The GOP controls nearly everything in Kentucky, a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 points in 2020. Republicans hold both U.S. Senate seats and five of Kentucky’s six House seats; they dominate both chambers of the state legislature.
What Republicans don’t occupy is Kentucky’s most powerful post. The state’s governor is Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019 who is hoping to win a second term tomorrow. Operatives in both parties think he might, but the governor’s in a close race with his Republican opponent, Daniel Cameron, the state’s 37-year-old attorney general. Whether Beshear can stave him off will determine if Democrats maintain one of their most surprising footholds in southern politics.
Beshear, 45, owes his success in a deep-red state to a combination of competent governance, political good fortune, and family lineage. His father, Steve, was a popular two-term governor who governed as a moderate and won the admiration of fellow Democrats for implementing the Affordable Care Act in the face of conservative opposition. The Republican governor whom Andy Beshear defeated in 2019, Matt Bevin, was widely disliked, even by many in his own party. Soon after taking office, Beshear earned praise for his steady leadership during the coronavirus pandemic and then later in his tenure during a series of natural catastrophes—deadly tornadoes, historic flooding, and ice storms. The crises have made the governor a near-constant presence on local news in the state, where allies and opponents alike usually refer to him by his first name. “I joke that Andy Beshear has 150 percent name ID” in Kentucky, Representative Morgan McGarvey, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, told me. “It’s because everybody knows who he is. And they actually know him.”
Major economic-development and infrastructure projects have also boosted the governor’s reelection bid—Beshear has taken advantage of billions in federal dollars that have flowed to Kentucky from legislation signed by President Joe Biden and backed by the state’s most powerful Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell.
Cameron is a onetime McConnell protégé who would be the state’s first Black governor if elected. In the campaign’s closing weeks, Cameron has touted an endorsement by Trump and tried to tie Beshear to Biden, who is deeply unpopular in Kentucky. The governor has endorsed Biden’s reelection, though he’s generally kept his distance from the president. At the start of one debate, Beshear, who had recently signed legislation legalizing sports gambling, “wagered” that Cameron would mention Biden’s name at least 16 times in their hour together onstage. Cameron was either unfazed or unable to improvise: He mentioned Biden’s name four times in the next 90 seconds.
Nationalizing the governor’s race is probably Cameron’s smartest bet in a state like Kentucky. But even Republicans concede that Beshear has done a good job of building a distinct brand during the past four years. “He ended up being able to operate in some nonideological arenas—the tornadoes, the floods, even COVID while it was going on,” Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant in Kentucky, told me. As they did for governors in most states, televised briefings during the pandemic allowed Beshear to connect with his constituents on a daily basis for weeks. The dynamic generally helped Republican leaders in blue states, such as Phil Scott in Vermont, and vice versa in Kentucky. “Anytime you come into people’s lives like that every day during an unusual situation, it does have an impact,” Jennings said. “You seem more familiar than the average politician that you see every now and again.” Since the beginning of 2020, just one governor—Democrat Steve Sisolak in Nevada—has lost a reelection bid.
Beshear has benefitted from incumbency in other ways as well. He’s raised and spent far more money than Cameron, which allows him to blanket the state in ads both positive and negative. He’s used ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings to tout job-creating projects. In September, Beshear placed the state’s first legal sports bet at the Churchill Downs Racetrack, a launch that was timed explicitly for the start of football season and implicitly for the start of his reelection campaign.
Among the issues Beshear has prioritized is abortion, a departure for a Democrat in a culturally conservative southern state. The procedure has been illegal in Kentucky since the overturning of Roe v. Wade triggered a statewide ban. But Democrats sensed a political opening last year after Kentucky voters rejected an amendment that would have stipulated that the state constitution did not protect abortion rights. The vote suggested that in Kentucky, as in other red states, such as Kansas, abortion rights have bipartisan support. “It’s a huge advantage for Andy,” former Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat who served for eight terms in the House before retiring last year, told me. “It has become a voting issue for the pro-choice side. It generates turnout and it moves some voters.”
One of Beshear’s TV ads features a woman who was raped by her stepfather at age 12 and who criticizes Cameron for his support of Kentucky’s abortion ban, which contains no exceptions for rape or incest. “I’m speaking out because women and girls need to have options. Daniel Cameron would give us none,” the woman says. After the ad began running, Cameron said that if the legislature presented him with a bill adding exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, he would sign it.
For Cameron, the Republican who has the best chance of winning him votes is Trump. The former president released a recorded endorsement last week, but he has not come to Kentucky to campaign for the attorney general. “We would accept any and all visitors to help get the vote out,” Sean Southard, a spokesperson for Cameron, told me when I asked whether the campaign had wanted a Trump rally.
What role, if any, race might play in the outcome is also a question mark. Cameron denounced a pair of ads by the Beshear-backing Black Voters Matter Action PAC that refer to him as “Uncle Daniel Cameron” and place his image alongside that of Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Django Unchained. “All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” a narrator says in a radio ad, urging a vote for Beshear, who is white.
To Republicans, Beshear is something of an accidental governor. After winning his race for attorney general in 2015 by slightly more than 2,000 votes, he defeated Bevin four years later by a margin nearly as minuscule (about 5,000 votes). The GOP-controlled legislature drives policy and can override his veto with a simple majority. “The Republican supermajorities have essentially stuffed him in a locker,” Jennings said. But, he argued, their dominance ultimately helps Beshear politically because they’ve prevented him from building a record to the left of where Kentucky voters want to go. “If left to his own devices, he’d be far more liberal on policy,” Jennings said. “In some ways, they save him from himself.”
As entrenched as they are in Kentucky’s legislature and congressional delegation, Republicans have struggled to win, and keep, the governorship. They’ve held the top job for just three four-year terms in the past eight decades, and both of their recent winners, Bevin and Ernie Fletcher, lost bids for reelection (each time to a Beshear). “What’s clear is that people view the governor differently,” McGarvey told me.
Both Republicans and Democrats I spoke with told me that they believed the GOP’s strength throughout the state would eventually extend to the governor’s office. Whether that happens tomorrow or in another four years is less clear. Private polls show Beshear with a small but not insurmountable lead, according to operatives in both parties who described them on the condition of anonymity. Public surveys have been limited, but they show a tightening race as well. Democrats close to the Beshear campaign told me that although they felt good about the race, a Cameron victory would not surprise them given the GOP’s overall advantage.
Yarmuth was a bit more confident. Sensing a lack of enthusiasm on the Republican side, he held out hope for a more convincing Beshear win that might even help Democrats in down-ballot races. But he, too, was skeptical that Democrats would be able to maintain their unlikely grip on Kentucky’s governorship much longer. “I would bet,” the former representative told me, “that it’ll be hard for a Democrat past Andy.”
(Bloomberg) — Li-Cycle Holdings Corp., which is set to receive significant backing from the Biden administration, saw its share price slashed nearly in half after announcing it would pause construction on a first-of-its-kind lithium-ion-battery recycling plant.
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The Toronto company said it would halt work on its Rochester Hub pending completion of a strategic review, including scope and budget. Li-Cycle said it is facing escalating construction costs that exceed prior guidance and is working closely with the US Energy Department concerning its offer of a $375 million loan commitment.
Li-Cycle is one of the many companies vying to help the US meet surging demand for battery materials needed in the transition from gas-powered cars. The government is pouring billions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives to build up a domestic supply chain, intended to help the US compete with China’s dominant industry position. The setback shows the challenges the US and the West face trying to essentially kick-start an industry from scratch.
Li-Cycle shares fell as much as 49% in New York. The stock closed at $1.23, down 46% for the day, its largest drop on record.
“The board of directors has decided to pause construction work on the Rochester Hub, pending a review of the project, including an evaluation of the go-forward phasing of its scope and budget, including construction strategy,” according to the statement. “As previously disclosed, engineering and procurement for the project are largely complete, with the current focus being on construction activities on site.”
Shares jumped 6% in February after the Biden administration announced the company’s US subsidiary would receive the loan to help finance expansion of a facility to recycle lithium-ion batteries into chemicals that can be used for the batteries of more than 200,000 electric vehicles a year. The funding is from the department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program amid a broader White House goal of having half of all car sales in 2030 be zero-emissions.
The unexpected announcement comes as congressional Republicans have vowed to find the next Solyndra LLC in their criticism of the hundreds of billions of dollars in new loan authority given to the Energy Department in President Joe Biden’s signature climate law. Solyndra, a California solar manufacturer that flopped soon after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee during the Obama administration, resulted in a years-long pause in loan activity amid intense congressional scrutiny.
The Energy Department said the Li-Cycle loan is still in the conditional phase and no money has yet been distributed.
(Updates with shares in fourth graph, expanded company comment in fifth graph.)
The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall.
“We are witnessing, before our eyes, the slaughter of thousands of people on our streets,” Omar Suleiman, the imam who led the prayer, had said beforehand. “We are witnesses to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine on a regular basis.”
The prayer group was part of a demonstration hosted by more than a dozen self-described progressive and religious organizations to call for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire. After Hamas massacred more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in its October 7 attack, Israeli bombardments of Gaza have reportedly killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were also civilians.
Although the protest’s organizers spanned a broad spectrum of faiths and group affiliations, it appeared that most of the rally attendees were Muslim, judging by the sea of multicolored head scarves and traditional dress. But progressives of other faiths were there, too, waving the red, white, and green flag of Palestine. Rally-goers called for President Joe Biden and the United States to stop supporting Israel’s blockade and air assault on Gaza. (The first convoy of trucks carrying aid entered Gaza through Egypt this morning, the United Nations reported.) As I moved through the crowd, we heard speeches from Gazan expats and representatives of progressive groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Movement for Black Lives, the Working Families Party, and the Center for Popular Democracy.
“Enough is enough,” Alpijani Hussein, a Sudanese American government employee who wore a long white tunic, told me. He and a friend carried a banner reading BIDEN GENOCIDE. Every time Hussein, a father of four, sees coverage of children killed in Gaza, he told me, he imagines his own kids wrapped in body bags. “I’m a father,” he said. “I can feel the pain.”
For nearly two weeks, the world has watched, transfixed, as a litany of horrors from the Middle East has unspooled before our eyes. First, the footage from October 7: the tiny towns on the edge of the desert, bullet-riddled and burning. Parents shot, their hands tied. Women driven off on motorcycles and in trucks. The woman whose pants were drenched in blood. And approximately 200 people—including toddlers, teenagers, grandparents—stolen away and still being held hostage.
Then, more death, this time in Gaza. The body of a boy, gray with ash. Rubble and rebar from collapsed concrete buildings or their ghostly shells. TikTok diaries from teenagers with phones powered by backup generators. “They’re bombing us now,” the teens explain, somehow sounding calm. Almost half of Gaza’s population are under 18; all they have known is Hamas rule—the Islamist group took over in 2007—and a series of similar conflicts. A barrage of rockets fired by Hamas and other militants; a wave of air strikes from Israel.
But this time is different: Israel has never been wounded this way—October 7 represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and over the protest hung a frantic sense that the vengeance had only just begun. Hackles were up and, at one point, a police car drove by, sirens blaring. Two women near me clutched each other nervously, but the officer drove on without stopping.
Inside the Capitol, a plain consensus prevailed: Many members of Congress from both parties have opposed a cease-fire and expressed strong support for the U.S. providing military aid to Israel. But outside, things weren’t so simple; they never are. None of the people I met said they supported Hamas, and certainly not the recent atrocities. But many said that the violence cuts both ways. “Israel is a terrorist country in my eyes—what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians,” Ramana Rashid, from Northern Virginia, told me. Nearby, people held placards reading ISRAEL=COLONIZERS and ZIONISM=OPPRESSION. Many protesters told me they did not believe that Israel has a right to exist. At various points in the protest, the crowd broke into the chant “Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!” (Whatever that slogan might mean for protesters—an anti-colonial statement or an assertion of homeland—for most Israelis it is clearly denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.)
“A cease-fire is the minimum to save lives,” a D.C. resident named Mikayla, who declined to give her last name, told me. “But what we really need is an end to the occupation.” Leaning against her bike, she shook her head no when I asked whether Egypt should open its doors to fleeing Palestinians. “If Egypt lets Gazans leave the Gaza Strip, then that is the definition of ethnic cleansing,” Mikayla said.
Other protesters I spoke with expressed concern only for ending the daily suffering of Gazans. The humanitarian crisis came first; the rest, the political stuff, would come later.
Sheeba Massood, who’d come with her friend Rashid from Northern Virginia, burst into tears when I asked why she’d wanted to attend. It was important to pray together, she told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, if you’re Palestinian, if you’re a Christian, if you’re Jewish,” Massood said, “we are all witnessing the killing of all of these children that are innocent.” Everything else, she said, was politics.
When I asked the demonstrators what might happen in the region, practically, after a cease-fire was enforced, most of them demurred. “I’m not a politician to know all the details and technicalities of it,” a Virginia man named Shoaib told me. “But I think just for one horrible thing, you don’t just go kill innocent kids.”
Every person I met was angry with Biden. The president has been unwavering in his support for Israel since October 7, and in an Oval Office address on Thursday, he reiterated his case for requesting funds from Congress for military aid to Israel. That same day, a senior State Department official resigned over the administration’s decision to keep sending weapons to Israel without humanitarian conditions.
In his remarks on Thursday, Biden spoke of the need for Americans to oppose anti-Semitism and Islamophobia equally. Friday’s demonstrators, so many of whom were Muslim Americans, were not impressed with that evenhandedness.
“Mr. President, you have failed the test,” Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, said from the podium outside of the Capitol. Ice-cream trucks parked nearby for tourists played jingles softly as he spoke. “You broke your promise to restore America’s moral authority.” Frankie Seabron, from the Black-led community group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams,led the crowd in chants of “Shame” directed at Biden. “This is a battle against oppression,” she said. “We as Black Americans can understand!” The crowd, which was beginning to thin, cheered its agreement.
As is generally the case, the program went on far too long. After two hours of speeches, the enthusiasm of an already thinned-out crowd was waning. The temperature dropped and raindrops fell, gently at first, then steadily. Finally, after organizers distributed blood-red carnations to every rally-goer, the group began the trek to the president’s house.
The demonstrators marched slowly at first up Pennsylvania Avenue, struggling with their banners in the driving rain. But as the remaining protesters got closer to the White House, the rain paused, and the sun peeked through the dark clouds. The protesters laid their flowers in the square before the White House gates—an offering and a demand for a different future for Gaza.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates pointed out that while President Biden has been working to advance bipartisan legislation and protect our national security, Republicans are busy fighting with one another as the nation hits the 17th day without a speaker in the U.S. House.
“While Joe Biden fights to advance bipartisan legislation that will protect our national security interests – including in Israel and Ukraine – provide humanitarian assistance for innocent civilians in Gaza, deliver critical border funding, compete with China, and grow our economy, House Republicans are somehow still fighting with each other,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement sent to PoliticusUSA.
“House Republicans need to end their chaotic infighting and their competitions to out-extreme one another, and instead join President Biden in working on urgent priorities for American families shared by both parties in Congress.”
The White House must be more than exasperated with the clown show, since these same people are responsible for approving aid to countries in needand have been refusing to give him the border funding we need, while spending their free time on Fox News hollering about… the border.
While some might find the show amusing, for anyone who cares about this country and is even vaguely interested in living in a democracy, the House circus show manned by an insurrectionist in one corner and “David Duke without the baggage” in the other is beyond troubling.
The American people deserve a functioning government, and were it not for gerrymandering, they might well have one right now. But thanks to massive corruption of the political process that amplifies extremism, the House is a mess when Republicans get the majority and it has been for at least 13 years.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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On a Thursday morning in April, I met with Vice President Kamala Harris at Number One Observatory Circle, the Victorian mansion that, for the past two and a half years, she and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, have called home. She can be a striking presence when she walks into a room, with a long stride and an implacable posture that make her seem taller than she is (about 5 foot 2). By the time I saw Harris at the residence, I had already traveled with her to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno, Nevada, as well as to Africa, trips on which she had carried herself with ease and confidence.
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Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered.
Harris is intensely private, so I was somewhat surprised to be invited to her home. The residence had been redecorated, and in keeping with past practice the work was done without fanfare. There have been no photo spreads, and the designer, Sheila Bridges, signed a nondisclosure agreement. But Harris seemed to enjoy showing me around. In the turret room, she pointed to the banquette seating built along the curve. (“I just love circles,” she said.) She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. “So you get the idea,” she said. We moved into the library, with its collection of books devoted to the vice presidency. (Who knew there were so many?) The green-striped wallpaper pattern that the Bidens had favored when they lived here was gone. Now there was bright, punch-colored wallpaper—chosen, Harris explained, in order to “redefine what power looks like.”
She said this with a laugh, but it was a studied phrase. Redefining what power looks like has been the theme of every chapter of Kamala Harris’s political career. She is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants—her mother a cancer researcher from India, her father an economist from Jamaica. As Biden’s running mate, she became the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to be elected vice president. Before that, she was the first South Asian American and only the second Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Before that, she was the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to serve as attorney general of her native California. Before that, she was the first Black woman in California to be elected as a district attorney.
When Biden underwent a colonoscopy in November 2021, Harris served as acting president, becoming the first woman (and first South Asian American) to officially wield presidential authority. If vice presidents have historically been tormented by the question of legacy—compelled to wonder not how they will be remembered but whether they will be remembered at all—Harris was assured of a mandatory nod in the history books the moment she was sworn in.
The hazy nature of Harris’s responsibilities has made for easy satire—“White House Urges Kamala Harris to Sit at Computer All Day in Case Emails Come Through,” read an early Onion headline. Clips of Harris sound bites gone wrong have ricocheted across social media, and not just right-wing sites. A Daily Show feature in October 2022 paired clips from various Harris speeches (“When we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community …”) with clips from the fictional vice president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on Veep (“Well, we are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states”).
In June 2023, an NBC News poll put Harris’s approval rating at 32 percent. While Biden’s own approval numbers, in the low 40s, are hardly inspiring, the percentage of those who disapprove of Harris’s performance is higher than for any other vice president in the history of the poll.
Ordinarily, as people around Harris like to remind reporters, a vice president’s approval rating does not warrant notice. But if Biden—already the country’s oldest president—wins reelection, he would begin a second term at age 82. And although Democrats recoil at any mention of Biden’s mortality, it’s hardly a coincidence that, as the 2024 campaign gathers pace, people have begun to contemplate the possibility that Harris could become president. In the campaign’s announcement video and at events across the country for the past few months, Harris has been enlisted more prominently as a spokesperson for the administration’s accomplishments—more visible, often, than the president himself. But unlike Biden, Harris does not simply need Americans to agree that she deserves four more years in her current job. She needs them to trust that she is ready, should the moment require it, to step into his.
