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      How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden

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      A study by a liberal group found a reverse coattails effect in 2020: Down-ballot candidates may have helped elect President Biden, rather than the other way around.Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.But her run may have helped another candidate: Joseph R. Biden Jr.The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates. That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts.The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found. The analysis was carried out using available precinct-level data in eight states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Kansas and New York — and controlling for factors like education to create a comparison between contested and uncontested districts.The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.“The whole theory behind it is that these candidates are supercharged organizers,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of Run for Something. “They are folks in their community having one-on-one conversations with voters in ways that statewide campaigns can’t do.”The idea isn’t new, but it is the first time that a comprehensive study has been done on the possibility of such a reverse coattails effect, and it comes as the Democratic Party ramps up its strategizing for the midterm elections next year.In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts. The hope was that if there was at least one Democrat running in every county, it would help the party build a larger base for future elections. Mr. Dean was met with skepticism from national strategists who believed in a more conventional method of focusing limited campaign resources on swing districts. After his tenure, the strategy fell out of favor.What tends to derail any such 50-state, all-districts strategy are the limited resources that both parties have in any election, and the realpolitik considerations that inevitably lead them to pour disproportionate amounts of money into certain races seen as particularly important and winnable.“If you have candidates dedicated to ground game, then it could be helpful, but usually campaigns at the lower end of the spectrum don’t have that kind of money, and it’s certainly not done by parties as much anymore,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster. He said that one reason for this could be that controlling messaging down the ballot is hard to do when campaigns at the top of the ticket have different approaches to issues from those of local candidates.For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.Mr. Morales Rocketto expressed hope that the study would start a conversation among Democrats on how they invest in state and local races.During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic campaigns for the Senate, like Amy McGrath’s in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison’s in South Carolina, raised huge sums of money, in some cases topping $90 million for a single campaign. By comparison, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said it raised $51 million for legislative races in 86 chambers across 44 states.“Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”And what those losses look like is already known, Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, argued.“When Republicans took control of 21 state legislative chambers in 2010, we lost control for a near decade to win the United States Congress,” she said. “We now have a challenge with keeping the United States Senate, and Republicans are eroding our voting rights in these state legislatures.”Since the presidential election, Republican-run legislatures across the country have been drafting bills to restrict voting access, prompting Democratic calls for additional local party infrastructure. The way to get that investment and attention from the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Morales Rocketto said, is to highlight how a bottom-up approach can help the party at the national level, too.Ms. Post echoed that sentiment. “So much of the building blocks of American democracy are truly built in the state,” she said.Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”Mr. Hobart said that both parties should want to have strong candidates running for office up and down the ballot, because parties never know what districts will become competitive. For Republicans in 2020, some of those surprise districts were along the southern border of Texas, which had previously been a relatively blue region.“It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”The new study will be just one consideration as the D.N.C. reviews its strategy for state legislative and other down-ballot races in the midterms. The committee is pledging to increase investment in such races, both to help win traditional battleground states and to grow more competitive in red-tinted states that are trending blue.Officials at the D.N.C., who declined to speak on the record about the study, pointed to Kansas, which has a Democratic governor but voted for former President Donald J. Trump by 15 percentage points, as an example of a state where they’d like to put the study’s findings into action.Democrats in the state are gearing up to try to re-elect Gov. Laura Kelly, and Ben Meers, the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, said he hoped to test the theory. He said that having Democrats campaign in deep-red districts required a different type of field organizing.“There are some counties where if the state party can’t find a Democrat, we can’t have an organized county party, because the area is so red,” he said. “But if we can run even the lone Democrat we can find out there, and get a few of those votes to come out — you know the analogy: A rising tide lifts all Democratic ships.”Some Democratic strategists in Kansas noticed that phone-bank canvassers had more success with voters during the general election when they focused on congressional and local candidates, rather than headlining their calls with Mr. Biden. They’re hoping that building local connections in the state will help Ms. Kelly’s campaign.In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits. That was five percentage points better than Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016.Ms. Carter said she had tried to start grass-roots momentum in the district. “For me, running for office was never an ambition,” she said. “It was more so out of the necessity for where I live.”Ms. Carter’s district has grown exponentially during the last decade, bringing with it changing demographics and different approaches to politics. She knew through previous political organizing and her own campaigning that many people in her district, including friends and family, didn’t know when local elections were, why they were important or what liberal or conservative stances could look like at a local level.Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.“I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”Nick Corasaniti More

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      The Improvement Association, Chapter Two: ‘Where Is Your Choice?’

