Biden’s Lackluster Speech Is a Reminder That He Couldn’t Win

President Biden’s speech on Monday night was a reminder of why the Democrats were right to make the switch to Kamala Harris as their candidate for president. I expected something personal from Biden, ruminating on his life, commitments and the hills and valleys of a long career. Instead, we got a familiar campaign speech that was about as personal and moving as a platform committee report.

I was hoping for something in the spirit of the Harris campaign — ebullient and joyful. Near the end, he got a little sentimental and said, “America, I gave my best to you.” But largely he delivered an unsmiling, haranguing speech.

We’ve had roughly a decade of the politics of anger, anxiety and indignation. The country is exhausted, and it would have been even more exhausted if this campaign had been another few months of old guys growling at her. On Monday, Biden offered people a vision of what his campaign might have been. I suppose the vast majority of Americans will be glad we are spared it.

I confess I still haven’t gotten over the way Biden was pushed from the nomination. He’s a sensationally good man. He made a million decisions as president that contributed to a string of policy victories, decisions that made him a superior president. The way it ended for him was unworthy of all he gave.

But on Monday it was clear there has been a shift in the spirit of the times, and Biden hasn’t quite caught it. He remains a great public servant. But he reminded us of the wisdom of Nancy Pelosi’s decision to maneuver him from the race, and the strategies of all those who worked to replace him. Anger and indignation is not the spirit America is hungering for now. The culture has moved on.

The first hours of the Democratic National Convention started with a whimper, as some of the party’s most awkward and uncharismatic speakers attempted to extol the Biden-Harris economic record to a skeptical American public. But when Shawn Fain, the bespectacled president of the United Auto Workers union, took the stage, he electrified the crowd.

In the cadence of a practiced union organizer, Fain quickly whipped a relatively sleepy stadium into a frenzy, asking the question that has prodded union members for nearly a century: “Which side are you on?” With the precision of an electrician (he is one), Fain dismantled Donald Trump’s claim that he is a friend of the American worker (he is not one), recounting the former president’s broken promises to the labor movement and declaring, “Donald Trump is a scab.”

That phrase sparked a riotous chant among the crowd: “TRUMP’S A SCAB.”

But beyond the hype, Fain’s speech also made a compelling case that the Democratic Party’s future is tied to an economy that works not only for businesses, but also for workers.

“Corporate greed,” he said, “turns blue-collar blood, sweat and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and C.E.O. jackpots. It causes inflation. It hurts workers. It hurts consumers. And it hurts America.”

For the people Fain represents, a labor-friendly administration couldn’t be more crucial. For a party that’s often criticized as elite, an alliance with labor demonstrates that working Americans are critical to the party’s identity.

It’s hard to talk about the compelling nature of Fain’s appearance without acknowledging the noticeable absence of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, from the night’s proceedings. Weeks ago, O’Brien spoke at the Republican convention; perhaps unsurprisingly, he was not invited to speak by Democratic organizers. This was a missed opportunity for the Democrats to demonstrate that their values transcend party loyalty.

The 1.3 million Teamsters are crucial to the labor movement at large; their directives to not cross picket lines bolster other unions’ attempts at collective bargaining. If the Harris-Walz ticket is serious about being a friend to labor, it should make a Teamsters endorsement a priority. If the Teamsters’ leadership is serious about representing the needs of its members, it should consider throwing the union’s support behind a presidential candidate who does not praise Elon Musk for firing striking workers.

Let’s admit that Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention Monday night is not going to go down in political history. Oratory, we all know, is not her best thing. But boy, it really did feel good to see her standing there, being wildly cheered while she called on the country to elect a woman as president.

Finally.

Clinton urged her audience to fight hard for Kamala Harris and remember that “the story of my life and the history of the country” was that “progress is possible but not guaranteed.”

It’s been less than eight years since Clinton — the first woman ever nominated for president by a major political party — lost to Donald Trump, to nearly everyone’s shock, including her own. Well, on Monday she did manage to mention that “nearly 66 million Americans” voted for her. She didn’t point out that was 2.9 million more votes than Trump got — this was a presidential nominating convention, not a symposium on reforming the Electoral College.

Hillary’s story isn’t quite as inspiring as Kamala Harris’s. Being married to the president is certainly a good way to make a name for yourself, but it’s not necessarily the perfect résumé for a job running the country.

And Clinton wasn’t a terrific candidate. Still, she worked as hard as humanly possible, soldiered on and then swallowed what many regarded as a deeply unfair defeat. She had been the secretary of state and a senator. Now she’s an advocate for the woman who’s trying to make America see a female president as something that’s perfectly normal.

“The future is here,” she proclaimed.

Yeah, I told you it wasn’t a super quotable effort. But give her credit — if it hadn’t been for Hillary Clinton, the Democrats wouldn’t have been prepared to embrace the idea of Kamala Harris as their nominee with such serene cheer.

For all the good cheer radiating from the United Center here, for all the rising poll numbers and buoyant rallies, Democrats can’t let themselves forget how serious the threat from Donald Trump remains, one longtime party operative said on Monday.

David Axelrod, a Chicago native best known for helping to engineer the rise of Barack Obama, told a group of Times Opinion writers and editors that they shouldn’t become deluded by Kamala Harris’s impressive poll numbers, because the polls often underestimate Trump’s real support.

“Everyone at the convention should be very much aware that this is a race he can win,” Axelrod said. “In fact, I think he would win today, despite those intoxicating Siena polls. I think it’s much more even or that she’s even slightly behind, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan.”

