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Tag: last fall

  • Closing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term

    Closing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term

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    Just since last November, the most closely watched measure of consumer confidence about the economy has soared by about 25 percent. That’s among the most rapid improvements recorded in years for the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, even after a slight decline in the latest figures released yesterday.

    And yet, even as consumer confidence has rebounded since last fall, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained virtually unchanged—and negative. Now, as then, a solid 55 percent majority of Americans say they disapprove of his performance as president in the index maintained by FiveThirtyEight, while only about 40 percent approve.

    That divergence between improving attitudes about the economy and stubbornly negative assessments of the president’s performance is compounding the unease of Democratic strategists as they contemplate the impending rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump. Most Democratic strategists I spoke with believe that brightening views about the economy could still benefit Biden. But many also acknowledge that each month that passes without improvement for Biden raises more questions about whether even growing economic optimism will overcome voters’ doubts about him on other fronts.

    Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin

    Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser to Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection, told me that if he was in the White House again today, “I would say I’m not that concerned” about improving economic attitudes not lifting Biden yet, “because this takes time.” But, Sosnik added, “if you come back to me in six weeks or two months and we haven’t seen any movement, then I’d start becoming very concerned.”

    Historically, measures of consumer confidence have been a revealing gauge of an incumbent president’s reelection chances. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, as I’ve written, all saw their job-approval ratings tumble when consumer confidence fell early in their first terms amid widespread unease over the economy. But when the economy revived and consumer confidence improved later in their term, each man’s approval rating rose with it. Riding the wave of those improving attitudes, all three won their reelection campaigns, Reagan in a historic 49-state landslide.

    By contrast, when Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush lost their reelection bids, declining or stagnant consumer confidence was an early augur of their eventual defeat. Collapsing consumer confidence amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 also foreshadowed Trump’s defeat, after sustained optimism about the economy had been one of his greatest political strengths during his first three years.

    Read: Biden Is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Polling leaves little doubt that since last fall, more Americans are starting to feel better about the economy. An index of economic attitudes compiled by the Gallup Organization recently reached its highest level since September 2021. Even after the small retreat in the latest numbers, the University of Michigan’s index is now at its highest level since the summer of 2021. A separate consumer-confidence survey conducted by the Conference Board, a business group, also slipped slightly in February but remains higher than its level last fall.

    None of this, though, has yet generated any discernible improvement in Biden’s standing with the public. In fact, the recent Gallup Poll that documented the rise in economic optimism since last October found that Biden’s approval rating over the same period had fallen, from 41 to 38 percent—a single percentage point above the lowest mark Gallup has ever measured for him. The fact that consumer confidence has revived without elevating Biden’s ratings suggests “that impressions of his economic handling have been set and will likely be hard to change as he faces other struggles with perceptions of age and capacity,” the Republican pollster Micah Roberts told me.

    Paul Kellstedt, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, told me that two big structural shifts in public opinion help explain why Biden has not benefited more so far from these green shoots of optimism.

    One, Kellstedt said, is that the relationship is weakening between objective economic trends and consumer confidence. Compared with the days of Reagan or Clinton, more voters in both parties are reluctant to describe even a booming economy in positive terms when the other party holds the White House, Kellstedt noted. Given Biden’s record of overall economic growth and job creation, as well as the dramatic rise in the stock market, the consumer-confidence numbers, though improving, are still lower “than they should be based on objective fundamentals,” he told me.

    Still, optimism about the economy has increased since last fall, not only among Democrats but also among independents and even Republicans, trends that have lifted previous presidents. That points to what Kellstedt calls the second structural challenge facing Biden: The relationship between voters’ attitudes about the economy and their judgments about the president is also weakening.

    Amid these new patterns in public opinion, “a strengthening economy is not going to hurt Biden, of course, but how much it is going to help him is quite uncertain,” Kellstedt told me.

    Political strategists in both parties believe another central reason Biden isn’t benefiting more from the many positive economic trends under his presidency is that so many Americans remain scarred by the biggest exception: the highest inflation in four decades. Although costs aren’t rising nearly as fast as they were earlier in Biden’s presidency, for many essentials, such as food and rent, prices remain much higher than when he took office.

    Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who also surveys economic attitudes for CNBC, told me that more than anything else, “what is holding back” Biden from rising is that “it is still well within your memory when you were spending at the grocery store 10 to 20 percent less than you are now.”

    Republicans see a related factor constraining Biden’s potential gains: The baseline that voters are comparing him against is not in the distant past, but what they remember from the Trump presidency before the pandemic. Even though the University of Michigan’s consumer-confidence index and Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index have improved substantially since last year, for instance, in absolute terms they still stand well below their levels during Trump’s first three years. “There’s an alternative economic approach that voters can remember and compare to the years under Bidenomics,” Roberts told me. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s 2024 campaign, told me voters don’t credit Biden for moderating inflation largely because they blame him for causing it in the first place.

    A silver lining in all this for Biden is that, as Kellstedt noted, voters’ judgments about which candidate can better manage the economy don’t determine their preferences in the presidential race as much as they once did. Today, as I’ve written over the years, the two political coalitions are held together more by shared cultural values than by common economic interests.