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      Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFrom the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.In this episode: Zoe talks to people in North Carolina who believe the Bladen Improvement PAC has been cheating for years. She tries to get beyond the rumors and into specifics; in the process, she comes face to face with the intense suspicion and scrutiny leveled against the organization. In the middle of another election, Zoe follows members of the PAC to watch how they operate and tries to make sense of all these allegations against them.In this series, the reporter Zoe Chace describes Bladen County’s notorious case of election fraud from 2018 as “individual people, in a tight-knit place, using their relationships to either make money or take revenge. Or both.”Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More

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      Scott Stringer Has Trained to Be Mayor for Decades. Will Voters Be Persuaded?

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      He Has Trained to Be Mayor for Decades. Will Voters Be Persuaded?Scott Stringer’s deep experience in New York City politics has yet to translate into momentum in the mayor’s race. Could an endorsement from the Working Families Party help?Scott Stringer, center, hopes to use his eight years as city comptroller as a launchpad to the mayoralty.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesThe New York City mayoral race is one of the most consequential political contests in a generation, with immense challenges awaiting the winner. This is the second in a series of profiles of the major candidates.April 14, 2021On a late February morning in Tribeca, the most seasoned politician in the New York City mayor’s race was sitting outside, futzing with his fogging-up eyeglasses as he wrestled with an assessment of an election that appeared to be slipping from his grasp.For Scott M. Stringer, every chapter of his steady ascent through New York politics — serving on a community planning board as a teenager; becoming a protégé of Representative Jerrold Nadler; moving from district leader to state assemblyman, Manhattan borough president and finally, city comptroller — has laid the groundwork for a long-expected mayoral bid.He has deep experience, boasts a raft of endorsements and verges on jubilant when describing his passion for his hometown. For much of the mayoral campaign, none of that has been enough to generate a surge of enthusiasm around his candidacy, according to polling and interviews with more than 30 activists, lawmakers and other New York Democrats.Mr. Stringer is working hard to change that.“If I was a book, and you’re in a bookstore and you saw the cover of the book, you may say, ‘I’m not sure I want to read that,’” Mr. Stringer said, framing a picture of himself with his hands, reaching from his head to his midline.“What my job is, is to get people of all different backgrounds to take that book off the shelf, open up the book, look at the different chapters of my career and the issues I’ve championed.”While several major labor endorsements have eluded Mr. Stringer, he won the backing of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesMr. Stringer, 60, would appear to have the resources, the résumé and the name recognition to do just that, trailing only Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, in funds on hand so far.He is hoping that his carefully cultivated political network and a mood of citywide emergency will help him attract voters motivated by both his progressive pitch and his pledges of steady managerial competence.On Tuesday, Mr. Stringer was endorsed as the first choice of the Working Families Party, aiding his efforts to emerge as the race’s left-wing standard-bearer.Still, in recent months, it is Andrew Yang — embraced as a celebrity from the 2020 presidential race — who has led polls and infused significant energy into the mayoral campaign. Mr. Stringer, who began the race as a top candidate, has scrambled to brand Mr. Yang as an unserious purveyor of “half-baked ideas” even as he dominates news media coverage.Mr. Adams and Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, beat out Mr. Stringer for several major labor endorsements. Those candidates and others in the crowded field are also competing with Mr. Stringer for either the “government experience” mantle or the title of left-wing standard-bearer.And for all of his prominent supporters, detailed policy plans and ambitious ideas on issues like climate and post-pandemic education, Mr. Stringer is also a white man who spent his career rising through traditional political institutions. New York Democrats in several recent races have preferred to elevate candidates of color and political outsiders.Now he faces his most challenging balancing act to date, as he campaigns as a veteran government official while seeking to ally himself with the activist left.“He’s trying to thread this needle between new and old supporters,” said Susan Kang, a member of the steering committee of the New York City Democratic Socialists, in an interview late last month. “You know how if you try to make everybody happy, you don’t make anybody happy? That is something that has given people pause.”Yet with the Working Families Party’s endorsement, Mr. Stringer found new cause for optimism. It was a signal to deeply progressive voters that the group believes they should unite around supporting Mr. Stringer’s candidacy, at a time of growing left-wing concern about Mr. Yang.Mr. Stringer remains in contention for other major endorsements, including one from the United Federation of Teachers. And he is aware that many voters have just begun to pay attention. Major debates do not begin until May, and the race to the June 22 primary may not crystallize until more candidates hit the airwaves with television advertising in the final weeks of the race.Still, one supporter recently compared Mr. Stringer to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Mr. Stringer’s choice in the 2020 presidential primary. Like Ms. Warren, Mr. Stringer has a long list of policy plans and is thoughtful about governance. But Ms. Warren, the ally noted, did not win.Mr. Stringer said his campaign planned to be “very aggressive” in the coming weeks, “reminding people of my record and who I am and what I believe in and what I would do as mayor.”