Opinion | Trump Gave Evangelicals Dobbs. They Don’t Seem Satisfied.


It is very clear that Republicans were caught off guard this month by a decision the Alabama Supreme Court issued that has jeopardized access to in vitro fertilization treatments in the state, on account of its conclusion that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” and that I.V.F. clinics can be held liable for their destruction.

When asked for his thoughts, Senator Tommy Tuberville, one of the state’s two Republican senators, struggled to give a coherent answer. “We need to have more kids. We need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” he said, seemingly unaware of how the decision might limit access to fertility treatments. “People need to have — we need more kids, we need the people to have the opportunity to have kids,” he went on.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador now running for the Republican presidential nomination, made several attempts to answer questions about the ruling. When asked about the Alabama court’s decision last Wednesday, she said that she believed that “an embryo is considered an unborn baby,” affirming the court’s conclusion. When asked again the next day, however, Haley said that she disagreed with the ruling. “I think that the court was doing it based on the law, and I think Alabama needs to go back and look at the law,” she said.

Facing the questions of I.V.F. and fetal personhood on Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas told CNN that it was a “complex” issue. “I’m not sure everybody has really thought about what all the potential problems are, and as a result no one really knows what the potential answers are,” he said.

One Republican who was not caught flat-footed was Donald Trump, who quickly declared his support for I.V.F. in a post on Truth Social. “Like the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Americans, including the VAST MAJORITY of Republicans, Conservatives, Christians, and Pro-Life Americans, I strongly support the availability of I.V.F. for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” he said.

Later, during a rally in South Carolina, Trump called on the Alabama Legislature to find an “immediate solution to preserve the availability of I.V.F.” in the state.

One way to understand this move is that Trump wants to pivot to the center and distance himself from the most vocally anti-abortion Republicans. The question of in vitro fertilization gives him a chance to do so. But as he attempts to moderate his message, it is important to remember two facts. The first is that Trump is the reason that I.V.F. is now a contested issue. The second is that what Trump says is less important than what key parts of the Republican coalition want. And what key parts of the Republican coalition want is fetal personhood.

There’s no question that the Alabama decision would not have been possible without the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which revoked the constitutional right to an abortion. In doing so, the court gave states and state courts wide leeway to restrict the bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom of Americans, in the name of protecting life.

That the Dobbs decision would threaten I.V.F. was obvious from the moment the Supreme Court released its opinion in June 2022. That’s why, toward the end of 2022, Senate Democrats introduced a bill to protect the right to use in vitro fertilization. It did not come up for a vote.

If there is no Alabama decision without Dobbs, then there was no Dobbs with President Donald Trump. He nominated the three justices who formed the Dobbs majority along with three other Republican appointees. That is why Trump’s attempt to paint himself as a defender of I.V.F. rings hollow. He is essentially trying to position himself against his own record.

This raises a question. Why was Trump such an anti-abortion hard-liner? The answer is easy: because he was a Republican president specifically indebted to conservative evangelicals and anti-abortion activists for his victory in the 2016 presidential election. In particular, Trump’s promise to stack the federal judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, with anti-abortion jurists helped him consolidate conservative evangelical voters in the midst of scandal and controversy. And as he makes his third run for the White House, conservative evangelicals remain the most pivotal group in the coalition that is fighting to win him another term in the White House.

When asked, last December, who they would support in the 2024 Republican primaries, 55 percent of white evangelical Republicans said Trump. Fifty-three percent of white evangelicals backed Trump in this year’s Iowa caucuses; 70 percent of white evangelicals backed him in the New Hampshire primary; and 71 percent backed him in the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday.

What’s important, for thinking about a second Trump presidency, is that fetal personhood is the next battlefield in the anti-abortion movement’s war on reproductive rights, and conservative evangelicals are among those groups waving the standard. As one such activist, Jason Rapert of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, told The New York Times regarding the Alabama court decision, “It further affirms that life begins at conception.”

At least 11 states, The Washington Post notes, have “broadly defined personhood as beginning at fertilization in their state laws.”

It does not matter whether Trump rhetorically supports access to I.V.F. treatments. What matters is whether he would buck the priorities of his most steadfast supporters and veto a bill establishing fetal personhood across the United States. Given his record — he’ll sign pretty much anything his Republican allies send to the White House — we can be relatively sure that he wouldn’t.

Presidents are shaped as much by their political parties as they shape them. Trump’s enormous influence on the direction of the Republican Party should not occlude the extent to which he will act on behalf of his coalition if given another term of office. And when it comes to actually making laws, what a coalition wants is often more important than what a president says.





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Biden Tries to Turn the Tables on Trump: ‘He’s About as Old as I Am’


President Biden has come up with a new defense against claims that he is too old to run for another term: At least he knows who his wife is — as opposed to “the other guy.”

As he expands his efforts to reassure voters that he is fit for another four years, Mr. Biden took a turn on the talk show circuit, using an appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC to poke his challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, on his own struggles with memory.

In a playful but pointed interview that was to air early Tuesday morning, Mr. Meyers sought to help the president address the age issue, which polls show is an important drawback in the minds of most voters. Mr. Meyers jokingly told the president that he had obtained classified information indicating that “you are currently 81 years old.”

Mr. Biden went along with the joke. “Who the hell told you that?” he asked. “That’s classified!”

He then went on to jab Mr. Trump, who is 77, over a video in which he seems to call his wife, Melania Trump, by another name. “You got to take the other guy,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”

Turning more serious, Mr. Biden added that the contest is not about how old the candidates are. “It’s about how old your ideas are,” he said. “Look, this is a guy who wants to take us back. He wants to take us back on Roe v. Wade. He wants to take us back on a whole range of issues that are — 50 to 60 years, they’ve been solid American positions.”

