Americans sometimes misperceive Trump’s actions as a fire hose of bizarre and disparate moves, a kaleidoscope of craziness. Yet there is a method to it, and I’ve seen parallels in authoritarian countries I’ve covered around the world over the past four decades.

It’s not that I offer a unified theory of Trumpism, but there is a coherence there that requires a coherent response. Strongmen seek power — political power but also other currencies, including wealth and a glittering place in history — through a pattern of behavior that is increasingly being replicated in Washington.

But let’s get this out of the way: I think parallels with 1930s Germany are overdrawn and diminish the horror of the Third Reich; the word “fascism” may likewise muddy more than clarify. Having covered genuinely totalitarian and genocidal regimes, I can assure you that this is not that.

Democracy is not an on-off switch but a dial. We won’t become North Korea, but we could look more like Viktor Orban’s Hungary. This is a question not of ideology but of power grabs: Leftists eroded democracy in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and rightists did so in Hungary, India and (for a time) the Philippines and Poland. The U.S. is the next test case.

When authoritarians covet power, they pursue several common strategies.

Checks and Balances

First, they go after checks and balances within the government, usually by running roughshod over other arms of government. China, for example, has a Supreme Court and a National People’s Congress — but they are supine. Here in the United States, many Republican members of Congress have similarly been reduced to adoring cheerleaders.

Trump ignores laws he finds inconvenient. He cannot legally fire inspectors general without 30 days’ notice, but he did so anyway. He moved to eliminate independent congressionally established agencies, which he has no authority to do. Probably unlawfully, he is sidelining Congress’ constitutional role by impounding funds. Even when faced with court orders, he appears not to be fully obeying in some cases.

U.S. judges have shown that they are made of sterner stuff than China’s, but is the Supreme Court? We’ll find out.

Attack on Media, Education, Banks

Second, authoritarians try to crush independent referees and civil society institutions, including news organizations, universities, statistical agencies and central banks. After I covered the Tiananmen Square massacre as an eyewitness in 1989, The People’s Daily declared that I “spread new lies,” and the prime minister’s office ordered an audit of my taxes and tried to bar my infant son from getting a residence permit. (Note to Trump: Bullying didn’t work for China then, and it won’t work for you against most journalists.)

For similar reasons, Trump is doing his best to intimidate news organizations and discredit them as “enemies of the people.” There is always tension between journalists and the White House. President John F. Kennedy expressed his pique by canceling subscriptions to The New York Herald Tribune. But Trump’s moves to cancel subscriptions, sue news organizations, demonize journalists and unleash the government against them are not Kennedyesque but Orbanesque.

Trump’s choice for interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, who was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has raised the possibility of prosecuting reporters for reporting on Elon Musk’s team upending the federal government. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is investigating PBS, NPR, ABC, NBC and CBS.

In a particularly blatant breach of free press principles, the White House has also barred Associated Press reporters from certain events for failing to adopt Trump’s terminology of the “Gulf of America.” What next? Denial of access to reporters who decline to refer to aid workers as “fraudsters”?

Recruitment of Private Enforcers

Third, authoritarians sometimes recruit shadowy private enforcers to employ violence to intimidate or punish critics. China has used triad gangsters to suppress dissent, and India and Iran appear to have hired thugs to silence critics in Canada and the United States.

Trump has not gone that far, and I hope he never will. But his mass clemency of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, including those who clubbed police officers, was a signal of impunity for violent political offenders acting in his name. His removal of security from former officials facing death threats, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Gen. Mark Milley, indicates a lack of concern for the fate of critics.

Trump in his first term tried to make the military function as a political militia, suggesting that troops fire on protesters, according to his former defense secretary Mark Esper. Trump once called on the Proud Boys to “stand by,” and he incited his followers to “knock the crap out of” hecklers. All this may be perceived by a band of extremists who despise some judge, journalist or senator as an echo of Henry II’s supposed plea, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

There are other characteristics of authoritarians that are evident in Washington today. The sycophantic praise directed at Trump by his aides is familiar to anyone who has seen personality cults from Turkmenistan to Bangladesh. Assertions that God has anointed a ruler or “spared my life for a reason,” as Trump put it, have been a dime a dozen.