Republicans may offer a mandatory “God forbid” when raising the prospect of some presidential health crisis, but they are already pushing the idea that “a vote for President Biden is a vote for President Harris.” They are doing so in large part because they see her as a more inviting target than the president himself: a woman of color whose word-salad locutions turn themselves into campaign ads, and whose outspoken advocacy on social issues makes her easier to paint as an ideologue lying in wait.
Harris and I talked at the residence for an hour. Toward the end of the conversation, she patted the cushion between us. “No reporter has sat here ever,” she said. It was a small moment, but it seemed to represent a recognition that something had to change—if not about the way Harris actually does her job, then about the way she presents herself, and her role, in public.
Even today, people who have worked for Harris make a point of telling you where they were during the Lester Holt interview. Usually, it is because they want to make clear that they were not involved.
In June 2021, at the end of a two-day trip to Guatemala, the vice president sat down with the NBC anchor to discuss Biden’s immigration agenda. Harris had recently become the administration’s lead on the so-called root-causes element of border policy, working with Central American countries to alleviate the violent and impoverished conditions that lead many migrants to flee north to the U.S. in the first place. The questions should have been easily anticipated—such as whether Harris had any plans to visit the border itself, where crossings had surged. Yet when Holt did ask that question, Harris threw up her hands in evident frustration. “At some point, you know, I—we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole—this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt corrected her: “You haven’t been to the border.” Harris became defensive. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” she snapped. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”
The exchange became the subject of headlines and late-night monologues. (“Well, that escalated quickly,” Jimmy Fallon said on his show the same night.) Afterward, Harris shied away from the camera for months.
For many Americans, the Holt interview was the first real exposure to Harris as vice president. She had spent the better part of her career as a “smart on crime” prosecutor who won her first election—district attorney of San Francisco, in 2003—by positioning herself as a pragmatic reformer. As California’s attorney general, she targeted transnational gangs and cartels and won billions in extra relief from big banks at the center of the foreclosure crisis. She had been the state’s junior senator for just over two years when she launched a bid for the presidency, in 2019, buoyed by the brief but bright flashes of stardom she’d earned from her tough, courtroom-style questioning of Trump-administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions (“I’m not able to be rushed this fast; it makes me nervous,” Sessions complained to her at one point), and of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And although she was an early favorite for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, raising millions in donations as she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump,” her campaign fell apart before the Iowa caucus, beset by uneven messaging, disorganization, and low morale.
Throughout her time in national politics, Harris has repeated some advice imparted to her by her mother: “You don’t let people tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.” Yet a consistent theme of Harris’s career has been her struggle to tell her own story—to define herself and her political vision for voters in clear, memorable terms. The result, in Harris’s first months as vice president, was that high-profile mistakes assumed the devastating weight of first impressions. Verbal fumbles (“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day”) became memes and were anthologized online. Shortly after the Holt interview, White House aides began leaking to variousnewsoutlets about top-to-bottom dysfunction in Harris’s office and Biden’s apparent concern about her performance. In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides. Her current chief of staff, Lorraine Voles—formerly Al Gore’s communications director, who has expertise in crisis management—was brought on initially to help with, as Voles put it, “organizational” issues with the team still in place.
Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, told me that after her initial missteps, Harris became highly risk-averse: “She’s always nervous that if she does something that doesn’t go well, she’s setting us back.” David Axelrod, a former senior strategist for President Barack Obama, noticed the same trait. “I think it’s one of the things that plagued her in the presidential race,” he told me. “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” He went on: “People can read that. When you’re playing at that level, people can read that.”
Those closest to Harris have tried to make sense of why the vice president’s positive qualities—her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity—have failed to register with Americans. It is impossible, of course, to talk about perceptions of Harris without laying some of the blame on racism and sexism. The briefest glance at the toxic comments about Harris on social media reveals the bigotry that motivates some of her most fervent detractors. But the vice president’s allies also acknowledge that she has struggled to make an affirmative case for herself. Judging from what has gone viral online, she is better known for her passion for Venn diagrams than for any nugget of biography; right-wing personalities enjoy mocking this predilection almost as much as they enjoy mocking the way she laughs.
Harris may understand intellectually the imperative to seem “relatable” to a broad audience—to condense her background to a set of compelling SparkNotes to be recited on cue—but she hasn’t made a habit of doing so. In smaller settings, she can be funny at her own expense. When I asked her what advice she would give to a successor, she referred back to some of those social-media reviews: “Don’t read the comments.” In our conversation at the residence, she touched briefly on how her “first woman” status shapes even the most workaday elements of the job: “I’m not going to tell you who said to me—it’s a previous president of the United States. He said, ‘Wow, women—I get up, I go work out, I jump in the shower, and I’m out the door. You guys …’ ” (I suspect she was quoting Obama, a friend of hers who has spoken about his efficient morning routine.) Harris told me that she has to let the Secret Service know a day in advance if she is going to be wearing a dress instead of a pantsuit, because agents have to pick her up in a different kind of car.
But she prefers a discreet distance from topics like these. A friend of Harris’s advised me before our first interview to avoid “small talk” or “diving immediately into personal matters.” The friend explained: “She appreciates the respect in that way.” Minyon Moore, a Democratic strategist with long-standing ties to Harris, made a related point: “She’s not a person—which I kind of like, but it doesn’t do her any good—she’s not a person that’s going to brag on herself. In fact, she’s very uncomfortable, say, beating her own chest. She just wasn’t raised that way.” Lateefah Simon, a former MacArthur fellow and now a candidate for Congress, was in her mid-20s when Harris hired her to run a program for young people convicted of nonviolent felonies, mostly involving drugs. Simon remembers Harris telling her she could either stand outside with a bullhorn or come push for change from the inside. “If you know Kamala Harris, she’s stern—she was a stern 38-year-old,” Simon recalled. But she could also be more than that: Harris gave Simon her first suit after she showed up on day one in Puma sweats.
Harris in 1997, when she was a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, California (Mary F. Calvert / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News / Getty)
Nearly three years after Harris’s swearing-in, her current and former staff still seem to be unearthing pertinent elements of her life story. Twice while I was reporting this article, aides highlighted an experience in Harris’s adolescence—one that had informed her decision to become a prosecutor—that they’d learned about only after joining her team. In high school, a friend confided in Harris that she was being molested by a family member, so Harris insisted that the friend move in with her own family (and she did). The outrage Harris felt in that moment would help define her path to the Alameda County district attorney’s office, where much of her work as a deputy involved prosecuting sex crimes against children.
I understood why her aides wanted me to hear that story, which is not widely known. I wondered why—when I’d asked about her decision to become a prosecutor—Harris hadn’t mentioned it herself. When we spoke at the residence, she did acknowledge the “request, sometimes the demand,” for personal revelation. “I guess it’s a bit outside of my comfort level,” Harris said, “because for me, it really is about the work. You know, I am who I am. I am who I am. And I think I’m a pretty open book, but I am who I am.” She went on a little longer, making clear that she understands that people want to know more. And then, in a softer tone, she said: “And I just, you know, yeah. I don’t know what to say about that.”
But what is “the work”? For the first time in her career, Harris holds a job devoid of any clear benchmarks of success. She was a transformational figure by the mere fact of her election, but the office to which she was elected doesn’t lend itself to transformational leadership.
After settling into Observatory Circle, Harris made a point of gathering historians for dinners—to discuss not just American democracy but also the history of the vice presidency itself. “You’re not supposed to be visible,” Heather Cox Richardson, who attended one dinner, told me, referring to the nature of the vice president’s job. “So there’s that really fine tightrope you walk, between how do you make people understand that you’re qualified without looking like you’re unqualified because you don’t understand your role.”
Neither Biden nor Harris arrived in Washington with a particular vision for Harris’s vice presidency. Harris had issues in which she was interested—racial justice, climate change, gun violence, maternal mortality—and as vice president she has explored these and others. But America imposed its own urgent agenda: Getting the pandemic under control absorbed much of everyone’s attention. With a 50–50 partisan split in the Senate, Harris was also compelled to spend much of her time in her old place of work, exercising the vice president’s constitutional duty to cast the deciding vote in the case of a tie. “We couldn’t make plans for me to be outside of D.C. for at least four days of the workweek,” she recalled.
More fundamentally, Biden and Harris came into office with few instructive models for their partnership, despite Biden having once held the job himself. For nearly half a century, with occasional exceptions, the vice president has been a creature of the capital. The president, in contrast, has been a relative outsider. Walter Mondale, the archetype of the modern American vice president, had 12 years in the Senate under his belt when he was sworn in. He became Jimmy Carter’s anchor to Washington. George H. W. Bush did the same for Ronald Reagan, as did Al Gore for Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney for George W. Bush, Joe Biden for Barack Obama, and Mike Pence for Donald Trump. But Harris and Biden flipped the script: a comparative newcomer serving as vice president to a man who’d launched his Senate career before she reached her tenth birthday.
In our interviews, Harris spoke of her relationship with Biden largely in generalities. When I asked how she and the president complement each other, she said, “Well, first of all, let me just tell you, we really like each other,” and then went on to talk about shared values and principles. When I asked Harris what aspects of her skill set Biden depends on, she was more direct: “You’ll have to ask him.” (When I did, a spokesperson for Biden sent this statement: “Kamala Harris is an outstanding vice president because she’s an outstanding partner. She asks the hard questions, thinks creatively, stays laser-focused on what we’re fighting for, and works her heart out for the American people. She inspires Americans and people around the world who see her doing her job with skill and passion and dream bigger for themselves about what’s possible. I trust her, depend on her, admire her. And I’m proud and grateful to have her by my side.”)
Current and former aides to both say Harris and Biden have a good friendship. The president made the relationship a priority early on, setting up weekly lunches with Harris, like the ones he himself had valued with Obama. She still has lunch with him, she says, “when he’s not traveling, when I’m not traveling.” Given that Harris loves to cook—and regularly has friends and family over for meals—I asked whether she and her husband had hosted the Bidens for dinner. She said that they hadn’t, and seemed momentarily stuck in a feedback loop: “We have a plan to do it, but we have to get a date. But he and I have a plan, we have a plan to do it. And yeah, no, we actually have a plan to do it.”
As vice president, Harris has been unfailingly loyal to Biden. For West Wing staff, especially at the beginning, this was no small thing. During Harris’s vetting for the job, some of those close to Biden—reportedly including his wife, Jill—struggled with the memory of her sharp attacks on him during the presidential primary. In a televised debate, Harris had brought up the subject of Biden’s past opposition to busing, leading to one of the most withering exchanges of the race. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris told Biden. “And that little girl was me.”
Perhaps in recognition of this history, Harris has been an unswerving advocate of Biden and his policy priorities. Ultimately, she told me, that is what she sees as the core of her mandate as vice president. Building out the rest of the mandate has proved more complicated.
The path to the Lester Holt interview began with tension over Harris’s policy portfolio. During one of the administration’s early multiagency meetings about the surge of unlawful crossings at the Mexican border, Biden was impressed as Harris outlined ideas for engaging the Central American countries that many of the migrants were coming from. According to Ron Klain, the president turned to Harris and said, “Well, why don’t you do that?”—meaning, become the point person on the morass of root-cause elements. Harris approached the chief of staff after the meeting. “And she said,” as Klain recalled, “ ‘Well, I wasn’t really looking for that assignment—my idea was, this is what we should do, and someone else should do it.’ ” Klain told Harris he understood but, as vice president, Biden had worked on this aspect of immigration policy for Obama, and they needed her to take it on as well.
It wasn’t that Harris lacked relevant experience; as attorney general of California, she had worked extensively with law enforcement in Mexico on drug and human trafficking. But the politics of the issue were radioactive. Harris knew this, and so did Klain. “It was obviously a controversial assignment,” he acknowledged to me. “It wasn’t necessarily anyone’s idea of a glory assignment.” (Asked about this, the vice president’s office responded that Harris had “plunged into the issue with vigor.”) Harris broke the news of the task to her staff on a mordant note, opening a meeting with the announcement that she was “going to oversee the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a person who was in the room, then dialing back to the slightly less grim reality.
As Klain saw it, Biden intended the appointment—to the same role he had once held—as a show of respect. But it also suggested obliviousness to Harris’s need, early in her term, for a measure of stability and success. Of course, as the Holt interview showed, Harris could make the task harder all on her own. Republican lawmakers and Fox News personalities relished the prospect of pinning the border crisis on Harris. She may have been responsible for just one sliver of U.S. policy, but they used her proximity to border issues to fuel the image of Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”
In the first year of his presidency, Biden did little to present Harris as essential to the administration; neither did the Democratic Party more broadly. Indeed, there was a sense that Harris might be a liability more than anything else. Less than two weeks into office, Harris appeared on a West Virginia news station to pitch the Biden administration’s coronavirus stimulus package—which Joe Manchin, the state’s conservative Democratic senator, was not yet sold on. In an interview on the same station the next day, Manchin said he was shocked that Harris had given him no notice of the appearance. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “That’s not a way of working together.” Later that year, as my colleague Franklin Foer has reported, Biden invited Manchin to the Oval Office to discuss the stimulus package; Harris was there initially, but after pleasantries was sent on her way. Biden had once said that Harris’s would be “the last voice in the room” during important conversations. Not this time.
Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, as they arrived in Accra, Ghana, in March 2023 (Ernest Ankomah / Getty)
In June 2021, Biden asked Harris to take the lead on voting rights for the administration. The House had recently passed the For the People Act—a massive overhaul of election law that addressed voter access, gerrymandering, campaign finance, and other matters—and Democratic leaders were eager to see movement in the Senate. That was unlikely. Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, promised that no Republican would support the bill; not all Democrats were on board either. The legislation would likely die by filibuster—a procedure that Biden, despite calls from many in his party, was almost certainly not going to try to undermine.
Harris’s allies would later characterize voting rights as one of those impossible issues—intractable is the word they often use—that the president had saddled her with. Yet it was Harris herself who had lobbied for the assignment. Her personal background made her a natural spokesperson, and as attorney general of California, she had signed on to an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold the protections against discrimination in the Voting Rights Act—the protections eventually struck down in Shelby County v. Holder. But the bill’s death by filibuster was virtually inevitable. And Harris didn’t do much to stave it off.
Harris’s aides once described her to reporters as potentially a key emissary for the administration in Congress—helping corral votes by way of “quiet Hill diplomacy.” But she lacked the deep relationships needed to exert real influence. Congressional officials told me that Harris rarely engaged the more persuadable holdouts on either side of the aisle. At a key moment in the negotiations, Biden went to talk with the two resistant Democrats, Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. Harris did not go with him. A White House official declined to get into details and said only that Harris was “interested and engaged” in conversations with Democratic lawmakers during this period. Harris shifted the terms of the discussion when I asked how her Senate background had proved useful in the administration’s push for legislation: “I mean, I think the work we have to do is really more in getting folks to speak loudly with their feet through the election cycle”—an unusual image, though the point was clear enough: Electing more Democrats might be more effective than trying to twist more arms.
For now, Senate Democrats are not fighting for time with Harris when she’s on the Hill. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic office that actually engages with her or her team on a regular basis,” one Democratic senator’s chief of staff told me. Traditionally, this person said, officials from the executive branch who visit the Capitol are cornered by lawmakers hoping to get their priorities before the president. But few people are “scrambling to make alliances” with Harris—not because of any dislike, as this person and other congressional officials told me, but simply because of uncertainty about the nature of her role. “In her case,” the chief of staff said, “it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And that’s kind of the end of it.”
This past spring, I traveled with Harris to Los Angeles, where she was scheduled to appear on Jennifer Hudson’s daytime talk show. When Hudson asked Harris what she missed most about her old life, before the White House, the vice president replied, “Have you watched The Godfather ?” I was in the greenroom with her staff as they looked apprehensively at the screen, wondering where their boss was going with this. Harris went on to describe the scene in which Michael Corleone is out for a quiet walk in Sicily with his fiancée, “and then the shot pans out, and the whole village is on the walk with them.”
There’s no escaping the reality that her every move is probed and dissected. During our conversation at the residence, Harris pointed to the veranda. “Sometimes in the summer, I’ll come and sit out with my binders and a cup of tea, and it’s just really nice and quiet,” she said. It wasn’t until later, when I listened again to the tape of the conversation, that I remembered what she’d said next: “You almost forget that there are 5,000 people around here.”
Having worked in politics and government for the better part of her life, Harris is accustomed to a certain amount of scrutiny. But in her past jobs—as a prosecutor, as attorney general—people were looking at her actual accomplishments. That was how it seemed to her, at least. A friend of Harris’s told me that her professional yardstick was “outcome driven.” Campaigning for district attorney of San Francisco, Harris criticized the incumbent’s low conviction rate for felonies; running later for reelection, she talked about how she had improved it by 15 percentage points. Communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.
This is still, in some ways, how Harris tends to perceive her job. She is always asking aides to get to the point: Show me the data; show me the metrics. And for some things, this works. But success in national politics involves gauzier, more emotional elements. It’s not an accident that the single utterance by Harris that most people can call to mind—“That little girl was me”—drew on searing personal experience.
Go to enough of Harris’s events and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them—conversations with community leaders at, say, a college campus or a civic center—begin shakily. The moderator opens by asking Harris a sweeping question about the state of the country, or the administration’s approach to some major issue—the sort of question that a seasoned politician should be able to spin her way through on autopilot. And yet Harris often sounds like she’s hearing the question for the first time.
During a discussion at Georgia Tech focused on climate change, I listened as Harris was asked to speak about the administration’s progress over the past two years in addressing the crisis. Her baroque response began: “The way I think about this moment is that I do believe it to be a transformational moment. But in order for us to truly achieve that capacity, it’s going to require all to be involved … and I will say, on behalf of the administration, a whole-of-government approach to understanding the excitement that we should all feel about the opportunity of this moment, and then also thinking of it in a way that we understand the intersection between so many movements that have been about a fight for justice and how we should see that intersection, then, in the context of this moment … And so I’m very excited about this moment.”
This is not Churchill. It’s not even Al Gore. Only when Harris assumed the role of interrogator herself did she seem to find her rhythm, pressing the moderators on the stage—two scientists—to discuss their personal journey toward an interest in climate issues. She then leveraged one moderator’s story to explain the administration’s plan to replace lead pipes across the country—using $15 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure deal, one of the Biden administration’s marquee victories. The communities that have been suffering from contamination “have been fighting for years and years and years,” Harris noted. “It didn’t take a science degree for them to know what was happening to their children.” The audience responded as if at a church service, with murmurs of affirmation.
Hillary Clinton told me that she has met with Harris at the White House and the vice president’s residence, and has talked with her numerous times by phone. “I’ve tried to be as helpful and available to her as possible,” Clinton said, adding, “It’s a tough role.” She noted that Harris isn’t a “performance” politician, a comment she intended not as a criticism but as an acknowledgment that Harris’s skills mainly lie elsewhere. (Clinton isn’t a performance politician either.) Harris doesn’t dispute the point: “My career was not measured by giving lovely speeches,” she told me.
