the Conservatives are on track to lose Wakefield to the main opposition Labour Party, less than three years after they won it in Mr. Johnson’s 2019 election landslide. That would give Labour back a seat it held for nearly 90 years and restore a brick to the party’s “red wall” — areas in England’s equivalent of the rust belt, former industrial cities and towns that were once Labour strongholds.The election in Tiverton and Honiton, in the rural Tory heartlands to the south, is more of a tossup. There, the centrist Liberal Democrats are hoping to evict the Conservatives from a seat they held since the district was created in 1997, and won with a hefty margin in 2019.The incumbent, Neil Parish, resigned in April after he admitted watching pornography on his phone while sitting in the House of Commons. In Wakefield, the Conservative, Imran Ahmad Khan, was jailed after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy.Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain speaking in 2019 during his Conservative Party’s final election campaign rally in London.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressThe lurid circumstances that required these off-year elections makes the Conservative Party especially vulnerable. It adds to the perception of what critics call “Tory sleaze.” But there is deeper disillusionment with politics in Wakefield, where a strike at one of the bus companies has depressed business at shops and restaurants.“Politicians always make promises and then they always break them,” said Christine Lee, 82, a retired dress designer, as she browsed in one of Wakefield’s mostly deserted outdoor shopping malls. She said she did not plan to vote on Thursday because neither the Labour nor the Conservative candidate would make a difference.Given its high stakes, the campaign has been surprisingly muted. The Labour candidate, Simon Lightwood, who is comfortably ahead in the polls, has avoided making waves. His Tory opponent, Nadeem Ahmed, has gone quiet since he gave an ill-fated interview to The Daily Telegraph last week, in which he described his predecessor, Mr. Khan, as a “one bad apple,” who should not cause voters to turn against all Conservatives.A Labour stronghold in Wakefield. The party lost the seat in 2019, but has been ahead in polls there.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesDavid Herdson, who is running for the independent Yorkshire Party, left the Conservatives because of Mr. Johnson’s “reckless strategy” on Brexit.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMr. Ahmed likened the case to that of Harold Shipman, a notorious English doctor and serial killer who is believed to have murdered 250 of his patients as a general practitioner before killing himself in prison in Wakefield in 2004. “Have we stopped trusting G.P.s?” Mr. Ahmed said to the Telegraph. “No, we still trust G.P.s and we know that he was one bad apple in there.”Mr. Johnson has so far kept his distance. On Friday, he skipped a conference of northern Conservative lawmakers in the nearby city of Doncaster, instead making a repeat visit to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where he met President Volodymyr Zelensky.To some local politicians, that was a telling sign.“Conservatives don’t think it’s worth fighting for,” said David Herdson, who is running for the seat as the candidate of the independent Yorkshire Party. “Labour thinks the election is in the bag, and they don’t want to make any mistakes.”Mr. Herdson, 48, who left the Conservative Party because of what he called Mr. Johnson’s “reckless strategy” in leaving the European Union, is emphasizing local concerns like affordable housing and better public transportation. He hopes for a respectable finish in the top five of a 15-candidate field. But in knocking on doors, he says he has encountered a “massive cynicism toward the political class in general.”A Labour Party spokeswoman, Phoebe Plomer, said Mr. Lightwood would spend the final days of the campaign telling voters that by defeating the Tories in Wakefield, they had a chance to force Mr. Johnson out of power. Under the rules of the Conservative Party, Mr. Johnson is not subject to another no-confidence vote for at least a year, though the rules can always be changed.A discount store in Wakefield, where a bus strike has emptied the town center.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesEither way, a loss in Wakefield would carry great symbolism. In 2019, the Conservatives pierced the red wall on the strength of Mr. Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done.” That message appealed to disillusioned Labour voters, many of whom voted to leave the European Union in 2016. It was hailed as one of the most significant political realignments in British politics since the free-market revolution engineered by one of his Conservative predecessors, Margaret Thatcher.But instead of being revolutionary, Mr. Johnson’s leadership has been chaotic. In the wake of the no-confidence vote, his ethics adviser quit in despair last week, and Parliament is still scrutinizing whether the prime minister lied to lawmakers. On top of all that is a cost-of-living squeeze and a potential recession in the coming months.“There is this conventional thinking that Boris is this Heineken politician who can appeal to Labour voters,” Mr. Bale said, alluding to British ads in which a lager brand promised that it “refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.”“But his appeal is actually kind of limited,” Mr. Bale said, “and he has become more of a liability then an asset.”Shoppers at an outdoor food market in Wakefield.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesGeoff Hayes, 72, who once worked in the now-defunct coal mines that ring Wakefield, said Mr. Johnson had sold many Labour voters on the promise that Brexit would liberate Britain from the regulatory shackles of the European Union. Now, however, they were realizing that the reality was trucks lined up for miles at ports on the English Channel, where they faced delays because of bureaucratic customs paperwork.“A lot of people thought Brexit was going to change everything,” said Mr. Hayes, as he gazed at peregrine falcons nesting in the steeple of Wakefield’s cathedral. “But in the end,” he said, “the Tories only care about the mega rich.” More