Biden’s Weakness With Young Voters Isn’t About Gaza

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. America’s young voters are fired up about the war in Gaza—aren’t they? Campus protests and the controversies around them have dominated media attention for weeks. So has the possibility that youth anger about the war will cost President Joe Biden the election. “Joe Biden Is Losing Young Voters Over Israel,” a USA Today headline declared last month. The New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall recently argued that nothing would help Biden more with young voters than negotiating…

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The Best Hope for Electric Cars Could Be the GOP Districts Where They’re Made

Dozens of used electric-vehicle batteries were stacked like cordwood on pallets in a warehouse-style building about 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada, when I visited the site last week. The batteries were bound for an assembly line that would begin the chemical process of recycling up to 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel they contain. Eventually, after treatment in two more buildings on the site, the metals will become a high-value, fine black powder called cathode active material that is shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to Toyota and Panasonic…

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The Woman Keeping the ‘Special Relationship’ Special

The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands. The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters…

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Don’t Both-Sides This One, Joe

Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET on May 3, 2024 President Joe Biden will make a speech on anti-Semitism on Tuesday, May 7, by way of observing the Holocaust remembrance in the Jewish religious calendar. If the speech is not to fail, or even backfire, the president needs to be very clear in his mind about what he has to say, and why. The questions Biden needs to answer on Tuesday are not questions about beliefs or values. They are not questions about himself or his personal commitments. They are questions…

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The Plot to Wreck the Democratic Convention

Opponents of the Iraq War gathered to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 2004. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in New York City; some put the total as high as 200,000. A minority of the protesters disregarded police lines. More than 1,800 people were arrested. Yet the convention itself proceeded exactly as planned. President George W. Bush was renominated, and subsequently won reelection. In so doing, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win a popular-vote majority in the 35 years since the end of the Cold War.…

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Trump Is Getting What He Wants

At today’s hearing on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority appeared poised to give him what he most desires in the case: further delays that virtually preclude the chance that he will face a jury in his election-subversion case before the November election. But the nearly three hours of debate may be even more significant for how they would shape a second Trump term if he wins reelection. The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s…

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