    As recently as the 2022 election, Democratic House candidates not only carried the small share of voters who described the economy as good, but also won more than three-fifths of the much larger group who called it only fair, according to exit polls. That was primarily because a historically large number of voters down on the economy, and Biden’s performance, nonetheless rejected Republican candidates whom they viewed as a threat to their rights (particularly on abortion), their values, and democracy itself. That same dynamic will undoubtedly help Biden in 2024, particularly among upper-middle-class voters who have felt less strain over inflation, are most likely to be benefiting from the stock market’s surge, and are the most receptive to Democratic charges that Trump will threaten democracy and their personal freedoms.

    But Biden also has plenty of his own vulnerabilities on noneconomic issues. Not only Republicans but also independents give him dismal ratings for his handling of immigration and the border. His expansive support of Israel’s war against Hamas has deeply divided the Democratic coalition. And a broad consensus of voters, now often about 80 percent or more in polls, worry that Biden is too old for another term. If attitudes about the economy continue to mend, and Biden’s approval remains mired, “the stories that will be written is that voters have tuned him out, they’ve made their minds up, he’s too old,” Sosnik told me.

    Trump inspires such intense resistance that Biden, in a rematch, is virtually certain to win more support than any modern president from voters who are pessimistic about the economy. But that doesn’t mean Biden can overcome any deficit to Trump on the economy, no matter how large. And that deficit right now is very large: In national polls released last month by both NBC News and Marquette University Law School, voters trusted Trump over Biden for handling the economy by about 20 percentage points.

    At some point, the strategists I spoke with agree, the economic hole could become too deep to climb from by relying on other issues. (Both the NBC and Marquette polls showed Biden running much closer to Trump in the ballot test than on the economy—but still trailing the former president on the ballot test.) To overtake Trump, Biden likely needs twin dynamics to continue. He needs the slight February pullback evident in the University of Michigan and Conference Board surveys to prove a blip, and the share of Americans satisfied with the economy to continue growing. And then he needs more of those satisfied voters to credit him for the improvement.

    Biden has some powerful arguments he can marshal to sell voters on his economic record. Wages have been rising faster than prices since last spring, particularly for low-income workers. The big three economic bills Biden passed in his first two years have triggered an enormous investment boom in new manufacturing plants for clean energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, with the benefits flowing disproportionately toward smaller blue-collar communities largely excluded from the tech-heavy information economy. He can also point to significant legislative achievements that are helping families afford prescription-drug and health-care costs—a potentially powerful calling card, especially with seniors. If the Federal Reserve Board cuts interest rates by this summer—which it has signaled it will do if inflation remains moderate—that could turbocharge the improvement in consumer confidence.

    “There is so much other good news that I feel like there’s a case to be made to people that this president has substantially improved the economy,” Campbell told me. “But whether that ultimately supersedes people’s negativity about [inflation] is a question that I don’t have an answer to.”

    Biden still has time to improve his standing on the economy, but that time isn’t unlimited. Sosnik says history has shown that voters solidify their judgments about a president’s performance in the period between the second half of his third year in office and the first half of his fourth year, about four months from now. President John F. Kennedy, speaking about the economy, famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The next few months will reveal whether Biden’s has run aground too deeply for that still to apply.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Grumpy Economy

    The Grumpy Economy

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    What was the worst moment for the American economy in the past half century? You might think it was the last wheezing months of the 1970s, when oil prices more than doubled, inflation reached double digits, and the U.S. sank into its second recession of the decade. Or the 2008 financial collapse and Great Recession. Or perhaps it was when COVID hit and millions of people abruptly lost their job. All good guesses—and all wrong, if surveys of the American public are to be believed. According to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the most widely cited measure of consumer sentiment, that moment was actually June 2022.

    Inflation hit 9 percent that month, and no one knew if it would go higher still. A recession seemed imminent. Objectively, it’s hard to claim that the economy was in worse shape that month than it had been at those other cataclysmic times. But substantial pessimism was nonetheless explicable.

    Over the next 18 months, however, the economy improved rapidly, and in nearly every way: Inflation plummeted to near its pre-pandemic level, unemployment reached historic lows, GDP boomed, and wages rose. The turnaround, by most standard economic measures, was unprecedented. Yet the American people continued to give the economy the kind of approval ratings traditionally reserved for used-car salesmen. Last June, the White House launched a campaign to celebrate “Bidenomics”—­the administration’s strong job-creation record and big investments in manufacturing and clean energy. The effort flopped so badly that, within months, Democrats were begging the president to abandon it altogether.

    Some kind of irreconcilable difference seemed to have opened up between public opinion and traditional markers of economic health, as many op-eds and news reports noted. “The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?” The Wall Street Journal asked in early November. “What’s Causing ‘Bad Vibes’ in the Economy?” The New York Times wondered a few weeks later. Terms like “vibecession” and “the great disconnect” were coined and spread.

    More recently, consumer sentiment has improved. After falling for months, it suddenly rebounded in December and January, posting its largest two-month gain in more than 30 years—even though the economy itself barely changed at all. Yet as of this writing, sentiment remains low by historical standards—­nothing like the sunny outlook that prevailed before the pandemic.

    What’s going on? The question involves the psychology of money—and of politics. Its answer will shape the outcome of the presidential election
    in November.