Trump has a “feral genius” for arousing his people, he said, and they will turn out at the polls to express their discontent. The United States is still a “65 percent wrong-track country,” he said, and Trump’s message that the world is out of control continues to resonate.

Axelrod’s admonition is an important reminder that Democrats and the Harris campaign can’t coast on giddy vibes. She may be doing better than President Biden was, but the race remains coin-toss close. The enduring mystery is how Trump’s base of support could continue unabated in the face of his increasing incoherence, his irrational attacks even on members of his own party and his overt denial of reality.

That’s an advantage Harris has, Axelrod said, and she needs to capitalize on a desperate desire among so many voters to have a chance for something new.

“A chance to turn the page on an era,” he said. “It’s somewhat awkward because you don’t want to be insulting to Biden. Tonight’s going to be challenging in that regard. But people wanted to turn the page on both these guys, and she’s offering them that opportunity — and she just needs to give them enough comfort that it is a reasonable step — that she is within the 30-yard lines and is focused on what’s important to people.”

It isn’t hard to find former Trump voters who are now supporting Kamala Harris — many of them are people who served in Donald Trump’s administration. But Rich Logis, whose video testimonial will air Monday on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, is unusual in that he was a MAGA die-hard, not just a conventional Republican who had reluctantly backed Trump.

A Florida businessman and a Ralph Nader voter with a deep suspicion of mainstream politicians, Logis was attracted to Trump’s outsider pose, eventually becoming a Trump volunteer, a contributor to pro-Trump websites like American Greatness and a MAGA podcaster. The Trump movement was his life.

“I was quite deep into that world,” he told me recently, explaining that his “MAGA second family” often “took precedence over my own blood family.”

Logis began to become disillusioned with his new family in 2021, at first because of its rampant anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. He describes his emergence from the movement as if he’d escaped a cult.

“All of these various pathologies about sex and race and Christian theocracy,” he said, “it keeps adherents in this constant perpetual state of desperation and feeling very panicked and hopeless.”

Today, Logis is the vice chair of Florida Republicans for Harris and has a nonprofit called Leaving MAGA, meant to provide outreach to former Trump supporters like him and to publicize their stories. Though the organization is still in its infancy, Logis has connected with a few fellow apostates.

“There has to be an offramp,” he said of MAGA devotees who might be harboring secret doubts. “There’s got to be a place for them to go, to make it just a little bit easier for them to leave. Because it’s not going to be easy at all.”

My, oh my, how a couple of weeks can change things. During the Republican National Convention (not even a month ago!), I was worried about how young the MAGA dynasty looked. At the time, President Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, which could have made the visuals at the Democratic convention look geriatric by comparison.

Now we are headed into a Democratic convention that will be defined by a changing of the guard. Remarkably, a woman of color is the Democratic presidential nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris has the organizational, financial and political backing of an establishment candidate and the brand potential of a history-making one.

Here are four things to think about as you’re watching this week:

• Personal biography. With such a historic candidate, the way the campaign frames Harris’s biography may be a rich political text. It might tell us how the campaign understands voters’ political imaginations and their taste for continuity. I believe Harris’s biographical narrative about race and gender has the most potential to challenge us. How will the convention display her identity as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother figure and as a Gen X leader?

• Accommodating the left. Some political strategists fear that Democrats will go too far to accommodate what they see as disconnected, discontented leftists. But some left-wing policies are among the most popular with Democratic voters, and many of its members are young people. How much will the Harris campaign play ball with them?

• Biden’s legacy project. This convention is as much about how Harris became the nominee as it is about her platform. Biden should receive a hero’s send-off for stepping aside and for his decades of party service. How that send-off happens may indicate how the Harris campaign plans to distinguish her platform from the Biden record. How will the convention both enshrine Biden’s wins and make room for Harris to define herself?

• The gender election. If 2008 was a reckoning on race, this election is a reckoning on gender. The Dobbs decision galvanized Democratic voters. The Trump-Vance campaign’s continued mischaracterization of its anti-abortion position also creates an opening for Democrats to reach Republican women. I expect to see this convention embrace everything from reproductive rights to Supreme Court expansion to energize the base. How much will it matter to undecided voters?

So Kamala Harris is a communist? As the Democratic convention opens, that’s the word Donald Trump has chosen to define her, accusing her on Sunday of having gone “full communist” in her economic platform, which she detailed in a speech on Friday. He even posted a fake image of Harris addressing the Chicago convention, made to look like a communist rally.

Talk about a blast from the musty past. During the McCarthy era, a period in the early 1950s that historians will surely compare to our own, Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being communists. The far right of the party — represented by the John Birch Society — even claimed President Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the communist conspiracy.

These charges declined in the years that followed. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls on the economy far more stringent and ill-advised than Harris’s anti-price-gouging program, there was plenty of criticism, but no one accused Nixon of being a Red.

That’s in part because Nixon was himself a famous Red baiter. But the bigger reason Nixon’s price controls brought a different reaction was that by the 1970s, we knew there was no communist threat in the United States. After 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, only crackpots flung the term around.

Which brings us to Sunday’s bogus charge by Trump and his fellow travelers. If Harris is a communist, then so was the “trust buster” Theodore Roosevelt, who in the Progressive era initiated the kind of vigorous antitrust enforcement that Harris would use against price-gouging corporations in the food sector. Roosevelt’s rhetoric and policies went far beyond anything Harris said in her Friday speech. Urging the 114-year-old Federal Trade Commission to continue its vigorous work on behalf of consumers is hardly radical.