I’ve covered lots of dictatorships employing this authoritarian tool kit, but I’ve also seen many of them collapse eventually, from Eastern Europe to South Korea. Determined citizens who understand the stakes can — eventually, inconsistently — defeat those who manipulate opinion and laws. We saw that most recently in Poland.

So let’s pay attention to the larger mosaic, not just the individual tiles of outrage. The upheaval in Washington is 1,000 things, yes, but what’s emerging is a pattern of undercutting restraints on executive power in ways that weaken the democracy that we inherited and that we must fight to preserve.

—

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
c. 2025 The New York Times Company

The post Not Quite a Unified Theory of Trumpism, but Still an Alarming Pattern appeared first on GV Wire.

Republican voters signed up for “The Trump Show: Politics Edition.” Musk is producing and distributing that show, one chaotic bite at a time.

In response to a brutal week for democracy, the Democratic leadership in Congress held a news conference. Sen. Chuck Schumer led those gathered in a chant, “We will win,” hands held high with Rep. Maxine Waters. Sen. Elizabeth Warren did a nice job of explaining what the payments mean to regular people. They framed the takeover of the Treasury Department’s payment system as an unprecedented overreach of power.

But the minority party cannot just chant. It has to act on what isn’t debatable: Trump has deputized a questionably legal extragovernmental actor. His mission is not just to dismantle the federal government, but to demoralize it.

Related Story: Social Media Users Troll Trump, Deem Musk as President

DOGE Outmaneuvers the Dems

So far, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gang has outmaneuvered the Democrats and produced a governmental soap opera that confuses some Americans but feeds their fans what they want. Storming anodyne cubicles as if they’re Waterloo creates chaos and it satisfies fans’ desire to vicariously storm the seat of world power. In Musk, Trump has found something important for his stylistic approach to authoritarianism. He needs a muckraker who can create content for our media environment.

I could not help but feel that the Democrats’ response, staged for 20th-century media with a lectern, microphones and standing outside in the cold, could not compete with the emotional power of content. And that could have disastrous consequences. DOGE is a democracy wrecking machine. It is targeting the government’s plumbing, the infrastructure that makes the state reliable and legitimate for millions of Americans.

DOGE is also a propaganda machine. A friend asked me recently why a president who controls both legislative chambers would need to elbow his administration’s way into relatively small, if important, bureaucratic offices. Why, he wondered, all the questionably legal mafia-like tactics?

The easy answer is that this is just Trump’s style and Musk is unpredictable. That is true, but it does not clearly assess the strategic efficacy of deploying gamified smash-and-grab antics.

In Musk’s World, Chaos Is Content

Musk’s escapades are political posturing staged like a video game side quest. The DOGE playbook is to target an office of which most Americans have only a vague notion. Then Musk’s operatives label the office a villain in overblown comic terms — “a criminal organization” as Musk called USAID. Then, the executive branch uses DOGE to pick a fight it knows it can win.

Musk’s fans love his narration of power as a vicarious gamelike experience of dominance. These fans don’t find the DOGE escapades chaotic or confusing. If anything, the bombastic flouting of norms and laws makes the world more sensible to them. It is government and civic life they don’t understand. Musk clarifies a scary world for them, putting it in terms they understand. Bad guy. Good guy. Evil. Villain. Kill. Win.

This is propaganda, but it is also a skilled manipulation of content in a content-saturated culture. Increasingly we cannot escape the closed world of bite-size performativity that feels like the real world. All of our emotions are fuel for the content machines that don’t care what we feel, only that we do.

Musk’s playbook makes us feel, with all the drama of a middle school burn book. His purchase of Twitter came with similar dramatics. He made an offer and tried to back out of it, while his online fans painted the social media company as Marxist and censorious. After completing his purchase, Musk walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink. It was something comic book fans recognized as an Easter egg — a semiotic message that looks absurd or chaotic to outsiders but makes perfect sense to insiders who know the Musk lore.

And that is what Musk does well. He turns routine cutthroat corporate shenanigans — stock buyouts and finance deals that usually would not leave the business press — into content for his fans. When he did that for Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX, it made an otherwise uncharismatic billionaire seem like a real-life Tony Stark.