Harris communicates most effectively when she can shift the focus away from herself. The first two conversations I had with the vice president, both while traveling with her, felt stilted and strained, as if I were tiptoeing around glass. But at the residence, alone, Harris was warm, inviting, at times even maternal. “You’re newly married,” she said. (“Yes,” I responded, though it wasn’t a question.) “Pay attention to your marriage,” she counseled. “Friendships, marriage require that you pay attention. Because life has a way of sweeping you up.”
Harris has configured many of her public events to resemble a back-and-forth conversation rather than a standard Q&A: She likes talking with people. The grassroots settings that Harris enjoys represent a mode of retail politics that rarely grabs national attention. But such events have given her a good read on what voters care about. They have also allowed her to inhabit her own space. As Klain observed, in Washington, you’re “just the vice president.” In the rest of the country, you’re “the vice president.”
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the abortion protections embodied in Roe v. Wade, Harris had a strong sense of American public opinion on the issue. Amid a crush of headlines predicting a so-called red wave in the upcoming midterm elections—with the economy as the central issue—Harris was steadfast in her view that abortion rights would shape the contest. She spent much of 2022 on the road, hosting conversations on reproductive rights in red and blue states alike. Women, she told me, “won’t necessarily talk loudly” about an issue like abortion. “But they will vote on it.” In this respect, Harris understood the mood of the country, and the potential impact at the ballot box, better than most people in Washington. In the midterms, the Democrats did far better than expected, even winning a majority in the Senate; there was no red wave. Harris has continued to travel and talk about abortion rights ever since. It is a central issue for the Democratic base and one that Biden—a devout Catholic who, in his own words, isn’t “big on” abortion—has been reluctant to press himself.
Harris marking the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade at an event in Tallahassee, Florida, in January 2023 (Aileen Perilla / Redux)
Fighting Dobbs will be a long battle. But it’s the kind Harris may be suited for. In one of our conversations, she spoke about “the significance of the passage of time”—a line that featured in one of her more unwieldy speeches as vice president. I remember steadying myself when the phrase surfaced. But what followed was a revealing commentary about the diligence and patience that are required to produce real change. Harris told me about a commencement speech she had given at the law school of UC Berkeley. She spoke to the new graduates about Brown v. Board of Education—about how, after the ruling, integration largely took place on a creeping, county-by-county basis, and only in response to continual pressure. Exerting that pressure meant building a legal foundation, erecting a structure brick by brick, and laboring over the details, all in return for progress that was often measured in inches. This is a truth, Harris noted, that Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley all knew. “And I just got up there and I was like, ‘You want to be a lawyer?’ ” she recalled. If you do, she told them, then you must learn to “embrace the mundane.”
She laughed at the memory of that line. “And the parents are like, Ooh, this is good,” she recalled. “And the kids are like, Oh, fuck.”
Harris’s engagement with abortion rights has broken through to voters more than anything else in her vice presidency, according to the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. But Harris has been effective in another arena—diplomacy—that to the public is hardly visible at all.
During his two terms as vice president, Joe Biden traveled to 57 countries—and before that, as a senator, he had decades to acquire experience abroad. In the past two years, Harris has traveled to 19 countries, including France, Germany, Poland, Guatemala, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, and Indonesia. She has met with 100 or so foreign leaders. They have tended to appreciate, as more than one White House official told me, how fact-based and direct she is. She has “very little patience,” one of them said, for the euphemisms and platitudes of routine diplomacy. Harris’s risk aversion appears to stop at the water’s edge.
Her first major diplomatic test came during a five-day trip to France in November 2021. For some time, Harris had been considering an invitation to attend the Paris Peace Forum, whose purpose was to discuss global inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. But in the weeks before the event, relations between Washington and Paris had been pitched into tumult after the announcement of a lucrative joint U.S.-British submarine deal with Australia that nullified France’s own submarine deal with Australia. French President Emmanuel Macron was furious, recalling his ambassador from Washington; Biden soon admitted that his handling had been “clumsy.” For Harris, the trip to Paris went from optional to crucial.
In front of the cameras, Harris and Macron both said what they were expected to say about a positive long-term bilateral future. The atmosphere was one of chilly civility. But behind the scenes, Harris was helping lay the groundwork for cooperation on the looming crisis in Ukraine. She used her nearly two-hour meeting with Macron at the Élysée Palace to present an array of U.S. intelligence. Harris urged the French president to take seriously the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Three months later, Biden asked Harris to represent the administration at the high-visibility Munich Security Conference. It was a sign of Biden’s confidence—on a personal level (Biden had attended the conference many times) and also because of the timing. The U.S. now knew that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, and Harris was tasked with helping press allies and partners to develop a coordinated response. Five days before the invasion, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to share U.S. intelligence and plans for military support. Publicly, Zelensky still seemed uncertain about Russia’s intentions and the scale of the threat. “The vice president directly and very clearly conveyed to Zelensky and his team that this was going to happen,” an official on the trip told me, “and they should really be planning on that basis and not waste any time.”
Harris returned to the Munich Security Conference this past February. Speaking for the administration, she formally declared the U.S. view that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.
A month later, I joined Harris on a multicountry tour of Africa. China’s deepening presence on the continent provided the geopolitical backdrop. But Harris was bringing with her more than $7 billion in commitments, largely from the private sector, to promote climate-resilience initiatives, money she had raised herself through months of tree-shaking phone calls to companies and individuals. The trip was a seven-day sprint, and logistically taxing. On one occasion, the American advance team had to upgrade an entire road from dirt to gravel; the vice president’s Secret Service code name may be “Pioneer,” but there are limits to what her motorcade can handle.
In Cape Coast, Ghana, Harris walked through the Door of No Return, where enslaved people had taken their final steps in Africa before being forced onto ships. She discarded her prepared remarks—something she had almost never done before—and spoke powerfully about the legacy of the diaspora in the Americas. In Lusaka, Zambia, she was driven to the rural outskirts of the capital to visit Panuka Farm, powered entirely by renewable energy. The vice president had spent time on a farm as a child; wearing jeans and Timberlands, she seemed at home inside the netted enclosures of sweet peppers and iceberg lettuce. Washington felt very far away.
Harris’s allies touted the Africa trip as a historic effort to deepen ties with the fast-growing continent. But it hardly registered back home. Terrance Woodbury is a Democratic pollster who focuses on young and minority voters; he saw the Africa trip as a “pivot” in terms of Harris’s self-presentation. Yet when I asked whether the trip had made any difference politically, he said, simply, “No.”
The trip also offered a reminder of Harris’s ongoing struggle when it comes to telling her own story—and of the Veep comparison. The vice president’s visit to Zambia had been billed as a kind of homecoming. As a young girl, Harris spent time in Lusaka with her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, who had been dispatched there in the 1960s from India to advise Zambia’s first independent government on refugee resettlement. Now, decades later, she was returning to Zambia as one of the most prominent public figures in the world. Harris’s scheduled stop at her grandfather’s old home in the capital, where she was expected to speak about his work and how his career as a civil servant had shaped her own ambitions, promised to be a special moment.
Instead, dozens of reporters and others looked on as Harris laughed somewhat awkwardly in front of a concrete-and-stucco office building. Greeting her near the doorway was a U.S.-embassy official, who explained that, after a year of combing through public records, researchers had managed to locate the plot of land on which Gopalan’s house had stood. The house itself, however, had been replaced by the headquarters of a Zambian financial-services group. Seeming not to know what else to do, Harris accepted an offer to tour the building. Reporters and cameramen, who had been anticipating a press conference at the end of the event, were ushered away. When I asked why the press conference had been scrapped, an aide said, “She needed a private moment.” Life has a way of sweeping you up.
My conversation with Harris at the residence came three weeks after our return from Africa. She took me through her herb garden, just off the driveway, crouching to examine the state of her oregano, dill, rosemary, thyme, and sage. Washington’s springtime pollen was at its worst, and my eyes were red-rimmed and watery as we made our way inside. After finding a box of tissues, Harris sympathized, referring to D.C. as “a toxic swamp of pollen.” People from outside the area, she went on, “are not acclimated to this mix.” It was a botanical comment, but it reminded me of something one of Harris’s old friends had told me about the vice president’s seeming discomfort in the capital, and how much happier she appeared when traveling to other parts of the country.
Perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021. A recent op‑ed in The Hill, largely sympathetic to the vice president, urged the Biden campaign to get her “off the sidelines”—this during a week when she traveled to Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Chicago. (Many weeks, she is on the road at least three days out of seven.) At one point during my conversation with David Axelrod, he wondered why Harris hadn’t become more of a champion for the administration’s most significant achievements, such as the infrastructure package. But much of her cross-country travel is focused exactly on that.
Of course, Harris is not alone in having trouble breaking through. “I mean, why do only a third of voters know what the president has done?” Celinda Lake, the pollster, asked when we spoke. “My God, they spent millions of dollars on it. They’ve got ads up now.” If voters don’t know what the president has done, Lake said, “they sure as heck aren’t going to know what the vice president has done.”
This summer, I asked Jeff Zients, the current White House chief of staff, if he could recall a moment when Biden had noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance, or when her input had meaningfully changed the administration’s approach to an issue. He had mentioned earlier in our interview that Harris had been instrumental in putting “equity” at the forefront of the administration’s COVID response—ensuring that public-health efforts reach the underserved. Other examples? “Let me think of a specific anecdote, and I’ll have somebody follow up,” he said. His spokesperson texted after the call to confirm that the office would get back to me. Despite my follow-ups, that was the last I heard.
Vice presidents are chosen mainly for political reasons—as Harris was—and not actuarial ones. In most of the presidential elections during the past half century, the possibility that the candidate at the top of the ticket might die in office was not a significant issue. (It was an issue for John McCain, in 2008, with his history of multiple melanomas, which was one more reason McCain’s selection of the erratic Sarah Palin as his running mate had such negative resonance.) This time around, given Biden’s age, the words heartbeat away connote a real possibility.
When I asked Zients what he’s observed in Harris that makes him confident about her abilities as a potential chief executive, he at first started chuckling in what seemed to be discomfort at the subtext of the question. (“Well, I want to, you know, make sure we’re not talking about anything—but, you know, she’s prepared.”) But after that he went on thoughtfully: “You know, the first thing I go to is when you’re president, there are so many issues, and understanding what’s most important to the American people, what’s most important to America’s position in the world—it takes experience, which she has, and it takes a certain intuition as to what matters most, and she’s very good at quickly boiling it down to what matters most, and focusing on those issues, and then within those issues or opportunities, understanding what’s most important, and holding the team accountable.”
That’s a sharp assessment of what a vice president can bring to the table, and not a bad way to make important observations about Harris that seem matter-of-fact and not tied to the prospect of a sudden transition.
So I was surprised when another White House official, who knows both Harris and Biden well, treated the topic of readiness as if it were somehow illegitimate—a ploy by desperate Republican candidates. “People who are polling near the bottom do things and say things to try and be relevant and get oxygen.” Was it ridiculous to ask about Harris’s constitutional closeness to the presidency? “She is the closest to the presidency, as all of her predecessors have been.”
Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, and Ron DeSantis, all of them presidential candidates, have explicitly raised the specter of a “President Harris.” So have other Republicans. The probable GOP nominee, Donald Trump, who habitually belittles women, will likely do so too. He has referred to Harris as “this monster” and has questioned her citizenship. On one occasion, he made fun of her name—“Kamala, Kamala, Kamala,” repeating it slowly with various pronunciations. Harris called him childish for that, but has largely declined to take the bait. Perhaps not surprisingly for a former prosecutor, she has become more publicly outspoken than anyone else in the White House about the indictments that Trump faces and the need to hold lawbreakers accountable.
The Biden administration has every incentive to embrace Harris. Why does addressing preparedness seem so difficult? Harris has affirmed that she is ready, if need be, but there’s a limit to what she herself can say. It’s not unusual for a president, any president, to take pains to demonstrate his vice president’s readiness for the top job, if only by regularly referencing their closeness—the notion that the person is briefed on everything and has an opportunity to weigh in on major decisions, even if the fingerprints aren’t always visible. And no president comes to the Oval Office with every necessary skill. Harris is an uncomfortable fit in the vice president’s role, whatever that is, and she cannot speak or act independently; the job makes every occupant a cipher. But she has been a successful public servant for more than three decades. She ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy. By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.
And yet the topic is treated as a trip wire. In a brief conversation after an abortion-rights rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I asked Harris herself: Had she and Biden discussed how to address questions about her readiness to step in as president, should circumstances ever require it? “No,” she said. And that was the end of the conversation.
This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Her?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Three words told the story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign had billed this afternoon’s event in Philadelphia as a “much-anticipated announcement.” Of course, that specific phrase may have been more true than intended.
Ever since Kennedy entered the Democratic presidential primary race in the spring, observers had been anticipating that he’d one day announce his honest intentions as a 2024 candidate. Given Kennedy’s rhetoric, his positions, and his support from conservative operatives, was he really running as a Democrat? A couple thousand people—supporters, journalists, campaign volunteers, people with nothing to do—trekked to Philly to find out.
The candidate was nothing if not on message. Standing in front of a backdrop that read DECLARE YOUR INDEPENDENCE, Kennedy looked out at Independence Hall as he spoke of “a new declaration of independence for our entire nation.” He rattled off a list of everything we’d soon be independent from: cynical elites, the mainstream media, wealthy donors. (Though, presumably, not the same wealthy donors who recently raised more than $2 million for him and his super PAC at a private estate in Brentwood, California, with help from his friend Eric Clapton). Onstage, Kennedy formally declared his independence “from the Democratic Party and all other political parties”—perhaps an unsubtle way to shoot down speculation that he might change his mind and run as a Libertarian, or even a Republican. As his wife, Cheryl Hines, said a bit cryptically before her husband took the stage: “Are you really ready for Bobby Kennedy?”
Kennedy, whom many came to know as a Boomer environmentalist, was the star of this mellow show with a distinct ’60s campus vibe. At one table, attendees were invited to literally sketch their vision of the future on blank sheets of paper with colored pens. Throngs gathered on the grass in front of the National Constitution Center and were led in a Native American tribal dance, followed by the inoffensive piano stylings of Tim Hockenberry, who covered “Jersey Girl” in a Springsteen growl. Outside the entrance, enterprising vendors sold an array of Kennedy memorabilia: buttons that read RESIST INSANITY, RAGE AGAINST THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE, and FIT TO BE PRESIDENT, featuring a photo of a buff, shirtless Kennedy. One attendee waved a giant black-and-white flag with a message for their fellow Kennedy-heads: WE ARE THE CONTROL GROUP. Many people wore fedoras.
They came from all over. Michael Schroth, 69, and his wife, Luz, had taken a 4:30 a.m. bus down from Boston. Schroth told me he voted for Barack Obama twice, but also voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader twice, as well as Jill Stein in 2016. “I look for the best candidate, and I don’t care if they’re going to win or not. It’s getting the idea out,” he said. Chris Devol, 56, from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was wearing a Philadelphia Eagles hoodie and smiling ear to ear as he awaited Kennedy’s arrival. Devol told me he had voted for the third-party candidate Ross Perot in 1992, and that although he wasn’t sure whether he’d support Kennedy next November, he “100 percent” supported the idea of him competing in the Democratic primary. An elderly woman named Barbara (last name withheld), a retired teacher from Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, told me she believed that President Joe Biden wasn’t doing anything to address the nation’s drug problem. She said a bag of fentanyl was recently found on the steps of her local church, then asked me if I was familiar with the Boxer Rebellion.
Prior to Kennedy’s address, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of the opening speakers, asked for a moment of silence to honor the violence of this past weekend. Someone in the crowd yelled out “Warmonger!” Another screamed, “Free the Palestinians!” Boteach acknowledged neither individual, and said he greatly respects Kennedy, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, as a man of faith. Later, Kennedy said he had arrived at a place where he was serving only his conscience, his creator, and “you”—the voters.
This afternoon marked the culmination of what he described as a “very painful” decision. He noted his long-standing ties to the Democrats, the party of his family, which he casually referred to as a dynasty, before tearing into the tyranny of the two-party system. For weeks, Kennedy had been attacking the Democratic National Committee for “rigging” the primary process. (The DNC has refused to hold primary debates, as is custom when a party’s incumbents are running for reelection.) Kennedy has been polling in the double digits against Biden, but his support hasn’t grown meaningfully since he launched his campaign. As of last Friday, according to the FiveThirtyEight average, Kennedy was polling at 16.4 percent compared with Biden’s 61.2 percent. Four of his siblings—Kerry Kennedy, Rory Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—issued a statement today denouncing their brother’s newly independent candidacy, calling his decision “perilous for our country.” Kennedy acknowledged the challenge ahead of him. “There have been independent candidates in this country before,” he said. “But this time it’s going to be different.”
Kennedy is the second candidate in as many weeks to go rogue. Cornel West dropped his Green Party affiliation in favor of an independent bid, telling The New York Times, “I am a jazz man in politics and the life of the mind who refuses to play only in a party band!” Though neither Democrats nor Republicans seem particularly worried about the candidacies of West or Marianne Williamson, Kennedy is different. “The Democrats are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Trump,” Kennedy said. He waited for a strategic beat. “The truth is, they’re both right.”
All year long, mainstream Democrats have tried to pretend that Kennedy simply doesn’t exist, with mixed results. Both the Biden campaign and the DNC declined to comment today on Kennedy’s switch. The RNC, for its part, blasted out a list of “23 Reasons to Oppose RFK Jr.,” and reports have been circulating that Trump’s allies are preparing to pummel Kennedy with opposition research. Last week, the election analyst Nate Silver argued that Kennedy’s independent run won’t necessarily hurt Biden, and it might even help him. David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Barack Obama’s campaigns, took a different view. “I think anything that lowers the threshold for winning helps Trump, who has a high floor and low ceiling [of support,]” Axelrod told me.
Kennedy tantalized the crowd with nuggets that purport to make the case for his electability: “I have seen the polls that they won’t show you.” He pointed out that 63 percent of Americans want an independent to run for president. Though he didn’t cite the origin of this statistic, it aligns with recent Gallup polling, which also showed that 58 percent of Republicans endorse a third U.S. political party, up from 45 percent last year.
Kennedy has built his candidacy, and his career as a lawyer and writer more broadly, on the idea that there are lots of things “they won’t show you.” As I wrote in a profile of Kennedy this summer, he has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”
“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Steve Bannon told me as I was reporting the profile. “Populist left, populist right, and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.”