As for thinking like a card-carrying communist, there is one candidate in this election with close ties to an infamous Soviet agent. Donald Trump has trashed hundreds of patriotic Americans, but he has never uttered a single critical word about a former K.G.B. colonel named Vladimir Putin. In fact, Trump has said that if our allies don’t pony up in the exact way he demands, Russia can have free rein to rebuild the old Soviet Empire in Europe.

When Trump inevitably claims in his Sept. 10 debate with Harris that he is tougher on Putin and the Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping, Harris will no doubt be ready with the words of Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton: “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un” — another communist — “and others: They think he’s a laughing fool. And they’re prepared to take advantage of it.”

Senator Joseph McCarthy dominated American politics from his first demagogic lies in 1950 to his censure by the Senate in 1954. Trump’s era has now gone three years longer than McCarthy’s, but an end may be in sight. With the help of hard work by real patriots, Trump may soon be remembered as a more powerful and dangerous McCarthy, consigned, like communism, to the dustbin of history.

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• Heading into the Democratic convention, I’m curious to see whether any of the speeches will be for the ages. Will any approach the soaring poetry of Mario Cuomo at the 1984 convention, the hope-filled apogee of Bill Clinton in 1992, the star-making performance of Barack Obama in 2004 and in 2016 the searing dignity of Khizr and Ghazala Khan and the home run of Michelle Obama? These are some of the people I could see grabbing America’s attention (if they indeed get a slot):

• Nancy Pelosi: Will the legendary House speaker become a legendary convention speaker? She has the goods: Her determination to put party (and country) ahead of personal interests — President Biden’s — gives her a singular standing to make a case about the stakes in this election. She’s reportedly speaking on Wednesday; at the very least, she can deliver zingers at Donald Trump that evoke Ann Richards taking on George W. Bush in 1988.

• Michelle Obama: The former first lady is a great speechmaker, but doesn’t do many of them, so when she does, they feel special. You can imagine her setting the stage powerfully for Harris during her remarks on Tuesday and making a call to the country to live up to its history and ideals.

• Pete Buttigieg: Anyone who watches Buttigieg on Fox News knows he can boil things down with terrific lines, and it’s being memorable in a matter of minutes that is meaningful.

• Bill Clinton: Like Ms. Obama, the Big Dog has kept a low profile lately. When he speaks on Wednesday, could he do for Harris what he did for Barack Obama in 2012, making that sharp case for her over Trump?

• Hillary Clinton: The ex-theater reporter in me wants her to surprise the audience by speaking from the heart, not the head. In an alternate universe, she is winding down her second term as president. What if she tried to transport listeners to that universe for a night — or else make people feel what might have been?

• Joe Biden: Talk about speaking from the heart. If ever there was a moment, Monday night is it.

• Beyoncé: She appeared with Hillary eight years ago to help close out the 2016 campaign. Will she do the same for Kamala Harris and turbocharge the Chicago convention?

• A Palestinian American speaker: I’m curious to see if a Palestinian American is given a speaking slot at the convention, to bring home the war and suffering in Gaza and bring inside a taste of the protests outside the hall. Gaza is a test for Harris, and the convention speaker lineup says a lot about a party.

• Tim Walz: He has a great stemwinder in him. Usually the V.P. doesn’t upstage the presidential nominee, but how Walz introduces himself to his biggest television audience yet will be must-see TV.

• Kamala Harris: The biggest speech of her life. She’s been on a roll on the campaign trail, but a lot of Americans are still getting to know her as a possible president. No matter your party, it’s intriguing to see what Harris makes of the moment — whether she tries to be all things to all people or tries to make a few indelible points. Not many presidential nominees give the best speech of an entire convention — it would be one for the ages if she did.

In Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, Kamala Harris did a pretty smooth job of reframing one of her biggest negatives — high prices — into a potential positive. If she can sell her message to voters, I think it will strongly improve her chances of winning in November.

Harris told the crowd that inflation is back below 3 percent for the first time since 2021. But she realizes that reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics don’t win votes. So she acknowledged that prices of essential items such as bread and ground beef are way higher than before the pandemic.

The plan that she presented wasn’t about how to lower the rate of inflation. It was about how to lower the cost of living.

There’s a difference. The rate of inflation — the increase in the prices of a broad range of goods and services — isn’t fully under the president’s control. Inflation is more strongly influenced by the Federal Reserve, which sets short-term interest rates, and by global economic forces, such as the pandemic-related interruptions to global supply chains in 2021 and 2022.

(The president isn’t entirely out of the inflation loop, of course. Generous pandemic aid from Congress, signed into law by President Biden, did contribute to the inflation spike.)

What the next occupant of the White House can more strongly influence is the cost of living, which is the bottom-line cost to households. Inflation is a broad economic phenomenon, while the cost of living can be affected by targeted interventions, like capping the cost of insulin.

In Raleigh, Harris detailed some of the interventions she favors to address the cost of living. They include incentives for housing construction; cracking down on “corporate landlords,” big supermarket chains and Big Pharma; restoration of the expanded child tax credit; and a more generous earned-income tax credit for families without children at home.

Harris also painted her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, as a friend of the rich who won’t help ordinary people deal with the cost of living. She got a big round of applause for saying, “If you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.”

High prices still sting, but polls are showing that voters don’t blame Harris for them as much as they blame her boss. With inflation having fallen significantly from its peak, and with a plan to make voters feel that she can ease the pain, Harris seems poised to minimize the damage that inflation has been doing to the Democrats.

For the past half-century, Donald Trump has always had the same spaghetti approach to litigation: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

On Sept. 18, Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s New York felony trial, is expected to sentence him for his conviction on 34 counts of business fraud. But before doing so, Merchan will rule on two laughable pretrial motions offered by Trump’s defense team.