“I need a message moment,” he said.A political upbringingAs a state assemblyman, Mr. Stringer made an unsuccessful bid for New York City public advocate in 2001.Robert Rosamilio/New York Daily News Archive, via Getty ImagesAny book written about Mr. Stringer would have a common theme: He is a political animal.Mr. Stringer, born to a politically active Jewish family, was raised in Washington Heights. His father was counsel to Mayor Abraham Beame, his mother was elected to the City Council, and his stepfather also worked in city government.He made his campaign trail debut at age 12, volunteering for Representative Bella S. Abzug, his mother’s cousin, who went on to run for mayor.At 16, he was tapped for a community planning board position. His appointment made the front page of The New York Times, and while on the board, he honed a version of at least one line that he still uses today: that the A train was his “lifeline.” Soon he was working for Mr. Nadler, serving on his assembly staff.“He was a little cocky,” Mr. Nadler recalled. “He learned to restrain that and to work with people very carefully.”Mr. Stringer, who did a stint as a tenant organizer, also served as a Democratic district leader in the 1980s, building a base on the Upper West Side, where the political culture reflects a vibrant Jewish community.Longtime observers tend to reach for Yiddish phrases of affection and derision to describe him. Admirers call the affable Mr. Stringer, a married public-school father of two sons, a “mensch.” Detractors privately dismiss the nasal-voiced candidate as a “nebbish.”Mr. Stringer and his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, live in Manhattan with their two sons, who attend public school.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesNew York City voters have often embraced politicians with more boldly distinctive personas.Mr. Stringer, who once taught his parrot to say “Vote for Scott,” is working on it.Asked in a campaign video to share something about himself that might surprise others, Mr. Stringer insisted, “I really am funny.” After a reporter asked him to tell a joke, Mr. Stringer spent the rest of an hourlong interview sprinkling his remarks with wisecracks.“Scott, when he’s not doing his work politically, he’s actually quite funny, he’s got a great personality” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. “But I guess because of his years of experience, he’s guarded when he’s doing his governmental work.”Mr. Stringer was elected to the State Assembly in 1992, following failed efforts running bars. In Albany, he pressed for some reforms of the State Capitol’s insular political culture, including a requirement that lawmakers be present in order to cast their votes.In 2005, he won a nine-way primary race for Manhattan borough president.Over the years he forged a reputation as a liberal who supported marriage equality and tenants’ rights, was skeptical of stop-and-frisk policing tactics, and had strong relationships with labor leaders and some reform-minded candidates. And he sharpened his skills as a strong retail campaigner who delights in touring senior centers.Representative Jerrold Nadler, who served as a mentor to Mr. Stringer, said that over the years, his protégé “learned to work with people very carefully.”John Marshall Mantel for The New York TimesHe mulled and abandoned several options for higher office, including a 2013 mayoral bid. Instead, he ran for city comptroller. In the greatest test of his career, he faced a late entry from Eliot Spitzer, the deep-pocketed and aggressive former governor who resigned after revelations of his involvement with a prostitution ring.Many had expected Mr. Spitzer to steamroll Mr. Stringer. For awhile, he seemed on track to do so. But Mr. Stringer held his own in a brutally personal race and overcame a polling deficit, though Mr. Spitzer beat Mr. Stringer with Black voters by significant margins.“We were not just behind early, we were behind at the end,” Mr. Stringer said. “I fought back through the debates, through the campaigning, and I won. So for me, this positioning is what I’m used to.”There are key differences, though: In 2013, Mr. Stringer had overwhelming support from unions and the political establishment. Now, labor endorsements are more scattered.And this race is unfolding in a pandemic. He had been cautious about in-person campaigning, after his mother died from Covid-related complications. Now vaccinated, he is seeking to match the more frenetic pace that some rivals, most notably Mr. Yang, have maintained for months.In 2013, Mr. Stringer won the Democratic primary for comptroller, holding off the former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, left, a late entry in the race.Angel Franco/The New York TimesAs comptroller, Mr. Stringer handled issues from housing authority audits to promoting kosher and halal food in public schools.He also supported closing Rikers Island and was a key part of the effort to divest $4 billion in city pension funds from fossil fuel companies; he cited that initiative when asked to name the proudest accomplishment of his career.People who have watched Mr. Stringer in the role say that he has been active in issuing audits and reports on issues vital to the city’s well-being, while embracing a time-honored comptroller tradition of tangling with the mayor.