Now, he is making the same kind of chaos-as-content in the federal government. But here, the stakes are far higher, and all of Musk’s preening on social media obscures what is actually happening. That is what content is really good at doing. It feels transparent to see an influencer bake bread in her grandma chic retro kitchen or to see a billionaire storm a corporate headquarters to vanquish his enemies to unemployment. But content does not reveal the machinery of influencing — the deals signed, the nondisclosure agreements issued, the metrics used to measure the dollar value of the audience’s emotional response. In politics, content can hide the money and power at play.

Content feels a lot like old school political spin, but unlike spin, it can be completely captured, its amplification manipulated and the response to it monetized. It can look like information while conveying little real meaning. But the problem with content isn’t that it is inherently empty or fake; it generates real emotion. But when it comes to civic life, it does everything in its power to keep you from taking any action beyond its economic interests.

Related Story: Inside Musk’s Power Play to Reshape the Federal Government

The MO of Trump 2.0

It is fast becoming clear that this content-driven chaos is going to be the MO of Trump 2.0. Trump may have learned in his first term that there is a political price for not feeding your loyalists enough content. Governance got in the way of the content machine he built on the campaign trail. Since then, he has had four years to refine his strategy. Chaos is central to his deployment of unchecked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.

That is Musk’s utility to Trump. He is willing to fill in for Trump by consistently producing DOGE’s bureaucratic takeovers as content.

If you are confused when you see Musk narrating a serious civic affair like a video game side quest, understand that you are not the intended audience. What looks like chaos to you is actually clarifying content to someone else. Those who understood Musk’s sink bit thought that a chaotic world made a bit more sense. Everyone else wondered why a billionaire was lugging around a porcelain fixture.

So wherever the content seems unbelievable, inscrutable or chaotic, it is best not to look away but rather to look around it, for actions or effects that are far more portentous. Musk, for all his antics, is now at an office that aligns with his technological expertise, his contacts, his grudges and his financial interests. His content may be about USAID one week and the CFPB the next. But looking beneath the content’s chaotic veneer reveals a strategic takeover of national interests that will demolish the state’s functionality in a way that benefits the ones swinging the hammer.

What we have is a president who made his career as a real estate developer and an empowered minion leading the federal government to move fast and break things. It is a politic of socialism-for-me and scarcity-for-thee: chasing government contracts while simultaneously compromising the government’s ability to pay its bills.

Chaos wants to shut down thinking and feeling by trapping us in the emotional state of its choosing. Name-calling, rudeness, childishness and pettiness put those of us who do not want to be the Twitch audience to Trump and Musk’s content on the defensive. Looking away would preserve our sanity. But content’s secret politics is that it wants people to look away while it works on the people who don’t. So what do we do about it?

You acknowledge that the chaos is smoke, but the heist is the fire. Don’t look away from the smoke. Look through it for what is being taken, redefined and reallocated. Stop pointing out the hypocrisy. The other side does not care. Its content makes the people there feel powerful but action is the only real power.

The left wing of the Democratic Party finally convinced the once-resistant Schumer that opposition is action. It is the best tool that a minority party has. More important, it expands our field of play beyond the area that Trump and Musk now control. If you are not inciting yourself or others to act, your political rhetoric will not eclipse Trump’s chaos.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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It’s not even in the interest of his own base: The five states with the largest share of wind power in America are red states. They generated at least a third of their power from wind. This is geography, not politics: Rural districts across the middle of America have the most solar and wind energy potential. They know it and are taking advantage of it — even if they vote Republican.

Most important: If Trump’s all-in-on-fossil-fuels, “drill, baby, drill” rallying cry — at the dawn of this era of artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, batteries, and autonomous cars — really becomes our strategy, it will not make America great again. But it will definitely help make China great again.

Indeed, when Trump declared in his inaugural address that he planned to propel Americans to Mars, the first vision that popped into my head was of a U.S. astronaut landing on the red planet and being met there by a Chinese astronaut, asking, “What took you so long?”

Hey, Friedman, why do you keep comparing America and China?

It’s certainly not because I’d prefer to live there or have its problems, which are many and deep, particularly in banking. No, it’s because, despite its problems, China still knows how to make big stuff — often with sheer force from the top down, usually buttressed by massive government support but also often by common-sense planning and, more often than we’d like to believe from an authoritarian system, by creative innovation.

China Doesn’t Weigh Energy Investment on a Political Scale

China is also not so silly as to treat one form of electricity generation as more conservative, liberal, or Maoist than another. In the end, the outputs are all just electrons. They have no politics. All Beijing cares about is which is most abundant, efficient, cheap, and clean.