The president has been on the defensive about his memory in recent weeks, particularly since a special counsel, in a report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, explained that one reason he would not charge Mr. Biden is because he would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” During his interview with the special counsel, the report said, Mr. Biden could not remember key dates of his vice presidency or the year his son Beau died. Mr. Biden’s defenders assailed the special counsel for mentioning that.

Mr. Trump has had plenty of moments of confusion in recent weeks as well. Among other things, he has mixed up his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claimed to have beaten Barack Obama in 2016 rather than Hillary Clinton and warned that the country is on the verge of World War II.

The moment Mr. Biden was referring to came during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland over the weekend when Mr. Trump was praising Mrs. Trump and then, as the audience applauded, said, “Oh, look at that, Mercedes — that’s pretty good.”

Mr. Meyers played that clip before Mr. Biden came out on the show, mocking Mr. Trump for seeming to have forgotten Mrs. Trump’s name. But Mr. Trump was addressing Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House adviser whose husband, Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, hosts the conference, according to the former president’s spokesman, Steven Cheung. “The clips were taken out of context by disingenuous people,” Mr. Cheung said.

Still, Mr. Trump has in the past misspelled Melania’s name on Twitter as “Melanie.” And during a deposition in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, Mr. Trump mistakenly identified a picture of Ms. Carroll as Marla Maples, his second wife. A jury found that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll in the 1990s, and a separate jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million for defaming her.

Mr. Biden joined Mr. Meyers to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the late-night show, a decade after appearing on the program’s debut episode in 2014 when he was vice president. It was Mr. Biden’s fourth appearance on a late-night talk show since becoming president. He was a guest of Jimmy Fallon in 2021, of Jimmy Kimmel in 2022 and on “The Daily Show” in 2023.

The audience was an important one for Mr. Biden, who relied on strong support among younger voters to defeat Mr. Trump in 2020 and needs them again despite surveys showing disenchantment among that generation. But he slipped when asked about his 2024 agenda. “The 2020 agenda is to finish the job,” he said.

Mr. Meyers asked the president about the “Dark Brandon” meme that his younger aides have promoted online, a laser-eyed version of the president intended to make him seem cool and hip. Asked if he enjoys the meme, Mr. Biden quipped, “No, I resent the hell out of it,” and then put on Ray-Ban sunglasses.

When Mr. Meyers noted that many on the political right have embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory that he and Taylor Swift “are working in cahoots,” Mr. Biden playfully snapped: “Where are you getting this information? It’s classified. That’s classified information.”

“But,” he quickly added, “I will tell you she endorsed me in 2020.”



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What to Watch for in Michigan’s Primaries


When President Biden made Michigan one of the first states on the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating calendar, he increased the political influence of a populous, diverse battleground state.

That decision over a year ago has led to the most significant test of Mr. Biden’s standing within his party since he was elected, as a push to protest his support for Israel threatens to upend what his allies had expected would be a straightforward primary campaign.

Mr. Biden is still widely expected to win Michigan’s Democratic primary election on Tuesday by a significant margin. But a homegrown campaign to persuade Michiganders to vote “uncommitted” will measure the resistance he faces among Arab Americans, young voters, progressives and other Democrats over his stance on the war in Gaza.

A high number of “uncommitted” votes would send a warning to his campaign nationally and set off alarms in Michigan, which he won in 2020 but where polls show weakness against former President Donald J. Trump. A low number, by contrast, would give Mr. Biden and his Democratic allies renewed faith that he can weather the tensions and focus on campaign priorities like the economy and abortion rights.

The absence of reliable public polling has left the outcome uncertain, and has helped turn the primary into a night that Mr. Biden’s allies are sweating.

“I am going to be looking at Democratic turnout, and it will tell me if I need to be worried,” Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan said in an interview on Monday. “We will know on Wednesday how deep this is.”

Republicans are also holding their primary election, though far more delegates will be at stake on Saturday in a nominating convention — or conventions — hosted by a state Republican Party at war with itself. Mr. Trump is the heavy favorite in both contests over his last remaining primary rival, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor.

More than one million early and absentee votes have already been cast in Michigan’s primaries, according to Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state. But that data did not reveal how the ballots were divided between each party’s primary.

Here’s what to watch for in Michigan’s primaries.

The Arab American-led group that began the uncommitted push three weeks ago, Listen to Michigan, has set a modest goal: 10,000 votes.

For some context, there were about 20,000 votes for “uncommitted” in each of the last two Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan that featured robust and competitive fields.

With Mr. Biden facing only a token challenge from Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the “uncommitted” tally will be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in Mr. Biden over his Gaza policy or other intraparty grievances.

Our Revolution, the progressive group started by supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has set 10 percent of the primary electorate as its target. (Mr. Sanders himself is supporting Mr. Biden and, a spokeswoman said, disavows the Uncommitted campaign.)

Mr. Biden’s allies tried to halt the momentum against him in the campaign’s final days. A pro-Israel group introduced a series of digital advertisements to back the president and warn that voting uncommitted would help Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden said on Monday that he hoped to have a cease-fire in place within a week, with Israel halting military operations in Gaza in exchange for the release of at least some of the more than 100 hostages being held by Hamas.

“My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” he told reporters in New York. “My hope is by next Monday we’ll have a cease-fire.”

Mr. Biden’s campaign has declined to engage in primary forecasting beyond asserting that he will win, which the Listen to Michigan leaders also predict. But his allies in Michigan and beyond are bracing for the possibility of a rough night, with the more pessimistic among them suggesting that “uncommitted” could draw well into the double digits.