The reality is that Kennedy will have an extremely hard time even getting his name on the ballot. The GOP “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who earlier this year was accused of being among those propping up Kennedy’s candidacy (something he has repeatedly denied), told me in a text message that Kennedy faces a “Herculean task” with “50 different state laws written by Republicans and Democrats working together to make ballot access as difficult as possible.” Even if Kennedy is right and voters are looking for a true alternative to Trump and Biden, mathematically, Kennedy’s path to 270 electoral votes is almost incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, he said he believes that he is at the start of a new American moment. “Something is stirring in us that says, It doesn’t have to be this way,” Kennedy said onstage. He nodded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech from the eve of his assassination and quoted Abraham Lincoln quoting Jesus Christ: “A house divided cannot stand.” He said that the left and the right had become “all mixed up.” He said that he was proud to count those on both sides of the abortion debate among his supporters, in addition to “climate activists” and “climate skeptics,” and, of course, the “vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated.” Perhaps saying the quiet part out loud, Kennedy said it would be very hard for people to tell “whether my administration is left or right.” He had no shortage of curious metaphors. He promised not just to “take the wheel,” but to “reboot the GPS.” The nation’s two-party system? “A two-headed monster that leads us over a cliff.” And, in case it wasn’t clear: “At the bottom of that cliff is the destruction of our country.”
When I interviewed Kennedy for the profile, I asked him what he thought would be more dangerous for the country: four more years of Biden, or another Trump term. “I can’t answer that,” he said.
Around that time, I asked his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, if Kennedy was committed to running solely as a Democratic candidate.
“He’s running in the Democratic primary,” Kucinich responded.
“So, no chance of a third party?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
“Gotcha. And nothing could change that?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
Today, after Kennedy finished speaking, Kucinich briefly seized the mic and led the crowd in a building, dramatic chant:
A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.
An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.
After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.
With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.
If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.
“Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.
But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”
These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.
Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”
The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.
The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.
These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.
“There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.
Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.
Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”
Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.
In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.
“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”
In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master.And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”
The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.
Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters.“That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”
Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.
Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.
The speaker’s abrupt impeachment probe against Biden is the latest sign that he’s still fighting for his job.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty
As Kevin McCarthy made his televised declaration earlier today that House Republicans were launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the House speaker stood outside his office in the Capitol, a trio of American flags arrayed behind to lend an air of dignity to such a grave announcement. But McCarthy looked and sounded like a hostage, and for good reason.
That the Republican majority would eventually try to impeach Biden was never really in doubt. The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman predicted as much nearly a year ago, even before the GOP narrowly ousted Democrats from control in the House. McCarthy characterized the move as “a logistical next step” in the party’s investigation into Biden’s involvement with his son Hunter’s business dealings, which has thus far yielded no evidence of presidential corruption. But intentionally or not, the speaker’s words underscored the inevitability of this effort, which is as much about exacting revenge on behalf of the twice-impeached former President Donald Trump as it is about prosecuting Biden’s alleged misdeeds.
From the moment that McCarthy won the speakership on the 15th vote, his grip on the gavel has seemed shaky at best. The full list of concessions he made to Republican holdouts to secure the job remains unclear and may be forcing his hand in hidden ways nine months later. The most important of those compromises, however, did become public: At any time, a single member of the House can force a vote that could remove McCarthy as speaker.
The high point of McCarthy’s year came in June, when the House overwhelmingly approved—although with notably more votes from Democrats than Republicans—the debt-ceiling deal he struck with Biden. That legislation successfully prevented a first-ever U.S. default, but blowback from conservatives has forced McCarthy to renege on the spending provisions of the agreement. House Republicans are advancing bills that appropriate far less money than the June budget accord called for, setting up a clash with both the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House that could result in a government shutdown either when the fiscal year ends on September 30 or later in the fall.
GOP hard-liners have also backed McCarthy into a corner on impeachment. The speaker has tried his best to walk a careful line on the question, knowing that to keep his job, he could neither rush into a bid to topple the president nor rule one out. Trump allies like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida have been angling to impeach Biden virtually from the moment he took office, while GOP lawmakers who represent districts that Biden won—and on whom the GOP’s thin House advantage depends—have been much cooler to the idea. McCarthy has had to satisfy both wings of the party, but he has been unable to do so without undermining his own position.
Less than two weeks ago, McCarthy said that he would launch a formal impeachment only with a vote of the full House. As the minority leader in 2019, McCarthy had castigated then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi for initiating an impeachment probe against Trump before holding a vote on the matter. “If we move forward with an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy told the conservative publication Breitbart, “it would occur through a vote on the floor of the people’s House and not through a declaration by one person.” By this morning, the speaker had reversed himself, unilaterally announcing an impeachment inquiry just as Pelosi did four years ago this month. (McCarthy made no mention of a House vote during his speech, and when reporters in the Capitol asked about it, a spokesperson for the speaker told them no vote was planned.)
The reason for McCarthy’s flip is plain: He doesn’t have the support to open an impeachment inquiry through a floor vote, but to avoid a revolt from hard-liners, he had to announce an inquiry anyway. Substantively, his declaration means little. House Republicans have more or less been conducting an impeachment inquiry for months; formalizing the process simply means they may be able to subpoena more documents from the president. The effort is all but certain to fail. Whether it will yield enough Republican votes to impeach Biden in the House is far from clear. That it will secure the two-thirds needed to convict the president in the Senate is almost unthinkable.
McCarthy’s announcement won praise from only some of his Republican critics. Barely an hour later, Gaetz delivered a preplanned speech on the House floor decrying the speaker’s first eight months in office and vowing to force a vote on his removal if McCarthy caves to Democrats during this month’s shutdown fight. He called the speaker’s impeachment announcement “a baby step” delivered in a “rushed and somewhat rattled performance.” A longtime foe of McCarthy’s, Gaetz was one of the final holdouts in the Californian’s bid to become speaker in January, when he forced McCarthy to grovel before acquiescing on the final ballot. “I am here to serve notice, Mr. Speaker,” Gaetz said this afternoon, “that you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role.”
If McCarthy has become a hostage of the House hard-liners, then Gaetz is his captor—or, more likely, one of several. Publicly, the speaker has dared Gaetz to try to overthrow him, but caving on impeachment and forsaking a floor vote suggests that he might not be so confident.
The speaker is as isolated in Washington as he is in his own conference. Senate Republicans have shown no interest in the House’s impeachment push, and they are far more willing to adhere to the terms of the budget deal that McCarthy struck with Biden and avert a government shutdown. Perhaps McCarthy believed that by moving on impeachment now he could buy some room to maneuver on the spending fights to come. But the impetus behind today’s announcement is more likely the same one that has driven nearly all of his decisions as speaker—the desire to wake up tomorrow morning and hold the job at least one more day.
August is the month when oppressive humidity causes the mass evacuation of official Washington. In 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki piled her family into the car for a week at the beach. Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed to the Hamptons to visit his elderly father. Their boss left for the leafy sanctuary of Camp David.
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They knew that when they returned, their attention would shift to a date circled at the end of the month. On August 31, the United States would officially complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan, concluding the longest war in American history.
The State Department didn’t expect to solve Afghanistan’s problems by that date. But if everything went well, there was a chance to wheedle the two warring sides into some sort of agreement that would culminate in the nation’s president, Ashraf Ghani, resigning from office, beginning an orderly transfer of power to a governing coalition that included the Taliban. There was even discussion of Blinken flying out, most likely to Doha, Qatar, to preside over the signing of an accord.
It would be an ending, but not the end. Within the State Department there was a strongly held belief: Even after August 31, the embassy in Kabul would remain open. It wouldn’t be as robustly staffed, but some aid programs would continue; visas would still be issued. The United States—at least not the State Department—wasn’t going to abandon the country.
There were plans for catastrophic scenarios, which had been practiced in tabletop simulations, but no one anticipated that they would be needed. Intelligence assessments asserted that the Afghan military would be able to hold off the Taliban for months, though the number of months kept dwindling as the Taliban conquered terrain more quickly than the analysts had predicted. But as August began, the grim future of Afghanistan seemed to exist in the distance, beyond the end of the month, not on America’s watch.
July 30, 2021: Joe Biden speaks to reporters before departing the White House for Camp David. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty)
That grim future arrived disastrously ahead of schedule. What follows is an intimate history of that excruciating month of withdrawal, as narrated by its participants, based on dozens of interviews conducted shortly after the fact, when memories were fresh and emotions raw. At times, as I spoke with these participants, I felt as if I was their confessor. Their failings were so apparent that they had a desperate need to explain themselves, but also an impulse to relive moments of drama and pain more intense than any they had experienced in their career.
During those fraught days, foreign policy, so often debated in the abstract, or conducted from the sanitized remove of the Situation Room, became horrifyingly vivid. President Joe Biden and his aides found themselves staring hard at the consequences of their decisions.
Even in the thick of the crisis, as the details of a mass evacuation swallowed them, the members of Biden’s inner circle could see that the legacy of the month would stalk them into the next election—and perhaps into their obituaries. Though it was a moment when their shortcomings were on obvious display, they also believed it evinced resilience and improvisational skill.
And amid the crisis, a crisis that taxed his character and managerial acumen, the president revealed himself. For a man long caricatured as a political weather vane, Biden exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved. For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering.
When it came to foreign policy, Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself. He liked to knock the diplomats and pundits who would pontificate at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Munich Security Conference. He called them risk-averse, beholden to institutions, lazy in their thinking. Listening to these complaints, a friend once posed the obvious question: If you have such negative things to say about these confabs, then why attend so many of them? Biden replied, “If I don’t go, they’re going to get stale as hell.”
From 12 years as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and then eight years as the vice president—Biden had acquired a sense that he could scythe through conventional wisdom. He distrusted mandarins, even those he had hired for his staff. They were always muddying things with theories. One aide recalled that he would say, “You foreign-policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics.” Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce. Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much.
One subject seemed to provoke his contrarian side above all others: the war in Afghanistan. His strong opinions were grounded in experience. Soon after the United States invaded, in late 2001, Biden began visiting the country. He traveled with a sleeping bag; he stood in line alongside Marines, wrapped in a towel, waiting for his turn to shower.
On his first trip, in 2002, Biden met with Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni in his Kabul office, a shell of a building. Qanuni, an old mujahideen fighter, told him: We really appreciate that you have come here. But Americans have a long history of making promises and then breaking them. And if that happens again, the Afghan people are going to be disappointed.
Biden was jet-lagged and irritable. Qanuni’s comments set him off: Let me tell you, if you even think of threatening us … Biden’s aides struggled to calm him down.
In Biden’s moral code, ingratitude is a grievous sin. The United States had evicted the Taliban from power; it had sent young men to die in the nation’s mountains; it would give the new government billions in aid. But throughout the long conflict, Afghan officials kept telling him that the U.S. hadn’t done enough.
The frustration stuck with him, and it clarified his thinking. He began to draw unsentimental conclusions about the war. He could see that the Afghan government was a failed enterprise. He could see that a nation-building campaign of this scale was beyond American capacity.
As vice president, Biden also watched as the military pressured Barack Obama into sending thousands of additional troops to salvage a doomed cause. In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama recalled that as he agonized over his Afghan policy, Biden pulled him aside and told him, “Listen to me, boss. Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He drew close and whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”
Biden developed a theory of how he would succeed where Obama had failed. He wasn’t going to let anyone jam him.
In early February 2021, now-President Biden invited his secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, into the Oval Office. He wanted to acknowledge an emotional truth: “I know you have friends you have lost in this war. I know you feel strongly. I know what you’ve put into this.”
Over the years, Biden had traveled to military bases, frequently accompanied by his fellow senator Chuck Hagel. On those trips, Hagel and Biden dipped in and out of a long-running conversation about war. They traded theories on why the United States would remain mired in unwinnable conflicts. One problem was the psychology of defeat. Generals were terrified of being blamed for a loss, living in history as the one who waved the white flag.
It was this dynamic, in part, that kept the United States entangled in Afghanistan. Politicians who hadn’t served in the military could never summon the will to overrule the generals, and the generals could never admit that they were losing. So the war continued indefinitely, a zombie campaign. Biden believed that he could break this cycle, that he could master the psychology of defeat.
Biden wanted to avoid having his generals feel cornered—even as he guided them to his desired outcome. He wanted them to feel heard, to appreciate his good faith. He told Austin and Milley, “Before I make a decision, you’ll have a chance to look me in the eyes.”
The date set out by the Doha Agreement, which the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban, was May 1, 2021. If the Taliban adhered to a set of conditions—engaging in political negotiations with the Afghan government, refraining from attacking U.S. troops, and cutting ties with terrorist groups—then the United States would remove its soldiers from the country by that date. Because of the May deadline, Biden’s first major foreign-policy decision—whether or not to honor the Doha Agreement—would also be the one he seemed to care most about. And it would need to be made in a sprint.
In the spring, after weeks of meetings with generals and foreign-policy advisers, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had the National Security Council generate two documents for the president to read. One outlined the best case for staying in Afghanistan; the other made the best case for leaving.
This reflected Biden’s belief that he faced a binary choice. If he abandoned the Doha Agreement, attacks on U.S. troops would resume. Since the accord had been signed, in February 2020, the Taliban had grown stronger, forging new alliances and sharpening plans. And thanks to the drawdown of troops that had begun under Donald Trump, the United States no longer had a robust-enough force to fight a surging foe.
Biden gathered his aides for one last meeting before he formally made his decision. Toward the end of the session, he asked Sullivan, Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to leave the room. He wanted to talk with Austin and Milley alone.
Instead of revealing his final decision, Biden told them, “This is hard. I want to go to Camp David this weekend and think about it.”
It was always clear where the president would land. Milley knew that his own preferred path for Afghanistan—leaving a small but meaningful contingent of troops in the country—wasn’t shared by the nation he served, or the new commander in chief. Having just survived Trump and a wave of speculation about how the U.S. military might figure in a coup, Milley was eager to demonstrate his fidelity to civilian rule. If Biden wanted to shape the process to get his preferred result, well, that’s how a democracy should work.
On April 14, Biden announced that he would withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. He delivered remarks explaining his decision in the Treaty Room of the White House, the very spot where, in the fall of 2001, George W. Bush had informed the public of the first American strikes against the Taliban.
Biden’s speech contained a hole that few noted at the time. It scarcely mentioned the Afghan people, with not even an expression of best wishes for the nation that the United States would be leaving behind. The Afghans were apparently only incidental to his thinking. (Biden hadn’t spoken with President Ghani until right before the announcement.) Scranton Joe’s deep reserves of compassion were directed at people with whom he felt a connection; his visceral ties were with American soldiers. When he thought about the military’s rank and file, he couldn’t help but project an image of his own late son, Beau. “I’m the first president in 40 years who knows what it means to have a child serving in a war zone,” he said.
Biden also announced a new deadline for the U.S. withdrawal, which would move from May 1 to September 11, the 20th anniversary of the attack that drew the United States into war. The choice of date was polemical. Although he never officially complained about it, Milley didn’t understand the decision. How did it honor the dead to admit defeat in a conflict that had been waged on their behalf? Eventually, the Biden administration pushed the withdrawal deadline forward to August 31, an implicit concession that it had erred.
But the choice of September 11 was telling. Biden took pride in ending an unhappy chapter in American history. Democrats might have once referred to Afghanistan as the “good war,” but it had become a fruitless fight. It had distracted the United States from policies that might preserve the nation’s geostrategic dominance. By leaving Afghanistan, Biden believed he was redirecting the nation’s gaze to the future: “We’ll be much more formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.”
August 6–9
In late June, Jake Sullivan began to worry that the Pentagon had pulled American personnel and materiel out of Afghanistan too precipitously. The rapid drawdown had allowed the Taliban to advance and to win a string of victories against the Afghan army that had caught the administration by surprise. Even if Taliban fighters weren’t firing at American troops, they were continuing to battle the Afghan army and take control of the countryside. Now they’d captured a provincial capital in the remote southwest—a victory that was disturbingly effortless.
Sullivan asked one of his top aides, Homeland Security Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, to convene a meeting for Sunday, August 8, with officials overseeing the withdrawal. Contingency plans contained a switch that could be flipped in an emergency. To avoid a reprise of the fall of Saigon, with desperate hands clinging to the last choppers out of Vietnam, the government made plans for a noncombatant-evacuation operation, or NEO. The U.S. embassy would shut down and relocate to Hamid Karzai International Airport (or HKIA, as everyone called it). Troops, pre-positioned near the Persian Gulf and waiting at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, would descend on Kabul to protect the airport. Military transport planes would haul American citizens and visa holders out of the country.
By the time Sherwood-Randall had a chance to assemble the meeting, the most pessimistic expectations had been exceeded. The Taliban had captured four more provincial capitals. General Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, filed a commander’s estimate warning that Kabul could be surrounded within about 30 days—a far faster collapse than previously predicted.
McKenzie’s dire warning did strangely little to alter plans. Sherwood-Randall’s group unanimously agreed that it was too soon to declare a NEO. The embassy in Kabul was particularly forceful on this point. The acting ambassador, Ross Wilson, wanted to avoid cultivating a sense of panic in Kabul, which would further collapse the army and the state. Even the CIA seconded this line of thinking.
August 12
At 2 a.m., Sullivan’s phone rang. It was Mark Milley. The military had received reports that the Taliban had entered the city of Ghazni, less than 100 miles from Kabul.
The intelligence community assumed that the Taliban wouldn’t storm Kabul until after the United States left, because the Taliban wanted to avoid a block‑by‑block battle for the city. But the proximity of the Taliban to the embassy and HKIA was terrifying. It necessitated the decisive action that the administration had thus far resisted. Milley wanted Sullivan to initiate a NEO. If the State Department wasn’t going to move quickly, the president needed to order it to. Sullivan assured him that he would push harder, but it would be two more days before the president officially declared a NEO.
With the passage of each hour, Sullivan’s anxieties grew. He called Lloyd Austin and told him, “I think you need to send someone with bars on his arm to Doha to talk to the Taliban so that they understand not to mess with an evacuation.” Austin agreed to dispatch General McKenzie to renew negotiations.
August 13
Austin convened a videoconference with the top civilian and military officials in Kabul. He wanted updates from them before he headed to the White House to brief the president.
Ross Wilson, the acting ambassador, told him, “I need 72 hours before I can begin destroying sensitive documents.”
“You have to be done in 72 hours,” Austin replied.
The Taliban were now perched outside Kabul. Delaying the evacuation of the embassy posed a danger that Austin couldn’t abide. Thousands of troops were about to arrive to protect the new makeshift facility that would be set up at the airport. The moment had come to move there.
Abandoning an embassy has its own protocols; they are rituals of panic. The diplomats had a weekend, more or less, to purge the place: to fill its shredders, burn bins, and disintegrator with documents and hard drives. Anything with an American flag on it needed destroying so it couldn’t be used by the enemy for propaganda purposes.
Wisps of smoke would soon begin to blow from the compound—a plume of what had been classified cables and personnel files. Even for those Afghans who didn’t have access to the internet, the narrative would be legible in the sky.