I was struck by the “coincidence” that on the day of Trump’s inaugural, where he boasted that “America will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before,” the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek unveiled its newest flagship AI model, R1, which demonstrated a new level of reasoning power — power that it was able to achieve with a smarter algorithm and without importing the most advanced U.S. chips that we’ve placed restrictions on China from acquiring. You can get more AI juice either by getting a bigger orange (more neural networks and data) or by squeezing a smaller orange tighter with a smarter algorithm. That is what DeepSeek has reportedly done.

As an article in Business Insider described it, “DeepSeek says R1 achieves ‘performance comparable to OpenAI o1 across math, code and reasoning tasks,’” and it quoted Theo Browne, a software developer behind a popular YouTube channel, as saying, “The new DeepSeek R1 model is incredible.”

So what does that have to do with energy policy?

Because everything today is connected — which is exactly what Trump and his right-wing wokesters don’t understand.

The faster AI improves, the more efficient and smarter autonomous electric vehicles will become. But the more AI improves, the more energy it will require. The more energy it requires, the more we want it to be renewable, so as not to exacerbate climate change. The more renewable it is, the more AI that America can generate and the more efficient our electric batteries become. The more efficient our batteries become, the more things they can power, from cars to homes to factories — and the more competitive our auto companies become in a world where the future of mobility is going to be largely hybrid-electric, all-electric and autonomous vehicles.

In other words, in the 21st century, the country that has the smartest, cheapest, and most efficient ecosystem of AI, EVs, smart batteries, and abundant clean electricity will dominate. Just as in the Industrial Age whoever had the biggest ecosystem of coal, steel, oil, and combustion engines dominated.

Best Energy Policy: Everything in the Toolbox

It’s the ecosystem, stupid. And if you pluck out one part of it for brain-dead, knee-jerk, right-wing woke political reasons, you lose.

I confess, I have family in San Francisco, and every time I visit, I use only Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxis. I love to see them roll up to the curb to pick me up, my initials flashing on the top; I get in the back seat, select one of the music channels playing my favorite hits and then get out at my destination — no fuss, no muss — because no human is driving.

But the thing about autonomous cars — and, coming soon, autonomous buses and long-haul trucks — is that they must be all-electric and satellite-connected. Electric motors can change the amount of power they apply to turn the wheels instantaneously, in a small fraction of the time that it takes to accelerate in a gasoline-powered car. The far faster reaction time of an electric car in response to an autonomous driving computer is essential so you don’t kill people.

Remember, these cars are just smartphones, smart robots, and smart batteries on wheels. So it’s not surprising that some of China’s most popular EVs are made by Xiaomi and Huawei, both smartphone companies, and BYD, the battery company. China’s companies see themselves as building digital transportation devices, not just cars. The whole audio and video driving experience feels different. Too many U.S. auto companies are still building cars that connect with your phone — and that’s it. (One of the most fateful industrial decisions made in America was when Apple and Google decided not to make cars.)

BYD, the world’s fastest-growing automaker, is pouring $14 billion into autonomous driving technology, as The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, reported last year. BYD decided that autonomous driving was the future and has jumped in with thousands of engineers. Meanwhile, GM shut down Cruise, its autonomous taxi project, and put money into share buybacks. Talk about how to mortgage your future.

Of course, the most ideal EV is one that is powered by renewable energy — wind, solar, wave, hydro, or nuclear. Then you are really riding clean. China is not fully there yet. But China’s energy approach is what Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush opted for: all of the above.

Yes, let’s exploit our oil and gas advantage: Under Biden, America pumped more oil in 2023 than any other country in the history of the world. But he also said that while we are exploiting our fossil fuel advantage, let’s double down on wind and solar, hydrogen, fusion, and nuclear — and electric vehicles — so we can own the mobility-AI-battery-autonomy ecosystem that will be the engine of so many innovations in the 21st century.

A Right-Wing Woke Energy Mess

And then along came Trump.

He immediately declared a “national energy emergency” — because the leaders of American AI companies told him, correctly, that they are not going to have enough power to run their energy-devouring data centers.

And how did Trump propose to address the emergency he declared? By doubling down on fossil fuels, coupled with freezing Biden-era government incentives for wind energy, putting in doubt incentives for solar and boasting of building huge, electricity-guzzling data centers for AI.