    The toll of inflation on the American psyche is undoubtedly part of the story. That people hate high inflation is not a novel observation: The Federal Reserve has long been obsessed with preventing another ’70s-style inflationary spiral; its patron saint is Paul Volcker, the former Fed chair who famously broke that spiral by jacking up interest rates, which plunged the economy into a recession. But although experts and political leaders know that inflation matters, the way they understand the phenomenon is very different from how ordinary people experience it—and that alone may explain why sentiment stayed low for so long, and has only now begun to rise.

    When economists talk about inflation, they are often referring to an index of prices meant to represent the goods and services a typical household buys in a year. Each item in the index is weighted by how much is spent on it annually. So, for instance, because the average household spends about a third of its income on housing, the price of housing (an amalgam of rents and home prices) determines a third of the inflation rate. But the goods that people spend the most money on tend to be quite different from those that they pay the most attention to. Consumers are reminded of the price of food
    every time they visit a supermarket or restaurant, and the price of gas is plastered in giant numbers on every street corner. Also, the purchase of these items can’t be postponed. Things like a new couch or flatscreen TV, in contrast, are purchased so rarely that many people don’t even remember how much they paid for one, let alone how much they cost today.

    The irony is that consumers spend a lot more, on average, on expensive, big-ticket items than they do on groceries or takeout, which means the prices we pay the most attention to don’t contribute very much to overall inflation numbers. (Less than a tenth of the average consumer’s budget is spent at the super­market.) Some measures of inflation—“core” and “supercore” inflation among them—­exclude food and energy prices altogether. That is reasonable if you’re a Fed official focused on how to set interest rates, because energy and food prices are often extremely sensitive to temporary fluctuations (caused by, say, a drought that hurts grain harvests or an OPEC oil-­supply cut). But in practice, these measures overlook the prices that matter most to consumers.

    This dynamic alone goes a long way toward explaining the gap between “the economy” and Americans’ perception of it. Even as core inflation fell below 3 percent over the course of 2023, food prices increased by about 6 percent, twice as fast as they had grown over the previous 20 years. “I think that explains a huge part of the disconnect,” Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, told me. “You won’t convince any consumer that inflation is under control when food prices are rising that fast.”

    Consumers say as much when you ask them. In a recent poll commissioned by The Atlantic, respondents were asked what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The price of groceries led the list, and 60 percent of respondents placed it among their top three—more, even, than the share that chose “inflation.” This isn’t exactly a new development. In 2002, Donovan told me, Italian consumers were convinced that prices were soaring by nearly 20 percent even though actual inflation was a stable 2 percent. It turned out that people were basing their estimates on the cost of a cup of espresso, which had abruptly risen as coffee makers rounded their prices up after the introduction of the euro.

    Gilad Edelman: The English-muffin problem

    What’s more, most people don’t care about the inflation rate so much as they care about prices themselves. If inflation runs at 10 percent for a year, and then suddenly shrinks to 2 percent, the damage of the past year has not been undone. Prices are still dramatically higher than they were. Overall, prices are nearly 20 percent higher now than they were before the pandemic (grocery prices are 25 percent higher). When asked in a survey last fall what improvement in the economy they would most like to see, 64 percent of respondents said “lower prices on goods, services, and gas.”

    What about wages? Even adjusted for inflation, they have been rising since June 2022, and recently surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, meaning that the typical American’s paycheck goes further than it did prior to the inflation spike. But wages haven’t increased faster than food prices. And most people think about wage and price increases very differently. A raise tends to feel like something we’ve earned, Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. Then we go to the grocery store, and “it feels like those just rewards are being unfairly taken away.”

    If inflation is in fact the main reason the American people have been so down on the economy—and its future—then the story is likely to have a happy ending, and soon. My great-grandmother loved to reminisce about the days when a can of Coke cost a nickel. She didn’t, however, believe that the country was on the verge of economic calamity because she now had to spend a dollar or more for the same beverage. Just as surely as people despise price increases, we also get used to them in the end. A recent analysis by Ryan Cummings and Neale Mahoney, two Stanford economists and former policy advisers in the Biden administration, found that it takes 18 to 24 months for lower inflation to fully show up in consumer sentiment. “People eventually adjust,” Mahoney told me. “They just don’t adjust at the rate that statistical agencies produce inflation data.”

    Mahoney and Cummings posted their study on December 4, 2023—18 months after inflation peaked in June 2022. As if on cue, consumer sentiment began surging that month. (Perhaps helping matters, food inflation had finally fallen below 3 percent in November 2023.)

    There is another story you can tell about consumer sentiment today, however, one that has less to do with what’s happening in grocery stores and more to do with the peculiarities of tribal identity.

    It’s well established that partisans on both sides become more negative about the economy when the other party controls the presidency, but this phenomenon is not symmetrical: In a November analysis, Mahoney and Cummings found that when a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans’ economic outlook declines by more than twice as much as Democrats’ does when the situation is reversed. Consumer-­sentiment data from the polling firm Civiqs and the Pew Research Center show that Republicans’ view of the economy has barely budged since hitting an all-time low in the summer of 2022.