“Have there been contracts that have gone haywire? It doesn’t seem so,” said State Senator John C. Liu, who preceded Mr. Stringer as comptroller and has yet to endorse in the mayor’s race. “Has the office conducted audits that improved the performance of agencies? I believe there have been some.”On the whole, Mr. Liu ruled, “He has done a fine job as comptroller.”Kathryn S. Wylde, who heads the business-aligned Partnership for New York City, said that she believed Mr. Stringer had been “bold on corporate governance issues, he’s been bold in taking on the mayor.”Mr. Stringer has pressed for more disclosures about board diversity, and he has sharply criticized the de Blasio administration over issues ranging from affordable housing to its handling of prekindergarten contracts.“He’s done an aggressive job — and substantive — on all the key responsibilities of the comptroller,” Ms. Wylde said.To many New Yorkers, Mr. Stringer retains a reputation of being a traditional Democrat. He supported Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential race, and served as a delegate for Mrs. Clinton. In 2018, he supported Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over his progressive challenger, Cynthia Nixon.Mr. Stringer has since called for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation amid accusations of sexual harassment.A progressive wager Mr. Stringer has been willing to back progressive challengers in contested Democratic primaries, as he did with his support for Tiffany Cabán in the Queens district attorney’s race in 2019.Scott Heins/Getty ImagesLast September, a group of New York’s leading left-leaning lawmakers, many of them women and people of color, gathered at Inwood Hill Park to cheer on Mr. Stringer’s announcement for mayor.It was a scene years in the making.In early 2018, Alessandra Biaggi and Jessica Ramos were political unknowns, seeking to topple powerful moderate members of the State Senate. Mr. Stringer heard out Ms. Biaggi over a side of pickles at the Riverdale Diner; Ms. Ramos of Queens sought his support at drinks in Albany.He became an early champion of several insurgent progressives, cultivating genuine relationships over strategy sessions, phone calls and meals. Those endorsements were an uncertain political bet at the time.By last fall, they appeared to have paid off: As he announced his mayoral campaign, he was flanked by a diverse group of progressive lawmakers — including State Senators Biaggi and Ramos — who, to their admirers, represent the future of the party.It is less clear if their endorsements will translate into grass-roots enthusiasm for Mr. Stringer among voters who are skeptical of his left-wing bona fides.In his 2005 borough president race, a rival ran an ad criticizing Mr. Stringer for taking real estate developer money at a time when the city’s traditional power donors were looking for receptive politicians (the mayor at the time, the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, accepted no donations). It wasn’t until much more recently that he said he would stop taking cash from big developers, as prominent progressives highlighted the issue.He has become a sharp critic of segregated schools, saying definitively that he wants to eliminate the admissions exam that determines access to top city high schools, which some critics say perpetuates racial inequality. But he has not typically been associated with major integration efforts in past years.And he appears uncomfortable discussing aspects of the policing debate.Amid protests over the killing of George Floyd, Mr. Stringer declared that it was time to defund the police.But Mr. Stringer no longer emphasizes calls to “defund,” a term associated with a specific movement — another reminder that he is not fully part of the activist left. Pressed on whether he believed the phrase was divisive, Mr. Stringer would not answer directly.“I have used it,” he said. “I don’t think you should be judged based on, you know, one word or another word. And I do believe that when you’re going to talk about these issues, you have to be prepared to come forth with a plan.”He has proposed reallocating $1.1 billion in police funds over four years and has been more specific on the matter than some of his rivals, though Dianne Morales, perhaps the race’s most left-wing candidate, has pushed for far more, urging $3 billion in cuts from the police budget.At the height of the racial justice protests last year, Mr. Stringer said he supported defunding the police. Now he typically avoids the phrase.Jeenah Moon/Getty ImagesNo saga better illustrates Mr. Stringer’s political high-wire act than his 2019 endorsement in the Queens district attorney race. His embrace of Tiffany L. Cabán, the choice of the New York Democratic Socialists, over Melinda Katz, a colleague from his Assembly days who narrowly won, delighted progressive activists but stunned old allies.Critics who spoke with him at the time say Mr. Stringer had privately described New Yorkers as moving to the left, and they sensed that he wanted to embrace that shift. Mr. Stringer has said he believed Ms. Cabán, who is now running for City Council, was the more qualified candidate, but he also sounded testy when pressed on his decision in an interview with a Jewish outlet, to the irritation of some activists.“Scott, you know, seemed to have changed some of his positions over the years,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, the chairman of the Queens Democrats. “That has caused him, in Queens County at least, which I can speak to, to have some difficulty.”Competence over ideology?Mr. Stringer often says that he is prepared to “manage the hell out of the city” if elected mayor.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesFrom Mr. Stringer’s earliest days in politics, he learned to think strategically about relationships.He has maintained communication with business leaders, and his central message that he will be prepared from Day 1 to “manage the hell out of the city” is not ideological.Ms. Wylde said that some business leaders “know him as a steady hand.”