When the Biden campaign wanted to run up the score in South Carolina, which the president placed at the front of the party’s nominating calendar, it dispatched a flotilla of surrogates, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to the state to drum up support. Vice President Kamala Harris closed the campaign with an energetic rally before a few hundred supporters on primary eve.

The Biden team’s footprint in Michigan has been lighter.

In Ms. Harris’s final primary-season appearance in Michigan, she met last week with nine allies in Grand Rapids — a move necessitated by fears that Gaza protesters would disrupt her focus on abortion rights. Mr. Biden last visited the state on Feb. 1, speaking at a small gathering with union autoworkers and stopping by a restaurant. Protesters demonstrated outside his events anyway.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared at a half-dozen events for Mr. Biden this month, and her political action committee hosted nearly 20 more, but the most prominent campaign surrogates from out of state who stumped for Mr. Biden in Michigan were Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor who is a campaign co-chair. Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, who now lives in Michigan, also promoted Mr. Biden in the state.

The White House did dispatch a high-ranking team to meet in private this month with Arab American officials in Dearborn, at which a senior foreign policy aide acknowledged “missteps” on the administration’s foreign policy and public messaging about the conflict in Gaza.

Other would-be Biden surrogates were asked to travel to Michigan and declined because they did not want to engage with Gaza protesters, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The Biden campaign declined to comment for this article.

Representative Ro Khanna of California, typically one of Mr. Biden’s most energetic supporters, came to the state without the branding of the Biden campaign, though it did authorize his trip. He hosted a “cease-fire town hall” on the University of Michigan campus and then appeared with Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — the one member of the state’s congressional delegation who endorsed the “uncommitted” campaign.

The leaders of the movement insist they do not want to hurt Mr. Biden in the general election, but hope to persuade him that his position on Israel will hurt him politically in time for him to correct himself.

“There is a risk for Biden to lose Michigan in November,” said Layla Elabed, the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan. “Hopefully the numbers after the primary will be significant enough for Joe Biden to care about listening to Michigan.”

Ms. Elabed and others involved with Listen to Michigan have argued that most Democrats protesting Mr. Biden’s Israel policy will support him in November — as long as he changes course on the issue. Other Michigan activists have said Mr. Biden must go further and reduce American military aid to Israel. A group of Armenian Americans is also urging an “uncommitted” vote to protest treatment of ethnic Armenians living in Azerbaijan.

How many Democratic primary dissidents come back to Mr. Biden in November in a likely contest with Mr. Trump remains an open question.

“Joe Biden can get the vast majority of these people to vote for him if he changes course,” said former Representative Andy Levin of Michigan, who has endorsed and campaigned for the “uncommitted” movement. “If he doesn’t change course, there’s nothing I can do to get folks to vote for him.”

Ms. Haley, after nearly a month of focusing on South Carolina’s primary only to lose by 20 percentage points to Mr. Trump in her home state, arrived in Michigan without much momentum. Her biggest outside benefactor, the Koch political network, announced it was pulling the plug on its support for her.

Michigan has an open primary system, which means Democrats could vote for Ms. Haley, as they have in other states — but given the outsize attention on how Mr. Biden performs in his primary, Ms. Haley may not be able to count on that kind of support this time around.

Still, the primary may be Ms. Haley’s high-water mark in Michigan, as most of the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention will be awarded at a party convention scheduled for Saturday. Convention delegates tend to be more devoted to Mr. Trump than the broader Republican primary electorate.

But this, too, is more complicated than meets the eye: A rift among Michigan Republicans has led to dueling conventions led by the two people who are each claiming to be the party leader.

Ms. Haley, in her campaign stops in Michigan, has continued to argue that Mr. Trump will lose the general election — a message very similar to what the “uncommitted” supporters are predicting about Mr. Biden if he doesn’t change course on the Israel-Gaza war.

Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting.



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After U.S. Strikes, Iran’s Proxies Scale Back Attacks on American Bases


Iran has made a concerted effort to rein in militias in Iraq and Syria after the United States retaliated with a series of airstrikes for the killing of three U.S. Army reservists this month.

Initially, there were regional concerns that the tit-for-tat violence would lead to an escalation of the Middle East conflict. But since the Feb. 2 U.S. strikes, American officials say, there have been no attacks by Iran-backed militias on American bases in Iraq and only two minor ones in Syria.

Before then, the U.S. military logged at least 170 attacks against American troops in four months, Pentagon officials said.

The relative quiet reflects decisions by both sides and suggests that Iran does have some level of control over the militias.

The Biden administration has made clear that Tehran would be held accountable for miscalculations and operations by proxy forces, but it has avoided any direct attack on Iran. The U.S. response “may be having some effect,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said in an interview.

“The question is are the militias attacking or not,” he added, “and at least for now, they are not.”

The lull also marks a sharp turnaround by Iran. Tehran had for months directed its regional proxies in Iraq and Syria to attack American bases in the Middle East as part of a wider battle against Israel, which is fighting Hamas in Gaza.

The American and Iranian officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

As the proxies’ attacks intensified, culminating in the deaths of three American soldiers, Iranian leaders worried that the level of autonomy provided to the militias was starting to backfire and might drive them into war, according to Iranian and American officials.

“They are scared of direct confrontation with the U.S., they know that if Americans are killed again it would mean war,” said Sina Azodi, a lecturer at George Washington University and an expert on Iran’s national security. “They had to put the brakes on the militia and convince them that a war with the U.S. could harm Tehran first and then by extension the entire axis.”