    Meanwhile, although sentiment among Democrats has recovered to nearly where it stood before inflation began to rise in 2021, it remains well below its level at the end of the Obama administration. It may never return to its previous heights. Over the past decade, the belief that the economy is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful has become central to progressive self-identity. Among Democrats ages 18 to 34, who tend to be more progressive than older Democrats, positive views of capitalism fell from 56 to 40 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to Gallup. Dim views of the broader economic system may be limiting how positively some Democrats feel about the economy, even when one of their own occupies the Oval Office. According to a CNN poll in late January, 63 percent of Democrats ages 45 and older believed that the economy was on the upswing—but only 35 percent of younger Democrats believed the same. To fully embrace the economy’s strength would be to sacrifice part of the modern progressive’s ideological sense of self.

    The media may be contributing to economic gloom for people of every political stripe. According to Mahoney, one possible explanation for Republicans’ disproportionate economic negativity when a Democrat is in office is the fact that the news sources many Republicans consume—namely, right-wing media like Fox News—tend to be more brazenly partisan than the sources Democrats consume, which tend to be a balance of mainstream and partisan media. But mainstream media have also gotten more negative about the economy in recent years, regardless of who’s held the presidency. According to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution, from 1988 to 2016, the “sentiment” of economic-news coverage in mainstream newspapers tracked closely with measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market. Then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would have predicted. After Joe Biden took office, the gap widened. Journalists have long focused more on surfacing problems than on highlighting successes—­bringing problems to light is an essential part of the job—but the more recent shift could be explained by the same economic pessimism afflicting many young liberals (many newspaper journalists, after all, are liberals themselves). In other words, the media’s negativity could be both a reflection and a source of today’s economic pessimism.

    What happens to consumer sentiment in the coming months will depend on how much it is still being dragged down by frustration with higher prices, which will likely dissipate, as opposed to how much it is being limited by a combination of Republican partisan­ship and Democratic pessimism, which are less likely to change.

    Will the place that it finally settles in come November matter to the election? How people say they are feeling about the economy in an election year—alongside more direct measures of economic health, such as GDP growth and disposable income—has in the past been a good predictor of whom voters choose as president; a healthy economy and good sentiment strongly favor the incumbent. Despite all the abnormalities of 2020—a pandemic, national protests, a uniquely polarizing president—economic models that factored in both economic fundamentals and sentiment predicted the result and margin of that year’s presidential election quite accurately (and much more so than polling), according to an analysis by the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck.

    It is of course possible that consumer sentiment is becoming a more performative metric than it used to be—a statement about who you are rather than how you really feel—and perhaps less reliable as a result. Still, the story that voters have in their heads about the economy clearly matters. If that story were influenced solely by the prices at the pump and the grocery store or the number of well-paying jobs, then—absent another crisis—we could expect the mood to be buoyant this fall, significantly helping Biden’s prospects for reelection. But the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by everything from the news we read to the political messages we hear to the identities we adopt. And, for better or worse, those stories have yet to be fully written.

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    Rogé Karma

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  • Sick Season Will Be Worse From Now On

    Sick Season Will Be Worse From Now On

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    Last fall, when RSV and flu came roaring back from a prolonged and erratic hiatus, and COVID was still killing thousands of Americans each week, many of the United States’ leading infectious-disease experts offered the nation a glimmer of hope. The overwhelm, they predicted, was probably temporary—viruses making up ground they’d lost during the worst of the pandemic. Next year would be better.

    And so far, this year has been better. Some of the most prominent and best-tracked viruses, at least, are behaving less aberrantly than they did the previous autumn. Although neither RSV nor flu is shaping up to be particularly mild this year, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, both appear to be behaving more within their normal bounds.

    But infections are still nowhere near back to their pre-pandemic norm. They never will be again. Adding another disease—COVID—to winter’s repertoire has meant exactly that: adding another disease, and a pretty horrific one at that, to winter’s repertoire. “The probability that someone gets sick over the course of the winter is now increased,” Rivers told me, “because there is yet another germ to encounter.” The math is simple, even mind-numbingly obvious—a pathogenic n+1 that epidemiologists have seen coming since the pandemic’s earliest days. Now we’re living that reality, and its consequences. “What I’ve told family or friends is, ‘Odds are, people are going to get sick this year,’” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me.

    Even before the pandemic, winter was a dreaded slog—“the most challenging time for a hospital” in any given year, Popescu said. In typical years, flu hospitalizes an estimated 140,000 to 710,000 people in the United States alone; some years, RSV can add on some 200,000 more. “Our baseline has never been great,” Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford, told me. “Tens of thousands of people die every year.” In “light” seasons, too, the pileup exacts a tax: In addition to weathering the influx of patients, health-care workers themselves fall sick, straining capacity as demand for care rises. And this time of year, on top of RSV, flu, and COVID, we also have to contend with a maelstrom of other airway viruses—among them, rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, and common-cold coronaviruses. (A small handful of bacteria can cause nasty respiratory illnesses too.) Illnesses not severe enough to land someone in the hospital could still leave them stuck at home for days or weeks on end, recovering or caring for sick kids—or shuffling back to work, still sick and probably contagious, because they can’t afford to take time off.