August 14
On Saturday night, Antony Blinken placed a call to Ashraf Ghani. He wanted to make sure the Afghan president remained committed to the negotiations in Doha. The Taliban delegation there was still prepared to agree to a unity government, which it might eventually run, allocating cabinet slots to ministers from Ghani’s government. That notion had broad support from the Afghan political elite. Everyone, even Ghani, agreed that he would need to resign as part of a deal. Blinken wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t waver from his commitments and try to hold on to power.
Although Ghani said that he would comply, he began musing aloud about what might happen if the Taliban invaded Kabul prior to August 31. He told Blinken, “I’d rather die than surrender.”
August 15
The next day, the presidential palace released a video of Ghani talking with security officials on the phone. As he sat at his imposing wooden desk, which once belonged to King Amanullah, who had bolted from the palace to avoid an Islamist uprising in 1929, Ghani’s aides hoped to project a sense of calm.
During the early hours, a small number of Taliban fighters eased their way to the gates of the city, and then into the capital itself. The Taliban leadership didn’t want to invade Kabul until after the American departure. But their soldiers had conquered territory without even firing a shot. In their path, Afghan soldiers simply walked away from checkpoints. Taliban units kept drifting in the direction of the presidential palace.
Rumors traveled more quickly than the invaders. A crowd formed outside a bank in central Kabul. Nervous customers jostled in a chaotic rush to empty their accounts. Guards fired into the air to disperse the melee. The sound of gunfire reverberated through the nearby palace, which had largely emptied for lunch. Ghani’s closest advisers pressed him to flee. “If you stay,” one told him, according to The Washington Post, “you’ll be killed.”
This was a fear rooted in history. In 1996, when the Taliban first invaded Kabul, they hanged the tortured body of the former president from a traffic light. Ghani hustled onto one of three Mi‑17 helicopters waiting inside his compound, bound for Uzbekistan. The New York Times Magazinelater reported that the helicopters were instructed to fly low to the terrain, to evade detection by the U.S. military. From Uzbekistan, he would fly to the United Arab Emirates and an ignominious exile. Without time to pack, he left in plastic sandals, accompanied by his wife. On the tarmac, aides and guards grappled over the choppers’ last remaining seats.
When the rest of Ghani’s staff returned from lunch, they moved through the palace searching for the president, unaware that he had abandoned them, and their country.
At approximately 1:45 p.m., Ambassador Wilson went to the embassy lobby for the ceremonial lowering of the flag. Emotionally drained and worried about his own safety, he prepared to leave the embassy behind, a monument to his nation’s defeat.
Wilson made his way to the helicopter pad so that he could be taken to his new outpost at the airport, where he was told that a trio of choppers had just left the presidential palace. Wilson knew what that likely meant. By the time he relayed his suspicions to Washington, officials already possessed intelligence that confirmed Wilson’s hunch: Ghani had fled.
Jake Sullivan relayed the news to Biden, who exploded in frustration: Give me a break.
Later that afternoon, General McKenzie arrived at the Ritz-Carlton in Doha. Well before Ghani’s departure from power, the wizened Marine had scheduled a meeting with an old adversary of the United States, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Baradar wasn’t just any Taliban leader. He was a co-founder of the group, with Mullah Mohammed Omar. McKenzie had arrived with the intention of delivering a stern warning. He barely had time to tweak his agenda after learning of Ghani’s exit.
McKenzie unfolded a map of Afghanistan translated into Pashto. A circle had been drawn around the center of Kabul—a radius of about 25 kilometers—and he pointed to it. He referred to this area as the “ring of death.” If the Taliban operated within those 25 kilometers, McKenzie said, “we’re going to assume hostile intent, and we’ll strike hard.”
McKenzie tried to bolster his threat with logic. He said he didn’t want to end up in a firefight with the Taliban, and that would be a lot less likely to happen if they weren’t in the city.
Baradar not only understood; he agreed. Known as a daring military tactician, he was also a pragmatist. He wanted to transform his group’s inhospitable image; he hoped that foreign embassies, even the American one, would remain in Kabul. Baradar didn’t want a Taliban government to become a pariah state, starved of foreign assistance that it badly needed.
But the McKenzie plan had an elemental problem: It was too late. Taliban fighters were already operating within the ring of death. Kabul was on the brink of anarchy. Armed criminal gangs were already starting to roam the streets. Baradar asked the general, “Are you going to take responsibility for the security of Kabul?”
McKenzie replied that his orders were to run an evacuation. Whatever happens to the security situation in Kabul, he told Baradar, don’t mess with the evacuation, or there will be hell to pay. It was an evasive answer. The United States didn’t have the troops or the will to secure Kabul. McKenzie had no choice but to implicitly cede that job to the Taliban.
Baradar walked toward a window. Because he didn’t speak English, he wanted his adviser to confirm his understanding. “Is he saying that he won’t attack us if we go in?” His adviser told him that he had heard correctly.
As the meeting wrapped up, McKenzie realized that the United States would need to be in constant communication with the Taliban. They were about to be rubbing shoulders with each other in a dense city. Misunderstandings were inevitable. Both sides agreed that they would designate a representative in Kabul to talk through the many complexities so that the old enemies could muddle together toward a common purpose.
Soon after McKenzie and Baradar ended their meeting, Al Jazeera carried a live feed from the presidential palace, showing the Taliban as they went from room to room, in awe of the building, seemingly bemused by their own accomplishment.
August 15: Taliban fighters take control of the presidential palace in Kabul. (Associated Press)
They gathered in Ghani’s old office, where a book of poems remained on his desk, across from a box of Kleenex. A Talib sat in the president’s Herman Miller chair. His comrades stood behind him in a tableau, cloth draped over the shoulders of their tunics, guns resting in the crooks of their arms, as if posing for an official portrait.
August 16
The U.S. embassy, now relocated to the airport, became a magnet for humanity. The extent of Afghan desperation shocked officials back in Washington. Only amid the panicked exodus did top officials at the State Department realize that hundreds of thousands of Afghans had fled their homes as civil war swept through the countryside—and made their way to the capital.
The runway divided the airport into halves. A northern sector served as a military outpost and, after the relocation of the embassy, a consular office—the last remaining vestiges of the United States and its promise of liberation. A commercial airport stared at these barracks from across the strip of asphalt.
The commercial facility had been abandoned by the Afghans who worked there. The night shift of air-traffic controllers simply never arrived. The U.S. troops whom Austin had ordered to support the evacuation were only just arriving. So the terminal was overwhelmed. Afghans began to spill onto the tarmac itself.
The crowds arrived in waves. The previous day, Afghans had flooded the tarmac late in the day, then left when they realized that no flights would depart that evening. But in the morning, the compound still wasn’t secure, and it refilled.
In the chaos, it wasn’t entirely clear to Ambassador Wilson who controlled the compound. The Taliban began freely roaming the facility, wielding bludgeons, trying to secure the mob. Apparently, they were working alongside soldiers from the old Afghan army. Wilson received worrying reports of tensions between the two forces.
The imperative was to begin landing transport planes with equipment and soldiers. A C‑17, a warehouse with wings, full of supplies to support the arriving troops, managed to touch down. The crew lowered a ramp to unload the contents of the jet’s belly, but the plane was rushed by a surge of civilians. The Americans on board were no less anxious than the Afghans who greeted them. Almost as quickly as the plane’s back ramp lowered, the crew reboarded and resealed the jet’s entrances. They received permission to flee the uncontrolled scene.
But they could not escape the crowd, for whom the jet was a last chance to avoid the Taliban and the suffering to come. As the plane began to taxi, about a dozen Afghans climbed onto one side of the jet. Others sought to stow away in the wheel well that housed its bulging landing gear. To clear the runway of human traffic, Humvees began rushing alongside the plane. Two Apache helicopters flew just above the ground, to give the Afghans a good scare and to blast the civilians from the plane with rotor wash.
Only after the plane had lifted into the air did the crew discover its place in history. When the pilot couldn’t fully retract the landing gear, a member of the crew went to investigate, staring out of a small porthole. Through the window, it was possible to see scattered human remains.
Videos taken from the tarmac instantly went viral. They showed a dentist from Kabul plunging to the ground from the elevating jet. The footage evoked the photo of a man falling to his death from an upper story of the World Trade Center—images of plummeting bodies bracketing an era.
Over the weekend, Biden had received briefings about the chaos in Kabul in a secure conference room at Camp David. Photographs distributed to the press showed him alone, talking to screens, isolated in his contrarian faith in the righteousness of his decision. Despite the fiasco at the airport, he returned to the White House, stood in the East Room, and proclaimed: “If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
August 17
John Bass was having a hard time keeping his mind on the task at hand. From 2017 to 2020, he had served as Washington’s ambassador to Afghanistan. During that tour, Bass did his best to immerse himself in the country and meet its people. He’d planted a garden with a group of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and hosted roundtables with journalists. When his term as ambassador ended, he left behind friends, colleagues, and hundreds of acquaintances.
Now Bass kept his eyes on his phone, checking for any word from his old Afghan network. He moved through his day dreading what might come next.
Yet he also had a job that required his attention. The State Department had assigned him to train future ambassadors. In a seminar room in suburban Virginia, he did his best to focus on passing along wisdom to these soon‑to‑be emissaries of the United States.
As class was beginning, his phone lit up. Bass saw the number of the State Department Operations Center. He apologized and stepped out to take the call.
“Are you available to talk to Deputy Secretary Sherman?”
The familiar voice of Wendy Sherman, the No. 2 at the department, came on the line. “I have a mission for you. You must take it, and you need to leave today.” Sherman then told him: “I’m calling to ask you to go back to Kabul to lead the evacuation effort.”
Ambassador Wilson was shattered by the experience of the past week and wasn’t “able to function at the level that was necessary” to complete the job on his own. Sherman needed Bass to help manage the exodus.
Bass hadn’t expected the request. In his flummoxed state, he struggled to pose the questions he thought he might later regret not having asked.
“How much time do we have?”
“Probably about two weeks, a little less than two weeks.”
“I’ve been away from this for 18 months or so.”
“Yep, we know, but we think you’re the right person for this.”
Bass returned to class and scooped up his belongings. “With apologies, I’m going to have to take my leave. I’ve just been asked to go back to Kabul and support the evacuations. So I’ve got to say goodbye and wish you all the best, and you’re all going to be great ambassadors.”
Because he wasn’t living in Washington, Bass didn’t have the necessary gear with him. He drove straight to the nearest REI in search of hiking pants and rugged boots. He needed to pick up a laptop from the IT department in Foggy Bottom. Without knowing much more than what was in the news, Bass rushed to board a plane taking him to the worst crisis in the recent history of American foreign policy.
August 19–25
About 30 hours later—3:30 a.m., Kabul time—Bass touched down at HKIA and immediately began touring the compound. At the American headquarters, he ran into the military heads of the operation, whom he had worked with before. They presented Bass with the state of play. The situation was undeniably bizarre: The success of the American operation now depended largely on the cooperation of the Taliban.
The Americans needed the Taliban to help control the crowds that had formed outside the airport—and to implement systems that would allow passport and visa holders to pass through the throngs. But the Taliban were imperfect allies at best. Their checkpoints were run by warriors from the countryside who didn’t know how to deal with the array of documents being waved in their faces. What was an authentic visa? What about families where the father had a U.S. passport but his wife and children didn’t? Every day, a new set of Taliban soldiers seemed to arrive at checkpoints, unaware of the previous day’s directions. Frustrated with the unruliness, the Taliban would sometimes simply stop letting anyone through.
August 24: Afghan families hoping to flee the country arrive at Hamid Karzai International Airport at dawn. (Jim Huylebroek)
Abdul Ghani Baradar’s delegation in Doha had passed along the name of a Taliban commander in Kabul—Mawlawi Hamdullah Mukhlis. It had fallen to Major General Chris Donahue, the head of the 82nd Airborne Division, out of Fort Bragg, to coordinate with him. On September 11, 2001, Donahue had been an aide to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Richard Myers, and had been with him on Capitol Hill when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.
Donahue told Pentagon officials that he had to grit his teeth as he dealt with Mukhlis. But the Taliban commander seemed to feel a camaraderie with his fellow soldier. He confided to Donahue his worry that Afghanistan would suffer from brain drain, as the country’s most talented minds evacuated on American airplanes.
In a videoconference with Mark Milley, back at the Pentagon, Donahue recounted Mukhlis’s fears. According to one Defense Department official in the meeting, his description caused Milley to laugh.
“Don’t be going local on me, Donahue,” he said.
“Don’t worry about me, sir,” Donahue responded. “I’m not buying what they are selling.”
After Bass left his meeting with the military men, including Donahue, he toured the gates of the airport, where Afghans had amassed. He was greeted by the smell of feces and urine, by the sound of gunshots and bullhorns blaring instructions in Dari and Pashto. Dust assaulted his eyes and nose. He felt the heat that emanated from human bodies crowded into narrow spaces.
The atmosphere was tense. Marines and consular officers, some of whom had flown into Kabul from other embassies, were trying to pull passport and visa holders from the crowd. But every time they waded into it, they seemed to provoke a furious reaction. To get plucked from the street by the Americans smacked of cosmic unfairness to those left behind. Sometimes the anger swelled beyond control, so the troops shut down entrances to allow frustrations to subside. Bass was staring at despair in its rawest form. As he studied the people surrounding the airport, he wondered if he could ever make any of this a bit less terrible.
Bass cadged a room in barracks belonging to the Turkish army, which had agreed, before the chaos had descended, to operate and protect the airport after the Americans finally departed. His days tended to follow a pattern. They would begin with the Taliban’s grudging assistance. Then, as lunchtime approached, the Talibs would get hot and hungry. Abruptly, they would stop processing evacuees through their checkpoints. Then, just as suddenly, at six or seven, as the sun began to set, they would begin to cooperate again.
Bass was forever hatching fresh schemes to satisfy the Taliban’s fickle requirements. One day, the Taliban would let buses through without question; the next, they would demand to see passenger manifests in advance. Bass’s staff created official-looking placards to place in bus windows. The Taliban waved them through for a short period, then declared the placard system unreliable.
Throughout the day, Bass would stop what he was doing and join videoconferences with Washington. He became a fixture in the Situation Room. Biden would pepper him with ideas for squeezing more evacuees through the gates. The president’s instinct was to throw himself into the intricacies of troubleshooting. Why don’t we have them meet in parking lots? Can’t we leave the airport and pick them up? Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low. Still, he appreciated Biden applying pressure, making sure that he didn’t overlook the obvious.
At the end of his first day at the airport, Bass went through his email. A State Department spokesperson had announced Bass’s arrival in Kabul. Friends and colleagues had deluged him with requests to save Afghans. Bass began to scrawl the names from his inbox on a whiteboard in his office. By the time he finished, he’d filled the six-foot‑by‑four-foot surface. He knew there was little chance that he could help. The orders from Washington couldn’t have been clearer. The primary objective was to load planes with U.S. citizens, U.S.-visa holders, and passport holders from partner nations, mostly European ones.
In his mind, Bass kept another running list, of Afghans he had come to know personally during his time as ambassador who were beyond his ability to rescue. Their faces and voices were etched in his memory, and he could be sure that, at some point when he wasn’t rushing to fill C‑17s, they would haunt his sleep.
“Someone on the bus is dying.”
Jake Sullivan was unnerved. What to do with such a dire message from a trusted friend? It described a caravan of five blue-and-white buses stuck 100 yards outside the south gate of the airport, one of them carrying a human being struggling for life. If Sullivan forwarded this problem to an aide, would it get resolved in time?
Sullivan sometimes felt as if every member of the American elite was simultaneously asking for his help. When he left secure rooms, he would grab his phone and check his personal email accounts, which overflowed with pleas. This person just had the Taliban threaten them. They will be shot in 15 hours if you don’t get them out. Some of the senders seemed to be trying to shame him into action. If you don’t do something, their death is on your hands.
Throughout late August, the president himself was fielding requests to help stranded Afghans, from friends and members of Congress. Biden became invested in individual cases. Three buses of women at the Kabul Serena Hotel kept running into logistical obstacles. He told Sullivan, “I want to know what happens to them. I want to know when they make it to the airport.” When the president heard these stories, he would become engrossed in solving the practical challenge of getting people to the airport, mapping routes through the city.
When Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, went to check in with members of a task force working on the evacuation, she found grizzled diplomats in tears. She estimated that a quarter of the State Department’s personnel had served in Afghanistan. They felt a connection with the country, an emotional entanglement. Fielding an overwhelming volume of emails describing hardship cases, they easily imagined the faces of refugees. They felt the shame and anger that come with the inability to help. To deal with the trauma, the State Department procured therapy dogs that might ease the staff’s pain.
The State Department redirected the attention of its sprawling apparatus to Afghanistan. Embassies in Mexico City and New Delhi became call centers. Staff in those distant capitals assumed the role of caseworkers, assigned to stay in touch with the remaining American citizens in Afghanistan, counseling them through the terrifying weeks.
Sherman dispatched her Afghan-born chief of staff, Mustafa Popal, to HKIA to support embassy workers and serve as an interpreter. All day long, Sherman responded to pleas for help: from foreign governments’ representatives, who joined a daily videoconference she hosted; from members of Congress; from the cellist Yo‑Yo Ma, writing on behalf of musicians. Amid the crush, she felt compelled to go down to the first floor, to spend 15 minutes cuddling the therapy dogs.
The Biden administration hadn’t intended to conduct a full-blown humanitarian evacuation of Afghanistan. It had imagined an orderly and efficient exodus that would extend past August 31, as visa holders boarded commercial flights from the country. As those plans collapsed, the president felt the same swirl of emotions as everyone else watching the desperation at the airport. Over the decades, he had thought about Afghanistan using the cold logic of realism—it was a strategic distraction, a project whose costs outweighed the benefits. Despite his many visits, the country had become an abstraction in his mind. But the graphic suffering in Kabul awakened in him a compassion that he’d never evinced in the debates about the withdrawal.
After seeing the abject desperation on the HKIA tarmac, the president had told the Situation Room that he wanted all the planes flying thousands of troops into the airport to leave filled with evacuees. Pilots should pile American citizens and Afghans with visas into those planes. But there was a category of evacuees that he now especially wanted to help, what the government called “Afghans at risk.” These were the newspaper reporters, the schoolteachers, the filmmakers, the lawyers, the members of a girls’ robotics team who didn’t necessarily have paperwork but did have every reason to fear for their well-being in a Taliban-controlled country.
This was a different sort of mission. The State Department hadn’t vetted all of the Afghans at risk. It didn’t know if they were genuinely endangered or simply strivers looking for a better life. It didn’t know if they would have qualified for the visas that the administration said it issued to those who worked with the Americans, or if they were petty criminals. But if they were in the right place at the right time, they were herded up the ramp of C‑17s.