Iran finances, arms and provides technical support and training for a network of militant groups in the region that it calls the Axis of Resistance.

The groups include Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; militias in Iraq, such as Kataib Hezbollah and Hashd al-Shaabi; Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza; and militias in Syria. While Iran directs an overall strategy to the axis, the level of day-to-day control and coordination runs a spectrum. Tehran has most influence over Hezbollah, with the Syrian and Iraqi militia falling in the middle and the Houthis being the most autonomous.

The Iranian effort to rein in the forces began soon after the killing of the three American soldiers in a drone attack in Jordan on Jan. 28, as Washington vowed a forceful response.

Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the high-level Iranian general killed by an American drone strike in 2020, kept the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria on a tight leash. That was largely because, for most of his tenure, war was raging in both countries, and he commanded the militia to fight Americans and then Islamic State terrorist groups. But when Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani succeeded him, most of those conflicts had settled, and General Ghaani assumed a hands-off leadership style, setting only broad directions, according to analysts.

General Ghaani, commander in chief of the Quds Forces, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps tasked with overseeing the proxies, has nonetheless been involved in coordinating the strategy toward Israel and the United States for the various militias during the current war in Gaza.

He led a series of emergency meetings in late January in Tehran and Baghdad with strategists, senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and senior commanders of the militia to redraw plans and avert war with the United States, according to two Iranians affiliated with the Guards, one of them a military strategist. Reuters first reported on the general’s visit to Baghdad.

In Baghdad, General Ghaani held a long meeting with representatives of all the Shia militant groups who operate under the umbrella of a collective they call Islamic Resistance in Iraq. The collective had been carrying out and then claiming responsibility for dozens of attacks on American bases, and Washington blamed the group for the drone attack that killed the Americans.

General Ghaani told them that Iran and the various militia groups had made enough gains in pressuring the United States because President Biden was facing intense criticism for his staunch support of Israel and fissures had emerged between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the two Iranians affiliated with the Guards said. A war between Tehran and Washington could also jeopardize the long-term goal of rooting out the United States from the region, he told the group, the two Iranians said.

Two of the larger Iraqi militias, Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba, at first fiercely resisted General Ghaani’s demand that they pause attacks on Americans, arguing that fighting U.S. troops was integral to their ideology and identity, the two Iranians said.

Influential politicians in Iraq, including senior clerics known as the marjaiah who are based in Najaf, a Shiite holy city, joined the efforts to persuade the militias to pause attacks. The Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, also played a role, telling the commanders of the Iraqi militia and General Ghaani that continued attacks on U.S. forces complicated negotiations between Baghdad and Washington for an American troop withdrawal from his country, according to Iranian and Iraqi officials.

The commanders conceded. Kataib Hezbollah announced that it was halting attacks on American bases and that its decisions were independent from Iran.

The outcome of General Ghaani’s consultations was a new strategy that called for Iraqi militias to stop all attacks on American bases in Iraq, including in the Kurdistan region in the north, and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In Syria, militia groups have been asked to lower the intensity of attacks on American bases to avoid fatalities, according to Iranian officials and American intelligence assessments. But the groups active against Israel in Lebanon and Yemen would continue at pace, the Iranians familiar with the strategy said.

Once the attacks on Americans subsided, the United States withheld striking at least one senior militia leader after Feb. 2 to avoid disrupting the pause and stoking more hostilities, according to a Defense Department official.

Another U.S. official said the Pentagon was prepared to hit more militia targets if necessary but had determined that carrying out more strikes now would be counterproductive.

The military strategist with the Guards said that Iran believed a direct war with the United States would work in favor of Israel at a time when world opinion had turned against it because of the heavy toll in civilian deaths and suffering in Gaza. After more than a decade, the strategist said, Iran believes that it is enjoying a surge of popularity among Arabs, who are angry that their own countries’ leaders are not doing enough to support Palestinians.

Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said last week, “Our assessment is that Iran doesn’t seek a wider regional conflict.”

“But they do support these militia groups that attack our forces,” she added.

Iran’s overall policy is to keep multiple fronts against Israel boiling through proxies as long as the war in Gaza rages, even if the Tehran-linked militias are avoiding striking U.S. bases.

Hezbollah in Lebanon exchanges almost daily fire with Israel’s military, and the Houthis in Yemen attack ships in the Red Sea and try to block commercial vessels from reaching Israeli ports.

The attacks by Hezbollah and the Houthis will intensify if Israel launches an offensive against Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million civilians are trapped, according to the two members of the Guards familiar with Iran’s new strategy. Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas leader, said at a news conference in Iran this past week that “any attack on Rafah will be met with a fierce response from the resistance.”

American officials acknowledged that they faced a particular challenge with the Houthis. U.S. strategy on the Houthis is to whittle away at the group’s formidable arsenal, prevent weapons transfers from Iran and press for a cease-fire in Gaza.

While a key part of the Washington-Tehran confrontation is on a hiatus, other destabilizing dynamics in the region remain active and unpredictable. Iran and Israel are engaged in an continuing shadow war, including a recent covert assault by Israel on two main gas pipelines in Iran and strikes on residential compounds linked to Iran in Damascus, the Syrian capital. Iran has not yet openly retaliated against Israel after those attacks.

Colin P. Clarke, director of policy and research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy, said: “Iran has this uncanny ability to walk up right to the line and not cross it.”

But, he added, “It doesn’t feel stable, and it doesn’t feel like we are over the hump, and things could really change at any moment.”