    To toss any additional respiratory virus into that mess is burdensome; for that virus to be SARS-CoV-2 ups the ante all the more. “This is a more serious pathogen that is also more infectious,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. This year, COVID-19 has so far killed some 80,000 Americans—a lighter toll than in the three years prior, but one that still dwarfs that of the worst flu seasons in the past decade. Globally, the only infectious killer that rivals it in annual-death count is tuberculosis. And last year, a CDC survey found that more than 3 percent of American adults were suffering from long COVID—millions of people in the United States alone.

    Read: Is COVID a common cold yet?

    With only a few years of data to go on, and COVID-data tracking now spotty at best, it’s hard to quantify just how much worse winters might be from now on. But experts told me they’re keeping an eye on some potentially concerning trends. We’re still rather early in the typical sickness season, but influenza-like illnesses, a catchall tracked by the CDC, have already been on an upward push for weeks. Rivers also pointed to CDC data that track trends in deaths caused by pneumonia, flu, and COVID-19. Even when SARS-CoV-2 has been at its most muted, Rivers said, more people have been dying—especially during the cooler months—than they were at the pre-pandemic baseline. The math of exposure is, again, simple: The more pathogens you encounter, the more likely you are to get sick.

    A larger roster of microbes might also extend the portion of the year when people can expect to fall ill, Rivers told me. Before the pandemic, RSV and flu would usually start to bump up sometime in the fall, before peaking in the winter; if the past few years are any indication, COVID could now surge in the summer, shading into RSV’s autumn rise, before adding to flu’s winter burden, potentially dragging the misery out into spring. “Based on what I know right now, I am considering the season to be longer,” Rivers said.

    With COVID still quite new, the exact specifics of respiratory-virus season will probably continue to change for a good while yet. The population, after all, is still racking up initial encounters with this new coronavirus, and with regularly administered vaccines. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me he suspects that, barring further gargantuan leaps in viral evolution, the disease will continue to slowly mellow out in severity as our collective defenses build; the virus may also pose less of a transmission risk as the period during which people are infectious contracts. But even if the dangers of COVID-19 are lilting toward an asymptote, experts still can’t say for sure where that asymptote might be relative to other diseases such as the flu—or how long it might take for the population to get there. And no matter how much this disease softens, it seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever disappear. For the foreseeable future, “pretty much all years going forward are going to be worse than what we’ve been used to before,” Hanage told me.

    Read: The next stage of COVID is starting now

    In one sense, this was always where we were going to end up. SARS-CoV-2 spread too quickly and too far to be quashed; it’s now here to stay. If the arithmetic of more pathogens is straightforward, our reaction to that addition could have been too: More disease risk means ratcheting up concern and response. But although a core contingent of Americans might still be more cautious than they were before the pandemic’s start—masking in public, testing before gathering, minding indoor air quality, avoiding others whenever they’re feeling sick—much of the country has readily returned to the pre-COVID mindset.

    When I asked Hanage what precautions worthy of a respiratory disease with a death count roughly twice that of flu’s would look like, he rattled off a familiar list: better access to and uptake of vaccines and antivirals, with the vulnerable prioritized; improved surveillance systems to offer  people at high risk a better sense of local-transmission trends; improved access to tests and paid sick leave. Without those changes, excess disease and death will continue, and “we’re saying we’re going to absorb that into our daily lives,” he said.

    And that is what is happening. This year, for the first time, millions of Americans have access to three lifesaving respiratory-virus vaccines, against flu, COVID, and RSV. Uptake for all three remains sleepy and halting; even the flu shot, the most established, is not performing above its pre-pandemic baseline. “We get used to people getting sick every year,” Maldonado told me. “We get used to things we could probably fix.” The years since COVID arrived set a horrific precedent of death and disease; after that, this season of n+1 sickness might feel like a reprieve. But compare it with a pre-COVID world, and it looks objectively worse. We’re heading toward a new baseline, but it will still have quite a bit in common with the old one: We’re likely to accept it, and all of its horrors, as a matter of course.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

    Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

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    Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.

    An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.

    The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”

    Read: Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers

    It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.

    By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.

    McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.

    The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.

    The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”

    Annie Lowrey: Work requirements just won’t die

    McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.

    House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.

    A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.

    Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.

    The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.

    But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.

    The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Elizabeth Holmes Isn’t Fooling Anyone

    Elizabeth Holmes Isn’t Fooling Anyone

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    Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone.

    The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over again. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone.

    On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes—which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received. The Axios editor Sam Baker picked the article apart on Twitter. The emergency-medicine physician Jeremy Faust called it “credulous drivel.” Journalists and doctors alike argued that the Times had erred by helping Holmes rehabilitate her image.

    When mistakes happen in the health-care system, doctors try to trace their origin to broken processes. Errors are addressed at the system—not individual—level: If a patient receives an incorrect dose of a medicine, for instance, the blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the nurse who administered it or the physician who prescribed it. The entire drug-delivery process, from pharmacy to bedside, is carefully inspected for unsafe practices. The media—and their content-delivery process—have been going through a similar postmortem over the Theranos debacle. Before John Carreyrou broke the bad news about the company at The Wall Street Journal, reporters were happy to write flattering profiles of Holmes with only the most rudimentary caveats. Even the Journal praised her before it damned her. But the Times’ latest visit to Holmesville suggests that this unsafe practice is still in place.