The first is yet another motion to force the judge to recuse himself from the case. Last spring, after an investigation, the New York courts determined that the work Merchan’s daughter performed for a Democratic political consulting firm did not pose a conflict of interest for the judge.

Of course, this did nothing to dissuade Trump and his legal team. When Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, they filed another motion for recusal, claiming that the work of Merchan’s daughter in Harris’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign “may result in a financial benefit” to his family. On Aug. 12, Merchan ruled that the defense motion was “nothing more than a repetition of stale and unsubstantiated claims.”

Of course, Trump wasn’t done. On Thursday, Todd Blanche, his lead lawyer, sent a bizarre letter to the judge arguing that the jury’s verdict should be dismissed and the case vacated “based on presidential immunity, until after the 2024 presidential election.”

What does the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity — which applies to what presidents do in office — have to do with the 2024 election? Here’s where things get a little, well, weird. First Blanche told the judge that his 2019 criticism of politicians who use Twitter — which Merchan had ruled irrelevant last March — must be revisited. Blanche now argues that the judge’s conversations with his daughter about Twitter should disqualify him from the case because the Supreme Court found that while president, Trump’s tweets fell under his “official duties.”

Then Blanche, no doubt following the boss’s orders, launched an even more explicitly political argument, down to calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party,” a handy G.O.P. insult for decades. He charged that Harris and Tim Walz “referred to this case in a public speech” — as if a campaign speech by Trump’s opponents is grounds for delaying sentencing or invalidating the jury’s verdict.

Blanche then writes ominously, with a little legal language to perfume his nonsense, “In the same time frame, Michael Nellis, a business partner of Your Honor’s daughter at Authentic Campaigns (and Authentic’s founder), posted on social media about, inter alia, making maximum donations to the Harris campaign and using his clout with that campaign to get Walz to ‘talk on our White Dudes for Harris call last week.’”

Horrors! Walz and the boss of the judge’s daughter are on a huge Zoom call together!

This is all vintage Trump, but also a sign of nervousness about his sentencing and the political peril he faces as the felonious nominee of the Republican Party.

On Wednesday Nemat Shafik resigned as president of Columbia University after little more than a year. Her resignation letter began by describing her “immense sadness” in stepping down, understandable given the prestige and opportunity of an Ivy League presidency, long considered a plum role in what Shafik described as a “life dedicated to public service.”

In normal times, you would have to ask why someone would give all that up. But these are not normal times, and the answer is obvious. A glance at the jubilant and downright vicious comments noting Shafik’s departure on the official Columbia University Instagram account gives a sense of the climate in which Shafik, who uses the name Minouche, was operating.

“A pathetic end to a feeble and embarrassing tenure,” noted one of the gentler posts. “Shame on her for not responding to antisemitism with courage and strength,” said another. “Go to hell Minouche! Free Palestine,” wrote a third. From many others, there were sounds of glee: “brat summer,” “Ding dong the witch is dead” and unprintable epithets laced with watermelon emojis.

Doubtless Shafik made mistakes during her brief tenure. A university has many stakeholders, and it is healthy and good for various parties to criticize a president’s policy decisions and positions and to work through appropriate channels to effect change. But the attacks against Shafik were not just professional, they were personal, and they were dehumanizing. The lack of civility, empathy and just plain humanity in the invective directed at her make it hard to think of the university as a welcoming or supportive environment in which to live and work.

Managing any large institution is hard, but the pressures on university presidents after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, the Israeli military response and subsequent student protests, faculty outcry and entrenched campus encampments make it almost untenable.

Shafik frequently found herself in a no-win situation, subjected to harsh judgment from both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel factions. She was criticized not only for the conciliatory nature of her testimony before Congress but also for agreeing to testify before Congress in the first place, even though institutions like Columbia rely on federal funding and support. It would have been fruitless for Shafik to try to please everyone, but the atmosphere on campus made it impossible for her to locate any common ground or sense of shared mission.

Shafik’s departure is nothing to celebrate, even for her critics. For now, Columbia has named an interim president, but doubtless it will be a challenge to find a permanent leader willing to assume the mantle. When running one of America’s great institutions goes from a prize position to a misery, nobody wins.

On Wednesday, crowds of women marched in the Indian state of West Bengal, protesting the brutal rape and murder of a female doctor trainee. While these demonstrations were a reaction to a week-old crime, the protesters chanted “reclaim the night,” a relic of an older protest movement — one that women across the world should revive.

Reclaim the Night began in 1977 in England, where the so-called Yorkshire Ripper had mutilated women after dark, and the police, in response, instructed women to stay home after sunset. English women, questioning why they should be restricted when dangerous men were the problem, responded with marches and placards that read “No curfew on women — curfew on men.” Since then, movements to “reclaim” or “take back" the night have waxed and waned.

According to a 2018 study, more than 80 percent of American women have experienced sexual harassment; worldwide, about a third of women have been subjected to intimate partner violence, sexual violence by a nonpartner or both at least once. Much of that violence happens after dark.

Women learn about night’s dangers from one another. Mothers warn their daughters never to walk alone at night, and TikTok is rife with videos of young women who share safety tips. (For example: hiss at threatening passerby.) In places where the sun sets in the afternoon (such as New York during the winter), it would be perfectly rational for a woman to feel the need to refrain from making after-work plans and immediately hunker down at home.