That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a right-wing woke energy mess.

Hello? Wind and solar together today provide more than 14% of the country’s electricity generation.

I can’t better describe how foolish this is than how my Times newsroom colleagues wrote about it last week: “Trump declared that the United States is facing an energy emergency, yet wants to block thousands of megawatts of planned wind projects that could power homes and businesses. He talks about strengthening American manufacturing but plans to withdraw assistance from the electric vehicle industry, which has invested billions of dollars in new factories across the United States.”

As Carl Pope, a former chair of the Sierra Club and the author, with Michael Bloomberg, of “Climate of Hope,” put it, “It’s like ringing a fire alarm and then laying off the fire department.”

Moreover, Pope told me, if we choke off the growth of the U.S. wind industry while electricity demand is soaring, we may well have to recommission mothballed coal plants, “which would be hugely expensive,” not to mention carbon polluting.

It is just the opposite of common sense. Indeed, it makes no sense. China has to be loving it — because its leaders know just how much it will weaken America as a competitor in the industrial ecosystem of the future: AI, autonomous vehicles, batteries and clean power.

As an analysis on the climate research site Carbon Brief noted last year, China made a huge surge in clean-energy investment in 2023 — “in particular, the so-called ‘new three’ industries of solar power, electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries.” In 2023 “clean-energy investment in China rose 40% year-on-year” to $890 billion, an investment that “is almost as large as total global investments in fossil fuel supply in 2023.”

No question: If Trump stays on this course, he will definitely make America more “exceptional” than ever — just not in the way he meant it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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One of 2024’s biggest hits featured an unfairly maligned woman who channels her galvanic anger into a fight against fascism. (I’m talking, of course, about “Wicked.”) Demi Moore gave a scenery-chewing performance in “The Substance,” a gruesome body horror film about the pressure on women to stay nubile. Amy Adams starred in Marielle Heller’s supernaturally inflected “Nightbitch,” in which a woman starts to go feral, perhaps literally, amid the tedium of early motherhood. Mikey Madison was incandescent as a street-smart sex worker from a post-Soviet country in “Anora,” a movie that takes the silly Cinderella fantasy behind “Pretty Woman” and explodes it.

Related Story: All Netflix Wants for Christmas Is No Streaming Problems for Its First NFL

Nicole Kidman’s ‘Babygirl’: An Unlikely Feminist Film

But perhaps the most unlikely feminist film of the year is the much-hyped, extremely kinky “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, which opens Dec. 25. It’s a movie that satirizes the archetype of the girlboss but ultimately affirms it. On the cusp of our terrible new era, it felt, for all its darkness and perversity, like an artifact of a more optimistic moment, when equality seemed close enough at hand that the orgasm gap between men and women — something the movie’s director, Halina Reijn, often talks about in interviews — could be a subject of serious concern.

This wasn’t the takeaway I was anticipating going into the movie, though, in truth, I’m not sure what I was expecting. In a recent profile in The New Yorker, Reijn, a feminist, said she grew up idolizing the directors of 1980s and ’90s erotic thrillers like Adrian Lyne, the maker of “Fatal Attraction,” to which “Babygirl” has been frequently compared. That movie, about a female stalker with a shrieking biological clock, was so reactionary that it’s the centerpiece of a chapter in Susan Faludi’s book “Backlash.” Faludi quoted Lyne saying, of feminist professionals, “Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman.”

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Exploring Female Empowerment in ‘Babygirl’

At least on the surface, the premise of “Babygirl” seemed like one Lyne might appreciate. The film centers on Kidman’s Romy, an icy executive with an outwardly perfect life — big job, loving family, multiple homes — who suffers over her unrealized desire to be sexually dominated. It comes out at a moment of misogynist retrenchment both politically and in parts of popular culture. (No one who read “Backlash” should be surprised by the rise of tradwives.) So despite Reijn’s politics, I wondered if her film would be an augur of a new, postfeminist Hollywood moment. It’s not. If anything, the problem with “Babygirl” — and here’s the place to stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers — is that, for all its psychodrama, it lands on a message of female empowerment that feels a little trite.

Though it’s billed as a thriller, “Babygirl” is really more of a black comedy about middle-aged self-discovery. As Reijn said when she introduced the movie at a screening this week, she was animated by a very personal question when making it: “Is it possible to love all the different layers of myself, not just the ones that I like to present to the outside world?”