    Read: Theranos and COVID-19 testing are mirror-image cautionary tales

    As a pathologist—a doctor who specializes in laboratory testing—I’ve been following the Theranos story since the beginning. Holmes’s rise and fall is the most glamorous scandal to hit my field in some time: Most are more body-parts-in-the-back-of-a-pickup than celebrity-stuffed financial crimes. Just last week, I was giving a grand-rounds talk about Theranos. Loopholes in laboratory regulation and widespread ignorance of how blood testing works had caused medical professionals and the public to fall for diagnostic scams, I told the academics in attendance. Toward the end of the lecture, I posed a question: Have the media learned their lesson after enabling Holmes’s charade?

    Much has changed about science reporting in the years since Holmes’s disgrace. I’ve watched the media’s discussion of novel health technologies grow more nuanced and leery. Major news outlets now go out of their way to emphasize the precariousness of early study findings. I’ve been getting more calls from journalists who seek a skeptical perspective on some new lab test or scientific finding. But there are cracks in the media’s armor. The weakest component is the headline: You can still declare all manner of decisive breakthroughs, as long as you append “scientists find” to the title. Another persistent problem is that medical controversies are reported out study by study. Back-and-forth articles about contested areas offer ready-made drama but little clarity. (Masks help prevent COVID; wait, they don’t work at all; never mind, now they do again.) When doctors evaluate the latest research, we recognize that some methods are more reliable than others. Wisdom comes from learning which results to ignore, and scientific consensus changes slowly.

    But journalists’ most stubborn instinct—the one they share with Holmes—is to lean into a good story. It’s the human side of science that attracts readers. Every technical advance must be contextualized with a tale of suffering or triumph. Holmes knew this as well as anyone. She hardly dwelled on how her devices worked—she couldn’t, because they didn’t. Instead, she repeatedly told the world about her fear of needles and of losing loved ones to diseases that might have been caught earlier by a convenient blood test. Of course reporters were taken in. The next entrepreneur to come along and tell a tale like that may also get a sympathetic hearing in the press.

    Holmes understood that almost everyone—journalists, investors, patients, doctors—can be swayed by a pat narrative. She’s still trying to get ahead by telling stories. In offering herself up to the Times as a reformed idealist and a wonderful mother, Holmes adds to a story that was started by her partner, Billy Evans. As part of Holmes’s sentencing proceedings last fall, Evans wrote a multipage letter to the judge pleading for mercy, which was accompanied by numerous photos of Holmes posing with animals and children. “She is gullible, overly trusting, and simply naive,” Evans wrote about one of the great corporate hucksters of our era.

    Journalists are still telling stories about her too, for better or for worse. Holmes is not naive, nor are most readers of The New York Times. While last weekend’s “a hero or a villain” coverage may be said to have betrayed the patients who were harmed by her inaccurate blood tests, and the memory of a Theranos employee who died by suicide, it is also just another entry in the expanded universe of Holmes-themed entertainment. There are books and podcasts and feature-length documentaries. A TV miniseries about Holmes has a score of 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (“Addictively engrossing!” “Consistently entertaining!”) Surely some of those who now bemoan the Times’ friendly treatment have consumed this material for less-than-academic reasons.

    The prosaic details of a convicted cheat’s domestic life aren’t really news, but they are interesting—because the character of Elizabeth Holmes is interesting. So, too, are her continued efforts to spin a narrative of who she is. But with such well-trodden ground, the irony is built right in. You know that Holmes is a scammer. I know it. On some level, The New York Times seems to know it too; the article runs through her crimes and even quotes a friend of Holmes’s who says she isn’t to be trusted. This isn’t character rehabilitation; it’s content. We’re all waiting to see what Liz gets up to next. Have the media learned their lesson? The real test will arrive when the next scientific scammer comes along, and the one after that—when their narrative is still intact, and their fraud hasn’t yet been revealed. At that point, the system for preventing errors will have to do its work.

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    Benjamin Mazer

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  • Donald Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Religious Right

    Donald Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Religious Right

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    The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

    “I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

    It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

    Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots

    Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

    According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

    But he isn’t the only one.

    Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

    The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

    “I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

    At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

    “Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

    It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

    From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church

    And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

    It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

    “A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

    The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

    “He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

    Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement

    Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

    Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

    “Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

    Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

    Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

    There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

    In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

    There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

    Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis

    Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

    “So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

    She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

    This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

    DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

    “He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

    Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

    Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

    Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

    “It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

    Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis

    Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

    In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

    The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

    Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

    Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

    If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

    That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

    Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence

    “The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

    After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

    Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

    Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

    “He fights,” Byrd replied.

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    Tim Alberta

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  • Trump Begins His ‘Final Battle’

    Trump Begins His ‘Final Battle’

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    Former President Donald Trump gripped the CPAC lectern as he workshopped a new sales pitch: “I stand here today, and I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent—and very easily—World War III.” (Wild applause.) “And you’re gonna have World War III, by the way.” (Confused applause.)

    It was just one in a string of ominous sentences that the 45th president offered tonight during his nearly two-hour headlining speech at the annual conservative conference, which for years prided itself on its ties to Ronald Reagan, but is now wholly intertwined with Trumpism, if little else. Yet even amid cultish devotion, Trump seemed bored, listless, and unanimated as he spoke to a sprawling hotel ballroom that was only three-quarters full.