“When I think he’s going totally off the deep end, we have a conversation,” she added.Ranked-choice voting, which enables voters to support up to five candidates, will test Mr. Stringer’s political skills like never before.Even if he is not the favorite of deeply progressive voters, he hopes to be their second choice. That could also work with moderates who see him as more of a manager than a firebrand. But first he must cement his standing as a leading candidate in the homestretch of the race.Mr. Stringer knows that he has significant work to do.In a campaign video he filmed to introduce himself to voters, he said that his favorite movie was “The Candidate,” a 1972 film that traced the arc of a dazzling young candidate, played by Robert Redford, who had little understanding of government process.He has little in common with Mr. Redford’s character. But Mr. Stringer, too, must prove that he can win. More

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      Democrats Were Lukewarm on Campaign Biden. They Love President Biden.

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      Joe Biden never captured the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama once did. But now that he is in office, he is drawing nearly universal approval from his party.The old cliché has it that when it comes to picking their presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love. But the party’s primary race last year was hardly a great political romance: Joseph R. Biden Jr. drew less than 21 percent of the Democratic vote in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and a dismal 8.4 percent in the New Hampshire primary.While Mr. Biden went on to win his party’s nomination, he was never widely seen as capturing the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama and Bill Clinton once did. For many of his supporters, he seemed simply like their best chance to defeat a president — Donald J. Trump — who inspired far more passion than he did.Yet in the first few months of his administration, Mr. Biden has garnered almost universal approval from members of his party, according to polls, emerging as a kind of man-for-all-Democrats after an election year riddled with intraparty squabbling.He began his term this winter with an approval rating of 98 percent among Democrats, according to Gallup. This represents a remarkable measure of partisan consensus — outpacing even the strongest moments of Republican unity during the presidency of Mr. Trump, whose political brand depended heavily on the devotion of his G.O.P. base.And as Mr. Biden nears his 100th day in office, most public polls have consistently shown him retaining the approval of more than nine in 10 Democrats nationwide.Pollsters and political observers mostly agree that Mr. Biden’s popularity among members of his party is driven by a combination of their gratitude to him for getting Mr. Trump out of office and their sense that Mr. Biden has refused to compromise on major Democratic priorities.“He has this ability to appeal to all factions of the party, which is no surprise to the centrists, but somewhat of a surprise to the progressives,” Patrick Murray, the director of polling at Monmouth University, said in an interview.During the primary, Mr. Biden was the establishment figure, a Washington centrist in a diverse field that included a number of younger and more progressive rivals. While he won a plurality of Democrats, he struggled to win support from the party’s younger and more liberal voters.But as president, he has been governing much like a progressive without abandoning his longtime public identity as a moderate.“He has found a winning formula, at least for now,” said David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Mr. Obama. “His tone and tenure reassure moderates and his agenda thrills progressives.”To that end, Mr. Biden has avoided taking up liberals’ most politically thorny proposals — like expanding the Supreme Court or canceling $1 trillion in student debt — while sticking to a public posture of bipartisan outreach and measured language. But his policy agenda has given progressives plenty to cheer, including the dozens of executive orders he has signed and the ambitious legislative agenda he has proposed, beginning with the passage of one of the largest economic stimulus packages in American history.Some progressives say the crises facing the country and the urgency of solving them have helped Mr. Biden, who was being evaluated against what Democrats saw as months of inaction by the previous administration.“Democrats were demanding shots in the arms and true economic help from the government,” said Faiz Shakir, who is a political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and managed Mr. Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “There was incredible unity in the Democratic Party of rising to the moment and acting quickly.”Mr. Shakir pointed to the passing of a popular $1.9 trillion relief package shortly after Mr. Biden took office, a bill he muscled through without any Republican support — opting for Democratic unity over bipartisan compromise. The president’s embrace of stimulus payments as part of that legislation — a policy that put money in the pockets of 127 million Americans — within weeks of taking office certainly didn’t hurt his standing, Mr. Shakir said.“It just had so many benefits for so many people,” he said.That bill was especially well liked within Mr. Biden’s party: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted just before it passed found that it enjoyed support from 97 percent of Democrats. As a result, the president has been able to unify his party around major initiatives tied to liberal investments in the social safety net.