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Trump appeals $454 million ruling in New York civil fraud lawsuit


NEW YORK: In an attempt to refute a judge’s conclusion that he misrepresented his income while building the real estate enterprise that propelled him to fame and the president, Donald Trump has filed an appeal of his $454 million civil fraud judgment in New York.

Attorneys for the former president filed notices of appeal on Monday, requesting that the state’s intermediate appeals court reverse the astronomical penalties that could deplete Trump’s cash reserves and overturn Judge Arthur Engoron’s decision from February 16 in Attorney General Letitia James’ complaint. In court filings, Trump’s attorneys stated that they are requesting that the appeals court rule on whether Engoron “committed errors of law and/or fact,” misused his discretion, or “acted in excess” of his authority. In New York, the appeals process begins with a notice of appeal. Trump’s attorneys will be able to elaborate on their complaints in later court documents.

Trump can file an appeal without having to pay his fine or post a bail, and doing so does not immediately stop the judgment from being enforced. The front-runner in the Republican presidential race has until March 25 to obtain a stay, which is a legal procedure that stops collection while he files an appeal. If Trump deposits cash, assets, or an appeal bond that covers his debt, he will automatically be granted a stay of proceedings. The attorneys representing Trump may potentially request that the appeals court issue a stay without requiring a bond or with a smaller bond.
If Engoron’s decision is upheld, Trump will have to forfeit a substantial portion of his wealth. With interest, the $355 million in penalties that Engoron ordered Trump to pay has already almost doubled to $454 million. Until he pays, the sum will rise by over $112,000 per day.

In addition to buildings and other investments, Trump stated during his testimony last year that he possessed roughly $400 million in cash. He claims that his net worth is in the billions. Democrat James threatened to take some of Trump’s assets if he couldn’t pay, according to ABC News.

For months, Trump’s attorneys had been setting the stage for an appeal by repeatedly objecting to Engoron’s management of the trial, as Trump had threatened to do. The most expensive outcome of Engoron’s recent legal issues, according to Trump, was his choice to “interfere in elections” and “weaponize against a political opponent.” Trump claimed that because he “had built a perfect company, great cash, great buildings, great everything,” he was being penalized.

The former president expressed confidence that the appeals court “will ultimately correct the innumerable and catastrophic errors made by a trial court untethered to the law or to reality” following the verdict, according to Trump’s attorney Christopher Kise.

Habba stated that “it will serve as a signal to every single American that New York is no longer open for business” if the ruling is upheld.

The verdict was finalized only when the clerk’s office at the Engoron courthouse filed documents known as a judgment, thus Trump was unable to appeal it right away. Following that action on Friday, Trump has 30 days to make amends, file an appeal, and request a stay of proceedings.

If Trump were to pay the fine now rather than request a stay, the funds would be placed in a court escrow account while the appeal is pending. The money would be given back to Trump if the court reversed the decision.

Trump’s attorneys charged Engoron of “tangible and overwhelming” bias during the trial. They have also taken issue with James’ lawsuit’s legal procedures. According to Trump, the legislation she filed the lawsuit under is a consumer protection act that is typically applied to stop companies that defraud clients.

Read More: US Senator Tim Scott criticizes Nikki Haley by endorsing Trump for president

Trump’s attorneys have already challenged Engoron’s earlier decisions at least ten times before the Appellate Division. During the trial, they attempted in vain to overturn a gag order and pay $15,000 in fines for violating it after Trump posted an inaccurate and derogatory social media comment about a significant court employee.

Trump’s attorneys have long maintained that some of the charges against him are banned by the statute of limitations. They also claim that Engoron disregarded an Appellate Division decision from the previous year directing him to reduce the trial’s scope in order to exclude untimely accusations.

The Appellate Division may maintain Engoron’s judgment, lessen or alter the punishment, or reverse the ruling completely. Trump may request that the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, take up his case if he is not successful at the Appellate Division.

Read more: The US was ‘more safe’ when? Donald Trump informs his supporters

Among Trump’s numerous legal battles is the appeal. In the past year, he has received four felony indictments. In Georgia and Washington, D.C., he is charged with conspiring to reverse his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 race. He is accused of keeping secret documents in Florida.

He is accused of fabricating business records pertaining to hush money payments made on his behalf to porn star Stormy Daniels, and his trial is set for March 25 in Manhattan.A jury found in January that Trump owed writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defamation after she accused him in 2019 of molesting her in a 1990s Manhattan department store. Carroll also received an additional $5 million from a jury in a separate trial that concluded last year.



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Biden Says He’s Hopeful for Gaza Cease-Fire Within a Week


President Biden said on Monday that he believed negotiators were nearing an agreement that would halt Israel’s military operations in Gaza within a week in exchange for the release of at least some of the more than 100 hostages being held by Hamas.

Speaking with reporters during a stop in New York, Mr. Biden offered the most hopeful assessment of the hostage talks by any major figure in many days, suggesting that the war might be close to a major turning point.

“I hope by the end of the weekend,” he said when asked by reporters when he expected a cease-fire to begin. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close. We’re close. We’re not done yet. My hope is by next Monday, we’ll have a cease-fire.”

The president delivered the comments spontaneously in response to questions during a visit to an ice cream shop after taping a segment on Seth Meyers’s late-night talk show. They came amid an active period of talks in the region, as Israel’s war cabinet over the weekend approved the broad terms of a deal that would involve a six-week truce for the release of about 40 hostages. An Israeli delegation is expected to meet in Qatar with intermediaries from the United States, Egypt and Qatar.

An agreement for a lengthy cease-fire would halt the Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, which has killed thousands of Palestinians and created a humanitarian crisis. It could also provide an opening for a surge in humanitarian assistance into Gaza, where food, water, electricity and other basics are in short supply.