    For much of the speech, Trump’s voice took on more of a soft and haggard whisper than the booming, throaty scream that characterized his campaign rallies. His language, by contrast, was bellicose. Tonight’s address was among the darkest speeches he has given since his “American carnage” inauguration. Trump warned that the United States was becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden filthy communist nightmare.” He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left. He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.” He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said.

    This was only Trump’s fourth public event since officially entering the 2024 race last fall. Rather than lay out his vision for America, he found a mess of topics about which to complain. The White House, Trump said, “wasn’t the easiest building to live in.” He opined that “illegal immigrants come in, and we house them in the Waldorf-Astoria.” He characterized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “China-loving politician” and sounded legitimately disappointed when saying, “My wonderful travel ban is gone.” He lamented the halcyon days before he knew the terms “subpoena” and “grand jury.” He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “racist” and griped about the “Department of Injustice.” Shortly before his speech, Trump told James Rosen of Newsmax that he intends to stay in the 2024 presidential race even if he is indicted in one (or more) criminal investigations. Relatedly, he promised to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”

    Adam Serwer: The FBI desperately wants to let Trump off the hook

    The audience, largely composed of Trump loyalists, hooted and repeatedly yelled “U-S-A!” A brief selection of the hats dotting the hallways outside the Potomac Ballroom: MAGA, ’MERICA, LET’S GO BRANDON, TRUMP WON, WE THE PEOPLE ARE PISSED. Trump’s solemn face was splashed across an array of comically dramatic acrylic paintings on display. (Kari Lake, the election denier who lost her race for Arizona governor last year, kissed one on stage Friday night.) Downstairs from the main stage, attendees could have their picture taken in a mock version of Trump’s Oval Office. Multiple people roamed the corridors in red, white, and blue “Trump 45” baseball jerseys. As the former president spoke, supporters waved bright red WE WANT TRUMP signs. But the man himself seemed only sort of into it, and very bitter.

    It was a strange and lackluster conference—more of a “1 a.m. at the party” vibe than “the greatest political movement in the history of our country” that Trump invoked tonight. Perhaps, years from now, 2023 will be remembered as “the last gasp of CPAC.” Gone was the FoxNation sponsorship; Newsmax hoped to fill the void. Attendees could also linger at pop-ups from The Epoch Times, Right Side Broadcasting News, America First News, OAN, Lindell TV, Proverbs Media Group LLC, and Patriot Mobile, which was pitching itself as a Christian cell-phone company.

    Aside from Trump, the CPAC lineup was missing many of its usual stars. And most of his potential 2024 challengers skipped the conference altogether this year, with several instead attending a rival Club for Growth event in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump spoke just a few hours after Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, and Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, who announced the formation of something called an “Election Crime Bureau.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado came next with a fire-and-brimstone speech peppered with Bible verses. “We must stand united in this battle against actual evil,” she told the room.

    On Friday, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gently distanced themselves from their old boss in their speeches. (Haley was met with chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” after she left the stage.) The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who is also running for the Republican nomination, paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech before pledging to get rid of affirmative action, calling it a cancer. He took aim at the Georgia congresswoman and super Trump surrogate Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Do we want a national divorce, or do we want a national revival?” Trump, when rattling off thank yous and compliments early into his speech—Representative Matt Gaetz: “a great guy”; Dr. Ronny Jackson: “he’s a doctor!”—joked that Greene is a “low-key” person.

    The CPAC straw poll, once a pivotal moment in the GOP election cycle, wrapped up 10 minutes ahead of schedule tonight. (On cue, someone tried to start a “Let’s Go Brandon” chant during the unveiling of the results.) Unsurprisingly, Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, crushing his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who received 20 percent. Curiously, Trump never mentioned DeSantis in his speech. (Tomorrow, DeSantis is scheduled to speak at the Reagan Presidential Library, and both candidates are soon headed to Iowa.)

    Read: Does Trump stand a real chance to repeat 2016?

    Steve Bannon, proud recipient of a Trump pardon, was among the biggest celebrities of the weekend. Late Friday afternoon, Bannon marched out to the stage in all black, three pens clipped to his shirt, and attacked Fox News for its alleged “soft-ban” of Trump. He referred to the Murdoch family as “a bunch of foreigners” and said, “Note to Fox senior management: When Donald J. Trump talks, it’s newsworthy.” He fired up the crowd: “We’re not looking for unity. We’re looking for victory!” He pounded his hand on the lectern, summing up the theme of the weekend: “MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!”

    As Trump spoke, another of the gathering’s many “Let’s Go Brandon!” chants broke out, and the former president thanked the crowd. At one point, he play-acted a scene between President Joe Biden and his son Hunter discussing the “laptop from hell” and received genuine laughs. Trump warned that Biden “is leading us into oblivion,” then promised to single-handedly end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Nearly every topic he touched—border security, foreign wars—had a way of coming back around to him, Trump. “NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up,” he said. He then spoke hypothetically about Russia blowing up NATO’s headquarters.

    “You know, I had a beautiful life before I did this,” Trump said wistfully at one point. “I lived in luxury. I had everything.” As the speech crossed the 90-minute mark, Trump was clearly losing the audience. He returned to the wartime language: “We will not yield. We will press forward,” he promised. “We will finish what we started.”