In India, gender-based violence routinely makes the news, both for its impunity and brutality. One of the country’s best-known cases, popularized internationally by the Netflix drama “Delhi Crime,” is that of Jyoti Singh, a woman who died after a brutal nighttime gang rape. As Indian law prohibits the publication of the names of rape victims, the press began calling her Nirbhaya, or “fearless.” This is the sort of nice, empty sentiment that does not make it safer for women to exist after dark. Why should women be expected to be fearless when violence against them continues to rise?

One-half of the world’s population shouldn’t be afraid of one-half of each day — which, by some simple math, adds up to one-half of each life. India’s protests, then, are a chance for women around the world to say that their entire lives, not just the daylight hours, belong to them. Nighttime is a fact of life. Violence against women shouldn’t be.

Some of the most important and alarming reporting during the 2024 election cycle has centered on what used to be one of the sleepiest and least divisive corners of election administration — the vote certification process. Specifically, the nationwide effort by Republicans to install state election officials who are prepared, if not motivated, to undermine and possibly block the certification of vote totals. If that were to happen in the right counties in the right states, it could tip the outcome of the entire election.

Republicans are not being secretive about this. According to an investigation by Rolling Stone, nearly 70 battleground-state election officials have openly “questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.”

Certification has long been a routine ministerial task, unencumbered by partisanship, as the investigation points out. Increasingly, though, that’s not the case in the Trump era, now that Republicans have reprogrammed themselves to believe that it is impossible for them to lose any election except by fraud.

The danger comes not only from isolated kooks who get their news from Rudy Giuliani news conferences. Last week in Georgia, the Republican-controlled state election board approved a measure that could unleash local election officials to do their own research and delay certifying vote counts (those that Trump doesn’t win outright, anyway).

Put aside for the moment that this new rule appears to be in conflict with longstanding Georgia law that requires certification in absence of a court challenge. The bigger problem here is in how we choose our president — via the Electoral College — and how much power that winner-take-all system gives a single state to influence the outcome of the entire election.

Americans experienced this firsthand in 2000, when the quirks of Florida’s ballot design allowed George W. Bush to win the whole state — and with it the White House — by a mere 537 votes. In 2016 and 2020, battleground states like Arizona and Georgia were decided by extraordinarily tight margins; as Trump’s threatening phone call to the Georgia secretary of state demonstrated, a swing of just a few thousand votes would have shifted all 16 of the state’s electoral votes from Joe Biden to him.

Thankfully, key election officials that year put their civic obligations above their partisan preferences, ensuring that the vote count in 2020 was reliable. Today, most local election officials and poll workers are still honest, hardworking citizens doing a thankless job. But as political rhetoric becomes more toxic and infused with partisanship, many of those workers are leaving or being driven out, replaced by single-minded people with a partisan agenda instead of a patriotic spirit.

None of this would be an issue under a national popular vote. Biden eked out his 2020 win in the Electoral College, but all together he won seven million more votes than Trump. A few dozen or hundred or even a few thousand well-placed votes would not have made any difference. In 2000, 2016 and 2020, of course, they made all the difference.

In the last decade, scientists have found evidence of liquid water pooling up seasonally on the surface of Mars in scant amounts. They’ve also seen indications that there are huge reservoirs of water deep underground. This week, researchers published more evidence to suggest there’s a vast ocean of water seven to 13 miles below the planet’s surface.

Where there’s water, there’s the potential to find signs of life, but scientists won’t know if there’s life in that water unless they get a chance to study Mars’s water up close. Based on NASA’s current priorities, the opportunities for them to do so seem very, very distant.

NASA does many things, but its crown jewel programs are focused on human exploration of outer space. In recent years, the agency’s Artemis program, intended to return American astronauts to the moon, has been given a greater priority than Mars exploration. Since its inception in 2017, Artemis has been mired in delays and its centerpiece technologies have come under enormous scrutiny for billions in overrun costs. The first Artemis flight with a crew is supposed to take place in September 2025, followed by a human landing on the moon in 2026 and, eventually, a sustainable, permanent moon base.

But it’s unlikely that this timeline will hold, given frequent hardware snags and testing delays. To make matters worse, NASA recently canceled VIPER, a lunar rover mission meant to look for ice at the moon’s south pole, a prerequisite for a lunar base. The agency already spent $450 million on the mission; the rover, already built, is now destined to collect dust.

It’s not as if all this sunk cost came at the behest of the American public. A 2023 Pew survey found that only 12 percent of Americans believe sending astronauts back to the moon should be a top priority for the agency. Just 11 percent say the same about sending humans to Mars.

But the possibility of life on Mars grows stronger and stronger with every finding. The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have found tremendous evidence of complex organics on the planet. Combined with water, there is so much rich potential that life on Mars once existed. Maybe it still does. But scientists won’t know unless space agencies start building and launching scientific missions with the express purpose of finding out.

Sending humans to extraterrestrial worlds is not a worthless goal. But this achievement pales in comparison to answering the question of whether we are alone — an answer that would change how humanity thinks about its place in this universe. Attaining that knowledge would be a worthwhile mission for an agency renowned for achieving what was once unimaginable.

I understand why Vice President Kamala Harris is going hard against inflation. Politically, it’s the right thing to do. Economically, though, she’s like a general fighting the last war.

Prices are rising much more slowly, mostly because economic growth is cooling. On Wednesday the government announced that consumer prices rose just 2.9 percent in the 12 months through July, the lowest annual increase since 2021.

Inflation is headed lower even if the White House does nothing: Economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators this month predicted the Consumer Price Index would rise just 2.3 percent in 2025 from 2024.

Better yet, the economists predicted that the personal consumption expenditures price index — the one targeted by the Federal Reserve — will rise just 2.1 percent next year. That’s a mere tenth of a point above the Fed’s target.