“The Democratic Party has shifted itself,” Mr. Murray said. “It has become more progressive, and you even have centrists who are on board with a few things that they wouldn’t have been happy with a few years ago.”But Mr. Biden may also be benefiting from some forms of progress that were not entirely of his own making. Millions of Americans are being vaccinated daily, moving the country closer to emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. As the United States moves slowly but steadily toward herd immunity, forecasters anticipate a quickly expanding economy, with even Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, predicting a financial boom that could last into 2023.Mr. Biden took steps to hasten virus vaccine production, but some of his political success on that front can be attributed to savvy public positioning. By tamping down expectations for vaccine distribution during his first weeks in office, when Mr. Biden beat his own expectations, his team conjured an image of a White House working overtime to leave the efforts of the previous administration in the dust.Though Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for widespread vaccine production with his Operation Warp Speed program, it is Mr. Biden who may be reaping the political benefit from that push — especially within his own party.Indeed, Democrats’ antipathy for Mr. Trump has a lot to do with their fondness for the new president, said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “Democrats utterly detested Donald Trump and Joe Biden saved them from Donald Trump, and so they love him,” Mr. Ayres said. “If you look at the overall job approval, not just among Democrats, Biden’s job approval is the inverse of Donald Trump’s.”Mr. Biden is hardly the first president to enjoy broad support from his party upon taking office. It is typical for commanders in chief to start their first term with a broadly positive approval rating, as Mr. Biden did, although that is always subject to the pull of gravity after the first few weeks are over.But in the history of Gallup polling going back to the mid-20th century, Mr. Biden is the first president to have started his term with the approval of more than 90 percent of partisans.To a degree, this reflects the fact that as the two major parties have grown more entrenched in their ideological identities, voters at the center have become slightly less likely to identify with either one. As a result, there has been a recent uptick in the share of Americans calling themselves political independents.“The partisan tribalism is such that you really are, in many ways, a true believer if you’re still going to call yourself a Democrat or a Republican,” Mr. Murray said. “What you’re left behind with is people who are going to be more staunch in their partisanship.”Just a few decades ago, a president with sky-high approval within his party would also be relatively popular outside it. But Mr. Biden’s approval rating, though positive over all, remains low among Republicans and stuck in the low-to-mid-50s among independents.“If you go back a generation and somebody has a 95 percent approval rating within their own party, that probably means they have about 50 percent approval among voters in the other party,” Mr. Murray said. “We don’t have that. We have this partisan split. His overall job rating is just above 50 percent. It’s still positive, but we would expect in former days that that would translate to a 60-percent approval rating.” More

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      Can These Democratic Pollsters Figure Out What Went Wrong?

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      Five competing Democratic polling firms put their heads (and their data) together about 2020.Everybody agrees the polls missed the mark in 2020, as they had four years earlier. But nobody’s certain why.In search of answers, five competing Democratic polling firms have decided to put their heads (and their data) together, forming a group that will undertake a major effort to figure out what went wrong in 2020 — and how the polling industry can adjust.The team released a memo today announcing the project and offering some preliminary findings that seek to address why polls again underestimated support for Donald Trump. But over all, the message was one of openness and uncertainty. The big takeaway: Things need to change, including the very nature of how polls are conducted.Innovation aheadThe authors wrote that their analysis thus far had pushed them toward thinking that pollsters must take a boldly innovative approach when mapping out the road ahead.“We know we have to explore all possibilities,” Fred Yang of Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, one of the five firms involved in the study, said in an interview today.That will probably mean embracing some tools that had been considered too untested for mainstream public polling: Officially, the survey-research community still considers live-interview phone calls to be the gold standard, but there is growing evidence that innovative methods, like sending respondents text messages that prompt them to respond to a survey online, could become essential.And it could also mean going back to some methods that have become less common in recent decades, including conducting polls via door-to-door interviews, or paying respondents to participate.