A negotiated deal would be a dramatic, and perhaps defining, moment in the nearly five-month-old Middle East conflict and could lead to the release of the six remaining American hostages, who were among more than 200 seized and taken to Gaza when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel.

It could also eventually mean freedom for dozens of other hostages still in captivity. Their families have been waging a pressure campaign in Israel and around the world to demand their release, even as Israel has responded to the Hamas attacks with a fierce ground and air assault.

Mr. Biden did not elaborate on Monday about the details of a cease-fire or about whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had signed off on a deal. But the president’s assessment that one could be reached within a week was the clearest indication of progress in several weeks.

For Mr. Biden, helping to orchestrate a lasting deal to halt the fighting could be a significant step toward addressing a difficult political vulnerability as he seeks a second term in the White House.

For months, Palestinian activists in the United States have been assailing Mr. Biden for what they view as his failure to do more to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza. Protesters have dogged the president at most of his public events in recent weeks, sometimes waving signs calling him “Genocide Joe.”

That anger is likely to be on display on Tuesday, when Democratic voters in Michigan go to the polls to make their choice for the party’s presidential nominee. Some activists in Michigan, which is home to many Palestinian Americans, have urged voters to protest Mr. Biden’s stance on Gaza by voting for “uncommitted” in the primary.

The timing of Mr. Biden’s response to an unprompted question by a reporter could undercut that effort and help the president show strength in the primary.

Efforts to secure an end to the fighting have been in the works since the early days of the war, though the president and his aides have repeatedly defended Israel’s responsibility to respond to the worst terrorist attack in its history.

At the same time, the administration has been under growing pressure to restrain Israel’s government in light of the rising death toll in Gaza, which Gazan health officials say now stands above 29,000, the majority of them civilians. In November, the United States helped broker a short pause in the fighting that led to the release of about 100 hostages. Israel’s military assault continued after the pause broke down over disagreements with Hamas.

In recent weeks, negotiators have expressed optimism that talks between the parties have been moving in the right direction. But the discussions were being held against a backdrop of threats from Mr. Netanyahu that the country’s forces were ready for a major assault on Rafah, in the southern part of Gaza.

More than a million civilians, many of whom fled Israel’s bombing in the north of Gaza, are gathered in Rafah, and humanitarian organizations warned that a major assault by Israel there could kill thousands more.

Mr. Biden talked with Mr. Netanyahu on Feb. 15, and White House officials said in a summary of the call that the two men “discussed ongoing hostage negotiations” and that the president “reaffirmed his commitment to working tirelessly to support the release of all hostages.”



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Justices Seemed Open to Challenges to Social Media Laws


During several hours of arguments today, the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of laws in Florida and Texas that ban major social media companies from making editorial judgments about which messages to allow. The justices seemed to align more closely with the social media companies, which accused the laws of violating the First Amendment.

The court’s decision, which is expected in June, will almost certainly be its most important statement on the scope of free speech in the internet era.

A ruling in favor of the states would expose users to a greater variety of viewpoints but would almost certainly amplify the ugliest aspects of the digital age, including hate speech and disinformation. A ruling in favor of the social media platforms seemed more likely, though the justices seemed poised to return the cases to the lower courts to answer questions about how other websites — like Gmail, Venmo and Uber — should be allowed to moderate users’ speech.

Supporters of the laws said that they were an attempt to combat any Silicon Valley censorship of conservative views, prompted in part by the decisions of some platforms to bar Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Hungary’s Parliament voted today to accept Sweden as a new member of NATO, clearing the final hurdle that had long held up the expansion of the military alliance. The approval sealed a major shift in the balance of power between the West and Russia set off by the war in Ukraine.

The vote followed a decision by Sweden to provide Hungary with four Swedish-made fighter jets and a promise that Saab, which manufactures the warplanes, would open an A.I. research center in Hungary. Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has maintained cordial relations with President Vladimir Putin, has a long record of using his veto power over key decisions in Europe.

Israeli negotiators have signaled that the country could release 15 Palestinians convicted of major terrorism charges in exchange for five female Israeli soldiers held hostage in Gaza.

The idea, a major shift in Israeli strategy, could bring the sides closer to a hostage deal and a pause in fighting. The Israeli government previously avoided such a concession partly because the release of Palestinians convicted of such crimes would attract significant domestic criticism.

In related news,the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, the body that administers part of the West Bank, tendered the resignation of his cabinet. The U.S. and Arab states have been trying to persuade the authority to position itself to take over the administration of Gaza after the war.


The Federal Trade Commission sued today to block Kroger, the supermarket giant, from completing its $24.6 billion acquisition of the grocery chain Albertsons, in what would be the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history.

The regulators argued that the deal would hurt competition, result in higher prices for customers and reduce the ability for employees to negotiate for higher wages. Kroger, which announced its plans for the deal 16 months ago, said that the merger was necessary in order for the two chains to compete against big-box retailers like Walmart, Costco and Amazon.


HBO will premiere on Sunday a comedy series, “The Regime,” starring Kate Winslet as Elena Vernham, a neurotic autocrat losing her grip on her Central European country. On one occasion, Elena broadcasts a message to her struggling, starving country at Christmas: a video of her singing “Santa Baby” in a fur-trimmed miniskirt and boots.

Winslet said the role had been “a heck of a lot of fun,” adding: “I have to let the audience know, this is something they are allowed to laugh at.”

The U.S. space agency is confident that it will be able to send people to Mars and ensure that they can survive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air. But on NASA’s list of 800 problems to solve might be one even greater than the technological ones: the trauma of isolation.