In other words, inflation is more or less a solved problem. Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, could do nothing more than stand at a podium and declare that high inflation is history, and she would be right — already now, and even more in the future.

But political considerations won’t allow Harris to be nearly so calm. Voters are still angry about the inflationary burst of 2022 and 2023.

The problem is that some of the things that Harris wants to do to protect voters could end up being counterproductive. We will hear more about her ideas in a speech planned for Friday in Raleigh, N.C., but what she has spoken about so far is a mix of pretty good and pretty bad ideas.

On the good side, I’d list an expanded child tax credit, which, depending on how it’s structured, could lift 400,000 children above the poverty line. She may also call for incentives to get state and local governments to build more affordable housing, which is badly needed.

I’m much less enthusiastic about Harris’s agreement with Donald Trump that tip income for service and hospitality workers should be exempted from federal income tax. It wouldn’t help lower-income workers who don’t get tips or tipped workers who already don’t pay federal income tax. And it would encourage employers to shift more workers into getting paid partly with tips, which is unsteady compared with a fixed wage.

I also think Harris’s campaign against “price gouging” is misplaced. Not every price increase, even one that increases a company’s profit, should be regarded as potentially criminal. The best fix for high prices is promoting competition, not prosecution. I hope that will be a big focus of Harris’s speech on Friday.

The W.H.O. has declared a new global public health emergency for an outbreak of deadly mpox, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In response, wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread.

Mpox, formerly known as the monkeypox virus, made the news in 2022 when a global outbreak, including in the United States, prompted a public health emergency. But by May 2023, cases in wealthy nations had receded, largely because of vaccination drives and behavior change among those most at risk of contracting the virus. The W.H.O. ended that mpox emergency.

But the virus hadn’t disappeared, and it’s now back on the rise, potentially with a vengeance.

The mpox virus has two types: a much deadlier Clade I and a less severe Clade II. In 2022, the United States experienced an outbreak of Clade II. But lacking support for eradication efforts, including vaccination drives, Clade II simmered in African countries. Worse, Clade I — estimated to have a 3 percent to 6 percent fatality rate — also spread, though it was confined to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite all the global attention heaped on this disease at the time, African countries never received enough vaccines or sufficient support to eradicate the virus.

Now, Clade I cases are sharply on the rise in Congo, where the disease has claimed the lives of more than a thousand people, most of them children. It has reached more urban areas. Cases have begun to pop up in other African countries, including Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

So far, wealthy nations have failed to send enough vaccines to counter the disease’s quick spread. The African Union’s health agency Africa C.D.C. has said it has only about 200,000 mpox vaccine doses available out of the 10 million needed. The global vaccine alliance GAVI told Reuters it needs $84 million to respond in areas at most risk, but it has raised only $8 million.

But providing vaccines alone is not enough. In Congo, stigma, regulatory obstacles and other crises — including measles and cholera outbreaks — have made a coordinated response difficult. The country finally approved two mpox vaccines just a few weeks ago, Reuters reported, but it has only about 65,000 vaccines available in the short term (for a population of about 100 million people) and vaccination campaigns appear unlikely to begin before October. Comprehensive international support may be the only thing that could beat back the disease.

Will we get it right this time around? If not, the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too, perhaps in its much deadlier form.

Kamala Harris is running an artful campaign so far, thanks in part to her upbeat, hopeful message. She has shrewdly positioned herself as the change candidate — no small feat for a sitting vice president — and has tagged Donald Trump as representing the weird past we should leave behind.

In her often joyful stump speech, Harris talks more about freedom than about threats to democracy. That makes strategic sense. Polls show that voters are more concerned with specific issues than about the specter of authoritarian government. But going too far in this direction risks letting some of the terrifying stakes move to the periphery of the campaign. Defending democracy was a potent issue for Democrats in avoiding a red wave in 2022, and it should remain a critical part of their argument.

It’s smart to make fun of Trump and treat him like a loser, which gets inside his head and causes more unforced errors. But jibes about his Willie Brown helicopter fantasies and crowd size nonsense should be matched with reminders that Trump inspires violence (including the attack on Paul Pelosi and Trump’s vile jokes about it), has promised to be “a dictator” on his first day and proposed the “termination” of the Constitution.

Democrats shouldn’t forget to emphasize that Trump said Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that displeased him, a position that, as his own former aides say, could cause a world war.

While these arguments will not sway hard-core MAGA supporters, there are still plenty of undecided voters and Trump leaners who might yet be persuaded to consider Harris or at least stay home instead of reluctantly voting for Trump and JD Vance. Many have a little Liz Cheney in them that can be brought to the surface with a reasonable conversation.

So ask your uncle Bob: Would you like to see violent Jan. 6 protesters pardoned and the Jan. 6 Choir perform at Trump’s inauguration? Do you think the three living former Republican vice presidents — Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney and Mike Pence — were wrong to stay away from the Republican convention?

Meanwhile, a little naming and shaming wouldn’t hurt, including making sure the members of the Georgia Election Board who advocate Election Day chaos — and the more than 70 other election officials around the country who have said they would not certify the results if Harris won — hear from the other side. While almost no Fortune 500 chief executives are endorsing the Republican nominee (a big change from the past), Elon Musk and Steve Schwarzman are among those backing Trump. As they and too many others fail the character test of their generation, it’s up to the rest of us to call them out on it.

The Kamala Harris campaign has adopted a song by the recording artist Beyoncé (who has recently seen some mainstream success) as its main musical anthem. But it shouldn’t stop there. The campaign could also go back in time and fully embrace a previous century’s patriotic musical heritage in a way that could unite progressives.