“We are going to put every solution, no matter how difficult, on the table,” the memo read.The consortium of Democratic firms plans to release a fuller report this year; so will a number of traditional survey-research institutions. The American Association for Public Opinion Research, which undertook a widely discussed post-mortem analysis in 2016, is already at work on another. AAPOR is a bastion of polling traditionalism, but if the Democratic groups’ preliminary report is any indication, even the association’s coming analysis might acknowledge that the industry should embrace more experimental approaches to data collection.In a separate analysis released late last month, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight found that traditional, live-interview phone polls weren’t meaningfully more accurate than others. In fact, out of dozens of polling firms analyzed, none of those with the lowest average error had exclusively used live-interview phone calls (and some hadn’t used them at all). Two of the three most accurate firms were Republican-aligned companies that are held in suspicion by most leaders in the social-science world, partly because they use methods that have long been considered suspect — including robo-calling, as well as newer techniques like contacting respondents via text message.What drove polling errorThe Democratic firms’ memo said polls had slightly missed the mark when determining the makeup of the electorate last year. This means they misunderstood, to some degree, who was likely to vote and who wasn’t: a crucial “X” factor in pre-election polling.Among so-called low-propensity voters — that is, the ones pollsters consider the least likely to turn out — Republicans proved four times as likely as Democrats to actually end up casting a ballot in November. This can be taken as another indication of how effective Donald Trump was at expanding the Republican electorate, and pollsters’ difficulties accounting for that, particularly among white voters without college degrees and those in rural areas.Tellingly, the researchers found that voters who considered Trump “presidential” were underrepresented in polls.But a greater source of concern was so-called measurement error. That’s a fancy way of saying polls have had trouble figuring out what percentage of people in certain demographic groups plan to vote for one candidate over the other.The report proposed some explanations for why there was significant measurement error in 2020 pre-election polling, and it landed on two big potential culprits. One was the higher prevalence of anti-institutional views (sometimes referred to as “social distrust”) among Trump supporters, meaning those voters would be less willing to respond to official surveys. The second explanation was the lower incidence of pandemic-related fears among Trump voters, meaning they were more likely than Biden voters to be willing to turn out to vote.“What we have settled on is the idea there is something systematically different about the people we reached, and the people we did not,” the report’s authors wrote. “This problem appears to have been amplified when Trump was on the ballot, and it is these particular voters who Trump activated that did not participate in polls.”New York Times PodcastsThe Improvement Association: A true story about election fraudWhy do election fraud allegations live on, even after they’ve been debunked? In our new audio series with Serial Productions, we went to one rural county to try to find out. Listen to the first episode now.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      The Improvement Association, Chapter One: ‘The Big Shadoo’

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      Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher From the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.A few years ago, Bladen County was at the center of a major news story — the only time in recent history a congressional election was thrown out for fraud. In a hearing that followed, a Black political advocacy group was mentioned and dragged into the scandal. The group was the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, and after the hearing, Horace Munn, one of the group’s leaders, reached out to Zoe with an invitation to come to the county.In chapter one, Zoe goes to North Carolina to hear what’s behind all these cheating allegations.A tree in the water at Jones Lake State Park in Bladen County, N.C.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More

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      Oh Se-hoon Wins Seoul Mayoral Election

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      Conservative opposition candidates won two mayoral races that were seen as a referendum on President Moon Jae-in and a bellwether for next year’s presidential contest.SEOUL — In his last year in office, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has seen his approval ratings in a tailspin. His trademark North Korea diplomacy remains in tatters. Citizens are fuming over his ​repeatedly ​botched attempts to arrest soaring housing prices.And on Wednesday, voters in South Korea’s two biggest cities dealt another crushing blow to the beleaguered leader.Mr. Moon’s Democratic Party lost the mayoral elections in Seoul and Busan to the conservative opposition, the People Power Party. Critics are calling the results of the two by-elections a referendum on Mr. Moon and his government.“The people vented their anger at the Moon government through these elections,” said Kim Chong-in, head of the People Power Party, referring to large margins by which its candidates won.