So the space agency asked four ordinary people to enact, for 378 days, the lives of Martian colonists as residents of Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot habitat built inside a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

In space news,Odysseus, the U.S. robotic spacecraft that landed on the moon last week, is likely to die in the next day or so. The company that built the spacecraft released photos of its landing.

Judy D’Mello vividly remembers her mother’s insistence to not waste food. So when Judy learned of an app that connects eaters with unsold food that would otherwise be thrown out, she experimented for a week.

Restaurant throwaways turn out to offer an affordable and tasty yet carb-heavy diet. The meals were mostly sold in “surprise bags,” which Judy said added an addictive experience of gambling: a dozen bagels on one day, two pounds of halibut on another.

Have a delectable evening.


Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Matthew

We welcome your feedback. Write to us atevening@nytimes.com.



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UnitedHealth Cyberattack Disrupts Prescription Drug Coverage


A cyberattack on a unit affiliated with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, has disrupted drug prescription orders at thousands of pharmacies for nearly a week.

The assault on the unit, Change Healthcare, a division of United’s Optum, was discovered last Wednesday. The attack appeared to be by a foreign country, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials, who expressed alarm at the extent of the disruption on Monday.

UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate, said in a federal filing that it had been forced to disconnect some of Change Healthcare’s vast digital network from its clients, and as of Monday, had not been able to restore all of those services.

Change handles some 15 billion transactions a year, representing as many as one in three U.S. patient records and involving not just prescriptions but dental, clinical and other medical needs. The company was acquired by UnitedHealth Group for $13 billion in 2022.

This latest attack underscores the vulnerability of health care data, especially patients’ personal information, including their private medical records. Hundreds of breaches at hospitals, health plans and doctors’ offices are being investigated, according to federal records.

In this case, the disturbance has been widespread, including for U.S. military overseas. Change acts as a digital intermediary to helps pharmacies verify a patient’s insurance coverage for their prescriptions, and some reports indicate that people have been forced to pay in cash.

Last week, after UnitedHealth found what it described as “a suspected nation-state associated cybersecurity threat actor” targeting Change, the company shut down several services, including those allowing pharmacies to quickly check what a patient owes for a medication. Some hospitals and physician groups that rely on Change for billing to get paid may also be affected.

Large drugstore chains like Walgreens say that the effects have been limited, but many smaller outfits say that they rely on Change whenever they handle a prescription for someone with insurance.

“For the last week, it has been hit or miss about whether we can take care of patients,” said Dared Price, who operates seven pharmacies in Kansas. While patients can pay cash if the medication is inexpensive, he says that some of his customers have been unable to obtain more costly treatments for flu or Covid because their insurance status is unclear.

“It’s a debacle,” he said.

Tricare, which covers the U.S. military, said its pharmacies in the United States and abroad are being forced to fill prescriptions manually. It continued to warn people this week of possible delays in getting medications.

Details about the attack, including whether any personal patient information has been stolen, are limited. Change has been making brief periodic updates on its website. On Monday, the company reiterated that the affected services would likely be unavailable for at least another day. It also emphasized that it had a “high-level of confidence” that other parts of United’s businesses were not targeted in the attack.

But there’s little question that United, whose sprawling businesses touch nearly every aspect of health care, made for a particularly rich target.

“If you’re going to go after stealing records, you want to go after the biggest pot of records you can get,” said Fred Langston, the chief product officer for Critical Insight, a cybersecurity firm. “You’re literally hitting the jackpot.”

The motives of the attacker are not yet known, Mr. Langston said. It may involve ransomware, allowing culprits to demand some sort of ransom. The intent may also have been to throw the health care system into disarray by making it harder to fill prescriptions or to bill for care in a timely manner.

“You have a concentration of mission-critical services for the entire sector, which represents a concentration of risk,” said John Riggi, the national adviser for cybersecurity and risk for the American Hospital Association. It has been advising hospitals to be careful about connecting to Change or affiliated businesses.

The industry has seen an increasing number of these kinds of assaults, said Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a nonprofit group.

According to federal officials, large breaches of health care data have nearly doubled from 2018 to 2022, including a spike in the number involving ransomware. Patients have had to go to different facilities, resulting in delays in care, according to a recent report.

Under federal law, patients must eventually be notified if their information is the subject of some sort of breach, Mr. Steinhauer said. People will be alerted even if their information does not appear to have become publicly available.

“It is worse if we find out that information is for sale on the dark web,” he said.

Glenn Thrush and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.



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Opinion | The Mystery of White Rural Rage


Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.

This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town.”

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there. (The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because the jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in health care.)

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.

Draw attention to some of these realities and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist. I’m sure responses to this column will be … interesting.

The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.

At this point you’re probably expecting a solution to this ugly political situation. Schaller and Waldman do offer some suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.



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The Democratic Taboo – The New York Times


The Democratic Party has had no shortage of argument and dissent over the years. Internal battles and backbiting are part of what it means to be a modern-day Democrat.

But over the past few months, Democrats have been distinctly inhospitable to the public airing of concerns about President Biden — particularly the question of whether, at age 81, he is too old to run for president again, but also criticisms of the day-to-day strategic decisions by his campaign.

This has played out on platforms large and small, most recently after Jon Stewart, on his return to his former Comedy Central show after a nine-year hiatus, mocked the “objectively old” President Biden. “Please make it another nine years,” Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host, said on X.