The right has recently seemed almost averse to a pre-eminent American flag, preferring corruptions like the so-called thin blue line flag. That provides an opportunity for liberals and progressives to reclaim the country’s iconography, and the next step is to remold and proudly sing the songs of the Civil War-era Union.

Crushing the breakaway slaveholding terror state known as the Confederacy — a nightmare built on America’s worst impulses — is among this country’s proudest moments. The music celebrating that victory is beautiful and patriotic — and already known to many Americans.

“While We Were Marching Through Georgia” and “Union Dixie” might be a stretch too far for the Harris campaign (though what could be more unifying, really, than bringing traitors back into the fold?), but “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” are surely fitting.

“The Battle Hymn” is particularly evocative. Its lyrics, written by Julia Ward Howe in the midst of the Civil War, evoke peace and war alongside each other. The goal of a peaceful country, embracing equality as its purpose, goes hand in hand with its willingness to fight for that outcome: The “righteous sentence” can be enacted only by willingness to fight for it and to “make men free”; to that end, America’s musicians must “never call retreat.”

The song expresses a martial Christianity, an understanding that slavery was a sin and that it must be cleansed, by flame and sword and through a war comparable in its moral scope to the Crucifixion itself. It presents a redemptive, just vision of Christianity, one that — unlike the exclusionary narrative advanced by Christian nationalists — seeks to use one faith tradition as a way to uplift rather than to repress.

And the Harris campaign seems to know this: At a rally in Eau Claire, Wis., this month, the folk band Bon Iver performed “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Surrounded by red, white and blue bunting, flags flying above, it presented an unabashedly patriotic vision of American liberalism writ large. It’s an image with appeal across party lines, like Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 “National Union” electoral alliance, which combined Republicans, Democrats and Unconditional Unionists into one bloc to support the continued war against slavery and secessionism.

Music has power. It can convey ideological messages, appeal to a mass audience and carry through lines in politics across decades or even centuries better than any other form. As the Jacobite movement of the 18th century used its songcraft to carry a proscribed ideology to a mass audience, Harris and her party have a unique opportunity to use America’s auditory history to build the iconography of a 21st-century political movement. They should seize it — as they trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

What has become the most notable epic fail of the Paris Olympics began with heartbreak. Ana Barbosu, a Romanian gymnast, appeared to place third in the floor event finals of the artistic gymnastics competition and prematurely celebrated her victory. Moments later, she wept as another gymnast moved into bronze medal position.

Jordan Chiles, Barbosu’s American competitor, initially appeared to place fifth in the competition. But after an inquiry by her coach, the judges agreed that Chiles deserved full credit for a leap they hadn’t scored and bumped her up to third place, above Barbosu and another Romanian gymnast, Sabrina Maneca-Voinea. The two Romanians had, in fact, received the same overall score, but in a tiebreaker, Barbosu was ranked higher based on her higher execution score.

The online backlash against Chiles’s bronze medal win was immediate, intense and unwarranted. But the slipshod nature of what has become a seemingly endless saga of inquiries and international rulings has cast a shadow over what should have been the sporting career highlight for three tremendous gymnasts.

The Romanian Gymnastics Federation appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international body that settles disputes in international sporting competitions. It ruled that Chiles’s coach’s inquiry had come four seconds too late, voiding her appeal and revised score. The panel then ruled that the International Gymnastics Federation should determine the final ranking of the gymnasts. The federation subsequently passed the decision on to the International Olympic Committee, which has stripped Chiles of her bronze.

There are additional complicating factors in this murky moral mess, including whether Chiles’s coach had in fact submitted the inquiry too late or whether Maneca-Voinea, the other Romanian, should not have received an out-of-bounds deduction that lowered her score. (Video replays showed that she did not step out of bounds.) If the judges had awarded Chiles full credit for her leap and more accurately scored Maneca-Voinea, then Maneca-Voinea would have finished third, Chiles fourth and Barbosu fifth.

There’s also a timeliness factor: If the Chiles inquiry was indeed too late, then it should not have been accepted. But it was accepted, and now the International Olympic Committee has decided to take back a bronze medal days after it was awarded, a dishonor usually reserved for athletes who have doped.

The Romanian Gymnastics Federation has proposed a solution that would ameliorate the mistakes made by officials that make sense: rank all three gymnasts third and give them all bronze medals. There is precedent for awarding duplicate medals (albeit in figure skating), and such a move would duly acknowledge that these three gymnasts were failed more by their judges than their own skill.

For sports like gymnastics, which are arbitrated by judges instead of, say, the click of a finish line camera, crediting gymnasts with the appropriate difficulty levels and accurately determining whether they stayed in bounds is crucial for the sport to function fairly. Given the incompetence of these officials, awarding each of these athletes a medal would be the most just outcome.

The data keep telling us that inflation is basically over as a problem.

On Tuesday morning we got the latest report on producer prices, and it was “soft.” That’s a good indicator for the much more widely watched Consumer Price Index, which we’ll get Wednesday. More important, the details in the report were especially encouraging for yet another price index, personal consumption expenditures, which won’t be released until later this month but which the Federal Reserve prefers as a basis for monetary policy.

This report follows some good news about inflation expectations.

Economists generally believe that the stagflation of the 1970s was so hard to end, requiring years of high unemployment, because expectations of continuing high inflation had become entrenched among businesses and consumers. Two years ago, when inflation was near its recent peak, I argued that disinflation would be much easier this time because it wasn’t similarly entrenched.