Romy is a woman who tightly controls her self-presentation. She’s the CEO of a robotics company with the highly suggestive name Tensile. In bed she performs porn-style fake orgasms for her husband. An early scene has her badgering her queer daughter to change out of her baggy clothes for a family Christmas photo. We see Romy getting Botox and standing naked in a cryotherapy chamber — a welcome acknowledgment, rare in Hollywood, that beauty, especially after a certain age, can be its own kind of grueling labor. Rehearsing a corporate presentation, she speaks of the need to “look up, smile and never show your weakness.” A media trainer corrects her, arguing that showing vulnerability can help win over an audience.

Related Story: Navy Honors Tom Cruise for Boosting the Military With His Screen Roles

The Complexities of Desire and Power in ‘Babygirl’

That trainer, however, doesn’t recognize just how vulnerable Romy is, both because of an unstable childhood that’s vaguely alluded to and, more urgently, because of her secret fetish, which fills her with corrosive shame. Somehow Samuel, an impudent intern played by Harris Dickinson, recognizes this in her. “I think you like to be told what to do,” he tells her in one of their first meetings. They begin a tempestuous affair in which he degrades her, and thus satisfies her, in a way that her uxorious husband does not. Especially in a post-#MeToo world, the affair could blow up her impeccable life. And there are moments when it seems that Samuel, who displays some stalkerish behavior, might try to do just that.

But Reijn, aiming to make a movie about female sexual liberation, is determined not to punish her characters for their transgressions. It’s a choice I sympathize with but one that lowers the narrative stakes a bit. Ultimately, the drama in “Babygirl” is about Romy coming to terms with her desires and integrating them into her life in a way that’s not self-destructive. At one point, a powerful man she works with who has somehow figured out her secret tries to use it to sexually harass and possibly extort her. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” she hisses. “If I want to be humiliated, I’m going to pay someone to do it.” At least in the cinema, women can have it all.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michelle Goldberg
c.2024 The New York Times Company

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Harris is ahead of Trump by 4 percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, 50% to 46% among likely voters in each state. The surveys were conducted from Aug. 5-9.

The polls, some of the first high-quality surveys in those states since Biden announced he would no longer run for reelection, come after nearly a year of surveys that showed either a tied contest or a slight lead for Trump over Biden.

While the reshaped race is still in its volatile early weeks, Democrats are now in a notably stronger position in these three battleground states. Still, the results show vulnerabilities for Harris: Voters prefer Trump when it comes to whom they trust to handle the economy and immigration, issues that remain central to the presidential race.

Harris Polling Better Than Biden Did

Harris’ numbers are an upswing for Democrats from Biden’s performance in those states, even before his much-maligned debate showing that destabilized his candidacy. In May, Biden was virtually tied with Trump in Times/Siena polling in Wisconsin and Michigan. Polling conducted before and after the debate in July showed Trump with a narrow lead in Pennsylvania.

Much of the newfound Democratic strength stems from improved voter perceptions of Harris. Her favorability rating has increased 10 percentage points among registered voters in Pennsylvania just in the past month, according to Times/Siena polling. Voters also view Harris as more intelligent and more temperamentally fit to govern than Trump.

Related Story: Majority of US Adults Say Democracy Is on the Ballot but They Differ on the ...

The polls offer an early snapshot of a race that was transformed in little more than two weeks. The whirlwind of political change seized the nation’s attention and reinvigorated some voters who were approaching the rematch between Biden and Trump with a deep sense of dread.

It is unclear how much of Harris’ bounce in the polls stems from the heightened excitement surrounding her ascension to the top of the ticket, or whether that momentum will last. Candidates traditionally gain a few percentage points in the days after announcing their running mates; Harris announced her selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Tuesday, as voters were responding to the Times/Siena surveys in Michigan and Wisconsin.

In the three battlegrounds, Harris is in a stronger position than Biden was in May with most demographic groups. But the polls also indicate clear vulnerabilities for the new Democratic nominee: They found that 42% of voters said Harris was too liberal; 37% said the same about Biden last October.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik

c.2024 The New York Times Company

The post Harris Leads Trump in Three Key States, Times/Siena Polls Find appeared first on GV Wire.