In anticipation of an evacuation, the United States had built housing at Camp As Sayliyah, a U.S. Army base in the suburbs of Doha. It could hold 8,000 people, housing them as the Department of Homeland Security collected their biometric data and began to vet them for immigration. But it quickly became clear that the United States would fly far more than 8,000 Afghans to Qatar.
As the numbers swelled, the United States set up tents at Al Udeid Air Base, a bus ride away from As Sayliyah. Nearly 15,000 Afghans took up residence there, but their quarters were poorly planned. There weren’t nearly enough toilets or showers. Procuring lunch meant standing in line for three or four hours. Single men slept in cots opposite married women, a transgression of Afghan traditions.
The Qataris, determined to use the crisis to burnish their reputation, erected a small city of air-conditioned wedding tents and began to cater meals for the refugees. But the Biden administration knew that the number of evacuees would soon exceed Qatar’s capacity. It needed to erect a network of camps. What it created was something like the hub-and-spoke system used by commercial airlines. Refugees would fly into Al Udeid and then be redirected to bases across the Middle East and Europe, what the administration termed “lily pads.”
In September, just as refugees were beginning to arrive at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C., four Afghan evacuees caught the measles. All the refugees in the Middle East and Europe now needed vaccinations, which would require 21 days for immunity to take hold. To keep disease from flying into the United States, the State Department called around the world, asking if Afghans could stay on bases for three extra weeks.
In the end, the U.S. government housed more than 60,000 Afghans in facilities that hadn’t existed before the fall of Kabul. It flew 387 sorties from HKIA. At the height of the operation, an aircraft took off every 45 minutes. A terrible failure of planning necessitated a mad scramble—a mad scramble that was an impressive display of creative determination.
Even as the administration pulled off this feat of logistics, it was pilloried for the clumsiness of the withdrawal. The New York Times’ David Sanger had written, “After seven months in which his administration seemed to exude much-needed competence—getting more than 70 percent of the country’s adults vaccinated, engineering surging job growth and making progress toward a bipartisan infrastructure bill—everything about America’s last days in Afghanistan shattered the imagery.”
Biden didn’t have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the coverage, and it infuriated him. It did little to change his mind, though. In the caricature version of Joe Biden that had persisted for decades, he was highly sensitive to shifts in opinion, especially when they emerged from columnists at the Post or the Times. The criticism of the withdrawal caused him to justify the chaos as the inevitable consequence of a difficult decision, even though he had never publicly, or privately, predicted it. Through the whole last decade of the Afghan War, he had detested the conventional wisdom of the foreign-policy elites. They were willing to stay forever, no matter the cost. After defying their delusional promises of progress for so long, he wasn’t going to back down now. In fact, everything he’d witnessed from his seat in the Situation Room confirmed his belief that exiting a war without hope was the best and only course.
So much of the commentary felt overheated to him. He said to an aide: Either the press is losing its mind, or I am.
August 26
Every intelligence official watching Kabul was obsessed with the possibility of an attack by ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS‑K, the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State, which dreamed of a new caliphate in Central Asia. As the Taliban stormed across Afghanistan, they unlocked a prison at Bagram Air Base, freeing hardened ISIS‑K adherents. ISIS‑K had been founded by veterans of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban who had broken with their groups, on the grounds that they needed to be replaced by an even more militant vanguard. The intelligence community had been sorting through a roaring river of unmistakable warnings about an imminent assault on the airport.
As the national-security team entered the Situation Room for a morning meeting, it consumed an early, sketchy report of an explosion at one of the gates to HKIA, but it was hard to know if there were any U.S. casualties. Everyone wanted to believe that the United States had escaped unscathed, but everyone had too much experience to believe that. General McKenzie appeared via videoconference in the Situation Room with updates that confirmed the room’s suspicions of American deaths. Biden hung his head and quietly absorbed the reports. In the end, the explosion killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 150 Afghan civilians.
August 29–30
The remains ofthe dead service members were flown to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, for a ritual known as the dignified transfer: Flag-draped caskets are marched down the gangway of a transport plane and driven to the base’s mortuary.
So much about the withdrawal had slipped beyond Biden’s control. But grieving was his expertise. If there was one thing that everyone agreed Biden did more adroitly than any other public official, it was comforting survivors. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole once called him “the Designated Mourner.”
August 29: President Biden watches as the remains of a Marine killed in the attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport are returned to Dover Air Force Base. (Associated Press)
Accompanied by his wife, Jill; Mark Milley; Antony Blinken; and Lloyd Austin, Biden made his way to a private room where grieving families had gathered. He knew he would be standing face to face with unbridled anger. A father had already turned his back on Austin and was angrily shouting at Milley, who held up his hands in the posture of surrender.
When Biden entered, he shook the hand of Mark Schmitz, who had lost his 20-year-old son, Jared. In his sorrow, Schmitz couldn’t decide whether he wanted to sit in the presence of the president. According to a report in TheWashingtonPost, the night before, he had told a military officer that he didn’t want to speak to the man whose incompetence he blamed for his son’s death. In the morning, he changed his mind.
Schmitz told the Post that he couldn’t help but glare in Biden’s direction. When Biden approached, he held out a photo of Jared. “Don’t you ever forget that name. Don’t you ever forget that face. Don’t you ever forget the names of the other 12. And take some time to learn their stories.”
“I do know their stories,” Biden replied.
After the dignified transfer, the families piled onto a bus. A sister of one of the dead screamed in Biden’s direction: “I hope you burn in hell.”
Of all the moments in August, this was the one that caused the president to second-guess himself. He asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki: Did I do something wrong? Maybe I should have handled that differently.
As Biden left, Milley saw the pain on the president’s face. He told him: “You made a decision that had to be made. War is a brutal, vicious undertaking. We’re moving forward to the next step.”
That afternoon, Bidenreturned to the Situation Room. There was pressure, from the Hill and talking heads, to push back the August 31 deadline. But everyone in the room was terrified by the intelligence assessments about ISIS‑K. If the U.S. stayed, it would be hard to avoid the arrival of more caskets at Dover.
As Biden discussed the evacuation, he received a note, which he passed to Milley. According to a White House official present in the room, the general read it aloud: “If you want to catch the 5:30 Mass, you have to leave now.” He turned to the president. “My mother always said it’s okay to miss Mass if you’re doing something important. And I would argue that this is important.” He paused, realizing that the president might need a moment after his bruising day. “This is probably also a time when we need prayers.”
Biden gathered himself to leave. As he stood from his chair, he told the group, “I will be praying for all of you.”
On the morning of the 30th, John Bass was cleaning out his office. An alarm sounded, and he rushed for cover. A rocket flew over the airport from the west and a second crashed into the compound, without inflicting damage.
Bass, ever the stoic, turned to a colleague. “Well, that’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened so far.” He was worried that the rockets weren’t a parting gift, but a prelude to an attack.
Earlier that morning, though, Bass had implored Major General Donahue to delay the departure. He’d asked his military colleagues to remain at the outer access points, because there were reports of American citizens still making their way to them.
Donahue was willing to give Bass a few extra hours. And around 3 a.m., 60 more American-passport holders arrived at the airport. Then, as if anticipating a final burst of American generosity toward refugees, the Taliban opened their checkpoints. A flood of Afghans rushed toward the airport. Bass sent consular officers to stand at the perimeter of concertina wire, next to the paratroopers, scanning for passports, visas, any official-looking document.
An officer caught a glimpse of an Afghan woman in her 20s waving a printout showing that she had received permission to enter the U.S. “Wow. You won the lottery twice,” he told her. “You’re the visa-lottery winner and you’ve made it here in time.” She was one of the final evacuees hustled into the airport.
Around 7 a.m., the last remaining State Department officials in Kabul, including Bass, posed for a photo and then walked up the ramp of a C-17. As Bass prepared for takeoff, he thought about two numbers. In total, the United States had evacuated about 124,000 people, which the White House touted as the most successful airlift in history. Bass also thought about the unknown number of Afghans he had failed to get out. He thought about the friends he couldn’t extricate. He thought about the last time he’d flown out of Kabul, 18 months earlier, and how he had harbored a sense of optimism for the country then. A hopefulness that now felt as remote as the Hindu Kush.
August 31: President Biden delivers remarks on the end of the war in Afghanistan. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
In a command center in the Pentagon’s basement, Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley followed events at the airport through a video feed provided by a drone, the footage filtered through the hazy shades of a night-vision lens. They watched in silence as Donahue, the last American soldier on the ground in Afghanistan, boarded the last C-17 to depart HKIA.
Five C‑17s sat on the runway—carrying “chalk,” as the military refers to the cargo of troops. An officer in the command center narrated the procession for them. “Chalk 1 loaded … Chalk 2 taxiing.”
As the planes departed, there was no applause, no hand-shaking. A murmur returned to the room. Austin and Milley watched the great military project of their generation—a war that had cost the lives of comrades, that had taken them away from their families—end without remark. They stood without ceremony and returned to their offices.
Across the Potomac River, Biden sat with Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, revising a speech he would deliver the next day. One of Sullivan’s aides passed him a note, which he read to the group: “Chalk 1 in the air.” A few minutes later, the aide returned with an update. All of the planes were safely away.
Some critics had clamored for Biden to fire the advisers who had failed to plan for the chaos at HKIA, to make a sacrificial offering in the spirit of self-abasement. But Biden never deflected blame onto staff. In fact, he privately expressed gratitude to them. And with the last plane in the air, he wanted Blinken and Sullivan to join him in the private dining room next to the Oval Office as he called Austin to thank him. The secretary of defense hadn’t agreed with Biden’s withdrawal plan, but he’d implemented it in the spirit of a good soldier.
America’s longest war was now finally and officially over. Each man looked exhausted. Sullivan hadn’t slept for more than two hours a night over the course of the evacuation. Biden aides sensed that he hadn’t rested much better. Nobody needed to mention how the trauma and political scars might never go away, how the month of August had imperiled a presidency. Before returning to the Oval Office, they spent a moment together, lingering in the melancholy.
Joe Lieberman wants to make one thing clear. “The last thing I’d ever want to be part of,” the former Connecticut senator and onetime vice-presidential nominee told me by phone last week, “is bringing Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.”
Democrats have their doubts. Lieberman and his former party have been warring for years, ever since he won a fourth Senate term, in 2006, as an independent after Connecticut Democrats dumped him in a primary. Suddenly liberated, Lieberman endorsed the Republican John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008 and proceeded to tank the Democrats’ dreams of enacting a public health-insurance program through the Affordable Care Act.
He’s now a co-chair of No Labels, the centrist group that, to the growing alarm of Democrats, is preparing to field a third-party presidential ticket in 2024. The organization’s leaders say they’re trying to save voters from a binary rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden that most Americans have told pollsters they don’t want. But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House. Both No Labels’ own polling and independent surveys have shown that a “moderate, independent” candidate could capture as much as 20 percent of the popular vote and would pull more of that support from Biden than from Trump. If the 2024 election is as close as 2020’s—and pretty much every political prognosticator believes it will be—that could be decisive.
No Labels has already lost one of its co-founders, William Galston, over its push for a third-party ticket; Galston resigned in protest this spring over the possibility that the bid could tip the election to Trump. Democratic members of the No Labels–backed Problem Solvers Caucus in the House have disavowed the effort for the same reason. The moderate Democratic group Third Way is adamantly opposed to the idea, and a new bipartisan group is forming to stop it.
For now, Lieberman is undeterred. “I think people in both parties, particularly the Democrats, are greatly overreacting,” Lieberman told me. “They really would do better to try to build up support for their own ticket and adopt a platform that’s more to the center.”
Founded by the Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson, No Labels launched in 2010 with an initial focus on promoting centrist policies and breaking partisan gridlock in Congress during the Obama presidency. It formed the Problem Solvers Caucus in 2017 and has touted some of the major bipartisan bills that have passed with Biden’s support, including the 2021 infrastructure law. It is now putting significant money behind an idea—a so-called unity ticket featuring one Democrat and one Republican—that has come uprepeatedly over the past two decades but never actually materialized. Leaders of No Labels have said they won’t decide whether to nominate a ticket until the spring, when they would assess the major-party nominees and see what polling shows about the effect a third-party bid might have. So far they’ve refused to discuss who their actual candidates might be.
Citing a large poll the group commissioned in December, No Labels has argued that a third-party ticket could win enough states—including some that are deeply red and deeply blue—to capture the Electoral College. Lieberman acknowledged that that remains a tall order. He said No Labels wanted a potential unity ticket to play “a constructive role” even if it didn’t win, drawing both parties back toward the ideological middle. They are hoping, for example, that one of the two parties will embrace the “Common Sense” policy agenda it released yesterday. It’s not clear, however, that this would make Biden or Trump any more palatable to voters.
The group’s lodestar is the late Ross Perot, who captured 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and was the last third-party candidate to draw significant popular support. Lieberman credits Perot’s bid for prompting President Bill Clinton to embrace policies that led to a balanced federal budget; many Republicans believe the Texas businessman cost George H. W. Bush a second term. More recent third-party candidates such as Jill Stein in 2016 have garnered much less support but played more obvious spoiler roles, delivering Republican presidential victories. And Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, is well aware of the impact that Ralph Nader had in that election, when he took crucial votes away from the Democratic ticket in Florida.
“When I look at the data next year, I’m going to be very cautious about interpreting it,” Lieberman said. “If it appears that, notwithstanding our goals, we may create a real risk of inadvertently helping to reelect Donald Trump, I will be strongly opposed to running a third-party ticket. And I think I’m reflecting a majority of people in No Labels, including the leadership.”
For all of Lieberman’s talk about caution, however, the group is aggressively laying the groundwork for what it calls a national “insurance policy” against a Biden-Trump rematch. No Labels is pursuing a $70 million effort to secure ballot access in every state and has already made progress in a few important battlegrounds. Today, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman will headline the formal launch of the group’s “Common Sense” agenda in New Hampshire. Manchin has not ruled out running for president on a No Labels ticket, although he insisted to CNN that his high-profile visit to the early-primary state was no indication that he’s warming to the idea.
Lieberman is clear about his distaste for Trump, but he’s hazier on the question of why—or even whether—Biden has fallen short. He’s said repeatedly that if the choice came down to Biden or Trump, he’d vote for the Democrat, and he speaks affectionately of a man he first met nearly 40 years ago and with whom he served for 20 years in the Senate. Yet he’s still hunting for a better option. I asked him whether he supported a third-party ticket because Biden had done a bad job or because voters think he’s done a bad job. “I think it’s both,” Lieberman replied. “He’s an honorable person, but he’s been pulled off his normal track too often” by pressure from the left. That’s a frequent talking point from Republicans and a complaint Manchin has made from time to time.
The perception that Biden has veered too far to the left, though, is not what has driven his low approval ratings. Indeed, in many ways Biden is the kind of president for whom moderates like Lieberman have long been clamoring. Yes, he signed two major bills that passed along purely party-line votes (the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act a year later), but he has repeatedly prioritized negotiating with Republicans, most recently over the debt ceiling. Lieberman credited Biden for his bipartisan infrastructure law and the budget deal he struck with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this spring. “He’s done some significant things,” Lieberman said, also praising the president’s initial handling of the coronavirus pandemic. When I asked him what specifically Biden had veered too far left on, he initially declined to list any issues. Then he pointed to No Labels’ policy plan, noting that it included “commonsense” proposals on guns and immigration.
Although he’s been out of office for more than a decade, Lieberman, at 81, is less than a year older than Biden. He said he believes the president remains up to the job, both physically and cognitively, and he was reluctant to call on him to stand down. But Lieberman gently suggested that might have been the better course. “I’m struck by how intent he is on running again,” he said with a chuckle. “It would have been easier for him not to run, and he could retire with a real sense of pride and just an enormously productive career in public service.”
Lieberman’s response subtly pointed to No Labels’ hope that, come springtime, their decision will be an easy one. Perhaps Biden will change his mind and withdraw, or Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere. At the moment, neither of those scenarios seems likely.
Lieberman and his allies might decide that nominating a third-party ticket won’t help reelect Trump, but that’s not something they can know for sure. I asked Lieberman: If he was so intent on keeping Trump out of office, wasn’t that too big a risk to take? He didn’t have a clear answer. “Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we’ll see.”
When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.
Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.
“We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.
This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.
“That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”
But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.
Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”
Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.
That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”
The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.
“What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”
In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).
The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.
There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.
Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”
Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.
Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.
But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.
Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.
But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).
Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.
Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.
The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.
The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”
Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last monthafter the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”
Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.
But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.
Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.
Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”
The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin has always been a little squirrelly. If SARS-CoV-2 really did begin infecting humans in a research setting, the evidence that got left behind is mostly of the cloak-and-dagger type: confirmations from anonymous government officials about vague conclusions drawn in classified documents, for example; or leaked materials that lay out hypothetical research projects; or information gleaned from who-knows-where that certain people came down with who-knows-what disease at some crucial moment. In short, it’s all been messy human stuff, the bits and bobs of intelligence analysis. Simple-seeming facts emerge from a dark matter of sources and methods.
So it goes again. The latest major revelation in this line emerged this week. Taken at face value, it’s extraordinary: Ben Hu, a high-level researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and two colleagues, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu, could have been the first people on the planet to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to anonymous sources cited first in the newsletter Public and then in The Wall Street Journal. These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeroes aren’t merely employees of the virology institute; they’re central figures in the very sort of research that lab-leak investigators have been scrutinizing since the start of the pandemic. Their names appear on crucial papers related to the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent experimentation on those viruses. (The Journal reached out to the three researchers, but they did not respond.)
Is this the “smoking gun,” at last, as manynowinsist? Has the Case of the Missing COVID Origin finally been solved? If it’s true these were the very first infected people, then their professional activities mean they almost certainly caught the virus in the lab, not a market stall full of marmots and raccoon dogs. The origins debate has from the start revolved around a pair of dueling “coincidences.” The fact that the pandemic just happened to take off at a wet market suggests that the virus spilled over into humans from animals for sale there. But the fact that it also just happened to take off not too far away from one of the world’s leading bat-coronavirus labs suggests the opposite. This week’s information seems to tip the balance very heavily toward the latter interpretation.
The only problem is, we don’t know whether the latest revelations can be trusted, or to what extent. The newly reported facts appear to stem from a single item of intelligence, furnished by a foreign source, that has bounced around inside the U.S. government since sometime in 2020. Over the past two and a half years, the full description of the sickened workers in Wuhan has been revealed with excruciating slowness, in sedimenting clauses, through well-timed leaks. This glacial striptease has finally reached its end, but is the underlying information even true? Until that question can be answered (which could be never), the origins debate will be stuck exactly where it’s been for many months: always moving forward, never quite arriving.