​South Korea’s Constitution limits Mr. Moon to a single five-year term. But he had hoped that a candidate backed by his party would succeed him in the presidential election next March and continue his progressive legacy, including a policy of engagement toward North Korea.Wednesday’s mayoral elections showed that the Democratic Party faces steep challenges as voters once loyal to Mr. Moon — especially those in their 20s and 30s — abandon it in droves.Oh Se-hoon, the People Power Party candidate, won the race in Seoul, the capital city ​of 10 million people. He routed Park Young-sun, the Democratic Party candidate and a former member of Mr. Moon’s cabinet, by more than 18 percentage points, according to voting results announced by the National Election Commission.The Seoul mayor is considered South Korea’s second-most powerful elected official after the president.In Busan, on the southeastern tip of the ​Korean Peninsula, Park Heong-joon, another candidate affiliated with the opposition party, ​​beat his Democratic Party rival by another large margin, according to the commission.A polling station on Wednesday in Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city, which also held a by-election for mayor.Yonhap/EPA, via ShutterstockThe by-election in Seoul was called after Park Won-soon, the former mayor, died by suicide last year following accusations of sexual harassment. The former mayor of Busan, Oh Keo-don, stepped down ​last year ​amid accusations of sexual misconduct from multiple female ​subordinates.The former mayors were both members of ​Mr. Moon’s Democratic Party and the president’s close allies. Their downfall ​weakened the moral standing of Mr. Moon’s progressive camp, which ​has cast itself as a ​clean, ​transparent​ and equality-minded alternative to ​its conservative opponents. Mr. Moon’s two immediate predecessors — Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak — were both conservatives and are now in prison following convictions on corruption charges.Mr. Moon was elected ​in 2017, ​filling the power vacuum created by Ms. Park’s impeachment. As a former human rights lawyer, he enthralled the nation by promising a “fair and just” society. He ​vehemently criticized an entrenched ​culture of privilege and corruption ​that he said had taken root while conservatives were in power, ​and vowed to create a level playing field for young voters who have grown weary of dwindling job opportunities and an ever-expanding income gap.Mr. Moon spent much of his first two years in power struggling to quell escalating tension between North Korea and the United States, successfully mediating diplomacy between the two countries. He shifted more of his attention to domestic issues after the two summit meetings between North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Donald J. Trump failed to produce a deal on nuclear disarmament or the easing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula.But things quickly turned sour on the home front ​as well.In 2019, huge outdoor rallies erupted ​over accusations of forgery and preferential treatment in college and internship applications​ surrounding the daughter of Cho Kuk, Mr. Moon’s former justice minister and one of his closest allies.The scandal flew in the face of Mr. Moon’s election promise of creating “a world without privilege,” and prompted outrage against the “gold-spoon” children of the elite, who ​glided into top-flight universities and cushy jobs while their “dirt-spoon” peers struggled to make ends meet in South Korea’s hobbled economy.President Moon Jae-in and his wife, Kim Jung-sook, casting early votes in Seoul on Friday.Choe Jae-Koo/Yonhap, via Associated Press​South Koreans expressed their growing cynicism over what they considered the hypocritical practices of Mr. Moon’s progressive allies with a popular saying: naeronambul. It roughly translates to, “If they do it, it’s a romance; if others do it, they call it an extramarital affair.”​Nonetheless, the Democratic Party won by a landslide in parliamentary elections last year as Mr. Moon leveraged his surging popularity around South Korea’s largely successful battle against the coronavirus. But Mr. Moon’s virus campaign has lost its luster.In recent months, South Koreans have grown frustrated with prolonged social-distancing restrictions, a distressed economy and the government’s failure to provide vaccines fast enough. On Wednesday, the government reported 668 new coronavirus infections, the highest one-day increase in three months.Mr. Moon’s most devastating setback came last month when officials at the Korea Land and Housing Corporation — the state developer — were accused of using privileged insider information to cash in on government housing development programs. Kim Sang-jo, Mr. Moon’s chief economic policy adviser, stepped down last month when it was revealed that his family had significantly raised the rent on an apartment in Seoul just days before the government imposed a cap on rent increases.“People had hoped that even if they were incompetent, the Moon government would at least be ethically superior to their conservative rivals,” said Ahn Byong-jin, a political scientist at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. “What we see in the election results is the people’s long-accumulated discontent over the ‘naeronambul’ behavior of the Moon government exploding. Moon has now become a lame duck president.”The real-estate scandal dominated the campaign leading up to Wednesday’s election. Opposition candidates called Mr. Moon’s government a “den of thieves.” Mr. Moon’s Democratic Party called Mr. Oh, the new mayor in Seoul, an incorrigible “liar.” Mr. Oh resigned as Seoul mayor in 2011 after his campaign to end free lunches for all schoolchildren failed to win enough support.Pre-election surveys this month showed that voters who planned to vote for Mr. Oh would do so not because they considered him morally superior to his Democratic Party rival. Instead, it was because they wanted to “pass judgment on the Moon Jae-in government.”Posters showing candidates for mayor of Seoul.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press More

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      American Flags Are Not Useful Political Clues, And Other Lessons From Google Street View

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      We recently showed Times readers images culled from Google Street View of 10,000 neighborhoods around the United States. Could readers guess, we wondered, how residents in a given place voted in the 2020 presidential election just by eyeballing a typical street scene? Our neighborhoods were representative of where American voters live, meaning they included about […] More