Author: News Polite

For the many Americans who are nervous about the polls showing that President Biden may lose to Donald Trump in November, there is one big source of comfort. Since Trump took office in 2017, Republicans have lost many more elections than they’ve won, sometimes even when the polls looked bad for Democrats.

The list of recent Democratic victories is striking: In the 2018 midterms, the party retook the House. In 2020, Biden beat Trump, and Democrats retook the Senate. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats fared better than many pundits expected. Last year, Democrats did well in Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. They have also won many special elections to fill political offices that unexpectedly came open.

Voters may express dissatisfaction with Biden in surveys. When the stakes have been real, however, a crucial slice of these voters prefers Democrats to Trump-aligned Republicans. The pattern is a legitimate reason for Democrats — and others who fear the consequences of a second Trump presidency — to be hopeful about the 2024 election. The U.S. may indeed have an “anti-MAGA majority.”

But there is also one clear reason to question this narrative. In the latest edition of his newsletter, my colleague Nate Cohn — The Times’s chief political analyst — explains why Democrats shouldn’t take too much comfort from recent results.

2024 isn’t 2022

Nate’s key insight is that the electorate in a presidential race is different from the electorate in midterms or special elections. In off-year elections, fewer people vote. Those who do are more likely to be older, highly educated and close followers of politics, as this table shows:

As a result, midterms and special elections often revolve around turnout, rather than persuasion. And Democrats now have a turnout advantage.

In part, this advantage stems from the class inversion in American politics — namely, the shift of college graduates toward the Democratic Party and working-class voters toward the Republican Party. But the Democrats’ new turnout edge is not only about the class inversion. More broadly, Democrats of all demographic groups have been more politically engaged than Republicans since Trump won the presidency in 2016, at least when Trump himself is not on the ballot.

“This energy among highly engaged Democrats has powered the party’s victory in special elections, and in 2022 it helped the party hold its own in the midterms,” Nate writes.

A presidential electorate, though, is much larger. It includes many more voters who don’t follow politics closely. These less engaged voters are more likely to be independents and more open to persuasion. A presidential electorate also includes more young voters, more voters of color and more voters who didn’t graduate from college. These are precisely the voters with whom Biden is struggling to match his support from 2020.

A thin margin

Here’s one way to think about the situation: Biden won the 2020 election by a very small margin. Nationally, he beat Trump by seven million votes, but the Electoral College margin was much narrower. If the right mix of about 50,000 people across a few swing states had switched their votes, Trump could have won.

By almost any measure, Biden’s standing seems to be weaker today than it was in November 2020. Only 41 percent of Americans viewed him favorably in a recent Gallup poll, down from 46 percent shortly before the election four years ago.

This deterioration is arguably more meaningful than the string of Democratic victories since 2020. In November, Biden won’t be facing the electorate that shows up for midterms and special elections. He will be facing a presidential electorate that is less favorable to his party — and less favorable to him than it was four years ago.

The big question is whether Biden can come close enough to matching his 2020 support in 2024 to win re-election.

Nate is careful to explain that the answer may well be yes. One reason is that Trump also has weaknesses he didn’t in 2020, including his role in the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and his criminal indictments. The safest conclusion, I think, is the 2024 race will be so close that the events of the next eight months are likely to determine the outcome. But Democrats shouldn’t assume recent history will repeat itself.

I encourage you to read Nate’s piece.

THE LATEST NEWS

Middle East

• Biden imposed sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, cutting them off from the U.S. financial system.

• Biden also lamented “the trauma, the death and destruction in Israel and Gaza,” saying he was “actively working for peace, security, dignity” for Israelis and Palestinians.

• Social media posts with opposing views of the Israel-Hamas war cost two New York doctors their jobs. Then their fates diverged.

• For many Palestinians in the West Bank, life is now subject to even more restrictions, like at checkpoints.

• Iran trained and funded the militia groups targeting ships and U.S. troops in the Middle East, Biden’s defense secretary said.

• Iran is sending more conciliatory signals, sensing a line has been crossed. Its supreme leader wants to avoid war.

Aid to Ukraine

Lives Lived: Toni Stern, a sunny California poet, became a trusted lyricist for Carole King, on “It’s Too Late” and other songs during King’s chart-topping career. Stern died at 79.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The Washington Commanders hired Dan Quinn, the Dallas Cowboys’ defensive coordinator, as head coach.

Mark Andrews: The Ravens’ tight end was feted as a hero for helping a woman with a medical emergency during a flight.