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    John Hendrickson

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  • Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

    Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

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    The Republican Party has had no better friend than Nassau County in the past few years.

    Of America’s largest counties, few have turned more sharply toward the GOP than New York City’s neighbor to the east. This collection of Long Island suburbs swept Democrats out of local office in 2021, and last fall, Nassau County voted resoundingly Republican in New York’s gubernatorial race. Most important for the national GOP, the county helped elect three Republicans to Congress, including two candidates who flipped Democratic seats in districts that President Joe Biden had carried in 2020.

    Representative George Santos was one of those recent winners, and now Nassau County Republicans are worried that his abrupt fall from grace will cost the GOP far more than the seat that his lies helped the party pick up in November. They want Santos to step down, even though that means his seat would be vacant until a special election later this year, which the Democrats would aggressively contest. Local Republicans are flummoxed that national party leaders, starting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, haven’t joined their united call for Santos to resign. And they see McCarthy’s continued tolerance of Santos as an attempt to hold on to a Republican vote in the near term without enough consideration for whether he’d lose it—and cause Republicans to lose many others—in the longer term.

    Tom Nichols: Amazingly, George Santos is a member of Congress

    “It’s the right thing to do morally, ethically, and politically,” former Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican who represented the district next to Santos’s in the House for 28 years, told me about trying to oust Santos. “If you want to keep controlling the Congress, you can’t just have the short-sighted view that you need his vote next week or next month. You’re gonna lose all the votes in two years when you’re no longer in the majority.”

    With 2024 in mind, and as the list of Santos’s biographical fabrications grows (seemingly by the day), Nassau County’s GOP machine has treated the congressman-for-now as a boil to be lanced.

    “As far as I’m concerned, he’s nonexistent. I will not deal with him. I will not deal with his office,” Bruce Blakeman, the Republican who was elected Nassau County executive in 2021, told me. Last week, Blakeman joined a group of local GOP leaders, including county Republican Party Chairman Joseph Cairo and Representative Anthony Garbarino, in demanding that Santos resign.

    Yet for the moment, the political imperatives of Long Island Republicans no longer align with those of McCarthy, who plainly cannot afford to lose Santos’s vote with such a narrow margin in the House. Santos backed McCarthy in all 15 ballots for speaker earlier this month, and McCarthy’s allies rewarded him with a pair of committee assignments earlier this week. The new speaker said that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” but has made no move to sanction him.

    “The voters of his district have elected him. He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference,” McCarthy told reporters last week.

    Democrats have already filed a complaint about Santos with the House Ethics Committee, and he is under investigation by federal and local prosecutors in New York who are reportedly looking into whether he committed financial crimes or violated federal campaign-disclosure laws.

    Santos has defied calls to resign, and McCarthy might need his vote even more should another House Republican, Representative Greg Steube of Florida, miss an extended period of time after he sustained serious injuries from a 25-foot fall off a ladder earlier this week.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which traditionally backs GOP incumbents, echoed McCarthy’s ambivalence toward Santos. “Voters in New York will have the final say on who represents them,” NRCC spokesperson Jack Pandol told me by email. “Rep. Santos will have to earn back their trust as he serves them in Congress.”

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    King and others in Nassau County are trying to impress upon McCarthy that the longer he stands by Santos, the more damage he will do to a Republican brand that has been on the rise. “The only reason Kevin McCarthy has the majority is because of the very close marginal seats that Republicans won in New York,” King said. “We can lose all of them in the next election.”

    Even if McCarthy wanted to force Santos out, however, there’s not much he can do. He could try to expel him, but that would take the support of two-thirds of the House, and members of both parties might be leery of setting precedent by kicking out a member who has not been charged, much less convicted, of a crime. King suggested that McCarthy insist on an expedited investigation by the Ethics Committee—the panel’s probes tend to drag on for months—but there’s little history of that either.

    Election to the House “is an unshakable contract for two years,” Doug Heye, a former House GOP leadership aide who has advised lawmakers ensnarled in ethics investigations, told me. “Unless two-thirds of the House say, ‘Get out of here,’ or you give it up yourself, nothing happens.”

    Santos has almost no incentive to leave of his own accord anytime soon, especially now that Long Island Republicans have all but foreclosed the possibility of his winning renomination to his seat. “He’s not going to have a career. He’s not going to have a public life, and he’s going to be ostracized in his own community,” Blakeman told me. Santos was wealthy enough to lend his campaign $700,000. But his present personal finances are, like so much else about his life, a mystery, so he may need the paychecks that come with a $174,000 annual salary. And his seat could be a crucial bit of leverage in potential negotiations with prosecutors, Heye noted; resigning his seat, in that scenario, could help him avoid other penalties, including prison time.

    As his struggle just to get the speakership demonstrated, McCarthy doesn’t exactly have an ironclad grip on his conference. The Republicans from Nassau County seem to realize that the new speaker has limited sway over Santos. But McCarthy’s decision to protect and even validate Santos’s standing inside Congress is at odds with a party clinging both to its House majority and to its precarious stronghold on Long Island. “I’ve dealt with people with all sorts of issues,” Blakeman told me,” and enabling them is not a good thing.”

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    Russell Berman

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