Prominent Democratic strategists like David Axelrod and James Carville who criticize Biden are facing a barrage of pushback on social media and from the White House — and sometimes, reportedly, from Biden himself. They are accused of lifting the prospects of Donald Trump, and of being disloyal alarmists (or, in a phrase from the 2008 campaign that has come back in vogue this year, bed-wetters).

There are critics of Trump on the Republican side, too, but they have been relegated to the sidelines, more likely to be ignored than seriously engaged, reflecting the party’s devotion to Trump and to the increasing conviction among his supporters that he will win.

What is happening among Democrats should not be a surprise. The political environment has changed starkly. Politics is more of a team sport — you are with me or against me. Olbermann assailed Stewart as a “bothsidesist fraud.” Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and one of his biggest critics, called Stewart “a potential disaster for democracy.” And platforms like X have grown into organizational tools, halls for rallying attacks on anyone who might be viewed as a heretic.

But it also goes to the particular dynamics of this election. Biden is almost certain to be his party’s nominee, despite concerns that have been raised by Democrats. But he is viewed unfavorably by much of the electorate, and is struggling against Trump in swing states like Michigan. “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden,” my colleague Ezra Klein in Times Opinion said in a 4,000-word audio essay, devoted to why Biden should step aside. (“No. Ezra Klein Is Completely Wrong. Here’s Why,” read the response from Talking Points Memo.)

Biden supporters argue that Democrats should not do anything that might be perceived as contributing to a second Trump term. That includes raising questions about any Biden shortcomings or the decisions of the Biden campaign command. The memories of 2016, when some Democrats piled onto Hillary Clinton in the weeks leading up to her loss, remain raw.

“Privately, there are a tremendous amount of misgivings about Biden running again,” said Douglas Sosnik, who was a senior White House adviser to Bill Clinton. “But there are some reservations, at least for some people, about publicly voicing the concerns about Biden.”

Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for Barack Obama, has been dragged by the White House and on X for questioning the way the campaign has been run, particularly how it has addressed Biden’s age.

“There’s this sense that this is a hugely consequential election and Biden is the guy and everybody should march unquestioningly behind him and don’t mention the things that they see,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think that’s helpful to him.”

“Everybody knows the score,” he said. “This is not a challenge you can wish away. I’d rather tell the truth and take my chance.”

Carville, who was a lead strategist to Bill Clinton when he was elected to the White House in 1992, has also come under fire for his critiques of Biden’s re-election team.

“Look, if I were in the White House, I wouldn’t like me right now either,” he said. “But that’s just part of the territory.”

And for what it’s worth, the pushback against critics like Stewart, Axelrod and Carville doesn’t seem likely to keep them quiet. Stewart used his second television appearance to eye-roll his critics. “I have sinned against you, I’m sorry,” Stewart said. “It was never my intention to say out loud what I saw with my eyes and then brain.”

Carville said it was important for Democrats to acknowledge the reality of Biden’s age as he seeks re-election.

“I haven’t said anything that is wrong,” Carville said. “I think some people think if you don’t mention it, it will solve itself on its own. I don’t think that is viable.”

It’s still early in the primary season, but a whiff of a possible polling error is already in the air: Donald Trump underperformed the polls in each of the first three competitive contests.

  • In Iowa, the final FiveThirtyEight polling average showed Trump leading Nikki Haley by 34 points with a 53 percent share. He ultimately beat her by 32 points with 51 percent. (Ron DeSantis took second.)

  • In New Hampshire, he led by 18 points with 54 percent. In the end, he won by 11 points with 54 percent.

  • In South Carolina, Trump led by 28 points with 62 percent. He ultimately won by 20 points with 60 percent.

In the scheme of primary polls, these aren’t especially large misses. In fact, they’re more accurate than average.

But with Trump faring well in early general election polls against President Biden, even a modest Trump underperformance in the polls is worth some attention.

So what’s going on? We can’t say anything definitive based on the data at our disposal, but three theories are worth considering.

One simple explanation is that undecided voters ultimately backed Haley, the former South Carolina governor.

This is plausible. Trump is a well-known candidate — even a de facto incumbent for his party. If you’re a Republican who at this point doesn’t know if you support Trump, you’re probably just not especially inclined toward the former president. It’s easy to see how you might end up supporting his challenger.

Another possibility is that the polls simply got the makeup of the electorate wrong. In this theory, pollsters did a good job of measuring the people they intended to measure, but they were measuring the wrong electorate. In particular, they did not include enough of the Democratic-leaning voters who turned out to support Haley.

For many pollsters, the problem is baked in from the start: They don’t even interview prior Democratic primary voters.

The decision to survey prior Republican primary voters is understandable — it makes the poll much cheaper and homes in on the respondents likeliest to vote — but it will obviously miss any previous Democratic voters who hadn’t voted in a Republican primary and now choose to do so.

If you’re a Democrat hoping that the polls are underestimating Biden in the general election, your best-case scenario is the polls are wrong because there’s a Hidden Biden vote, or at least a Hidden Anti-Trump vote.

In this theory, the polls did well in modeling the electorate while undecided voters split between the candidates, but anti-Trump voters simply weren’t as likely to take surveys as pro-Trump voters. If this theory were true, then the general election polls might be underestimating Biden by just as much as they’ve underestimated Haley.

There is one reason the anti-Trump turnout might have relevance for general election polling: It’s consistent with other data showing Biden with the edge among the most highly engaged voters. This could yield a slight turnout advantage, even in a general election. It may also mean that the current polls of all registered voters slightly underestimate Biden compared with the narrower group of actual voters.

This wouldn’t mean the polls today are vastly underestimating Biden, but it could make the difference in a close election.

—Nate Cohn

Read Nate’s full newsletter, available to Times subscribers, here.





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