The story of these sickened workers has been in the public domain, one way or another, since the start of 2021. Officials in the Trump administration’s State Department, reportedly determined to go public with their findings, put out a fact sheet about various events and circumstances at the Wuhan Institute of Virology around the beginning of the pandemic. Included was a quick description of alleged illnesses among the staff. The fact sheet didn’t name the sickened scientists or what they did inside the lab, or when exactly their illnesses occurred. It didn’t specify their symptoms, nor did it say how many scientists had gotten sick. If you boiled it down, the fact sheet’s revelations could be paraphrased like this:
Several researchers at WIV became ill with respiratory symptoms in autumn 2019.
That vague stub did little to budge consensus views. The lab-leak theory had been preemptively “debunked” in early 2020, and broad disregard of the idea—contempt of it, really—hadn’t yet abated. The day before the State Department fact sheet was released, a team of 17 international experts dispatched by the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan to conduct (with the help of Chinese scientists) a comprehensive study of the pandemic’s origins. By the time of their return in February 2021, they’d come out with their conclusions: The lab-leak theory was “extremely unlikely” to be true, they said.
The next month, while the WHO team was preparing to release its final report, further details of the sick-researchers story began to trickle out. In a panel discussion of COVID origins and then in an interview with the Daily Mail, David Asher, a former State Department investigator who’s now a senior fellow at a conservative think tank, filled in a few more specifics, including that the researchers had been working in a coronavirus laboratory and that the wife of one of them later died. The intel had arrived from a foreign government, he said. Now the facts that were revealed could be summarized like so:
Three coronavirus researchers at WIV became severely ill with respiratory symptoms in the second week of November 2019.
Pressure for a more serious appraisal of the lab-leak theory grew throughout that spring. In May 2021, more than a dozen prominent virologists and biosafety experts published a letter in the journal Science calling for “a proper investigation” of the matter. A week later, The Wall Street Journalpublished a leak from anonymous current and former U.S. officials: According to a “previously undisclosed US intelligence report,” the paper said, the sickened researchers had been treated for their sickness at a hospital. In other words, they probably weren’t suffering from common colds. This new aspect of the narrative was making headlines now, like this:
Three coronavirus researchers at WIV became severely ill with respiratory symptoms in the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.
After all of this publicity, President Joe Biden ordered the intelligence community to redouble efforts to analyze the evidence. While that work was going on, the leaks kept coming. In a 12,000-word story for Vanity Fair, the investigative journalist Katherine Eban gave some backstory on the sick-research intelligence, claiming that it had been gathered in 2020 and then inexplicably file-drawered until State Department investigators rediscovered it. (One former senior official described this as a “holy shit” moment in an interview with Eban.) Her article contained another seemingly important detail, too: The sickened researchers were doing not simply coronavirus research, her sources told her, but the very sort of research that could produce amped-up versions of a pathogen—an approach known as “gain of function.” Later in the summer, Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, added that, according to his unnamed sources, the sickened researchers had lost their sense of smell and developed ground-glass opacities in their lungs. By this point, in the middle of 2021, the expanded piece of intel amounted to the following:
Three gain-of-function coronavirus researchers at WIV became severely ill withCOVID-like symptomsin the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.
The latest revelations are coming at just the moment when Republicans are lambasting the Biden administration for failing to declassify COVID-origins intelligence in accordance with a law that the president signed. The Sunday Times quoted an anonymous former State Department investigator who said they were “rock-solid confident” that the three sick researchers had been sick with COVID, because people as young as the researchers would rarely be hit so hard by a mere seasonal illness. A few days later, someone spilled the researchers’ names to Public. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal matched the scoop, and it seemed that every detail of the once-secret information was now exposed:
Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, three gain-of-functioncoronavirus researchers at WIV, became severely ill with COVID-like symptoms in the second week of November 2019 and sought hospital care.
However vivid this may sound, its credibility remains unknown. Did Hu, Ping, and Zhu really get sick, as the intel claims? If so, was it really COVID? Two years ago, the Journal cited two anonymous sources on this question: One, the Journal wrote, called the intelligence “potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and corroboration”; the other said it was “of exquisite quality” and “very precise.” Just this week, anonymous officials in the Biden administration told The New York Times that intelligence analysts had already “dismissed the evidence,” by August 2022, about the sickened workers at WIV for lack of relevance. Which secret source should be trusted to explain the significance of this secret intelligence? Readers are left to sort that out themselves.
In the meantime, over the past two years, even as the sickened-worker intel was revealed, a very different sort of evidence was mounting, too. A new research paper, published just days after Eban’s feature in Vanity Fair, revealed that live wild animals, including raccoon dogs, had been for sale at the Huanan market in Wuhan shortly before the pandemic started. In early 2022, scientists put out two detailed analyses of early case patterns and viral genome data, which argued in favor of the animal-spillover theory. Another study involving many of the same researchers came out this past spring, noting the presence of genetic material from raccoon dogs in early samples from the market; its authors described their findings as providing strong evidence for an animal origin. But other scientists were quick to challenge the study’s importance. A further study of the same data by Chinese scientists made a point of not ruling out the hypothesis that the pandemic had started with a case of tainted frozen seafood; yet another study, released in May, argued that the original work provided no useful information whatsoever on the question of COVID’s origins.
So it goes with the animal-spillover theory. The evidence in favor has always been highly esoteric, knotted with data and interpretation. Scientific points are made—a particular run of viral nucleotides is a “smoking gun” for genetic engineering, one famous scholar said in 2021—and then they are re-argued and occasionally walked back. Long-hidden sample data from the market suddenly appear, and their meaning is subjected to vituperative, technical debate. If the evidence for a lab leak tends to come from messy human stuff, the evidence for animal spillover emerges from messy data. Simple-seeming claims are draped across a sprawl of numbers.
In this way, the origins question has broken down into a pair of rival theories that don’t—and can’t—ever fully interact. They’re based on different sorts of evidence, with different standards for evaluation and debate. Each story may be accruing new details—fresh intelligence about the goings-on at WIV, for example, or fresh genomic data from the market—but these are only filling out a picture that will never be complete. The two narratives have been moving forward on different tracks. Neither one is getting to its destination.
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.”
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.”
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.
As the government careens toward the brink of default without a deal to lift the debt limit, an unlikely source of reassurance has emerged.
“I think everyone needs to relax,” Mitch McConnell told reporters on Tuesday in his home state of Kentucky. “The country will not default.” The longtime Republican leader, who once boasted of being the Senate’s “grim reaper,” isn’t known for his soothing bedside manner. His equanimity was hard to reconcile with the vibes emanating from the Capitol on that particular day, where House Republican negotiators were accusing their Democratic counterparts in the White House of intransigence and insisting that the sides remained far apart.
The Treasury Department has said that if Congress does not raise the nation’s borrowing limit, the government could, as early as June 1, default on its debt for the first time. The economic repercussions could be catastrophic—first a market crash, then, economists believe, a recession. Because the House and Senate would need at least a few days to approve any agreement that President Joe Biden strikes with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the real deadline could be even sooner.
But McConnell, who has spent nearly half of his 81 years on Earth in the Senate, has seen more than a few difficult negotiations. Despite all the histrionics—the censorious sound bites, the “red lines” each side has drawn, the breakdowns and “pauses”—the talks thus far haven’t looked all that different from past Washington deadline dances, which tend to end with a deal. “This is not that unusual,” McConnell said.
The public feuding is actually a good sign, and so, in a way, is the delay. “They need this to run to the very last minute,” Brendan Buck, a former aide to Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, told me. As Buck sees it, the theatrics between GOP and Democratic leaders is a necessary precursor to a deal, because it shows partisans on their respective sides that they fought as hard as they could before reaching a compromise.
Biden and McCarthy are trying to find a solution that can pass both a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate. A quick-and-tidy agreement is likely to be viewed suspiciously by both parties, and particularly the GOP’s hard-right faction, which made McCarthy sweat out 15 votes to become speaker. “There’s no way McCarthy could have walked in two weeks ago, had a one-hour meeting with the president, and come out and said, ‘We have a deal,’” Matt Glassman, a former congressional aide who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. “That would be just deadly for him with his conference.”
Today’s impasse has drawn comparisons to the debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011 between Boehner and then-President Barack Obama. Those talks featured even more drama, including the sudden collapse of a “grand bargain” and, later, a worried prime-time address to the nation from Obama. Even though the two parties have since drifted further apart (mostly thanks to the GOP’s move rightward), the gap between them in these negotiations is much smaller.
Back then, Obama was pushing aggressively for tax increases, while Boehner wanted several trillion dollars in spending cuts, including major changes to entitlement programs. Biden initially took a harder line this time, refusing for months to engage McCarthy in negotiations over the debt ceiling. But since backing off that position, he’s made only half-hearted—and swiftly rejected—attempts to get McCarthy to raise taxes or make any kind of policy concession. To the frustration of progressives, he’s even seemed willing to tighten work requirements for people receiving federal safety-net benefits. Republicans, for their part, have agreed not to seek cuts to Medicare or Social Security. “I don’t actually think this is that difficult of a deal to reach,” Buck said. Getting that deal through the House and the Senate, he said, will be more difficult, which is why both Biden and McCarthy will need to save the biggest deadline pressure for the votes themselves.
By most accounts, the parties are haggling chiefly over whether to freeze government spending at current levels—Biden’s latest offer—or cut as much as $130 billion by reverting to 2022 spending, as Republicans have proposed. Republicans want to exempt the Defense Department from any cuts, which is a sticking point for Democrats.
Considering the yawning philosophical differences between the parties, that’s not much of a gap. “Compromising over numbers isn’t that hard,” Glassman said. “It’s not like compromising over abortion.”
Look closer and there are other reasons for optimism. Although some of McCarthy’s members are urging him to hold fast to the conservative provisions of the debt-ceiling bill Republicans narrowly passed last month, the speaker has moved off those demands. Even the blowups have been timed, either intentionally or coincidentally, to avoid spooking investors and causing stock markets to slide. The White House meetings between McCarthy and Biden, for example, have all occurred after the markets closed, and the biggest breakdown in the talks (so far) happened over the weekend before negotiations resumed on Monday.
Republicans have many reasons for not causing a stock-market crash; the simplest is that they and many of their constituents would stand to lose a lot of money. Another possible reason is that party leaders, and McConnell especially, seem to recognize that a panic over the debt ceiling is not in their political interest and could undermine their negotiating position.
McConnell is not a soothsayer—his prediction that Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP would loosen, for example, has not exactly panned out. Nor is his confidence that the country will avert default merely a forecast from a disinterested observer. If McConnell is saying it, he must think it benefits Republicans for him to do so.
But even a self-interested assurance is one more indication of hope, a sign that Republicans want to prevent economic disaster. A debt-ceiling deal between Biden and McCarthy remains more likely than not. It might just take a few more days of posturing and setbacks before it happens.
The budget cuts that House Republicans are demanding in their high-stakes debt-ceiling standoff with President Joe Biden sharpen the overlapping generational and racial conflict moving to the center of U.S. politics.
The House GOP’s blueprint would focus its spending cuts on the relatively small slice of the federal budget that funds most of the government’s investments in children and young adults, who are the most racially diverse generations in American history.
Those programs, and other domestic spending funded through the annual congressional-appropriations process, face such large proposed cuts in part because the GOP plan protects constituencies and causes that Republicans have long favored: It rejects any reductions in spending on defense or homeland security, and refuses to raise taxes on the most affluent earners or corporations.
But the burden leans so heavily toward programs that benefit young people, such as Head Start or Pell Grants, also because the Republican proposal, unlike previous GOP debt-reduction plans, exempts from any cuts Social Security and Medicare. Those are the two giant federal programs that support the preponderantly white senior population.
The GOP’s deficit agenda opens a new front in what I’ve called the collision between the brown and the gray—the struggle for control of the nation’s direction between kaleidoscopically diverse younger generations that are becoming the cornerstone of the modern Democratic electoral coalition and older cohorts that remain predominantly white and anchor the Republican base.
The House Republicans’ plan would solidify a similar tilt in the federal budget’s priorities. Because Social Security, Medicare, and the portion of Medicaid that funds long-term care for the elderly are among Washington’s biggest expenditures, the federal budget spends more than six times as much on each senior 65 and older as it does on each child 18 and younger, according to the comprehensive “Kids’ Share” analysis published each year by the nonpartisan Urban Institute. Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow there who helped create the “Kids’ Share” report, told me, “We are already in some sense asking the young to pay the price” by cutting taxes on today’s workers while increasing spending on seniors, and accumulating more government debt that future generations must pay off.
Spending on children 18 and younger now makes up a little more than 9 percent of the federal budget, according to the study. But that number is artificially inflated by the large social expenditures that Congress authorized during the pandemic. By 2033, the report projects, programs for kids will fall to only about 6 percent of federal spending.
One reason for the decline is that spending on the entitlement programs for the elderly—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—will command more of total spending under the pressure of both increasing health-care costs and the growing senior population. Under current law, in 2033 those programs for seniors will expand to consume almost exactly half of federal spending, the “Kids’ Share” analysis projects.
By protecting those programs for seniors from any cuts, and rejecting any new revenues, while exacting large reductions from programs for kids and young adults, the GOP plan would bend the budget even further from the brown toward the gray. The implication of the plan “is that children will get an even smaller slice of federal spending” than anticipated under current policies, Elaine Maag, an Urban Institute senior fellow and a co-author of the “Kids’ Share” report, told me.
Federal spending on kids is particularly at risk because of how Washington provides it. The federal government does channel substantial assistance to kids through tax benefits, such as the child tax credit, and entitlement programs, including Medicaid and Social Security survivors’ benefits, that are affected less by the GOP proposal. But many of the federal programs that benefit kids and young people are provided through programs that require annual appropriations from Congress, what’s known as domestic discretionary spending. As Maag noted, the programs that help low-income and vulnerable kids are especially likely to be funded as discretionary spending, rather than entitlements or tax credits.“Head Start or child-care subsidies or housing subsidies are all very targeted programs,” she said.
The GOP plan’s principal mechanism for reducing federal spending is to impose overall caps on that discretionary spending. Those caps would cut such spending this year and then hold its growth over the next nine years to just 1 percent annually, which is not enough to keep pace with inflation. Over time, those tightening constraints would result in substantially less spending than currently projected for these programs. If the GOP increased defense spending enough to keep pace with inflation, that would require all other discretionary programs—including those that benefit kids—to be cut by 27 percent this year and by almost half in 2033, according to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive advocacy group. If the GOP also intends to maintain enough funding for veterans programs (including health care) to match inflation, the required cuts in all other discretionary programs would start at 33 percent next year and rise to almost 60 percent by 2033.
As Sharon Parrott, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me this week, by demanding general spending caps, the GOP does not have to commit in advance to specific program reductions that might be unpopular with the public. “What they are trying to do is put in place a process that forces large cuts without ever having to say what they are,” Parrott said.
Federal agencies have projected that the cuts required under the Republican spending caps would force 200,000 children out of the Head Start program, end Pell Grants for about 80,000 recipients and cut the grants by about $1,000 annually for the remainder, and slash federal support for Title I schools by an amount that could require them to eliminate about 60,000 teachers or classroom aides. The plan also explicitly repeals the student-loan relief that Biden has instituted for some 40 million borrowers. Its cuts in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, generally known as welfare, could end aid for as many as 1 million children, including about 500,000 already living in poverty, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated.
The appropriations bill that a House subcommittee recently approved for agricultural programs offers another preview of what the GOP plan, over time, would mean for the programs that support kids. The bill cut $800 million, or about 12 percent, from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Parrott noted that to avoid creating long waiting lists for eligibility, which might stir a more immediate backlash, the committee instead eliminated a pandemic-era program that gave families increased funding through WIC to purchase fruits and vegetables. “They are saying the country can’t possibly afford to make sure that pregnant participants, breast-feeding participants, toddlers, and preschoolers have enough money for fruits and vegetables,” she said.
Parrott doesn’t see the GOP budget as primarily motivated by a desire to favor the old over the young. She notes that the GOP plan would also squeeze some programs that older Americans rely on, for instance by reducing funds for Social Security administration or Meals on Wheels, and imposing work requirements that could deny aid to older, childless adults receiving assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Instead, Parrott, like the Biden administration and congressional Democrats, believes that the GOP budget’s central priority is to protect corporations and the most affluent from higher taxes. “To me, that’s who they are really shielding,” she said.
Yet the GOP’s determination to avoid reductions in Social Security and Medicare, coupled with its refusal to consider new revenue or defense cuts, has exposed kids to even greater risk than the last debt-ceiling standoff. Those negotiations in 2011, between then-President Barack Obama and the new GOP House majority, initially focused on a “grand bargain” that involved cuts in entitlements and tax increases along with reductions in both discretionary domestic and defense spending. Even after that sweeping plan collapsed, the two sides settled on a fallback proposal that raised the debt ceiling while requiring future cuts in both domestic and defense spending.
The House Republicans’ determination to narrow the budget-cutting focus almost entirely to domestic discretionary spending not only means more vulnerability for programs benefiting kids, but also less impact on the overall debt problem they say they want to address. Even some conservative budget experts acknowledge that it’s not possible to truly tame deficits by focusing solely on discretionary spending, which accounts for only about one-sixth of the total federal budget. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute, supports Republican efforts to limit future discretionary spending but views it only as an attempt to “prevent the deficit from getting worse.”
Riedl told me that in his analysis of long-term budget trends, he found it impossible to prevent the federal debt from increasing unsustainably without also raising taxes and significantly slowing the growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare. But, as he acknowledged, the GOP’s willingness to consider reductions in those programs has dwindled as their electoral coalition in the Donald Trump era has evolved to include more older and lower-income whites. “As the Republican electorate grew older and more blue collar, they revealed themselves as more attached to entitlements [for seniors] than previous Republican electorates,” he said.
Trump in 2016 recognized that shift when he rejected previous GOP orthodoxy and instead opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Trump has maintained that position by publicly warning congressional Republicans against cutting the programs, and attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who entered the 2024 GOP race yesterday, for supporting such reductions in the past. Biden has also pressured the GOP to preserve Social Security and Medicare.
Though it’s not discussed nearly as much, the GOP’s refusal to consider taxes on high earners also has a stark generational component. With the occasional exception, older Americans generally earn more than younger Americans (the top tenth of people at age 61 earn almost 60 percent more than the top tenth of those age 30). Older generations are especially likely to have accumulated more wealth than younger people, Steuerle noted. As part of the economy’s general trend toward inequality, Steuerle said, older generations today are amassing an even larger share of the nation’s total wealth than in earlier eras.
Refusing to raise taxes on today’s affluent while cutting programs for contemporary young people subjects those younger generations to a double whammy. Not only does it mean that the federal government invests less in their health, nutrition, and education, but it also increases the odds that as adults they will be compelled to pay higher taxes to fund retirement benefits for the growing senior population.