I was right. In fact, on Monday the widely followed New York Fed survey of consumer expectations found that expected inflation over the next three years has fallen to its lowest level since the survey began in 2013:

Still, some people are having a hard time letting go of the narrative that America is suffering from runaway inflation. Among those people, of course, is Donald Trump, who ranted about consumer prices in Monday night’s conversation with Elon Musk.

I continue to be especially struck by Trump’s odd obsession with the price of bacon, which he insists costs “four or five times more than it did a few years ago.” This simply isn’t true. Indeed, while bacon prices are up, most workers’ wages are up considerably more:

Honestly, I find Trump’s delusions about smoked pork harder to understand than his conspiracy theories about crowd sizes. After all, grocery prices are part of everyday experience, and easy to check. Why haven’t some big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to him to say, “Sir, you’re wrong about bacon”?

Current artificial intelligence technologies have become surprisingly good at creating realistic images and video, unleashing fears that fake images can be used for political and election manipulation.

Well, yes and no.

Fake A.I. imagery is a challenging problem, and not simply because it looks realistic. The key issue is that these images muddy the waters of credibility for everyone while providing a handy excuse for political operatives willing to lie to their supporters already eager to believe the lie.

Take Donald Trump’s social media post on Sunday in which he accused Kamala Harris’s campaign of manipulating an image to make her crowd seem bigger at a Detroit airplane hangar last week.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

How do we know an image is real in this day and age? An average person can no longer be certain of the authenticity of images or, increasingly, even videos through individual sleuthing. The A.I. is that good and is getting better. (That’s why the classic media literacy advice — do your own research — doesn’t work anymore.)

This makes it difficult to know what to believe, except through a key mechanism: trusting sources and trusting that they have either taken the image or video themselves or carefully vetted it as authentic.

That’s how we know that the crowd waiting for Harris was real, because there are pictures from photo agencies like Getty, as well as images and reports from multiple other news organizations that were on the tarmac, that match the circulating social media photos that caught Trump’s ire. We know that credible news organizations and photo agencies have very strict rules about images and videos. But that, in turn, requires trusting the photo agency or other media source furnishing the image or video.

It’s no accident that Trump has made it a habit to portray credible news organizations as untrustworthy liars, and many of his supporters seem to have internalized that message they were open to in the first place.

Once trust is lost and all credibility is questioned, the lie doesn’t have to be high quality. It doesn’t have to be supported by highly realistic fake A.I. It doesn’t have to be so easily disprovable. To work, the lie just needs a willing purveyor and an eager audience. The A.I., then, is but a fig leaf.

China and the United States tied for gold medals at 40 apiece, and the United States had more medals overall, but the most successful nation at the Paris Olympics was Australia. France was second, followed by Britain and the Netherlands, with the United States coming in fifth and China 89th.

That’s according to a new ranking method that I wrote about ahead of the Games. Its inventors, Robert Duncan and Andrew Parece, wanted a method that wouldn’t overly favor the most-populous nations, but also wouldn’t give the top ranking every four years to a small country that gets a medal or two. (This year Grenada, with two medals, had the most per capita, followed by Dominica and St. Lucia.)

Australia tends to do well by their method. It also came out on top in the Tokyo Games. (It bears repeating, of course, that there is no official national winner, because the Games are a competition among athletes, not countries.)

The Duncan-Parece method ranks countries according to how improbable their medal counts are, on the assumption that all medal-winning nations have an equal propensity per capita for winning medals.

As they wrote in their paper on the subject: “We simply ask: how probable is it, in this idealization, for a given high-performing country (with a given population) to have won as many medals as it actually did, or more medals?”

Their measure of improbability is the one you would use to calculate the likelihood of flipping heads, say, 10 times in a row.

There seems to be growing interest in the subject. Duncan emailed me on Sunday to say that people from 153 countries had visited their website, olympicnationalrankings.com.

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• Where the candidates physically are and what they’re up to: On Wednesday, Donald Trump is expected to hold a rally in Asheville, N.C., and JD Vance plans to campaign near Grand Rapids, Mich. Kamala Harris has not yet released information about upcoming events but did say over the weekend that her campaign would release an economic policy proposal this week.

• Everything changes so fast right now that taking stock of the race can feel like an ephemeral pursuit, but in a series of polls, including the New York Times/Siena poll, Harris has either pulled even with Trump or has moved ahead in some places.

• At the very least, the campaign has been reset to a toss-up, compared with the anemic state of President Biden’s polling against Trump. Nate Cohn of The Times observed in a sharp thread on Twitter over the weekend that people’s perception of Harris wasn’t totally stable — it’s changed in the last few weeks as she’s become more popular, and could change again. But, he added, “at least for now, we’re getting a reminder of what happens when the Democrats nominate a broadly acceptable candidate against Trump and his allies: They do pretty well.”

• Harris is known to people, but is also totally new as a candidate. One place that the idea of Harris is being shaped for people, especially in battlegrounds, is on TV and in digital advertising. The first weekend of the Olympics, I was in A Battleground State for the weekend, and could see it in real time: It felt as if each commercial break alternated between “Kamala Harris is good” and “Kamala Harris is bad.”

  The emphasis in the negative advertising was on the border especially.

• The emphasis in the positive advertising was on reintroducing Harris and her bio, including her time as a prosecutor. The Trump campaign and allies have also tried out more of a San Francisco radical theme.

• As more of Harris’s campaign gets locked in, it has expanded the portfolio of ads running: There are multiple versions of a bio ad that foregrounds her upbringing and middle-class economics (a big focus of the campaign so far) and an ad where she promises, as president, to hire more border agents. Next up in reintroducing Harris and her priorities will be the Democratic convention, which begins next week.