M.L.B.: Days after the team was sold, the Baltimore Orioles traded for the 2021 Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes.

Lindsey Horan: The U.S. women’s soccer captain said most American soccer fans “aren’t smart” and “don’t know the game” in a wide-ranging interview with The Athletic.

Ancient wonders: The Egyptian authorities recently announced a plan to cover the Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of Giza’s three main pyramids, with granite blocks of the kind that once clad part of its exterior. It has revived what experts say is a constant debate in conservation: whether to try to return ancient structures to their earlier splendor, or minimize intervention.

More on culture

More than 800 officials in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza.

The letter is the first instance of officials in allied nations across the Atlantic coming together to openly criticize their governments over the war, say current and former officials who are organizing or supporting the effort.

The officials say that it is their duty as civil servants to help improve policy and to work in their nations’ interests, and that they are speaking up because they believe their governments need to change direction on the war. The signers say they have raised concerns through internal channels but have been ignored.

“Our governments’ current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice and human rights globally,” the letter says, according to a copy obtained Thursday by The New York Times. It adds that “there is a plausible risk that our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.”

The Israeli military launched a bombing and ground campaign in Gaza after Hamas fighters invaded Israel on Oct. 7 and killed about 1,200 people while abducting about 240, Israeli officials said. More than 27,000 people in Gaza have been killed and nearly 2 million have been displaced since Israel’s offensive began, according to the health ministry in Gaza and United Nations officials.

The document does not include the names of signers because they fear reprisal, said one organizer, an official who has worked in the State Department for more than two decades. But about 800 current officials have given approval to the letter as it has quietly circulated among employees at the national level in multiple countries, the official said.

The effort reveals the extent to which pro-Israel policies among American, British and European leaders have stirred dissent among civil servants, including many who carry out the foreign policies of their governments.

About 80 of the signers are from American agencies, with the biggest group being from the State Department, one organizer said. The governing authority most represented among the signers is the collective European Union institutions, followed by the Netherlands and the United States.

National-level officials from eight other member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as Sweden and Switzerland, have approved the letter, said another person familiar with the letter. Most of those supporters work in the foreign ministries of those nations.

“The political decision-making of Western governments and institutions” over the war “has created unprecedented tensions with the expertise and duty that apolitical civil servants bring to bear,” said Josh Paul, who worked in the State Department bureau that oversees arms transfers but who resigned in October over the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s military campaign. Mr. Paul said he knew the organizers of the letter.

“One-sided support for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, and a blindness to Palestinian humanity, is both a moral failure and, for the harm it does to Western interests around the globe, a policy failure,” he said.

U.S. officials released a few similar letters and dissenting messages last fall. In November, more than 500 employees of about 40 U.S. government agencies sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his policies on the war. In that letter, the officials also did not reveal their names.

More than 1,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development released an open letter along the same lines. And dozens of State Department officials have sent at least three internal dissent cables to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

Across the Atlantic, dissent among European officials has also broken through in the months since Israel’s military response in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack.

In the European Union, which maintains a joint diplomatic corps known as the European External Action Service, as well as agencies dealing with humanitarian aid and development, hundreds of officials have signed at least two separate letters of dissent to the bloc’s leadership. Unlike the United States, the E.U. does not maintain “dissent channels” for officials to formally register their disagreement with policy.

The 27 E.U. countries, and their joint institutions, have taken diverging stances on the war, but the majority of governments are largely pro-Israel.

Only a handful of E.U. nations — prominently Ireland, Spain and Belgium — have consistently called on their partners and the E.U. to moderate support for Israel, push for a cease-fire, and focus on Gazans’ suffering.

Berber van der Woude, a former Dutch diplomat, said she wanted to speak out on behalf of the active civil servants who had signed the letter anonymously because they feared retribution for dissenting.

Ms. van der Woude, a conflict and peacekeeping expert who had served in the Dutch Foreign Ministry, including its mission in Ramallah, in the West Bank, resigned in 2022 to protest her government’s policy. She has since been a prominent pro-Palestinian voice in the Netherlands.

Ms. van der Woude said that dissent in situations like the Israel-Hamas conflict, even among the ranks of civil servants who tend to work behind the scenes and take political direction from elected governments, was justified if the policies being adopted were seen as harmful.

“Being a civil servant doesn’t absolve you from your responsibility to keep on thinking,” she said. “When the system produces perverse decisions or actions, we have a responsibility to stop it. It’s not as simple as ‘shut up and do what you’re told’; we’re also paid to think.”