Although Biden also wants to avoid cuts in entitlements for seniors, his call for raising more revenue from the affluent still creates a clear contrast with the GOP. By proposing higher taxes, Biden has been able to devise a budget that protects federal spending on kids and other domestic programs while also reducing the deficit. Biden’s budget proposal achieves greater generational balance than the GOP’s because the president asks today’s affluent earners, who are mostly older, to pay more in taxes to preserve spending that benefits young people. If Biden reaches a deal with congressional Republicans to avoid default, however, their price will inevitably include some form of spending cap that squeezes such programs: the real question is not whether, but how much.
Looming over these choices is the intertwined generational and racial re-sorting of the two parties’ electoral coalitions. As Riedl noted, especially in the Trump era, the GOP has become more dependent on older white people who are either eligible for the federal retirement programs or nearing eligibility. According to a new analysis published by Catalist, a Democratic electoral-targeting firm, white adults older than 45 accounted for just over half of all voters in the 2022 and 2018 midterm elections and just under half in the 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns. But because those older white Americans have become such a solidly Republican bloc, they contributed about three-fifths of all GOP votes in the presidential years, and fully two-thirds of Republican votes in midterm elections.
Democrats, in turn, are growing more reliant on the diverse younger generations. Catalist found that Democrats have won 60 to 66 percent of Millennials and members of Generation Z combined in each of the past four elections. Those two generations have more than doubled their share of the total vote from 14 percent in 2008 to 31 percent in 2020. Adding in the very youngest members of Generation X, all voters younger than 45 provided almost 40 percent of Democrats’ votes in 2022, Catalist found, far more than their overall share (30 percent) of the electorate.
The inexorable long-term trajectory is for the diverse younger generations to increase their share of the vote while the mostly white older cohorts recede. In 2024, Millennials and Gen Z may, for the first time, cast as many ballots as the Baby Boomers and older generations; by 2028, they will almost certainly surpass the older groups. In the fight over the federal budget and debt ceiling—just as in the struggles over cultural issues unfolding in the states—Republicans appear to be racing to lock into law policies that favor their older, white base before the rising generations acquire the electoral clout to force a different direction.
The White House and Congress have not made much progress in their talks to avert an unprecedented, and potentially calamitous, national default that could occur as soon as early June. But on the most fundamental point of dispute, President Joe Biden has already caved: He’s negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling.
For months, the president’s ironclad position has been that the debt ceiling is not a bargaining chip. No longer would Democrats allow Republicans to hold hostage the nation’s creditworthiness and economic prestige. Paying the government’s bills by raising the U.S.’s statutory borrowing limit would be nonnegotiable. As recently as Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared without equivocation, “We are not going to negotiate over the debt limit.”
But Biden himself has dropped the pretense that his weeks-long budget discussions with the GOP have not revolved around the debt ceiling. Asked specifically about the debt ceiling on Sunday—in anticipation of a second White House visit by congressional leaders, planned for today—Biden told reporters, “Well, I’ve learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do: It never is good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation.”
So there you go: It’s a negotiation. Exactly what the two parties are discussing is only starting to become clear. According to variousreports, a deal to avert default could include some changes to permitting rules that would speed up domestic-energy production; a revocation of unused COVID funds; additional work requirements for some federal programs (although the president has ruled out any modifications to Medicaid); and, most significant, a cap on overall federal spending.
The Biden administration still claims to be haggling only over the budget, not the debt ceiling. “The president has been emphasizing for months that he’s eager to have budget negotiations,” a White House official, who requested anonymity to explain the administration’s somewhat tortured position, told me. “That’s of course different from avoiding default, which is nonnegotiable.”
Biden’s no-negotiation stance was born of past experience, when in 2011 Republicans dragged out debt talks with the Obama administration to the brink of default, resulting in a downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating. But Biden’s approach this time is proving to be neither realistic nor sustainable, especially after Speaker Kevin McCarthy defied expectations last month by getting a budget-slashing debt-ceiling bill through his narrow House majority.
Crucially, Biden failed to win strong support for his strategy from House centrists. Democrats had been hoping to persuade Republicans representing swing districts to buck McCarthy and help pass a debt-ceiling increase. But those lawmakers have stuck by the speaker. Complaining about a lack of outreach from the White House, they instead criticized Biden over his refusal—until recently—to negotiate. With Republicans unwilling to budge, Democratic centrists began to lose patience with Biden’s approach and conducted their own bipartisan negotiations.
“We believe it’s very important in general that both sides sit down and try to work this out,” Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, the Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told me before Biden’s first meeting last week with McCarthy and other top congressional leaders. “This can’t become a part of a political back-and-forth as the country drives off the cliff.”
Last month the Problem Solvers offered their own plan, which they presented as a fallback option that could win bipartisan support should Biden and McCarthy fail to strike a deal in time. The proposal would immediately suspend the borrowing limit through the end of the year to buy time for broader budget talks. If Congress agrees to unspecified budget limits and creates a fiscal commission to tackle the nation’s long-term deficits and debt, the plan stipulates that the debt ceiling would be increased through the 2024 elections.
The compromise has yet to gain momentum, but its release seemed to undermine the Biden administration’s insistence that Democrats would not tie a debt-ceiling increase to spending reforms. “We didn’t try to fill in every blank, but we thought this was a really good framework to become the meat of the deal,” Representative Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped write the Problem Solvers plan, told me.
It could still prove handy. Biden struck an optimistic note on Sunday, telling reporters, “I really think there’s a desire on [Republicans’] part, as well as ours, to reach an agreement, and I think we’ll be able to do it.” But McCarthy is sounding more dour. “I still think we’re far apart,” he told NBC News yesterday morning. The speaker said that Biden “hasn’t taken it serious” and warned that an agreement needed to happen by this weekend in order for the House and Senate to have time to debate and pass it by early June.
Whether a Biden-McCarthy deal could even get through the House is also in question. Democrats have largely stayed quiet on Biden’s evident capitulation to Republicans, and the talks initially did not stir a backlash. But that may be changing as the president openly considers concessions that would be anathema to progressives, such as the possibility of adding work requirements to social safety-net programs. Still, the lack of a credible primary challenge to Biden’s reelection has helped give him room to negotiate, as Democrats fret about the effect that a default could have on the president’s already tenuous public standing.
“As long as he continues to try to avoid default, and avoid the middle class having to pay the cost for it, then he’s in the position that the majority of the electorate wants him to be,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic strategist, told me.
McCarthy has much more to worry about. He traded away his own job security to win the speakership in January, agreeing to rule changes that would make it easier for hard-right conservatives to depose him. A debt-ceiling deal that fails to secure deep enough spending cuts or policy concessions from Democrats could threaten his position. “Default can be avoided. The question is whether Kevin McCarthy could withstand putting that bill on the floor,” Ferguson said.
The speaker has secured no substantive commitments from Biden, nothing specific that he can sell to his party. But McCarthy has elicited one major concession from the president, which serves as a prerequisite for any others to come. Biden has come to the table with default in the balance, and he’s negotiating on the GOP’s terms.
“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people,” former President Donald Trump declared during a CNN town hall tonight, shortly after he endorsed defaulting on the national debt.
Trump remains without shame. Neither impeachment nor indictment nor arraignment nor a barely day-old verdict against him in a civil suit can change the fact that he’s still leading the field of Republican presidential candidates—comfortably.
During tonight’s hour-plus live broadcast from New Hampshire, Trump steamrolled over the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, at one point calling her a “nasty” person—an echo of his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. Collins did her best to fact-check the former president, but her efforts consistently fell short. Trump’s ability to disgorge words is unparalleled. She tried to cut him off, but he battled through it.
Tonight, Trump rattled off myriad conspiracy theories about voter fraud and claimed, as he had at CPAC, that he could end the war in Ukraine in a quick 24 hours. He painted the January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as a martyr and called the Capitol Police officer who shot her a “thug.” He referred to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as a “crazy woman.” He repeatedly denigrated the writer E. Jean Carroll, who was just awarded $5 million in damages after a jury found that he defamed and sexually assaulted her. Trump repeated his earlier claims not to know her, calling her a “whack job.”
But will it matter? Has it ever mattered before?
Trump is currently leading both the incumbent, President Joe Biden, and the top Republican alternative, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, in the polls. Though the 2024 election is still a long way off, the campaign is officially under way—such was the network’s justification for tonight’s town hall. Many observers on social media objected to the fact that it happened at all.
On set in New Hampshire, Trump was speaking not just to the country, but to a roomful of undecided voters. Most of them seemed eager to applaud and giggle along with the former president, whom nearly everyone addressed as “Mr. President.” He’s still the star, the draw, the showman. When he theatrically pulled papers out of his breast pocket, the crowd hooted. He teased a few 2024 talking points: The economy? Stinks. Inflation? A disaster. Afghanistan? “The single most embarrassing moment in the history of this country.”
And then there’s the topic of January 6. The laughably big question going into the next election is whether a president who incited a violent mob and tried to stage a coup in lieu of orchestrating a peaceful transfer of power can once again be president. Has Trump taken the past two years to reflect on his actions? Has he been humbled? Chastened? Of course not.
Tonight, Trump doubled down on his claim that former Vice President Mike Pence should have overturned the results of the 2020 election. He said he was inclined to pardon “many” of the January 6 rioters, bemoaning that “they’re living in hell right now.” He referred to these insurrectionists as “great people,” a subtle callback to his comments in the aftermath of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which he claimed there were “very fine people” on both sides.
Next month marks eight years since Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president. Hardly anyone in the media seemed to know how to properly cover him then. CNN was among the networks that used to carry his campaign rallies live. Tonight’s town hall, despite Collins’s admirable attempts at pushback, felt like a regression to that earlier era. Even some of Trump’s lines felt ominously familiar. “If I don’t win, this country is going to be in big trouble,” he said. Are we really about to do this all over again?
By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.
His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.
Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”
And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.
There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.
The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.
On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.
“The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”
After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.
Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost his reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.
With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.
But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.
If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.
That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.
For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.
In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.
For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.
Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.
The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”
Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.
Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more.“While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.” A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released today offered one concrete measure of that dynamic: In an echo of the 2022 pattern, three-fourths of the adults who said they mildly disapproved of Biden’s performance in office nonetheless said they did not want a second term for Trump.
Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.
In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”
On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump.Although Devine told me,“I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”
One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.
In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden’s choice to run the Federal Aviation Administration has withdrawn his nomination, a setback for the administration that comes after Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington failed to gain enough support in the closely divided Senate.
Washington’s withdrawal was confirmed Saturday night by a person familiar with the situation who insisted on anonymity to discuss the matter. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Republicans were united in opposition to Washington, calling him unqualified because of limited aviation experience. Democrats and allied independents still might have pushed the nomination through, but key senators on their side balked at supporting Biden’s pick.
Washington’s fate appeared settled when Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., abruptly called off a scheduled vote last Wednesday — a sign that she lacked enough votes to move the nomination out of committee. She said some senators wanted more information about Washington.
FILE – Phillip Washington, the nominee to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, testifies before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at the Capitol in Washington, March 1, 2023.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who was a Democrat until switching to independent in December, and moderate Democrat Jon Tester of Montana declined to say how they would have voted. Before the White House announces a new nominee, it likely will want assurances of support from Sinema, Tester and other moderates.
The FAA has lacked a Senate-confirmed administrator since March 2022. The agency is trying to reassure Americans that air travel is safe despite a surge in close calls between planes this year. It is also struggling with aging technology that failed in January, briefly canceling all takeoffs around the country. And it is still trying to repair its reputation after approving Boeing planes that crashed in 2018 and 2019.
Washington ran transit agencies in Denver and Los Angeles, but his only aviation-related experience is serving as CEO of the Denver airport for less than two years. He has strong ties to the administration, however — he led Biden’s 2020 transition team for the Transportation Department, which includes the FAA.
Biden nominated Washington last July, but he didn’t get a committee hearing for eight months. Republicans attacked his resume and seized on disclosures that his name appeared in search warrants related to a corruption investigation in Los Angeles.
Washington said he did nothing wrong and had not been contacted by law enforcement. The agency is being led by an acting administrator, Billy Nolen, a pilot who has held safety jobs at three airlines and the FAA. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who led opposition to Washington, said Nolen could win bipartisan support.
The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the GOP wants to cut.
A much larger share of Republican than Democratic House members represent districts where seniors exceed their share of the national population, census data show. Republicans are also more likely to represent districts where the median income trails the national level, or the proportion of people without health insurance is greater than in the nation overall.
House Republicans, in their ongoing struggle with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling, have signaled they will push for sweeping reductions in domestic social programs, likely including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the principal federal programs providing health care for working-age adults. And while House Republicans appear to have backed away from pursuing reductions in Social Security and Medicare, the conservative Republican Study Committee has set a long-term goal of cutting and partially privatizing both programs.
The fact that so many House Republicans feel safe advancing these proposals in districts with such extensive economic need testifies to the power of what I’ve called “the class inversion” in American politics: the growing tendency of voters to divide between the parties based on cultural attitudes, rather than class interests. That dynamic has simultaneously allowed House Democrats to gain in more socially liberal, affluent, metropolitan areas and House Republicans to consolidate their hold over more culturally conservative, economically hardscrabble, nonurban areas.
Yesterday, Biden forcefully reiterated his charge that Republicans would shred the safety net at a White House ceremony commemorating the 13th anniversary of Barack Obama signing the ACA into law. An extended battle between House Republicans and Biden this spring and summer over the safety net may test whether any economic argument can allow Democrats to break through the cultural resistance that fortifies Republican control of these downscale districts.
While Republicans have gained in some areas primarily around culturally and racially infused disputes such as those over crime and immigration, a struggle over spending priorities will inevitably highlight that “their policies on these bread-and-butter issues remain diametrically opposed to the economic interest of much of their base,” Paul Pierson, a political scientist at UC Berkeley and a co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, told me.
As I reported last week, to understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
That analysis inverts many traditional assumptions, even within the parties themselves, about whose voters rely on the social safety net. “There has been a massive transformation of the coalitions,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.
Democrats, who led the legislative efforts to create Social Security under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson, have long thought of themselves as the party of seniors. But today, Republicans represent 141 of the 215 House districts where adults aged 65 and older exceed their 16 percent share of the national population, while Democrats hold a clear majority of seats in districts with fewer seniors than average, according to the Equity Research Institute analysis.
Republicans now also control most of the House seats in which the median income trails the national level of nearly $65,000 annually. Republicans hold 152 of the 237 seats in that category. Democrats, in turn, hold 128 of the 198 seats where the median income exceeds the national level.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Republicans hold a clear majority of the districts where the share of residents who lack health insurance exceeds the national level of 9 percent. The GOP now holds 110 of those 185 highly uninsured seats. Democrats control 138 of the 250 seats with fewer uninsured than the nation overall.
Equally revealing is to examine what share of each party’s total strength in the House these seats represent. From that angle, the parties offer almost mirror-image profiles. About two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts with more seniors than the national level, while about two-thirds of Democrats represent districts with fewer of them. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts where the median income lags the national level, while three-fifths of Democrats hold seats where incomes surpass it. Almost exactly half of Republicans, compared with only about one-third of Democrats, represent districts with an unusually high concentration of people lacking health insurance.
The economically vulnerable districts that each side holds also present a stark demographic contrast. Low-income Democratic seats tend to be in urban centers with large nonwhite populations. In more than three-fourths of the Democratic seats with a median income below the national level, and in virtually all of the Democratic districts with more uninsured people than average, the minority share of the population is also higher than the national average.
Some low-income Republican districts also have large minority populations, particularly in Texas and Florida, where the GOP has made inroads into culturally conservative Latino communities. But mostly the low-income GOP seats are centered on working-class white areas, many of them outside metropolitan areas.
In the 141 seats Republicans hold with more seniors than the national average, white residents exceed their national share of the population in 127 of them. Likewise, white residents surpass their share of the national population in more than four-fifths of the Republican-held districts that lag the median income. Nearly half of House Republicans represent districts in which all three things are true: They have more seniors than the national level, more white residents than the national level, and a lower median income than the national level.
All of this reflects how working-class white voters, many of them financially squeezed, have become the unquestioned foundation of the GOP’s coalition at every level, from the House through presidential elections.
Biden is laying siege to those voters with a strategy of deemphasizing cultural disputes and stressing kitchen-table economic benefits. “Democrats really are making appeals to these districts in a big way,” Pierson said. “Most of that infrastructure and climate [spending] is going to go on in red states. There really is a big effort to say, ‘We are going to use policy to try to make our electoral coalition bigger.’”
A key element of Biden’s courtship of these voters is defending the social safety net, especially Social Security and Medicare. The president’s repeated rejection of reductions in those programs, combined with former President Donald Trump’s opposition to potential cuts, has resulted in the most obvious concession by House Republicans to their evolving electoral base: public declarations by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other leaders that they will not target Social Security and Medicare in the cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit this summer.
Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs that many voters in blue-collar Republican districts rely on, potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.
Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. “We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,” Blendon said. “The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.”
The one risk for Republicans in such areas, he noted, would be if voters conclude that they present a genuine threat to Social Security and Medicare. Even most conservative voters strongly favor those programs, Blendon told me, primarily because they view them as an earned benefit that workers have contributed to during their lifetime. If the GOP seriously pushes ideas such as converting Medicare into a voucher program, or diverting part of Social Security revenue into private investment accounts, then “in districts with a lot of older people, they are going to get in trouble,” Blendon said.
Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute, also believes that current Democratic arguments targeted at older and non-college-educated white voters that they are “voting against their interests” economically are unlikely to succeed. The problem, he says, is that those arguments don’t directly address the way many voters also define their interests to include cultural and racial dynamics. Because Republican strength in these older, predominantly white, financially stressed districts is rooted largely in “the alienation of white voters who fear the country is shifting on them demographically,” Democrats must ultimately make a more explicit case to those voters about how all Americans can benefit from a more diverse and inclusive society, Pastor said. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out how to talk more effectively about race and racism—not try to ignore it, but try to inoculate people against it,” he said.
Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, notes that the majority of voters, including seniors, support Biden’s approach to preserving the safety net for retirees: In a recent national survey, his group found that voters were nearly four times as likely to support stabilizing Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent rather than cutting benefits. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bennett told me. Even Medicaid, once seen as a program for the poor, now draws widespread support across party lines, he said.
Yet Bennett, too, is cautious about predicting that Republican efforts to cut the safety net will hurt them in districts that highly depend on it. The GOP, Bennett said, is gambling that it can cut programs that benefit the party’s lower-income white base and still prevent those voters from defecting to Democrats by stressing “other issues like immigration and the culture war.”
If Republicans face any internal resistance to sharp cuts in the safety net, in fact, it may be more likely to come from their members who represent socially liberal white-collar districts that don’t rely as much on these programs than from their members who represent the culturally conservative blue-collar districts that do depend on them. The Republicans who seem least concerned about targeting the social safety net are those who represent the places that need those programs the most. That’s another telling measure of just how fully the concrete has settled beneath a modern political alignment that revolves more around culture than class.
